[Fun] A Fun Fact About Every Episode Of Swords (Part 1 of 51?)

I actually posted the first episode twice! I posted this less polished version on Twitter a few days before posting the polished one to Reddit, which went a little bit viral and kicked off the series proper.

You might have noticed in these early episodes, I was hand-writing all of the dialogue. It got a bit cleaner before being replaced with a custom font.

Kargob's name was a bit of a loose of parody of Crom, the god from Conan the Barbarian. Xiphos is not-very-loosely inspired by a Chaos Barbarian from Warhammer.

Swords was originally going to be much more low fantasy, like Warhammer or Conan. The Travel Goblin became brighter colours, more rounded and nicer as time went on.

There are shields in this episode because shields have always existed in the world of Swords. Also it's quite weird that the Kingdom ran out of swords - something funny must have happened that needs to be covered in the HD remaster.

This is a blatant Lord Of The Rings parody, but Stabbins is a fawn. His ears are pointed in almost all of his future appearances. Stroller was a mix of Strider and the laid-back nature of Oberyn Martell, any resemblance to Aquaman's outfit was an accident.

Edge the Merblade was going to be a more prominent character, but things were still forming at this point.

Harpe was destined to become more of a Brienne Of Tarth type of muscle woman. I redrew this episode because the metrics kept indicating that I was losing readers when they reached this page of the website - I'm unsure if it's because it was popular, getting shared lots and people weren't sticking around; or people got bored; or the art was bad - but redrawing it seemed to help.

A simple Lady Of The Lake parody.

The Great Sage Of The Heavens has a lop-sided mouth because he's a parody of Stephen Hawking, who passed away on the day this episode was made.

This episode was a parody of a news headline that appeared on the same day, with a Startup guaranteeing a "100% fatal" procedure to preserve your brain forever.

The art style shifted more towards anime over time. People often remark that they liked it better when it felt more like Tintin. Since everyone was calling Bread Knight Vegeta already, I leaned in and made this guy extra Vegeta.

I'd already made goblins very weird, but I ended up having a really normal dwarf, which stopped me using them for a long time because I wasn't sure how to make them interesting to explore. The word "racist" was replaced with "prejudiced" at some point because the comment sections were always insufferable.

The "Sword In The Stone" god and the "Lady Of The Lake" god ended up being main characters alongside Kargob. A fan asked me a bunch of times to call them Bill & Ted, which I eventually bastardized into "Baltad & Greg". This is the first instance of the Barbarian Badlands being pink.

I changed the Medical symbol from red to green because it violates the Geneva Convention to use the red one in media. I can't remember why Travel Goblin changed colour.

Edge the Merblade was going to be part of the main story by becoming Harpe's sword, but things changed.

This might be the only time a hand-torch isn't sword-shaped. Another reason we need a remake.

Stroller, Stabbins, Kris the Necromancer and Bread Knight are all in the background, which made the story way more complicated when the Swor'nament became the focus. No take-backsies though.

It seems really out of character for Chad to have killed 101 people, so let's assume Guy is lying. Guy only appears one other time and it's not entirely clear why he is helping Chad prepare for the Swor'nament. These characters are all meeting in the Burnt Forest from Episode 2.

This episode was making fun of the people who thought I was gonna run out of ideas soon (it was 997 episodes ago, yikes); but also making fun of myself for doing 20 comics in 20 days and not spending more time on each one. Yes, Swords used to update daily. People were complaining they were missing updates because they were coming out too fast. Harpe and Smith became a couple which threw Edge the Merblade's placement in the story out the window.