Comic #995: Reality Bites: Part Four (Patreon)

If you recall from the previous commentary, one initial idea for this arc was going to include the gang selling their jewelry for huge sums of money. This comic initially came from that thought process. What would they buy once they had money? The idea that Gigz would buy medical supplies to still feel useful, and Narya would downplay came pretty quickly from that.

This comic ended almost exactly how I wrote it a few weeks ago, but some things changed as I was putting it together this morning. Originally I was going to just have a tooltip for hand sanitizer in the first panel, but then I realized I could make a good bandages joke if I included band-aids. It also solved a small problem I had about the fact that hand sanitizer doesn't actually heal. It allowed me to add band-aids to Narya's face while she squirted him with sanitizer.

Another change I made along the way was the splitting of panels 5 and 6. Have I ever done a horizontal split before? I'm sure I have somewhere. It's pretty rare. Originally panel 5 was a full panel, and panel 6 included Narya's dialogue: "Hand over the battery, peasant!". I needed a beat in there before the punchline. I realized if I added a small panel before 6, I could shift his dialogue there, and allow a full panel for Narya's spell to fail.

I also originally had zero dialogue in the final panel, but I quickly realized I was missing an opportunity for Gigz to say the thing.

Long time readers will probably also recognize the man on the phone as myself. Surprisingly I didn't even think about who the person using the phone was going to be until I started drawing. Using myself again like in the last real life arc starting with #798 seemed like a no-brainer.