Comic #187: Under the World (Patreon)

Originally published: May 3rd 2009.

Is this the first fourth wall break I did like this? I guess #157 kind of counts. I had a few over the years. Let me know if there were any others earlier that I forgot about.

The original joke here was to have Narya literally falling out of the comic panel. My original website was pretty bare and had a dark blue background. Here's how this comic originally looked on my old site:

You can see it for yourself on the internet archive here.

I had to redraw this comic a few times over the years to fit the website of the time. Every time I would update my website I'd have to go back through and edit any comics that broke the 4th wall like this one and used the website itself. There was another later example with the clones that I had to redo numerous times.

The story behind this particular comic was a specific zone wall I loved to climb in Vanilla. In Dun Morogh there was a particular spot where you could climb up to the top of the mountains and explore the region between Ironforge and Stormwind. This was of course before flying. There were several areas that had holes in the floor where you would fall for a few minutes before falling in water far underground. I decided I wanted to make a comic about this and the idea to have Narya literally fall out of the comic seemed like a fun idea.