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No. 364: What Does the Fox News Say?

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What Does the Fox News Say?

First | Previous | 2020-03-12 | Next | Latest

Permanent URL: https://mezzacotta.net/itoons/?comic=364

Strip by: KelpTheGreat

{Celia, Haley, and Belkar are pulling a cart, containing supplies, and Mr. Scruffy.}
Belkar: See, now that's what being on a team is all about. You wanted to not kill ANY hobgoblins, I wanted to kill ALL the hobgoblins, and what happened? We compromised: I killed ONE of the hobgoblins.
Celia: You didn't need to kill him.
Belkar: True. But I didn't need to NOT kill him either.
Haley: Celia, I can't believe I'm about to say this, but Belkar didn't do anything wrong.
Belkar: I didn't? Huh.
Haley: Everything worked out fine. This is a war: if one of them happen (sic) to die today, that's one less for the Resistance to fight later.
Haley: Now both of you, shush. There's a gnome on the road.
Solt: Hello, fellow travelers! Hail, and well met! My name is Solt Lorkyurg, humble spice peddlar.[1] I bring my wares from the North to Azure City to sell.
Haley: Uh... I hate to tell you this, but Azure City was conquered by evil goblinoids, like, months ago.
Solt: Was it? Oh my. Well, I suppose that's what I get for getting all my information from Fox News.
{Scene cuts to a fox sitting on a rock, delivering news to several gnomes:}
Fox: Ring-ding-deringeding. Wa-pa-pa-pa-pow. Hatee-hatee-ho. Joff-tchoff-tchoff. Jacha-chow. Fraka-kow. A-hee, a-oo.
{Conspicuous white space to the right of this punchline has a very small sentence, which reads, "this space intentionally left (almost) blank"}

The author writes:

I've been sitting on this idea for a year or two. It's about time I finally got around to making it a reality. The main problem I had was that since I was making the original strip's mid-joke into the final punchline, I had to have the strip end there - but the original artwork has a lot of speech bubbles bleeding over the edges of panels into other panels, and I'm not great at photo editing. I ended up just giving it my best shot, and it turned out a lot better than I was expecting. I think it actually looks pretty good in places; I must finally be starting to improve.

If I was a lot better, I would have liked to center the two panels in the second row below the first row, but that would have taken even more editing, so I had to make do with that awkward blank space.

Fun fact: I found out during the creation of this strip that the first 946 OotS strips used Comic Sans, before changing to Wildwords Lowercase in strip 947. I'm pretty font-blind, and don't have any prejudice against Comic Sans, so I just never noticed.

Original The Order of the Stick strip: 539.

[1] I wasn't sure if "peddlar" was a misspelling in the original strip, or a legitimate - if archaic - spelling that Rich Burlew used intentionally. A little bit of research showed that the latter was the case, despite Google trying to tell me that I meant to type "peddler."