Comic #940: Donuts (Patreon)

I don't know why, but Patreon is suddenly heavily compressing my post image (it was almost unreadable). So I'm posting just the thumbnail above and the comic below until they fix it.

The first boss of the new raid (The Geargrinder) enters exactly as shown in the final panel, killing everyone in the way. As soon as I saw that I knew I wanted to make it into a comic. However, I also knew if I really wanted it to be perfect, I would have to animate it, which was a pretty daunting task.

I ended up looking at the boss in the wowhead model viewer and taking screenshots of multiple angles. I put those screenshots into place and created a crude animation of it doing donuts and kept fiddling with the frames till I felt the animation looked right. I then used those screenshots as reference to draw the boss frame by frame. I knew since the vehicle would be in motion I wouldn't have to be extremely detailed, but it was still a lot of work. I then added some dust and sparks to hide some more of the ugliness.

As to the actual content of the comic, I made a few small changes from the initial idea to the final product. First of all, the whole "donut" joke didn't manifest until later. Initially this was the script:

Krom: Ready to wipe all night?

Nyte: Aww, c’mon. It’s the first boss of a new raid, this is the fun stuff!

Krom: I’ll have “fun” if we kill it without wiping.

Nyte: We’ve all watched the boss fight video. We know all the mechanics. Relax. Krom: Yeah, fine. I guess.

Boss doing donuts around the screen.

I was then thinking about what I wanted the title to be, and thought about "Donuts". I liked the title, but it would need to have an earlier reference to donuts in order to make it work. I then thought about having Krom say something like "Donuts are fun, wiping is not" or something of the sort. Then when the idea of Nyte trying to give him a donut, and him finally accepting it only to have a giant tank do donuts on him, I got really excited. It added another layer to the punchline that tickled me.

Here's an example of a still frame of the tank. You can see that it's colored in pretty roughly. If it were a still image I would spend a lot more time on details, shading, and highlights.