Comic #198: Marmalade (Patreon)

Originally published: July 26th, 2009.

It's Marmalade! And I also finally decided to make this an arc.

I honestly have no idea where the idea for this character came from. I'm pretty sure Marmalade is a goblin but if I'm being honest I don't completely remember. I probably just needed an NPC that was really off-putting and weird. I think I succeeded.

Marmalade eventually became one of those characters that disappeared from the comic and never returned, like the clones. The problem was my comic was both a standalone episodic comic and occasionally a serialized story. I enjoyed the occasional serialized story arc, but I also wanted my comic to make sense to new readers. So if I had any strange characters that only showed up sporadically (like the clones or Marmalade) and enough time went by without them being in the comic, it became harder and harder to bring them back without including some huge exposition dump. Still, I could have brought them back in the background or something.

I like the small touches in this comic, like Keydar drawing in the sand, Keydar covering Marmalade's ears to shield them from Nyte's insults.

Fun random tidbit about Marmalade is that I never gave them a gender. It wasn't intentional at first, but after a few comics when I realized nobody ever referred to Marmalade by their gender, it just became fun to keep up. In this particular comic, Nyte refers to Marmalade as "It", not because derogatorily, not because at this point Marmalade was supposed to be gender neutral or anything.