Classic Da Blog

Because someone claimed Part V of “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” didn’t count as February’s OOTS post. Also, mega MEGA spoilers.

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized four words… or maybe three. An epic strip deserves an epic post linked to from the OOTS forum, so look for a traffic influx.)

A lot can happen when you’re on a deserted island where the only other people to step foot on it are an imp, a pissed-off dragon, and three fiends.

If you’ve been reading The Order of the Stick at all in the current book (at least when it wasn’t focused on Haley, Celia, and Belkar), or even if you’ve been reading my OOTS posts, you know that Vaarsuvius has been undergoing a slow descent into madness out of his/her desperation to reunite the group and get Roy resurrected.

V has not slept tranced in a long time, with accompanying decline of his/her mental faculties, and quite a bit of physical deterioration as well, with his/her hair and clothes becoming dissheveled and (strangely purple) veins showing. He/she’s tried virtually everything to get something, anything through to her good friend Haley – homemade scrying spell, messenger birds, the works – but despite taking part in as many battles as he/she can to collect as much XP as he/she can, nothing’s cracked the Cloister she doesn’t even know exists (well, except the birds, but that didn’t end well). In the meantime his/her singleminded devotion to contacting Haley has led to becoming rather estranged from Durkon and Elan, and rather unwilling to tolerate any sort of distraction. This came to a head late in the 500s, the last time we checked in on that half of the Order, when Daimyo Kubota, chief villain for nearly a hundred strips, plotter to overthrow Hinjo, fresh from poisoning his ex-assassin Therkla to death, freshly surrendered to Elan’s custody, suddenly gets taken out by a single Disintegrate from Vaarsuvius, who asks, “Can we PLEASE resume saving the world?”

Kubota may have been a red herring all along, but his disposal is itself important as part of V’s ongoing descent. (And Elan’s character development, but that’s a story for another day.) Elan’s argument with V on the rightness of the move leads to V dismissing Therkla as a “bundle of experience points”, insinuating Elan had an affair with her when he categorically didn’t, and ultimately threatening to take out Elan himself. At this point, V becomes convinced (s)he could no longer continue his/her studies on the boat – not out of fear for retribution, but because of the constant distractions of having to deal with this quest or that one, and even more so, the lack of any help from Durkon or Elan (who (s)he doesn’t even guarantee (s)he’ll contact back should (s)he find Haley). Elan sends him/her off and covers for him/her despite having said he wouldn’t, and the real villain here, Qarr, takes off after him/her.

At this point – and this greatly added to the anticipation for #600 and the impact when it turned out to be a switch back to Roy and an anticlimax – it looked for all the world as though V’s infamous “four words” were imminent.

As OOTS has developed a rather complex plot, one of the guiding principles of forum speculation has been the prophecies given to the group by the Oracle of Sunken Valley. So far, two have already come to pass: Haley‘s, and Belkar’s. All in all, three prophecies were cryptic (Haley, Belkar, and V), while the other three were relatively straightforward (Roy (if unhelpful), Durkon, and Elan… although Elan’s leans more towards the cryptic side, and indeed is almost as cryptic as Belkar’s, it’s also not as conducive to speculation because people don’t like to think about the end of the strip). With two of the cryptic prophecies out of the way, that leaves V’s prophecy as one of the most talked-about single panels in the history of the strip (though Belkar’s prophecy got plenty of play back in the day).

Vaarsuvius asks “how (he/she) will attain ultimate arcane power”, and the Oracle responds that it will come “by saying the right four words to the right being at the right time for all the wrong reasons”.

For three hundred strips, nearly half the strip’s entire existence, that sentence has touched off almost as much debate as the question of V’s gender or the exact nature of that thing in the dark – and as V’s descent has progressed, forum speculators have taken to looking for any four-word string to come out of his mouth to, ultimately, turn out to be the four words that trigger “ultimate arcane power”, often completely ignoring the rest of the sentence. (To show how ridiculous it can get, one theory that was actually rather popular was that when V disintegrated Kubota, she actually said the four words as “Disintegrate. Gust of Wind”, the latter scattering Kubota’s ashes into the sea.) V’s descent into madness seemed to be a perfect moment of weakness, especially as #599 ended. Anyone could see what would happen next: Qarr would tempt V with the promise of ultimate arcane power, and V would say the right four words to agree to the deal.

