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utilitymonstergirlOnce more unto the breach.
I had a lot of feelings in January 2025. Above all, I felt line the Beltway with crucifixions until it's clear there is nothing redemptive about it. But I got on with life, trying not to dwell on fantasies of going full Etienne Lux, and eventually the irritation produced this pearl.
R.2: My goal with this story was to incorporate real-world political dreads in a way that didn't feel hokey or instantly dated. I find a lot of protest art to be pretty uninteresting - there's nothing inherently wrong with making art designed to be as bluntly persuasive as possible, but I'm just not good at it. So, aside from the ripped-from-the-headlines screenshot here, there's nothing firmly pinning this down to a specific timeframe.
R.GRIEF: These chapter headers were a late addition (midway through the creation of part 3), but I had been toying with the idea for a while as I realized that this was shaping up to have a distinct story structure paralleling the original. After that, it took a minute to find suitable epigraphs for each one, but this one was a lock from the moment I heard its source. GET SHOT is my favorite Rural Internet song I've heard so far, built around four perspectives on gun violence from three weird trans women and RXKNephew. This quote is from Doin' Fine's verse, a parody of fascistic American gun culture, and I figured that overtly referencing the Pulse shooting was a good counterpart to the silent censorship here.
R.3 - R.4: I like using page spacing for minimalist, timing-based gags like this, as a contrast to the much busier compositions later on.
R.5 - R.6: A reference to kickasstorrents, and how these sites do a great job of teaching me about obscure national TLDs: in order, we've got Antarctica, Bhutan, the Czech Republic, Mongolia, Nigeria, Slovakia, and Vatican City.
R.7: The page title comes from the chorus of Webpunk by Vylet Pony, a bop that has gotten me through a lot of dread for the future of art distribution. "ZXX" is my go-to for fictional file extensions and web domains; it's the library reference code for "no linguistic content/not applicable".
The folders here are meant to briskly evoke the fandom/mod scene that's been propping up a piece of abandonware; I spent no more than a few seconds deliberating names for the mod before accepting that it had to be Lilith.
R.8 - R.9: I imagine that the game's soundtrack is a bunch of extremely unlicensed weird edgy shit, which I had fun shouting out here.
R.10: Tom Lehrer had died just about two weeks before this page was drawn, and I thought that one of the best to ever do it deserved a tribute here. (This also teases the concept of real-world ideologies becoming important within this story.)
The avatar here has the same Lodestone symbol as the story's very first corpse, with hair that echoes Antimony's asymmetrical cut and Copper's eyepatch.
R.11: While this comic uses the same brush for the character models as all previous Replaceable Parts stories, the environments are all drawn with brushes from TOMB of NULL's STIPPLE BEAST EVOLVED pack (h/t friend of the show Hydrahideout). I wanted to evoke a similar kind of art style/timeline jump as from Portal to Portal 2, with the added curveball of how this world may have aged and changed of its own accord.
Thus, we've also got a new spawnpoint design here, meant to evoke airport baggage claims and be a visual gag of "meat curtains". I also like to think there's a fandom meme about how the price of the starting handgun is as immutable as the Costco hotdog.
R.12: Here we start the slow-burn dread of what's been going on with the game during the timeskip. The architecture here has none of the floating-platform whimsy of earlier times, it's all flat utilitarian Albert Speer-ass parade grounds and unadorned buildings. The jagged skybox texture was a happy accident - I had laid down a solid block of that color to carve out the distance-model buildings, but I realized that it worked well as an Italian Futurist-style flourish.
R.13: I thought about how to identify these players as fascists - I thought about them painting slurs and slogans on the walls, but I don't wanna write that shit and you don't want to read it. Then maybe just painting emblems, but that felt a bit silly. Then I realized that I could just repurpose the shoulder-emblems. The first ones are semi-obscure, with the Winged Othala here, and build up to the headliners; even if readers don't recognize this one, there's also the subtle wrongness of a male avatar not having a periodic-table abbreviation.
