New Comics Every Weekday - Written by T Campbell & Phil Kahn - Illustrated by John & Jason Waltrip
Guilded Age
The Saga of the Working Class Adventurer – New comics every weekday!
Katsucon XX
(National Harbor, MD 2/14-16)
Smudge Expo
(Arlington, VA 3/8)
AwesomeCon, D.C.
(Washington, D.C. 4/18-20)
“But that’s, like, work. Couldn’t you have gotten some peasants to do that part?”
“This is not epic. I am epic. Thus, this is not for me.”
“There is an Epic Shovel in the corner there, get cracking!”
“Only if there is an epic reward afterwards. As in gold, women, and power, not confetti.”
An Epic Shovel of +5 digging? Do you know how rare those are? I’m gonna take it to the auction house right now!
Shovels are for lifting, not digging.
Spades are for digging.
This is inherited folk wisdom. A man looks forward to the day when his son confuses the two so he can give him the same lecture he got from his own father.
I received the same lecture. I had no idea it was so prevalent.
I thought spades were just the little hand-shovels you use in a garden.
I thought five of them beat a pair.
No, that’s a trowel.
Come on now, call a spade a spade.
Hey, that’s racist!
A spade has a flat edge, a shovel has a rounded edge with a point. The tiny garden “shovels” are called trowels.
Weird, i was always told the opposite. After all, card spades are pointed. And a trowel is flat, little gardern tools are spades.
What about shovelspades? And spadeshovels?
Best should just use spandex.
I thought spades were for playing on hearts or diamonds, keeping in mind the ranks must be played in descending order? You cannot play it on a club, nor another spade.
Maybe he should just get an Epic Backhoe and be done with spades and shovels.
Why aren’t Yorkshiremen any good at farming?
Because whenever they get a spade, they spit on their hands.
I don’t get it.
I think you mean why aren’t they any good at poker.
Oh, …… Bad Word.
Your barking up the wrong tree. Any kind of shovel would be mundane here. Give him a feather duster. Digging a hole with that would be epic.
Bah, digging is beneath Best…
Not just content to be a douche, Best had upgraded to lazy douche.
Best has always been lazy.
I’m gonna have to differ on that- back in the beginning of his introduction, he -tried- to help out with the work, and nobody would let him because they thought he was the prophecy hero.
Dude, he’s an adventurer. Killing hordes of evil, stopping dark conspiracies, plundering ancient ruins, these are things he’s typically asked to do.
Digging isn’t a quest, it’s a minimum wage job.
And he only has an axe on hand.
If that axe functions as a digging instrument it will officially be the most utilitarian axe ever.
Maybe you can make an epic heavy metal song about it, Payet.
Already happened.
“Ima workin in a coal mine goin down down,
Workin in a coal mine, Oh I gotta get down!”
If I had the authority, I’d give you a celestial body of the golden variety for that.
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go.
I owe my soul to the company store.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUpTJg2EBpw
Tears. Tears in my eyes. Manly tears.
Ah, “Tennessee” Ernie Ford. Used to have his own television show. Phenomenally deep singing voice, excellent range and sustain, incredible resonant power… as opposed to his nasal, kind of girly speaking voice.
And he’s still seven thousand times MORE awesome than Best.
Payet! Get your stupid stink-elf carcass moving, and DIG!
<3
Not the brightest candle in the box, eh?
Ah, poor Best. I doubt the ground will be swayed by your gentle melodies and awesome riffs to spit back up our treasure.
I dunno, Best has caused an absurdly localized and accurate cave-in with his music.
He may be able to pierce the earth with the power of ROCK.
Now he needs to pierce it with the power of SHOVEL.
Spade, not shovel. Pay attention to prior discussions, m’lad.
Spades are the ones with the pointy end, to make it easy to pierce hard ground. Shovels are the wide ones, which tend to have a flat end and higher sides, so that the shit one picks up with them does not fall off.
garden shovel. snow shovel. both dig.
But you are correct, they do have flat ends.
Besides, we start bandying Spade around, folks are gonna start making cheap detective puns.
But the Diggers only fought along side the Tommies, not the Sammies!
Correct, A passer-by.
I think this is a reasonable reaction. If Best does indeed dig it up, there is no douchyness here that I see.
Stories don’t have heroes stop and dig out holes in the ground. When something lies far beneath the earth, the must travel through dangerous caves. Not grab a shovel and get at it. Being a bard, he would be well informed of such cliches, and likely expecting them.
