Comic #969: Don't You Be My Neighbor (Patreon)

A couple weeks ago when I was working on comic #965, I had a few ideas surrounding player housing. I put one of those ideas in the back page of the newspaper in #967, but I’m afraid I haven’t fully milked the player housing topic yet. I knew I wanted to do something more regarding neighbors, especially within guilds.

I knew I wanted to use Gigz, but I wasn’t entirely sure who should be her neighbor. My two thoughts were, pick Donald and have him be a general idiot or weirdo, or pick Keydar and have him build a phallic object. I decided to just do both.

Funnily enough, making a phallic object with creative endeavors has already been done by Narya WAY BACK in #407. Realizing that, I changed my mind and decided to pick Narya rather than Keydar for the final panel.

Also, yes, the chimney color was a purposeful choice. Given the third panel I REALLY went back and forth on whether or not I should make that choice. I know it's a really crass joke, but I just couldn’t help myself. I’m sorry. I could have made it a normal color chimney. The joke would have still worked fine. But I felt like I would just get a bunch of comments from readers saying “you should have made the chimney purple” and it would have killed me. So I went for it.

I did consider going a step further and having Gigz make a comment about Donald in the final panel, but it felt too forced. It also took away from the real point of the comic, which is that Gigz went from one kind of annoying neighbor to another. Also, that’s what my bonus panels are for after all (spoilers).

In the end, I kind of like that there’s a subtle secondary joke in the final panel that may cause readers to wonder if it was even intentional.

Edit: I realized like an hour after posting that I had made a mistake in Donald's dialogue in panel #3. My original intention was "My favorite flavor is purple" but I had accidentally put "color" rather than "flavor". It's not fixed. It may seem like a minor change, but to me him thinking of purple as a flavor is funnier.