R.14-15: Repeating the pace of the story's first eating scene, sharply interrupted by the once-climactic respawning; the building blocks of history return, but jumbled and recontextualized.
R.16-20: Lodestone learns quickly, getting sneaky and trying to work around the reload times. The second corpse is a bit blunter of a dogwhistle; H2, or "HH". The sprawled-out pose on page 20 is inspired a bit by the cover of Blackwinterwells' BEAR NOTHING.
R.21: Now that the gameplay loop is established, I was looking for clever ways to shortcut it, and literally saying "and so on" fit the bill perfectly; this is one of my favorite pages in the comic. Silicon and radium are elements 14 and 88, and the bridge they're hanging from is based on the section of the Ponte Vecchio with windows installed by Mussolini.
R.22: The first shot here was inspired by the body-printer in Mickey-17, a movie I wish I liked more than I did. The griefing-report popup is another riff of the Report Abuse gag here - what the hell is griefing in a game like this?
R.23: Originally I was thinking of having another respawn loop here, where Lodestone has to dodge mortars instead of rifle shots and eventually falls into a moat full of naval mines. I'm glad I didn't, because three loops was sufficient to get the point across and it was time to advance the plot already. So, now we meet...
R.24: Sulfur! This redesign was fun as hell: I knew from the start that she would have Copper's rifle and bandolier, and some sort of a cool bandana, but the scratches and white hair came quickly after. I like how they suggest a long history of rough-and-tumble adventures, with the white hair also implying a transcending of the nonsensical team assignments. (Plus, with the fang bandana, the hair makes her look like Erica Slaughter from Something is Killing the Children.) Even her speech bubbles are jagged and scratched; language itself is getting worn down.
R.ENDLING: I'm glad I was able to cite media that didn't exist when the original story was drawn, and Love & Ponystep was one of my favorite albums of 2025. A key part of its early-2010s aesthetic is framing Call of Duty as nostalgic queer kitsch, which was such a slam-dunk match for Replaceable Parts that I simply had to pay homage somewhere.
R.25: Lodestone's username came from a fun brainstorming session with friends about what kinds of handles players would have here. Sulfur then asks about ideology, another sign of the external world bearing down on this playground.
R.26: Hm, with what we've seen so far, it seems ominous that this chat system lets you say 'white' and 'ice'.
R.27: I like keeping it ambiguous if Sulfur even has a player, or if she ever did at all. Has she cut her puppet strings in the intervening years?
R.28: More ominous emblems: a white supremacist version of the Celtic cross, and some pretty blunt chemical notation. (Ar is more obtuse: it's element 18, as in "AH", and also seems like an abbreviation for "Aryan.") The corpse here was killed via necklacing, which I went back and forth on including but I think the impact is worth it.
R.29-R.31: Finally, the tower from the first view of the map! I wanted Sulfur to have an imposing headquarters to emphasize just how much time she's had to dig her feet in, and I snuck in the naval mines I had to cut earlier. The keypad is in Linear A, foreshadowing the ancient ruins to come.
R.32: This setpiece was fixed in my mind from the moment I settled on the premise: three corpses with the Axis powers' emblems, killed in the same way as their leaders. This is the point where the theme becomes overt, and I'm okay if people mostly pick up on the other symbols on a reread as long as the point lands clearly by Act 2.
R.33: A silly gag, but another point of establishing Sulfur as The Boss, for better or worse. On my first pass, I immediately forgot to draw Lodestone with the missing arm in the last panel.
R.34-R.35: More boss parallels, with the table covered in maps and data, but with the never-before-seen power of spawning and despawning assets at will. (And yet she's been using Copper's old bolt-action rifle this whole time...)
R.36-R.39: This conversation has been by far the thematically-trickiest of the series to write. One of Sulfur's inspirations was my friend's grandfather who did genuinely great work resisting Mussolini, but then became unable to ever admit fault about anything - Sulfur has become unable to negotiate in good faith with anyone. I didn't want her to be Just As Bad As The Fascists or anything like that, she's making reasonable points but with an unyielding stubbornness.
