Race condition
What is up with new entries for web comics showing up in your RSS reader before the graphic of the comic itself is available? It happens to me all the time with Penny Arcade and I've had it happen a couple of times with Double Fine Action Comics.
I really appreciate the feeds so I'm not trying to complain too much here, I'm just wondering what the cause is. Are their admin interfaces submitting the post and uploading the image in one step? Surely they should be doing the upload & preview then final submit dance.
Unless it's issues with a CDN or something, but penny-arcade's certainly appears to be coming from the same domain. And anyway, the delay seems far too long for it to be either of those things. Curious!