The raw art of this strip was up as a placeholder while the the strip was being finished.
l33t = leet
t3h grrl = the girl

Piro speaks:
The use of zip-tones and applied tones is a standard practice in the production of manga, any my thinking was that if i could develop a some sort of analogue to this for my style of work, it would amount the same kind of thing. I did some more digging, and figured out other ways of aproximating the look and feel of my hatching (liberal use of the motion blur filter seems to be the trick) as well as getting a better understaing of using patterns and building a library of them in photoshop.
Last night i posted this screenshot of how things were looking in hatching friday's comic. About an hour ago, i posted the finished version to the site, and i'm actually fairly happy with how it looks.
It's not perfect, but i think that over time with some experimentation, widening my hatching library, getting used to the process and what i can do with it, etc i can achieve two things - more consistency with the look and feel of megatokyo pages, and less time in the production.