Indeed.
Not to mention that remote caves usually have traps and/or monsters guarding an object sitting right out in the open. Who buries mystical relics in a cave?
Dunno … read Band of Brothers sometime. They dug a lot of holes. Different sort of story, but heroes nonetheless.
Yeah, but those were REAL heroes. Not plundering cowboys.
I cannot even begin to describe the way in which a gritty quasi-realistic depiction of modern warfare does not lend itself towards parallels with the black and white world of fantasy fiction where a single individual is given a noble quest that will save the world from a force of absolute evil.
If I were to try something basic, the first is based on the principle of cutting out as little as possible, whereas the second quite literally cuts everything that isn’t “Epic quest” “Team Formation” and such.
*ways
same thing in Digger, digging holes and questing for destiny go hand in hand
..so those caves are actually graves of our original five?
“Oh hey, it’s coming back to me… I pwned this one… almost did this one, but got cock-blocked…”
ahem…”boxblocked”?
If the GUY’S getting boxblocked there may be certain concerns to address.
Yeah, I could be wrong but I always understood “cockblocked” to mean “the guy’s cock being blocked,” not “the woman getting blocked from the guy’s cock.” (Pardon my vulgarity.)
Coxblocked?
Bloxcocked?
Blocksclock?
Fox in sox come?
No, wait…
Oshkoshbegosh? No.
I believe Best would tell you she was being overclocked.
Susan?
Cer-vexed.
Gold Star.
./applause
Hee hee! I’ll have to remember that.
After the round of puns, I think you’re correct: There are indeed 5 hills, with a total of 5 caves, for a total of 5 heroes. Knowing that, is Best un-Earthing something or someone?
They never got killed. This is all building up to the most elaborate april fools joke ever.
Now that you said it…
“But… but I just ATE!”
[spooky voice] If we spirits could dig it up ourselves, do you really think we’d have called on YOU?!? [/spooky voice]
…. goddammit, Best.
He has people for that.
He used to have people for that. Then he ate them.
Why do I not hate him? It doesn’t make any sense.
Don’t be such a pansy, Best. Major archeological digs are a single-second cast with only three seconds on cooldown, and whatever you’re looking for is always just underneath the topsoil.
I’m going to go ahead and guess that he’s digging up either
A. The bodies of our heroes.
Or
B. An artifact to resurrect our heroes.
And by guess I mean hope.
I’d be really surprised if they’re buried this fast. Then again, we don’t know how long has passed from the suicide mission to Best’s mass-orgy.
Considering who killed them, I’d be surprised if they were buried at all. My guess, their bodies were boiled in a pot until the flesh sloughed off and the bones were used to adorn various bits of wall.
But then again, we’ve verified that this isn’t our world, so … probably no corpses to deal with.
In reality, the phantom is the ghost of Ashton Kutcher. This is the greatest prank of all time.
Along those lines…. this is the ghost winning.
So… Charlie Sheen is casted as the ghost?
yeah I’m on drugs… they’recalledCHARLIESHEEN… but you can’t get that stuff nonono.
Because it’d make your face EXPLODE, and children would WEEP over your smoking body. He makes Jagger and Richards look like droopy-eyed, armless children.
Chuck Norris sprinkles charlies drug all over his cereal in the morning.
Gives his hair a nice Sheen.
Yellow Star!
Pffft, who needs stars? I’ll give you a gold Charlie Sheen.
Is this ctrl-alt-del inspired?
Naw, I dont read them. Hence why I didn’t make any jokes about abortions.
“But… it’s dirt. Dirt is DIRTY. And besides, theses hands weren’t ment for manual labor. How am I supposed to keep the ladies and men happy if my hands become ruined from this… work?!”
Really guys? I understand how Payet tends to be buried under loads of quest, but this is taking it a tad too literal. Well… regardless, it is rather Best’s fault for digging himself a hole this time.
Somebody’s got to do the dirty work, I guess they decided to find the Best man for the job.
I’d loam him a shovel, but I don’t know where he’s been.
Guess a shit-elf is the best candidate for ‘dirty work’ *chuckles*
That’s the spirit! Payet’s attitude needed to be more down to earth.
“Gah! If my hands weren’t ethereal I’d strangle you right now!”
Bust out laughing at the spirit’s posture in the final panel.