As it turned out (and we would have to wait for an interlude with Haley’s group before finding this out), that’s not quite how it would happen… and it seems ridiculous in retrospect that the whole deal could be completed in a single strip. And we would have been a lot poorer if that was how it happened.

You see, Vaarsuvius may be sleep trance-deprived, but he/she’s not stupid. He/she can see what’s coming just as well as anyone else could. So when Qarr tempts him, not even with the catch being any sort of damnation (or hidden entirely), but merely helping him with “a certain project of my own”, V goes almost directly to the Disintegration finger. V wasn’t about to sell his soul over this minor setback; he’s going to solve his problem on his own, without any infernal assistance.

Funny how fast circumstances can change.

Right at that moment, an ancient black dragon shows up and proceeds to own V’s ass. She explains that she’s the mother of a dragon V killed nearly 450 strips earlier (nearly three fourths of the strip has passed in the interim), waiting and watching for V to first leave the boat and then use up all his spells fighting Qarr. But for her vengeance, she won’t kill V; that would be too easy. Instead, she’ll make V suffer the same pain she feels by eating V’s own children, bind their souls to herself to frustrate any attempt at simply reviving them, and leaving the material plane for good so V can’t locate her ever again.

The dragon pops out, and just like that V’s relationship with Qarr is drastically changed. Unable to come up with any way to save his/her kids even using Qarr, V is left practically begging him to arrange some sort of Faustian deal. Qarr warns him/her that the chances of success are low, the response time is long, and so will the process of filling out the paperwork even if it does happen, but almost instantly an envelope appears from the “IFCC”, and out pops three fiends in hoods and robes.

The fiends – representing the “Inter-Fiend Cooperation Commission”, out to broker a truce between the respective Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic Evil fiendish populations, who see V as a test case to prove their point – look pretty much exactly like the fiends Sabine was seen reporting to upon learning of the gates, to the extent that the forums are basically taking the idea that they’re the same as given. They offer to perform a “once-in-a-century” “Soul Splice”, grafting the souls of three powerful conjurers to V’s own, giving V power that would “dwarf that wielded by any ar[c]ane spellcaster who has ever lived” (since it’s double the power of just one fiend performing the Splice), which V would have complete control over for as long as V holds on to it. V won’t even get eternal damnation, only time with each fiend equal to the amount of time (s)he holds on to the splice.

Would you take the deal? To save your children’s lives, and their souls?

With regard to the Seven Deadly Sins, it’s easy to associate Faustian deals with Avarice or Envy. Someone wants some goal – youth, money, power – and is willing to sell his soul to the Devil to get it. Occasionally it’s Wrath, such as wanting revenge against some particular person or group. It’s far from unheard of for someone to sell their soul for rather benign, understandable ends, such as reversing a spell of bad luck (The Devil and Daniel Webster), where usually the problem (if there’s presented as being one) is having too much of a concern for earthly things rather than the glories of Heaven, or even (theoretically) for noble purposes, such as to give up your own soul for that of another or for a greater good. At first glance, this deal might appear to fall into this last category, where Vaarsuvius is sacrificing his/her own soul for not one, but two or three others, and the chief objection to these being the “four words” on the forums was that saving his/her family was hardly the “wrong reasons”. Personally, I felt it was sufficiently wrong given the larger context and the other priorities, especially if you read V’s motivation in the context of revenge, but that’s just heartless old me. But even if it was, that wouldn’t be nearly as rich of a motivation, or nearly as tragic a fall. This is an odd case of a Faustian deal being made primarily out of pride.

