©2007 by Peter Bernhardt. All rights reserved.

Author's Notes:

This "Gill Bates" is actually only the latest comic in a long, long line of other "Gill Bates" comics (there are probably a dozen of these). This one pretty much follows the formula that I laid out for the others much earlier:

1. Gill Bates develops a horrible and unholy software package designed to cause human suffering and/or world domination.
2. The software package is bought and installed by unwitting fools world wide. The evil plan begins to work.
3. Gill Bates is challenged by someone or something that wants to foil his plan, usually one of my other characters, a movie star, the government, or someone else who wants to do something even more evil.
4. After a battle royale, Bates is typically defeated (though he has won, on occasion... usually just to be crushed later) and he begins plotting his next programming abomination.

Bates does not always directly deal with Satan in all of the comics, nor is he always defeated by holy means (he has been defeated by foes ranging from Bill Clinton to the Blues Brothers). Sometimes he lives, and sometimes he dies. It doesn't matter; he is always back and ready to inconvenience humankind in the next comic.