Hidden Details: The Lord of the Sings (Patreon)

Yo! Time to reveal some hidden details in last week's comic: The Lord of the Sings.

This comic was a lot of fun to make, especially since I'm a huge Lord of the Rings fan. The movies are my three favorite movies of all time and I’ve seen them at least 30 times each. Maybe even 50. It’s hard to count. When me and my brothers were younger, we’d just watch them over and over again. So I was super excited to do a Lord of the Rings comic. I’ve been toying with the idea for this comics for a few years actually and I decided this week was the week to finally draw it.

However, I grossly underestimated the Lord of the Rings fanbase. Particularity the book readers, I guess. Almost every comment on Reddit was calling me out on that this is not actually how the books go. The comic performed very poorly.

Sigh.

I never meant to accurately depict how the Lord of the Rings books go. I just wanted to make fun of the amount of songs in those books. OF COURSE THEY’RE NOT LIKE THIS, IT’S A SILLY WEBCOMIC, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!

Okay, this will be one of the rare (if not the only) times you’ll see me rant and be salty about the reception of a comic. I’ve gotten it out of my system. I can safely continue to write about a few hidden details for THOSE THAT AREN’T HUMOURLESS AND CAN RECOGNIZE A JOKE WHEN IT SLAPS THEM IN THEIR FACE.

Er-hem.

This comic has numerous references to things that actually happen in The Fellowship of the Ring. And because I love you, I went to the trouble of downloading the clips, cropping them and exporting them as GIFs so I can show you the scene's the references are based on without you having to follow some YouTube link!

The first panel is virtually a screenshot from the film. The second panel is a bit more cartoony, but there's still a bunch of movie-accurate stuff going on, for example:

Legolas piggyback riding the cave troll and shooting an arrow in it's skull. The skull proves to be too thick though, so the arrow shatters:

Aragorn killing a goblin by throwing a dagger across the room to save Boromir:

Sam smacking goblins with his frying pan. He then utters the somewhat iconic "I think I'm getting the hang of this!":

And of course, Frodo's sword, Sting, glowing since there are orcs nearby. Yes, Sting glows blue when there are orcs nearby. To me, information like this are common knowledge, but I realize some people might hear stuff like this for the first time, so I apologize in advance if I fail to clearly explain things because I think everyone is as big of nerd as I am.

One of the things that doesn't happen in the movies - at least not to my knowledge - is the goblin lying under the ground and having a peek at what's going on behind the loincloth of the cave troll (bottom right).

In the fourth panel, the hobbits form a close harmony backup choir behind Legolas. Pippin decides to improvise a bit by adding the line "second" breakfast to his shoop-shoop-de-la-doop. This is a reference to the scene in the Fellowship of the Ring in which a hungry Merry and Pippin ask Aragorn "what about second breakfast?" when he remarks that they just had breakfast. It's somewhat of a meme over on reddit.com/r/lotrmemes.

I don't know if this was obvious to the average viewer, but that lewd Frodo offers the audience a peek at his (Mithril) underwear. Frodo wears a Mithril (extremely hard material, created by dwarfs) vest underneath his regular clothes. He is stabbed by a cave troll (an orc captain in the books) but survives the stabbing because of the vest.

In the background, you can see Pippin passionately singing "en dan zitten we hier in deze oude steenmijn". This might be the first time I've ever put a bit of Dutch in a comic. It translates to: "and now we are here, sitting in this old stone mine" and it's a lyric from a Dutch song called Zoutelande (a place in the Netherlands) by BLØF and Geike Arnaert, which is a cover of the German song Frankfurt Oder, by Axel Bosse. You can immediately forget this information because you'll probably never hear from this song again if you're not Dutch. The melody is catchy though, I'll give them that. It's a huge hit here in the Netherlands (and in Belgium as well, I believe). It's basically the Dutch Despacito.

Speaking of Despacito... I'll give you one guess what the little goblin to the right of the last panel is singing!

Lastly, Aragorn sings about him being afraid of breaking a toe. This is a reference to the Two Towers. There's a scene in which Aragorn kicks a helmet, screaming in agony because he assumes Merry and Pippin have been killed. The scream was actually genuine, because Viggo Mortesen (who played Aragorn) broke his toe while kicking the helmet!

And that's it for today's Hidden Details! I don't think I'll be making any more Lord of the Rings comics since I didn't really like the reactions to this comic, but I'm still happy I got to draw my favorite characters from my favorite movies.

Hope you enjoyed the GIFs! See you all next week!

- Abel