Paid vacation...

[Katra]

I think the Brotherhood knows Toby and his companions well enough to figure 'paid vacation' will give them time and funds to wander around and trip over bad guys in need of a comeuppance.

[Coop]

Good point, Katra.  The guys who run the Brotherhood are undoubtedly pretty crafty.  And Kira is clever enough to see what they're doing.  Toby, of course, is not.  But that doesn't mean he's an idiot.  He's just a loyal knight who trusts his knightly superiors; he'd never consider the possibility that they might be using him in some devious manner.

Really, in this strip we haven't seen much about the Holy Brotherhood, so I'll say a few words about it here and summarize what we've already learned.  We know that Toby has never been considered one of their top recruits; during his training, he performed so poorly with a sword that he was ordered to use a mace instead.  And his horsemanship skills were woeful at first (he eventually improved them through intensive training).  When he visited one of the order's headquarters awhile back, he asked for a special assignment and was told that he wasn't skilled enough for anything except standard duty, which consists of patrolling a certain region and killing the monsters who live there in order to protect the citizenry.  Toby receives a salary for his efforts, though it's obviously pretty meager.  The Brotherhood is affiliated with a church, which funds the order as part of its mission to benefit mankind.  And of course the order stresses the usual knightly virtues (chivalry, courtesy, honesty, skill at arms).  That's the Holy Brotherhood in a nutshell.

[sethtriggs]

One of my best memories in C&K is Toby taking a faceplant off a horse, that big ol' mane splayed everywhere.

That was some great and dark comedy.

-Seth

[Coop]

That was years ago.  It's great that you still remember it.

I had a lot of fun with Thunder, the talking horse.  I had at least one reader send me an email, begging me to make Thunder a regular part of the cast.  It was tempting, but I decided not to, for some very practical reasons.  First, he was hard to draw.  Second, horses are so big that if Thunder was appearing regularly in the strip, there would be no room in the panels for the other characters unless they were drawn very small, which in my view made them look less appealing.  Third, I already had a certain amount of chemistry working between the three main characters, and I didn't see Thunder fitting in very well; Ulf and Kira are always jousting verbally with each other, Toby is trying to keep the team functioning, all three are pushing their own agendas, and where does a sarcastic talking horse fit in to all that?  He would have been like the fourth wheel on a tricycle, a part with no real function.

So I put Thunder out to pasture.  Too bad.  He was a fun character.  Maybe he trotted off to some other webcomic, where he's making life miserable for somebody else.