Hee hee, me too. It reminds me of the “Grim Reaper” scene in Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life, where the Reaper finally manages to get the clueless socialites he’s come for out of the house. We see him from the back, leading the way, when one of the dead people suggests taking their cars. Cue car doors opening and closing, whereupon the Reaper abruptly stops short, as if thinking “WTF?”, then turns around and resignedly beckons them on, in their cars, into Heaven.
Weird. Best approached tangentially, then turned a right angle.
In the previous comic he was strolling through the tombs(?) and then the ghost caught his attention to his left, at which point I assume he made the turn we see in footprints here.
I just dirt understand what the hole is going on in this comic.
I’m sure if you dig a little deeper you’ll undersand
*Facepalm*
I think Picard would agree with me.
You really want to soil the joke with an explantation?
Peats me if it would further ground his knowledge or dust confuse him further. I shale just have to wait and see.
Plow through the recent strips and I am sure you can sift out what’s going on.
Real gneiss guys, real gneiss.
Posting schist like this…*shakes head*
Don’t worry though, I won’t think any loess of you.
Sorry, I’m an Earth Science major, I’m legally required to make geology jokes wherever appropriate.
It’s true. They have to make a solemn vow upon the underlying strata of their mother… Earth.
And also where not appropriate.
Do you pick up girls by telling them they’re spathic?
And how he’s impressed by the movemnt along their fault lines.
hanging on to that one…
Man, when I join punnings on this site late in the game, it makes me realize that I usually take the good puns for granite. Oh well, I can’t let it get me depressed, lest I chance it muddying my outlook on life.
just chalk it up to experience.
What motherfucker was it that said puns weren’t funny? Just look at them. LOOK HOW FUNNY THEY ARE!
Picard, you are fucking cursing at the wrong motherfucker, motherfucker. The fucking motherfucker that motherfucking said that fucking puns aren’t fucking funny is all the fucking way up there. Fuck.
(Sorry, but once we turn the profanity valve on, I go all the way.)
You know… Except in a few divine or science influenced cases, in order to be a mother one must first be fucked. So why is it bad to be a mother fucker? It’s like, helping, right?
Hence, calling someone a motherfucker implies that he got it right at least once. It shouldn’t be a swear word. It should be more like yelling Congratulations.
Holy potty mouth batman! :o
There’s a mutha-humpin’ pottymouth on this mutha-humpin’ thread!
I’m tired of motherfucking
snakesswears on this motherfucking page!I always wanted to see a version of Golden Age Robin with severe Tourettes… In fact, he probably had it. It’d explain the random exclamations.
I admire your rock hard dedication to the uppercrust of comedy. I will try to keep my brittle attempts from undermining your fine grained examples. Furthermore I would like to wipe my slate clean and return once i’ve had time to dig up some new material.
Do, please return once you’ve caught up to your quarry.
glad to see you’re getting in at ground zero.
Stop! All this punning is disturbing the earth!
PUNQUAKE!
I’m loving this mysterious spirit guy
See, now we miss the Bwakba-chicken thing. Just haul out some gyshal greens and the bird takes care of the digginses.
I think it’s time for: THE CHOCOBO HOT AND COLD GAME!
KWEHH??!?!
KWEH! *digging sound* KWEH!!
“Looky-loo”? Why has Best been talking like Ned Flanders?
Well he Best get to it.
I do not think the prospect of having to dig is music to his ears… Best would rather shovel it to the Spirit, imo.
If it turns out there’s no relic and this whole ghost-quest was a red herring, we’ll finally have our answer to the age-old question:
How I mine for fish?
Gold Star.
I thought stuff like this is why god created hirelings?
That could be why Best is there. After all, he started off as a stableboy, ended up a hero by accident… Maybe he’s an epic-level hireling by now?
Oh, nice. I like that quite a lot. :D
“Why won’t you help me dig up the artefact o great spirit?”
“Mine your own business!”
Nah, it’s just not in his union contract.
I hope he brought a spade, otherwise he’ll have to go all the way back to town and buy one. Because that’s how these things work.
And he’d better constrain his epicness and not dig too deep, or the giant fire demon will get him!
Don’t worry, you only get to have Fun with the Clowns if you hit the Circus by digging through the Cotton Candy.
