Irregular Webcomic! #1199

This is the winning entry in the recent caption competition, submitted by a reader identifying himself only as Anton. I modified the wording slightly because, as he said in his e-mail, he's not a native English speaker and was apologetic for any clumsy wording. But the concept was good enough for me to select as the winner!

I received a total of 109 entries this time, in the barely over 48 hours that I accepted submissions. Some statistics:

36 entries referred to specifics of the Internet or Windows, such as BSODs or Wikipedia. Four mentioned MySpace. Two mentioned Google Mars.
19 entries made fourth-wall breaking references, such as to comic script writing contests or Irregular Webcomic! specifically.
15 entries made reference to spam or Internet scams, and most of them mentioned Nigeria or the Nigerian Finance Minister explicitly.
14 entries violated my PG rating principle by making explicit mention of scantily clad or unclad females. (Humans that is. Only one entry mentioned unclad Martian females.)
12 entries mentioned specific computer games. World of Warcraft was most popular.
2 entries referred to movies: one to Independence Day and one to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Some of my favourite runners-up:

1 Martian 1: See what you can find about Earth's defenses.
2 Martian 2: I'm trying, but every time I change pages, ad windows pop up.
3 Martian 2: Argh!
4 Martian 3: Well at least they saved us the trouble of disabling their computer network.

-- Lee K. Seitz

1 Martian 1: What did you find on the Earthling's computer?
2 Martian 2: A few school papers, but mostly combat trainers.
3 Martian 1: Combat trainers?
3 Martian 2: Yes, but with odd names. Here's one called "Half-Life 2."
4 Martian 3: So we just left a highly trained Earth warrior loose in here?

-- Lee K. Seitz

1 Martian 3: What's he doing now?
1 Martian 1: He's reading strip cartoons.
2 Martian 2: These cartoons all rely on the same comic device.
3 {silent beat}
4 Martian 1: A silent penultimate panel?
4 Martian 2: Schulz did it fifty years ago.

-- David Brewer

1 [caption]: Martian invasion - stage 1: Place a news release on Yahoo - "The Martians are Invading!"
2 [caption]: Stage 2: Hack snopes.com, confirming the rumour.
3 [caption]: Stage 3: Post a Wikipedia article - "The Glorious Martian Victory and the Subjugation of Earth."
4 Martian 2: Gentlemen, the invasion is complete.

-- Paul Leech

Thanks to all who entered the competition!

2015-09-22 Rerun commentary: On that last entry in the annotation just above, imagine if Orson Welles' 1938 radio drama broadcast of The War of the Worlds had taken place in a world with ubiquitous Internet and social media, and the panic over people thinking it was a real Martian invasion had reached billions of people.

I think there's a novel in that somewhere. Heck, there's probably a movie in it.