Comic #988: Void Assault (Patreon)

For readers not playing currently: Void Assaults are open world events that spawn in zones within the game and require players to work together to complete tasks in order to earn rewards. However, many players will just fly to the location and go AFK and thus get the rewards without participating in the event.

I was almost going to go with a comic idea that was much more generic, but then I decided to do a Void Assault to see if any ideas came to me. At first I thought about making a joke regarding them being taken down due to bugs. I just thought it might be funny to point out that players are annoyed the assaults are disabled, but for lore reasons that should be a good thing. However, when I saw many people AFK this idea came to me.

I knew to make it funny I would want to have as much of a contrast between the characters' behavior in the first 4 panels and the final panel. The joke wouldn't land at all unless the characters were super enthusiastic. Because of that I spent a bit of time on that first panel. I didn't just want Keydar yelling it out, I needed him to grab Narya by the head and bellow it into his face.

There are a couple slight callbacks in this comic that were fun to use. The first is Narya, Gigz, and Keydar on their Ashes mounts from #934. I initially thought about using a regular gryphon, but I liked the idea of a callback. The second isn't much of a callback, but the use of the quest head popup in panel #4. I originally was just going to have the three characters saluting without the popup, but thanks to the head popup I used in #986, I was able to easily sneak in an extra gag with the troll speak.

Edit: I also initially went back and forth on whether or not to include Gigz because laziness felt a little out of character for her. I thought about using Miji instead, but in the end I liked having Gigz there, because I feel like even though she's not the lazy type, she's definitely the type to not suffer inconvenience if there's a shortcut and not feel the least bit bad about it.