R.40-41: It's important to temper Sulfur's gravitas with a bit of silly counterplay, I think.
R.42: This seemed like a fun plot device for setting up creative combat encounters that don't just devolve into tedious shootouts, and I'm excited to show off just what the hell kind of assets the game has accumulated. (Some readers parsed this at first as "you can only spawn one item ever", but I'm glad that I got to quickly clarify that.)
R.43-45: I like the double gag here of the sharp return to browser windows followed by the search parameters. However, the actual screenshots used here are taken from a Neoseeker walkthrough for Twilight Princess, not for any firm reason, it just had formatting that looked good here.
R.46: Though I've only ever played Halo on a few occasions, the Gravity Hammer has captured my imagination as a wonderfully goofy weapon, and this one is designed as a riff on the Prop Gun from Garry's Mod (a revolver with some slapdash electronics on it).
R.47: The boot being thrown out to check for traps is a nod to the delightful torment-nexus film Cube.
R.48: Chekhov's Naval Mine!
R.49 - 52: It's an important part of Sulfur's characterization that her isolation has made her a bitter, jaded veteran but also unimaginably chuuni; she's fucking thrilled to break out the billowing tattered cape and pince-nez and katana.
R.53 - 54: The mine's explosion blew open a hole from dreary fascist architecture to a world of nonsensical floating blocks, but there are far more layers to reach: a middle layer that gestures more at functionality, and then a pit of dense pipes and tanks and fungal overgrowth. Even though drawing this all got pretty involved at times, I had fun taking such a swerve from the main architectural styles.
R.55: The lines here are taken from Half-Life's HEV suit, and I figured this was a good mini-cliffhanger spot to fit a chapter break that mirrored the original: we've fallen out of the world, so now what?
After finishing Replaceable Parts and Field Stripping, I thought "maybe I'll return to this world and maybe I won't, but this body of work stands well by itself." The night after writing that letter to Visa, I was replaying the Portal games and a hook for a timeskip sequel just clicked.
The original Replaceable Parts was made between November 2023 and May 2024. Field Stripping ran from June 2024 to January 2025.I had a lot of feelings in January 2025. Above all, I felt line the Beltway with crucifixions until it's clear there is nothing redemptive about it. But I got on with life, trying not to dwell on fantasies of going full Etienne Lux, and eventually the irritation produced this pearl.
R.2: My goal with this story was to incorporate real-world political dreads in a way that didn't feel hokey or instantly dated. I find a lot of protest art to be pretty uninteresting - there's nothing inherently wrong with making art designed to be as bluntly persuasive as possible, but I'm just not good at it. So, aside from the ripped-from-the-headlines screenshot here, there's nothing firmly pinning this down to a specific timeframe.
R.GRIEF: These chapter headers were a late addition (midway through the creation of part 3), but I had been toying with the idea for a while as I realized that this was shaping up to have a distinct story structure paralleling the original. After that, it took a minute to find suitable epigraphs for each one, but this one was a lock from the moment I heard its source. GET SHOT is my favorite Rural Internet song I've heard so far, built around four perspectives on gun violence from three weird trans women and RXKNephew. This quote is from Doin' Fine's verse, a parody of fascistic American gun culture, and I figured that overtly referencing the Pulse shooting was a good counterpart to the silent censorship here.
R.3 - R.4: I like using page spacing for minimalist, timing-based gags like this, as a contrast to the much busier compositions later on.
R.5 - R.6: A reference to kickasstorrents, and how these sites do a great job of teaching me about obscure national TLDs: in order, we've got Antarctica, Bhutan, the Czech Republic, Mongolia, Nigeria, Slovakia, and Vatican City.
R.7: The page title comes from the chorus of Webpunk by Vylet Pony, a bop that has gotten me through a lot of dread for the future of art distribution. "ZXX" is my go-to for fictional file extensions and web domains; it's the library reference code for "no linguistic content/not applicable".
