There's now a "hide profiles / show profiles" button underneath the profiles on comic pages. I thought of an easy way to add it and it should be useful in making some pages with really long profiles easier to read.
I didn't do it for the bandwidth reasons (though I'm sure that'll help a bit), I did it because a lot of people have really long profiles which means if you want to page through their comics you have to scroll down a bunch to see the comic and hit the next and previous comic buttons.