Already frustrated by his/her inability to find Haley and Co., Vaarsuvius is out to prove that arcane magic can solve his/her problems, and that leaving his/her home to study it wasn’t a complete waste of time that only cost her his family. There may well be several ways to save the day at less cost, and if there aren’t it’s probably better for V to just cut his/her losses rather than do something that could have far worse consequences. (Nothing says the fiends have to have his/her soul after (s)he dies.) But V is stubborn and arrogant, as we already knew, and it is proving to be his/her fatal flaw. He/she is not going to admit defeat – not for finding Haley (hence his/her problems with Durkon and Elan), not for saving his/her children, and in a broader sense, not for his/her devotion to magic. Even saving his family is secondary to proving herself right. It’s like the old saying goes, “pride cometh before a fall”, and V is falling, hard.

Rich drives the point home in the current strip (titled, in a deliberate callback to the Oracle’s prophecy and possible reference to the forumites’ problems, “The Wrong Reasons”), when the fiends present V with the alternative: kill herself, have Qarr teleport the head to Durkon and Co., be resurrected, and describe his mentor to Durkon so he can get a message through to him and get him to intervene. (Oddly, despite having a hairstyle similar to that that made me think V was female, Aarindarius seems pretty clearly male to me.) “But,” the fiends warn, “but then you would have to admit that your magic had failed you yet again. That a cleric and a monster had to run and tell Master to come clean up your mess. Hell, you couldn’t even claim to have come up with the idea, since we just gave it to you!” And the fiends know V would never do that – and the ultimate “four words” pound the message home further. This isn’t just a standard plot twist, or even a standard re-use of the Faustian deal. This is Christian morality meeting Greek tragedy, the journey into the belly of the whale (I considered making the line at the top “click for full-sized mouth of the whale”), a desperate hero’s hubris doing him/her in and leading to what will likely be a rather dear cost paid.

In Part IV of “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis”, I claimed that webcomics were not doing enough to break out of its routines, to become great literature rather than just entertain the masses (something all of comics are arguably guilty of), and that not even The Order of the Stick was “much more than a neat story for the masses, with plenty of plot upon subplot but not much in the way of subtext or meaning,” not really enough of that intangible timeless quality that would allow it to stand the test of time.

O great and powerful Rich Burlew, I hast forsaken thee, for I was wanting faith, and I was a fool to do so, and I humbly bow down before thee and beg thee for thy forgiveness. For thy story is truly great and worthy to take its place in the annals of great literature, and ist indeed in the upper eschelon of the great fantasy tales, and thy name shalt be spoken of in the same sentence with Tolkien, Lovecraft, and Pratchett. And certainly its spot in the Greatest Webcomics once the medium matures certainly seems secure now. Burlew has already presented a sort of classic tragic redemption tale with Miko, but that was fairly standard material by comparison. This is the sort of resonant, classic tragedy that’s actually rather rare in fantasy (off the top of my admittedly-not-immersed head, only Tolkien even comes close! Not coincidentially he’s the only surefire author I could think of for the above list, and the only one people could easily agree on), and it shows just how surprising that should be, how well-fit the trappings of fantasy really are for this sort of thing.

Cleverly, Rich has left some room for error as to whether or not these are really the “four words”, because two of them are really a stutter, they seem shoehorned in at the last minute and not really relevant or causal, and the fiends’ alternative is hopelessly convoluted, not guaranteed to work, and even assuming the fiends are telling the truth about the circumstances would take comparatively too long. It’s plausible – V says the four words, to him/herself, right as time is running out on the offer and time resumes, and for very, very wrong reasons – but the debate is allowed to go on as we wonder whether there’s even more ultimate arcane power awaiting him, the current debacle only sending V spiraling down the path of despair as he gets a taste of true power, leading to even more wrong reasons and even wronger reasons.

Who says comics can’t be art?

Because contrasting opinions are the spice of life.

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David Morgan-Mar wrote a reply to my recent Darths and Droids post, as I’m sure you figured would happen. It’s actually rather illuminating, so if you haven’t already, check out the comments to the original post.

Yes, I’ve read today’s Order of the Stick. Post coming, probably early in the morning. Like Vaarsuvius, I’m tormented by distractions everywhere.

State of Darths and Droids: It’s Not You, It’s… Well, It’s Both of Us

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(From Darths and Droids. Click for full-sized things that go bump in the night.)

I may be leaning towards removing Darths and Droids from my RSS reader.

