Spoils of War [Bonus Comic] by @Thorvald (El Thorvaldo)

Hindsight is 20-20, and I remain convinced that had this comic aired, DYOS 6 wouldn't have died when it did. When @GenMarshall became involved in the pirates' war on the Flying Circus, it meant he was squaring off against Stylesrj; in-story, what started as a 'scenic tour' by Locke and Co. had ballooned into an international crisis: just about every active contributor had some stake, and these interests were not all mutual. None of this I anticipated, but by ending the Flying Circus with a clean cut, we could all turn our attention to loftier goals, namely the Sibling Crusade, whereto the pirates were supposed to be heading in the first place. Instead, it dragged on, Stylesrj dug his heels in, and the flaming became so bad the mods locked the thread.

So, why wasn't this posted? Earlier comics demonstrated I'd been having poor program performance. On top of this, the computer hardware itself was slowly beginning to fail, and so I purchased a replacement computer that arrived right around New Year's. The comic was mostly finished by this time, lacking only the pictures for Goebbels and Themi. Assuming, reasonably enough, that I'd wrap it up on the new desktop, I dismantled my setup and installed the new computer. But for reasons that I never figured out, it could not properly connect to the router no matter what code-tweaking I tried, and for the next few weeks I was borrowing a different computer for all my Internet needs, by which time the thread was locked. This piggybacking is what prevented me from joining DYOS 7 as I did not have optimal access to produce comics at the speed then demanded. I later found a partial fix for the problem by using a KVM switch to run both old and new computers at once, using the old one for 'Netting and shuffling files between the two as needed. The problem was eventually corrected by resetting the router itself to factory default settings, after which everything worked more or less fluidly. It never once occurred to me to plug in the old tower just to finish the comic.

Fun fact: Themi's thought bubble is from the SpongeBob episode "The Secret Box". The final image is from the victory scene for the third Soviet mission in Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Having played the video file raw, I added in the lines myself.

[Originally submitted to DeviantArt May 2013.]