My problem, if it really is one, with The Oatmeal, is that he isn't creating comics as an art or for entertainment. He creates comics that he knows will be linked to and drive up page views. A great example of this is his recent Christmas comic, where he portrays 30-somthings without kids having horrible holidays, which resulted in a fair amount of 30-year-olds getting mad and linking to his site when explaining why it pissed them off.
This is a great example of how much better the JS engine is in Chrome or Safari than Firefox. FF just seemed to chug for me when the particles really started moving.
I'm really excited about CSS3 lowering our need to rely on things like jQuery, but I can just see some lame tool being made that allow people to animate things and we see hundreds of horrible CSS3 animations.