1 Ophelia: Hi Will. Loren wants to give you her opinion on Harry Potter.
2 Loren: Who is this Harry Potter you keep mentioning?
3 Shakespeare: The hero of the greatest series of children's novels ever written!
4 Loren: Oh. Did you read them when you were growing up, then?
4 {Ophelia turns her back on the conversation to face Mercutio, who watches from his desk in the background.}

All along I planned to have <explanation deleted> at the end of this one. In the end I decided it's better not to have <explanation deleted>, but to allow the reader to fill in the gaps.

When I decided to delete that bit of material from the comic, I planned to mention it explicitly in the annotation. In the end I decided it's better not to mention what it was that I removed in the annotation, because that would kind of defeat the purpose of having removed it in the first place. So I deleted it from the annotation as well, so the reader can fill in the gaps in the comic without being prejudiced by what I say in the annotation.

And then I considered deleting parts of the paragraph above and making things even more circular and self-referential, but that was just being silly.

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2016-02-02 Rerun commentary: For this rerun, you have to remember that when this comic was first published, J.K. Rowling had not yet finished writing the Harry Potter series. The release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was still almost a full year in the future.

Nowadays it's possible to come across an adult who indeed read the Harry Potter series while growing up as a child, but in 2006 not so much.

Oh, and the cryptic deleted explanation mentioned above really isn't that obscure or difficult. The first thing you thought of is probably correct.