The folders here are meant to briskly evoke the fandom/mod scene that's been propping up a piece of abandonware; I spent no more than a few seconds deliberating names for the mod before accepting that it had to be Lilith.
R.8 - R.9: I imagine that the game's soundtrack is a bunch of extremely unlicensed weird edgy shit, which I had fun shouting out here.
R.10: Tom Lehrer had died just about two weeks before this page was drawn, and I thought that one of the best to ever do it deserved a tribute here. (This also teases the concept of real-world ideologies becoming important within this story.)
The avatar here has the same Lodestone symbol as the story's very first corpse, with hair that echoes Antimony's asymmetrical cut and Copper's eyepatch.
R.11: While this comic uses the same brush for the character models as all previous Replaceable Parts stories, the environments are all drawn with brushes from TOMB of NULL's STIPPLE BEAST EVOLVED pack (h/t friend of the show Hydrahideout). I wanted to evoke a similar kind of art style/timeline jump as from Portal to Portal 2, with the added curveball of how this world may have aged and changed of its own accord.
Thus, we've also got a new spawnpoint design here, meant to evoke airport baggage claims and be a visual gag of "meat curtains". I also like to think there's a fandom meme about how the price of the starting handgun is as immutable as the Costco hotdog.
R.12: Here we start the slow-burn dread of what's been going on with the game during the timeskip. The architecture here has none of the floating-platform whimsy of earlier times, it's all flat utilitarian Albert Speer-ass parade grounds and unadorned buildings. The jagged skybox texture was a happy accident - I had laid down a solid block of that color to carve out the distance-model buildings, but I realized that it worked well as an Italian Futurist-style flourish.
R.13: I thought about how to identify these players as fascists - I thought about them painting slurs and slogans on the walls, but I don't wanna write that shit and you don't want to read it. Then maybe just painting emblems, but that felt a bit silly. Then I realized that I could just repurpose the shoulder-emblems. The first ones are semi-obscure, with the Winged Othala here, and build up to the headliners; even if readers don't recognize this one, there's also the subtle wrongness of a male avatar not having a periodic-table abbreviation.
R.14-15: Repeating the pace of the story's first eating scene, sharply interrupted by the once-climactic respawning; the building blocks of history return, but jumbled and recontextualized.
R.16-20: Lodestone learns quickly, getting sneaky and trying to work around the reload times. The second corpse is a bit blunter of a dogwhistle; H2, or "HH". The sprawled-out pose on page 20 is inspired a bit by the cover of Blackwinterwells' BEAR NOTHING.
R.21: Now that the gameplay loop is established, I was looking for clever ways to shortcut it, and literally saying "and so on" fit the bill perfectly; this is one of my favorite pages in the comic. Silicon and radium are elements 14 and 88, and the bridge they're hanging from is based on the section of the Ponte Vecchio with windows installed by Mussolini.
R.22: The first shot here was inspired by the body-printer in Mickey-17, a movie I wish I liked more than I did. The griefing-report popup is another riff of the Report Abuse gag here - what the hell is griefing in a game like this?
R.23: Originally I was thinking of having another respawn loop here, where Lodestone has to dodge mortars instead of rifle shots and eventually falls into a moat full of naval mines. I'm glad I didn't, because three loops was sufficient to get the point across and it was time to advance the plot already. So, now we meet...
R.24: Sulfur! This redesign was fun as hell: I knew from the start that she would have Copper's rifle and bandolier, and some sort of a cool bandana, but the scratches and white hair came quickly after. I like how they suggest a long history of rough-and-tumble adventures, with the white hair also implying a transcending of the nonsensical team assignments. (Plus, with the fang bandana, the hair makes her look like Erica Slaughter from Something is Killing the Children.) Even her speech bubbles are jagged and scratched; language itself is getting worn down.
