Comic #190: Whitecraft (Patreon)

Originally published: May 24th 2009.

Wowwww this one is a blast from the past. A lot of the jokes in this one don't really work anymore. The game as well as the culture has shifted a lot.

This one was a bit of an ode to my friends (two in particular). They would often complain about the lack of ethnic character selection choices in games in general, but also specifically in wow.

I did my best to draw a real life version of one of my friends in the first panel. Looking at it now, I did a pretty crappy job, it looks nothing like him. I also remember struggling to draw him as visibly asian, especially considering my comic style at the time had no noses and dots for eyes, and I sucked at drawing hair. So I wanted him to read as asian without accidentally drawing some kind of racist caricature. In hindsight, I think I Ironically may have ended up doing exactly what I was teasing blizzard about. Hah.

I used to talk with my friends about how you could adjust the skin tone slider for humans in vanilla wow but the facial features would remain exactly the same. So you would end up with very dark skin but a caucasian looking face. Or that in most games the "ethnic" hairstyle choices were always effectively dreads or afro. Obviously character selection in the game has become a lot more diverse since then.

This one is a bit of a time capsule though. These days this is much more of a mainstream idea and games with complex character creation are expected to have a better array of choices.

This one also reminds me how much easier it was to make political commentary on the internet back in 2009. I don't think it would have even read as that political at the time either. Reading this now in 2026, I was lucky social media was in its infancy when I made this one. Back then terms like "woke" didn't exist, even the precursor to woke, "SJW" didn't exist yet. The closest thing I could have been called at the time was probably "politically correct", but it was a term that was used pretty loosely on both ends of the political spectrum. You could much more easily make tongue-in-cheek counter-culture jokes and not get a slew of insults thrown at you.

Also the whole Chinese farmer thing isn't as big as it used to be. So I'm not sure the punchline even makes sense to most readers anymore. Also, what gems is he selling? Like from jewelcrafting? Were those a big deal in 2009? It just seems like an oddly specific thing.

For those of you that play classic, did they upgrade models, or do they still use the base game customization? Also, if you play Wrath classic, are gems a big deal? I must know.