Introduction to this edition

The story of Bob, the Anal Fissure was originally posted to the USENET newsgroup alt.tasteless over a period of two months at the very end of 1993. It is to the best of my knowledge a true story, which is to say that I have no idea whether it's true or not, so I choose to take it at face value.

While the tale can still be found at various places around the web, the illustrated version presented here is sadly no longer accessible at its original home. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet Archive's diligent efforts to permanently preserve the ephemeral web, I was able to retrieve all of the source files and images from Bob's previous home. Which means that I can now present to you these lovingly-reconstructed pages, formatted to preserve the style and presentation of the original tale.

I didn't create any of what follows — words, pictures, none of it is mine. I don't know anything more about the people who did create it, than what's found here. I simply felt that it would be a shame if one of the Internet's great pre-Web* epics ended up squirreled away in some capture files at the Internet Archive. Bob earned his time in the spotlight.

* 
(Yes, I realize October 1993 isn't technically pre-Web. But as a USENET thread, Bob's story remains one of the last examples of the Old Ways™— the means by which we disseminated such things, before the ascendance of the WWW.)