Comic #957: Time Lapse (Patreon)

This one had many versions before I finally settled on what you see.

Initially this was going to be a misclick comic. I was literally going to show a close-up of a keyboard with a finger hitting both buttons. The punchline was going to be Krom screaming “WHO LUSTED?!” with Narya trying to disappear into himself.

I struggled a bit with the setup though. At first it was going to be Narya giving a fire-mage rotation demo or something. Which was weird and didn’t work. Then it was going to be Narya pre-casting pyroblast at the countdown, and misclicking, which also didn’t really work.

I kept trying to find a way to include someone yelling at him to unbind Time Warp. I then thought that knowing him, it would probably be safer not just to unbind it, but to remove it from his bars entirely and have him click it from the spellbook. As soon as I thought of that I knew I wanted to visualize it.

I then thought about flipping the premise with the punchline. What if they ask him to lust, and it’s revealed it’s in his spellbook, and it takes FOREVER. But what is the punchline? Initially it was Narya on the bench saying, “So you misclick lust a few dozen times and they tell you to unbind it, now it’s taking too long? PICK A LANE!” I hated how much exposition I was dropping into the punchline to make the joke. But then it occurred to me that another player on the bench could reveal the misclick portion of the dialogue, and it worked.