Well, now he’s in Minecraft. :P
Oh man, it’s going to take forever to find some gold, and gold is useless
Speculation: what he finds will not be the usual sword of plot advancement. Instead, it will be something, in context, very weird: something placed by Dedalus, that will breach the wall between Arkerra and sepia world.
I hope he finds *something* that causes a change of scene. I’m quite sick of him and his face.
Don’t hate him becuase he’s beautiful.
Nah, we hate him because he’s a shit elf.
We loathe and despise him because he’s a dick, too.
We want to lock him up in the basement and rent him out because he’s beautiful.
How you make links, crazy man? Because, see, the only system I know is the Tvtropes system.
Thus, I shall boldly go and risk my own neck. I bet Payet finds [[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HealingShiv this.]]
DAMMIT.
It’s html. [a href="www.google.com"]Text Here[/a] but with pointy brackets.
It, like, tells you under the text input box the format of HTML tags you
canevidently can’t use.:p
I just noticed that, and half the tags I don’t recognize. I’m feeling old.
Also, for a deprecated tag, strikeout seems to be going strong.
Yeah, the html tags are there. And sometimes *gasp* they even work too.
Now explain to me why bracket-slash-I-bracket doesn’t stop the italics.
because you should use (em) for emphasis, and allow the users browser determine how to render that (usually italics) – rather than telling people how you want your meaning to be formatted :D
(in other words, the (i) tag is depreciated.)
let’s try it out though and see if it works.
seems to work. were you using capitalised characters in your tags?
Dammit. Nobody told Payet that this quest required having Archaeology trained!
It’s night… Best will dig a few squares down and then hear “SSSSSSS” from behind.
The comic comes to an abrupt end.
Don’t dig straight down, Payet!
… On the other hand, dig straight down! And straight up! And don’t use any torches!
digging straight up is perfectly safe — OH GOD GRAVEL IS AFFECTED BY GRAVITY SOMEHOW WHO COULD HAVE FORSEEN IT
Digging to the side now, no gravel should fall on me.
What is that strange hissing sooooooohhhhhhmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyygoooooooooooooood!!!!
“Okay, I’ve put up some torches, blocked myself in to keep stuff from sneaking up on me, I’m safe. I’ll just dig to the OTHER side. I mean, I’m on the diamond leve- Wait, is that lava- OH DEAR GOD WHYYYYYYY?!”
Usually goes like this.
*SSSS….*
“FUCK!”
*BOOM!*
I’d be irritated too if I came out here on a quest to save the world, had my Bwakgabok shot out from under me, had to risk my life fighting landsharks, spending all day and night in the desert(Which isn’t fun wearing a uniform designed for it, much less black leather), and come to the objective of my mission, only to be told to dig in the hard ground when all I have is an axe and my hands.
And note that the sand ends at the mouth of the cave. What he probably has there is sandstone or some other collection of rocks and crap.
Well, he used to be a stable boy. I’d say he remembers hard labor.
I dunno about a day and a night; it looks more like he had dinner in the sunset and started traveling again after full dark. (Not that I would blame him, hot desert sun + black leather, and all.)
If he was more practical (like, say, a wombat) he would always, always bring some kind of digging implement. You never know when saving the world might involve something so humble as a crowbar.
Here’s waiting for the ‘spirit’ to be doing the digging himself and grumbling away while Dr Douche catches up on his beauty sleep…
I can’t help but find it adorable/funny every time the ghost lifts its arms to say something.
Quick, Payet! Punch the soil with your geometric fists! Maybe it’ll explode in a similarly geometric fashion and give you a cube of soil! THINK OF THE IRON, MAN!
heh. iron man.
IT”S A GRAVE!!!!
Or at least it will be.
*crosses fingers*
Hopefully not a *Grave* full of *Dust*…
I think I’d go berserk if that was the case.
Imagine the Byrony of it all!
That’d be so Friggin cool.
He’s probably gonna find a dirty Syr’nj
Best case scenario for Payet would be that the relic is harmless, really.
Naw, Best case scenario is if he and his noble (seasoned and deceased) steed Bandit together to dig.
Something doesn’t seem right about this “spirit”
The last three panels are so damn funny. Isn’t this also the first time Best became the object of the joke? No, the Douchebag Achievement doesn’t count.
I love the prospect of an exasperated spirit. “Do I have to do EVERYTHING myself? I’m non-corporeal, I can’t dig up the damn relic for you!!”
Laughed so much at that. XD