Comic #979: Beyond Repair (Patreon)

This is obviously a callback to #767, nearly 5 years ago. Hence Marda's comment.

The way this one came about was interesting. I was originally planning to make a comic where Narya had become a vendor. Basically, he was going to be bragging about making millions on repairs and ultimately the rest of the characters were going to sell greys to him until he was destitute.

As I was putting it together I was worried that I had already made that joke somewhere, and I was pretty sure it was in the Gunther/Marda comic I referenced above. So I went back and looked, and realized how much I liked the original comic and wanted to bring the two of them back somehow. I initially thought about having them beef with a repair bot, but I realized that most repairs were probably on mounts these days, not bots.

In hindsight, I could have combined both ideas and ended up with Narya on a repair mount, which would have also been funny.

I wanted this one to really feel like a callback to the original, so I kept the pattern of the dialogue. Namely, he gives a suggestion, she refutes it, and so on. Even the dialogue in the punchline is the same as the original, just with a different situation and context. I updated Gunther and Marda's looks to be a bit more in-line with how they look in-game.

I also knew I wanted to reference Elaine somewhere in here. The idea of her going insane and beating Elling to death with cheese seemed delightfully horrible.