Comic #764: Killing Time (Patreon)

Oh man... This one took FOREVER to write.

I must have had at least 10 different versions with 4 different titles. I kept flip-flopping on whether to have the filibuster joke be the punchline or the title. At one point I had the Lich King instead of Illidan, and the title was "The King's Speech". I finally gave up on that title and swapped to Illidan because he was already a character that I've used in the comic, and as I've mentioned before I like the consistency.

My original comic idea was actually about transmogs. I won't spoil too much because that may still become a future comic. However it started out with a boss NPC monologuing like in this comic, but the boss is quickly murdered by Keydar who loots a transmog piece. I started thinking about the NPC refusing to finish his dialogue to avoid death, and realized that would essentially be a filibuster. That idea tickled me enough that I scrapped the original comic and made this one.

The early versions of the filibuster comic all had a boss giving a monologue, the boss would spot the hero, then the boss would start reciting shakespeare and the hero would be angry. The problem I kept running into with these early versions was that it was never really clear in the comic that the boss was extending his life by continuing his dialogue.

I solved this by having:

1. The hero make it clear that she was waiting for him to finish so she could kill him. (panel 4)2. Have Illidan ask Akama for help. (panel 5 & 6)3. Have the hero identify their actions as a filibuster. (last panel)

Another technical side note. I decided to blur the background in this comic because the colors and lines of the background were matching a little too closely with Illidan, and the blur added some needed contrast.

I also blurred Illidan and Akama in the final panel to make it clear that they were in the background (before I blurred them, Gigz just looked like a giant).