Irregular Webcomic! #62

Thanks to GngrBear for the punchline for this. My originally planned punchline was as follows:

... but when I got close to finishing the strip I thought it lacked a certain something. I'm much happier with the newer version.

2012-01-10 Rerun commentary: Peter Murray, a.k.a. GngrBear, is responsible for more of Irregular Webcomic! than anyone else apart from myself. I'd known him for many years before starting the comic, via Usenet newsgroups and IRC chat sessions. Although he lived in England and we never met, he was an early enthusiastic supporter of the comic and we often discussed scripts I was working on or punchlines that I thought could use some tweaking. He's not explicitly credited for his many, many contributions to the comic, but they're certainly in there.

It was Peter who first got me interested in the then-new series of books written by a promising new author. Her second book had recently been released, and Peter raved about it. So I went out and got copies of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Over the next few years, Peter introduced me to the world of Harry Potter fan-fiction. I never got into it nearly as deeply as he did, but enough to know some of the tropes and reference them in a few comic strips using the characters, after the LEGO Group released sets based on the books.

By that stage it was clear that Harry Potter had grown to become a global phenomenon. Peter took both the books and the films and spent time making complex 3D models of various bits of Hogwarts castle, rendered using a ray-tracing program. (Peter is also responsible for teaching me of the existence of POV-Ray and how to use it, which led directly to the use of rendered 3D models in some of my comics.)

After the shocking events of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Peter, like many fans around the world, was eagerly awaiting the release of the seventh and final Harry Potter novel. Unfortunately, Peter succumbed to ill health and passed away in 2007, just months before the book was published.

J. K. Rowling said in an interview: "My books are largely about death. They open with the death of Harry's parents. There is Voldemort's obsession with conquering death and his quest for immortality at any price, the goal of anyone with magic. I so understand why Voldemort wants to conquer death. We're all frightened of it."

It would have been nice if death hadn't come quite so literally to Peter when it did. But Fate is cruel and we can only look back with sadness. Peter was also a huge fan of Diane Duane's ongoing Young Wizards series, which predated Harry Potter by 14 years. He was active in its fan community and was a moderator on the official Young Wizards Forums (as he was on the IWC! forums). Diane honoured his memory by dedicating her 2010 instalment, A Wizard of Mars, to him.

So thanks again to Peter for all his contributions - to at least three different works of fiction. He got me into some pretty good company.