Fan favorites part 1

Here’s some favorite AFRs picked by fans who commented on last week’s posts.

There’s a story behind this one, as you might imagine. You see, a few of my comic titles had some risquee puns, and a few more were perfectly innocuous but just happened to have an unfortunate combination of words, so for a while I was getting a lot of search hits from people who clearly were not looking for WoW comics. When I made another punning title (involving ERP, or erotic role-play) commenter Tokkar pointed out:

Of course you realize that the title will bring out the people who are searching for naked blood elves again…

At which I threatened to start naming all my comics: “Statistical abstract of projected fire hydrant maintenance outlays for fiscal year 1972.” Commenter Coffinshaker then came back with:

awe man, I came here looking for erotic statistical abstract of projected fire hydrant maintenance outlays for fiscal year 1972 pics! wtf? I call bait and switch!!!

After that, this was kind of inevitable.

Poor Hurgon. He’s usually the butt of the joke. But here’s one comic where he gets to deliver the punch line.

This one is about Scarlet Monastery. From today’s perspective, this comic may not make much sense, but back in the old days, before the Cataclysm revamp of Azeroth and the dungeon finder system, if you wanted to run Scarlet Monastery as an Alliance player at the appropriate level you had to run through several high-level zones and the Undead starting zone just to get there. For many groups, just getting to Scarlet Monastery took more time, more planning, and more resurrections than the dungeons themselves. This comic may not work so well in today’s Azeroth, but I still think “Heal yourself, flag boy!” is one of Hurgon’s best lines.

Early on, Thizzible’s running gag was that she role-played as Jewish.  Although she officially switched role-plays later it’s always been there in the background for her (and when her mother started playing there was definitely some Jewish mother humor going on). This comic played on that role from a different angle, invoking the People’s Front of Judaea. (There’s a callback many comics later, by the way, when Thizzible was experimenting with being a battle pet.)

So, this comic, about the chess game in Karazhan, is basically the tactical deployment of Calvinball. For the record, the games that Thizzible and Targe invoke are: old Star Trek‘s 3-D chess, checkers, poker, tennis, darts, horse racing, cold-war-era Olympics, some weird foot-basket-hockey-ball amalgam, Latin American football announcers, and the casino game dabo from Deep Space Nine. And yes, this is exactly how Targe and Thizzible would play chess, even if they were just having a friendly game one afternoon.

Fan Favorites part 2

Fan Favorites part 3