gravatar, Identicon fallback problem

Hello ?? I did homework and researched a lot, and still did not find an answer, so, here I am ??

I am a wordpress newbie, been using it for… 3? 4?… 4 days. I am designing my custom template to match the overall page design. The template is basically a modification of the default Kubrik template, without any plugins besides those that come with wordpress 2.7.1

OK, my particular problem concerns gravatars.

What I want to achieve is for my blog to use gravatars, but fallback to using identicon for users who do not have gravatars.

I go to Settins>discussion and choose to show avatars and to use Gravatars.

Then I have to go to comments.php and change the get_avatar parameter’s default attribute to show ‘Identicon’

Lovely…

but where in comments.php IS get_avatar? In fact it appears that get_avatar is nowhere to be found in the kubrik template, in spite of gravatars actually showing up in comments.

Even when I could just add some lines in comment.php, my question will still be “why did they show up before then?”

I would link you to the comment.php file but it’s just the default kubrik comments.php file… it would make no sense.

So, that is it. Sorry for the perhaps unnecessary length of this post, but I wanted to leave no information behind.

??