1 Mordekai: Hail, hobbit merchant and elf maiden! May I join your caravan?
1 Alvissa: Are you a pickpocket?
2 Mordekai: Please! Pickpockets are thieves!
3 Alvissa: Oh, sorry... no offence.
4 Mordekai: But I do know how to pick pockets.

2011-11-02 Rerun commentary: Having exhausted the possibilities of pointing the webcam at myself (or so I thought at the time), I decided the next most obvious thing to do was come up with some actual fictional characters. Here we see the first appearance of Mordekai, Alvissa, and Lambert.

All three of these were actual characters in a GURPS fantasy game I was sporadically running at the time, using these actual miniatures during gameplay for combat tracking. I didn't come up with any of their names - my players did. So although we don't learn their names within the comic for a while, the characters did have names at this point.

Not that anyone would have known, since the transcripts which most of you probably now assume have always been around weren't a feature of the website until significantly later. At some point (I forget exactly when, but it was a hundred or more strips in), I decided to add transcripts and had to go back and retype the entire scripts for every comic up to that point.

The green thing they're on - representing grass - is a green clipboard. And I hadn't figured out how to make a sky behind them yet, so that's just the blank wall behind my desk.