Comic #817: Feedback (Patreon)

This idea came to me pretty quickly. I thought of the premise of Donald submitting a bug report, and it just grew from there. Sometimes when I'm having trouble coming up with a comic idea I just run through various premises with different characters until something funny comes out of it.

I feel like the final panel makes or breaks this comic. I wanted Donald to look extremely serious, almost as if he's complaining about game mechanics for the first time in his life, and he's trying on a serious face. I hope I pulled it off.

Also, I decided to try using a different font for Donald's speech. I wanted something that looked a bit more like a child's handwriting, but was still easily legible, and similar enough to the normal font as to not be distracting. I also think I'm gonna commit to him not using capitals or punctuation, even though I've flip-flopped a lot on that in the past. It helps sell his childlike quality.

I'm pretty sure I could have made this comic 3 panels, effectively removing panels 2 and 3, and slightly altering the dialogue in 4, but I wouldn't have liked the finished result. I see a lot of opinions online where people critique comics for having useless panels, and I was definitely guilty of that in the past, but I think you can take that philosophy too far. If you shorten a comic to only have the most basic levels of setup, and punchline, you lose a lot of the rhythm and character.