I’ve said in the past that Darths and Droids is incredibly innovative, taking the basic concept introduced to it by DM of the Rings and building a rich, layered metaplot on top of it, creating a comic I found more captivating than either its predecessor or Irregular Webcomic!

IWC has since moved into a rich, unified plot of its own, but that’s not the only problem I’ve been finding with Darths and Droids. I still believe every word of that description – I was remiss in leaving Darths and Droids out of any consideration for the greatest webcomics of all time last week, at least in those places where it would be on the same list as IWC. Yes, I mean that; it would rank low, but its sort of innovation is worthy of notice, and if it somehow sparked a wave of “RPG screencap comics” there could be no denying its influence.

But as it’s progressed, it’s gotten disjointed.

This problem started as we entered the climax of Phantom Menace, as the strip, following the lead of the movie, split into three separate subplots: the battle between the Gungans and the droids, Anakin and R2D2 taking off on their own little mission, and Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan squaring off against Darth Maul. The resulting cross-cutting can work when the comic is read all at once, but when the comic is read on Darths and Droids’ Tuesday-Thursday-Sunday schedule, each switch to a new plot, the one snippet of the story we get on a particular day, has no connection to what has come immediately before, and one is forced to think back more than a week to remember what we’re picking up on. Each strip becomes an individual moment in time. Imagine going about your day and remembering it’s Tuesday and Darths and Droids must have a new strip up, and seeing this. Oh, and imagine waiting two days later for this.

Once again, with a “long-form” comic you have to maintain that balancing act between making sure your comic makes sense read all at once, and also makes sense read in bite-size chunks. This is a major reason gag-a-day strips have held the edge over longer continuity strips to this point in webcomics.

Things calmed down a little after Qui-Gon was critically injured and we settled into Darth Maul’s flashback. That meant several strips of fairly linear, strip-to-strip storytelling. Even when we went back to cross-cutting afterwards it was mostly to mop up the aftermath. It was fairly slow-paced, but readable.

Then we went through an intermission of several strips.

Then came Attack of the Clones.

The Comic Irregulars are explicitly making each movie a separate campaign played out with several years between them. So we’re introduced to the players as they exist two years after the events of the first campaign/movie, including a Sally significantly older and wiser. It’s a significant change to the dynamic, one that’s been brought into sharp focus with the recent huddle-up involving all the PCs. It’s awkward seeing everyone all huddle up as an established group after ten game years apart.

When we actually get into the plot, it resumes the disconnectedness while maintaining a single plot thread. Now I admit, I’ve seen almost zero of Attack of the Clones, and what I have seen is nearer the end. But we basically launch into the story in media res and almost immediately are subjected to something that’s basically a gag. At this point, it feels like the Comic Irregulars are rushing through the story much faster than the occasionally stalled pace at which they moved through The Phantom Menace. They spent a lot of time in Phantom Menace trying to establish the characters and building hints of their personalities and relationships with each other. We got to know the various characters, we paced through the story and every single thing the characters did, and the characters, in turn, slowly learned about the world and the campaign. In Attack of the Clones, the Comic Irregulars basically barge into the story guns a-blazin’. We already know the characters, they already know about the world and we can take care of the campaign in one strip, so let’s take a pure utilitarian approach and get through the plot as quickly as we can.

In The Phantom Menace, the Comic Irregulars may have created a more captivating story than they ever intended.

Truth be told, that may be partly because they actually created a story. So far, Attack of the Clones has mostly felt like a bunch of disconnected moments loosely strung together. Each individual strip has mostly served the purpose of a gag. It’s almost been a reverse Cerebus Syndrome, where the strip has developed less of a reliance on the plot and become more gag-a-day in nature.

Consider the succeding sequence, where Padme/Jim meets with the Jedi Council and Chancellor Palpatine over the vote to create a Grand Army of the Republic. The first strip involves everyone discussing Padme’s character, and Padme walking in, checking the Jedi’s support for the Army, and trying to boss Palpatine around. The second strip creates the subplot of rebuilding the moon of Naboo, destroyed by the Trade Federation during The Phantom Menace. And strip #3 mostly involves back-and-forth dialogue between Padme and Bail Organa. All three are somewhat disconnected from each other, especially when read one at a time. The last strip in particular comes off as being disconnected even when read in sequence all at once.

