I think this is gonna be one of those comics that's kind of a generational gap thing.

Remember when I last did a comic about TV news stations that broadcast a "test card screen" at night when there's no more programming--and how after I finished the comic I found out that ... well ... almost no one does that anymore?

This is kind of the same thing, I think. Or, maybe it's not.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I got the idea from this by reading TV Tropes. They've got a few pages over there that talk about two seperate books Neuromancer and Neverwhere, both of which describe the sky in certain parts as "like a dead TV channel."

Except that in Neuromancer, it's meant to mean that the sky is a grey overcast ... and in Neverwhere, it's meant to say that the sky is pure blue (as a reference to Neuromancer).

Why the difference? Older TVs, which were built to receive signals from TV stations broadcasting with analog signals--display static when they're not receiving any kind of signal at all--or if they are, but the signal is too weak for the picture to show clearly.

Newer TVs don't do that. They just display a blue or black screen if there's no signal.

So in Neuromancer, the analogy to a TV screen backfired when new TVs no longer displayed something like an overcast, but a clear blue sky. (Or a clear night time sky, I suppose!)

Well, back on the 13th of this month, the U.S. finally shut down all analog TV stations, going full digital instead; you have to use a conversion box for older TVs if you still want to use them.

I hadn't thought about doing a comic for it, but it is a pretty big event in the history of television, and I thought this might be a faster comic to do than the other ideas I have lined up (oh, the irony!).

... See, all we need now is a montage of this happening across the globe while Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" plays. Or we can have Rudolph Ravioli sing it while his face appears on every analog TV screen in the world. It would be a crazy mind-bender!