Comic #188: Donald The Explorer (Patreon)

Originally published: May 10th, 2009.

If you regularly read my commentaries you know how much the speech bubbles in this era of my comics annoy me. Well apparently 2009 me also saw an issue because I added a black outline to all the bubbles in this comic. I have to say, as much as I am still not a fan of the speech bubbles, at least they stand out better from the background in this particular comic.

Unfortunately, I immediately reverted to the non-outlined bubbles in the next comic. I was so close!

Other than my speech bubble rant, I really like this one, it's very classic Donald. I believe this was the first comic where I decided to make Donald canonically a child.

I remember the original idea behind this comic was joking with a friend about the explorer title. From my memory it was a default title for a lot of players. It was one of the easier titles to get, and after resets you would often get stuck with it randomly and have to change it back to your prefered title. I think I joked about the idea that if Donald tried to get explorer he would probably somehow fail it, then the comic became me trying to think up ways for him to fail to explore. His pants falling down was the end result I guess.

In hindsight I think the comic is funny just because of Donald, but the premise itself got lost in the weeds. The comic isn't really about Donald trying to get the explorer title, it's more just about Donald being an idiot, which is okay.

For example, if the comic had no Krom, and instead was just Nyte trying desperately to get Donald a title out of the goodness of her heart, it could end the same way with her giving up. However, panel 8 is my favorite and that might not exist in such a comic, so I give it a pass.

When I first re-read this comic, I wondered why I left Krom's mouth open in the final panel. I wasn't sure if it was a mistake or a purposeful choice until I looked in the original comic file and found some hidden dialogue I had originally planned for the final panel:

I think I made the right choice to remove it.