1 [sound]: THUD! THUD!
1 Serron: It's coming on to the bridge!!
2 Spanners: Quercus! Where's the Allosaurus?
2 Quercus: I restrained it in the hold while I reset the circuit breakers.
3 Iki Piki: But Allosaurs are bloodthirsty carnivores with massively powerful jaws full of razor-sharp serrated teeth capable of rending flesh limb from limb!
4 Quercus: Yes. Lucky they're not herbivores.

This strip wins the prize for the Most Blatantly Obviously Telegraphed Joke Ever in Irregular Webcomic! I had this idea about four months ago, and carefully plotted out the story arc to lead up to this point, inserting enough gags to carry the plot forward as it developed and set up this strip.

Unfortunately, ever since #1285 way back at the beginning of August, every time a Space strip has appeared I've seen numerous posters on the forums and LiveJournal feed, and received countless e-mails from people, all saying that "Quercus will be okay! He's a plant, but Allosaurs only eat meat!" And I could do nothing but ignore it and hope that maybe someone - anyone - out there hadn't thought of that yet.

If you were one of those people who figured it out, THANKS FOR RUINING MY JOKE, ASSTARD give yourself a pat on the back for being so clever. :-)

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2016-05-20 Rerun commentary: And now here we are in the reruns, so of course you'll all have seen the joke before already anyway.

Actually, if there's anyone reading this comic by just keeping up to date with the reruns, and has never read any comics beyond the current rerun, I'd be curious to know.

EDIT: And less than 24 hours later I've now heard from 8 people who inform me that they indeed fall into this category, being first time readers of these strips and either not having read past the current rerun at all, or only reading reruns plus the currently published brand new strips, but never having read forwards to fill in the gap between them.

To all of you, and anyone else doing a similar thing, a most hearty welcome to IWC!