Just posting to add my agreement. This strip shows us that while V hasn’t solved all of his personality problems, he’s working on them and making progress.
That’s a lot of ice on the end of an airship. Just sayin’.
And y’know, Elan wasn’t necessarily pointing out the obvious. This is Julio Scoundrel’s ship, after all-- It probably does have an option for making flames shoot out of the engines.
It doesn’t create ice, it just drains heat, so the only ice would be the water that rained down while the spell was going off. Which is presumably not much.
V looks weird with boots. Even when the others were drawn with boots at the end of their stick-legs, V was “barefoot”. Well, I assumed wearing sandals or slippers or something. But now he has big ole honkin’ mud-kickers on.
Between #920, when V, who had one more Fly spell available, was sent to retrieve Haley and Elan, and #921, when we see Haley flying back with V, carrying Elan.
Why does it cost money? Does the process involve expensive material ingredients?
So, is it the kind of spell that is permanent or the kind that will wear off in a day?
Yeah. Well, that’s the in game reason. Really you just wouldn’t want a campaign where the wizard could spend all their free time creating a massive armament of spells to carry around with them.
Of course, these are the same game rules that give us this 
If V is using the Overland Flight spell, it lasts for most of a day.
The in-game justification is that copying magical spells of higher magick requires magickal components to enable ritual applications of supranaturally fockused higher mental powers something something physical focus bladibladiblah.
The real, metagame reason is that spellcasting classes are buff as hell, scrolls further empower them and if scrolls were free free it would totally skew what semblance of balance D&D 3.5 still has in (further) favour of CoDzilla (read : Cleric or Druid, Fuck Your Adventure Sideways Haw Haw Haw).
E.g. compare a Fighter who has to annihilate an entire goblin tribe to be able to afford his first Ring of Protection +1 (congrats on popping your cherry, Fighter !) vs. a cleric who could forever scroll his Shield of Faith spell which adds 1/3 of his level to his armour class for HisClass rounds. In game, the combination of spell slot restrictions + time component makes the CoDzilla a somewhat punctual monster : he can only be a total monster for a given number of rounds per day. If he had access to infinite scrolls (which would happen if scrolls were free, since past a certain level it’s almost mundane for adventuring parties to have access to a pocket plane outside of time, and even without that there’s always a downtime period between adventures), he would be a monster all of the time. Which would make the Fighter sad. Sadder than he already is, anyway.
Agreed. This strip didn’t do a whole lot to advance the plot. Highly unusual (read: never happens) when it’s Rich.
As far as we know right now.
“V, the engine’s on fire!”
“And it’s not supposed to be!”
“Thank you, Elan, for that key situational context.”
Hee.
Actually you do. It prevents the ‘15 minute day’. It also uses up XP and means that the wizard is a level or two below the non-spellcasters and that the party aren’t stymied when a particular spell is needed.
There’s a difference between having a handy Water Walk scroll on you and having twenty Fireballs.
Only at the cost of creating the 15 minute month. The problem of mages burning 24 hours of preparation in a few minutes of frenzied spellcasting cannot be solved simply by letting them build up more hours of preparation. You’d have to do the opposite - give them the limited ability to refresh themselves more than once every 24 hours. Maybe cantrips should only take 10 minutes to prepare, and can be prepared while performing light duties like walking rather than requiring 8 hours rest.
Or, more generally, reduce preparation time as the difference between the caster level and the spell level increases, down to some minimum that makes it impractical to refresh them in combat.
On the other hand, at fifth level, you can just make a wand of fireballs, and have forty of them on you.