As a husband, father, writer, artist, magazine editor, and general ne’er-do-well, I have a lot of stuff on my plate on a day-to-day basis. I’m always looking for ways to budget my time more effectively. This is what I’ve come up with: a way to spend time with my son AND get a new Ben & Winslow comic drawn up by Friday every week.

This is what happens when Winslow is allowed to be Dungeon Master.

The party here consists of Laura (a valkyrie), Apsara the Attention Whore (a barbarian), Kurt the Cynic (a necromancer), Ben (a warrior with kickass sideburns), and Psychic Rob (who is not, in fact, a psionic and is instead a humble archer).

Every gaming night, Ben, Kurt the Cynic, Apsara the Attention Whore, and Psychic Rob head over to Laura’s house to play RPG for Cool Dudes, one of the greatest role playing games of the late 90s. They eat junk food, talk about bad movies, and raid the dungeons of the dreaded Dark Viscount for gold, magical artifacts, and exotic weapons. And tonight, they’re doing all of that again. But with Winslow in the mix.

Those of you who host regular events (gaming nights, parties, orgies, whatever) always have that one person you never invite. You know the guy. The social reject that never talks, or never stops talking, or eats all the dip, or somehow manages to lock himself in the bathroom/shed/hall closet for several hours before anyone knows he’s even in there. Winslow is that person. He knows it. And it’s taken a heavy psychological toll.

I wish I could say that this comic is based on a true story, but sadly, none of my friends have ever used a flare gun to summon fellow gamers to their RPG. We always used such boring methods as text messages, or e-mails, or phone calls, or even–dare I say it–organizing a game in person! Of course, if we used flares, particularly novelty flares that “look like things,” we could end up summoning the wrong sort of people entirely. Like when you find Fezzik’s Summoning Pot in the lowest depths of the dungeon, and you try to use it but fail your intelligence test on a d20 roll of 13 or higher, and instead of summoning a level 7 ifrit you summon a demon from the Blackest Nether Reaches that gobbles up you and the rest of your party.