Comic #930: Freeloaders (Patreon)

There are a couple complications in this comic that I struggled with.

Firstly, there is a lot the reader has to unpack by looking at both the meters and the rankings. The joke here is that Toxic is placing hypothetical rankings above his actual observations. For the readers to get this, I need them to see that Death Knights are on top of the DPS meter, while rankings list them as last. In hindsight, I think I probably should have highlighted the bottom of the rankings better. Maybe angling Toxic's head downwards more, and lifting up the rankings chart. Oh well.

Secondly, many readers don't necessarily know my characters, and thus won't know what Douche looks like. I didn't want to add unnecessary exposition like putting Douche's name above his head or anything. So I just had to bank on the fact that he looked smug as hell in the second panel to communicate to people that he was top DPS. I also ended up adding Narya to the comic last minute to help have a low DPS character as a juxtaposition with Douche. You can picture how it could have looked originally without Narya. It would have worked fine, but the added fact that Toxic picks Narya over Douche makes it funnier to me.

The third issue was my choice of characters. Currently Death Knights are really low on "rankings", and I only have one recurring DK character. This left me in a strange position of having Douche be the sympathetic character here. I literally named him "Douche" to highlight the fact that he's an obnoxious player, and on top of that, his name may confuse readers that don't know my comics. In the end, the fact that Toxic is booting out his long-time douchey buddy really works for me, but as for his name, I just have to hope it doesn't confuse the readers.