Comic #915: Too Close for Comfort (Patreon)

This comic is basically my personal soapbox for the melee range nerf. The idea for this specific joke came to me while I was running a dungeon. I kept finding myself so close to a group of enemies that I would sometimes be literally INSIDE the enemy I was fighting. I thought it would be funny to visualize that in a comic.

The original form of this comic had many iterations. My first idea started out really close to keydar smushed into something. Then it would slowly zoom out revealing he was mashed up against a kobold. Finally it would zoom out fully and you would see him flailing swords while mushed up against the kobold, and Gigz off to the side said something like "How's the melee range nerf treating you?", and Keydar would reply something like "It's not too bad".

I still like that idea, but I ended up thinking of the idea that Keydar gets so close he forms a singularity in a spur of the moment conversation on discord. I also ended up liking the playfulness of Keydar in this version. He jaunts happily into a point blank body merge.

This was also a rare occasion where I ended up adding dialogue at the last minute. Usually I try to remove as much exposition as possible, but in this case I felt that there wasn't enough. Panels 3, 4, and 5 had absolutely no dialogue until just before posting. I realized that without that dialogue, it never is really clear that Keydar is not in melee range until the final panel. It could easily be interpreted that he's just getting extra close for no real reason.

P.S. The best thing about this expansion is that I can make good use of drawing kobolds again. I'm sure I will use them a lot in the future.