This is strip #811. We're 81.1% done with the story.

There are some strips that can last forever. Leftover Soup isn't one of them. This configuration of characters was always unstable, it could never last indefinitely as it is. The world as we know it will, inevitably, end.

Someone in the forum once asked me what models of cellphone everyone had. That was an issue, of sorts - Ellen has a flip phone, Jamie's phone is essentially a brick. That's partly because I'm an old fuddy duddy who hates phones and hates the modern obligation to carry one in your pocket at all times (I begrudgingly own a Samsung Galaxy Ace II that I share with my wife & leave at home whenever possible.)

But even if I had assigned all the characters modern smartphones (as of this writing, perhaps iPhone 6Ses and Galaxy S6es) it would only serve to further stick them in an ever-receding past. Already, parts of the Leftover Soup archive are hopelessly out of date, no longer credible as being in the now - Ellen installing Windows XP service pack 3, for example, or twenty-somethings reminiscing about cartoons from the decade before they were born.

Leftover Soup is, in theory, set in a sliding-scale perpetual now (much like Spider-man), but I have to accept that some day, it will be an artifact, a period piece. I know what the end is. In fact, I've already given it away, if you're especially clever.