Comic #194: Invention Time! (Patreon)

Originally published June 21st, 2009.

It's the start of the second NPC rebellion arc! Kind of. It doesn't really pick up for a few more comics but this one started the whole thing rolling. I'm pretty sure I didn't have an arc planned at all at this point, I think it just worked out that way. I didn't really plan anything in the old days.

Arcs aside I really like this one. I remember being really happy with it at the time too. I always liked the buddy buddy comics between Narya and Miji as well as Gigz and Nyte. Often times when I couldn't think of an idea over the years I would sit there and think of either of the two of them hanging out and see if anything came to me. I often fell back on engineering and inventions which ultimately formed many arcs.

The gun skill joke doesn't really work anymore in retail, but I think the joke lands whether you've experienced the in-game mechanics of it or not. Thankfully classic helps with that too.

I wonder what's on the schematic Miji is holding. I tried zooming in on the original photoshop file to see if I could make anything out but still nothing. I don't think I intended it to be anything. Seems like a missed opportunity for a tiny easter egg.

I often complain about my backgrounds in early comics making the rest of the characters hard to see, but I think the fall foliage actually makes a nice contrast to Miji & Narya in this one. I even put leaves on the ground and everything!

Reading this comic again after all these years I realize I miss Narya's ever changing hairdos. I feel like I should have leaned into Narya's desperation to cure baldness a little more in the recent comics and continued to change his hair every 100 comics or so. Now that I think about it, he came close to breaking the world at least half a dozen times over the years but I don't think any of those occasions were directly related to his hair (except debatably the fountain of youth), right? Just think, he could have used Kobold DNA to cure baldness and turned everyone into kobolds. Candle prices would have soared.