Comic #977: Grind My Gears (Patreon)

Sometimes if I'm struggling to come up with an idea, I just think of a premise and start working through a story in my mind to see if anything funny pops up. In this case, I thought about an NPC giving a hero a quest, and the idea of the hero bringing back the wrong item came into my head. Initially I thought maybe the key item in the quest would be a homonym or something. In the end I went with a typo.

Figuring out what the type was going to be was a bit tough. I kept thinking of body parts and tried changing one letter to see if I could make it into a regular object. For a while I thought I was going to go with "Wands" and "Hands". But I felt that a typo where a letter went missing would be better than a typo where you use completely different letters. So I ended up coming up with "Gears" and "Ears".

I only ended up deciding to make the hero in the comic Gigz as I was adding the color. I felt that using Gigz' blue skin helped with the contrast in the second panel and made it easier to make out. Her skin color and cuff are also distinct which allow the second and last panels to clearly communicate that it was the same person.

I originally was going to have the quest window open in the final panel, showing the entire quest text. The problem was you really had to read through a lot of text to see the "ears" typo, and I was worried it would take away from the punchline. So I decided to just use the quest progress tracker to more easily communicate the typo. It also makes more sense, since one of my running jokes is that heroes don't read quest text at all.