R.ENDLING: I'm glad I was able to cite media that didn't exist when the original story was drawn, and Love & Ponystep was one of my favorite albums of 2025. A key part of its early-2010s aesthetic is framing Call of Duty as nostalgic queer kitsch, which was such a slam-dunk match for Replaceable Parts that I simply had to pay homage somewhere.
R.25: Lodestone's username came from a fun brainstorming session with friends about what kinds of handles players would have here. Sulfur then asks about ideology, another sign of the external world bearing down on this playground.
R.26: Hm, with what we've seen so far, it seems ominous that this chat system lets you say 'white' and 'ice'.
R.27: I like keeping it ambiguous if Sulfur even has a player, or if she ever did at all. Has she cut her puppet strings in the intervening years?
R.28: More ominous emblems: a white supremacist version of the Celtic cross, and some pretty blunt chemical notation. (Ar is more obtuse: it's element 18, as in "AH", and also seems like an abbreviation for "Aryan.") The corpse here was killed via necklacing, which I went back and forth on including but I think the impact is worth it.
R.29-R.31: Finally, the tower from the first view of the map! I wanted Sulfur to have an imposing headquarters to emphasize just how much time she's had to dig her feet in, and I snuck in the naval mines I had to cut earlier. The keypad is in Linear A, foreshadowing the ancient ruins to come.
R.32: This setpiece was fixed in my mind from the moment I settled on the premise: three corpses with the Axis powers' emblems, killed in the same way as their leaders. This is the point where the theme becomes overt, and I'm okay if people mostly pick up on the other symbols on a reread as long as the point lands clearly by Act 2.
R.33: A silly gag, but another point of establishing Sulfur as The Boss, for better or worse. On my first pass, I immediately forgot to draw Lodestone with the missing arm in the last panel.
R.34-R.35: More boss parallels, with the table covered in maps and data, but with the never-before-seen power of spawning and despawning assets at will. (And yet she's been using Copper's old bolt-action rifle this whole time...)
R.36-R.39: This conversation has been by far the thematically-trickiest of the series to write. One of Sulfur's inspirations was my friend's grandfather who did genuinely great work resisting Mussolini, but then became unable to ever admit fault about anything - Sulfur has become unable to negotiate in good faith with anyone. I didn't want her to be Just As Bad As The Fascists or anything like that, she's making reasonable points but with an unyielding stubbornness.
R.40-41: It's important to temper Sulfur's gravitas with a bit of silly counterplay, I think.
R.42: This seemed like a fun plot device for setting up creative combat encounters that don't just devolve into tedious shootouts, and I'm excited to show off just what the hell kind of assets the game has accumulated. (Some readers parsed this at first as "you can only spawn one item ever", but I'm glad that I got to quickly clarify that.)
R.43-45: I like the double gag here of the sharp return to browser windows followed by the search parameters. However, the actual screenshots used here are taken from a Neoseeker walkthrough for Twilight Princess, not for any firm reason, it just had formatting that looked good here.
R.46: Though I've only ever played Halo on a few occasions, the Gravity Hammer has captured my imagination as a wonderfully goofy weapon, and this one is designed as a riff on the Prop Gun from Garry's Mod (a revolver with some slapdash electronics on it).
R.47: The boot being thrown out to check for traps is a nod to the delightful torment-nexus film Cube.
R.48: Chekhov's Naval Mine!
R.49 - 52: It's an important part of Sulfur's characterization that her isolation has made her a bitter, jaded veteran but also unimaginably chuuni; she's fucking thrilled to break out the billowing tattered cape and pince-nez and katana.
R.53 - 54: The mine's explosion blew open a hole from dreary fascist architecture to a world of nonsensical floating blocks, but there are far more layers to reach: a middle layer that gestures more at functionality, and then a pit of dense pipes and tanks and fungal overgrowth. Even though drawing this all got pretty involved at times, I had fun taking such a swerve from the main architectural styles.
R.55: The lines here are taken from Half-Life's HEV suit, and I figured this was a good mini-cliffhanger spot to fit a chapter break that mirrored the original: we've fallen out of the world, so now what?