I say that a “long-form” webcomic should take care to make each strip a complete, satisfying experience, but it’s a balancing act. If it’s too diffuse, it loses cohesion; it may come off like a complete comic when read all at once, but as a day-by-day comic, it almost no longer becomes a plot-based strip.

Two factors may make that sound absurd. The first is the popularity of gag-a-day webcomics, and the second is the specific fact that The Order of the Stick is very much gag-a-day and yet balances that out with an ongoing plot. But gag-a-day strips don’t have an expectation of a plot unless they’re undergoing Cerebus Syndrome, and OOTS substantially advances the plot with each strip, building a strong connection from one strip to the next, and still lets each stand on its own and end with a funny gag. The two share billing on OOTS while the Comic Irregulars seem to be sublimating the plot to the funny. (So you don’t think I’m showing my OOTS bromance too much here, I’ll also ask you to look at Sluggy Freelance. And the OOTS balance between plot and gags has been especially apparent in recent strips, as I’ll cover in a day or two.)

But perhaps more than any of that, is the problem that gag-a-dayness is not in Darths and Droids‘ DNA. The strip has been funny throughout The Phantom Menace, but it’s been a sort of punchlineless humor, where the humor has existed in equal amounts in every panel, a natural result of the personalities of the characters (especially Jim, Sally, and Pete, in that order), so if each strip ended with a gag, it did so as part of the natural progression of the story. That’s helped to minimize the extent to which the Comic Irregulars have had to contort the story to fit each page and actually built the sense of the strip as a long-form, drama-based, comic-book-style webcomic. While I’ve certainly laughed along with Darths and Droids, that wasn’t the reason I read the comic, and the plot is starting to fall out of focus, especially read one-installment-at-a-time (I didn’t quite grasp much of what was going on until I re-read these strips). I wonder if the Comic Irregulars are/were trying to move Darths and Droids in the direction of gag-a-day in order to avoid the Girl Genius/Gunnerkrigg Court problem, and are running into the limitations of that.

Now, it’s early in Attack of the Clones, and the basic situation is only just getting set up. The last two strips have had a bit more of a connection with each other, which bodes well for the future (at least the near future), and I think I have a better idea of where the plot is going and might better be able to follow the strip from this point forward. Part of the problem may have been the need to follow various strips I’m planning to write reviews of over the next month or two, and those strips distracting me to some extent from Darths and Droids. It might be a shame if Darths and Droids were to chase me away, because it’s become apparent, especially towards the end of The Phantom Menace, that the strip is going to be using a very different plot from the movies (on top of alternate interpretations and the things the players bring to their characters) and that would mean we might be in for more surprises than one might think. (I can’t tell from the strip; was the destruction of the moon of Naboo part of The Phantom Menace or not?) But Darths and Droids has recently hit a bit of a rough patch, falling into some easy mistakes made by continuity strips and weakened my investment in the strip. The bad news is it needs to spend some time to win me back. The good news is anyone else looking to dive in can learn from it.

State of Ctrl+Alt+Del: Our Little Manchild is All Grown Up

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(From Ctrl+Alt+Del. Click for full-sized sperm quest.)

If you’ve been following just the main comic of Ctrl+Alt+Del, something happened that you may have missed.

Winter-een-mas came and went.

Back in November, I expressed my amazement that some people were organizing Winter-een-mas festivities at my school, complete with visual evidence. As it developed, the promotion for it became even more pervasive than it was when I posted on it, going from a simple table setpiece to include a massive banner hanging over the lobby of the Student Center (both of which are common with various things school clubs do around here), advertising an entire week of festivities (including weekends) on school property. If I still lived in the dorms it might have been a major event around here.

Except in the place where it got started.

Winter-een-mas used to be a big, multi-week deal, where Ethan would go on positively epic escapades; last year he met with the Gods of Gaming and the strip moved up to a once-a-week schedule while we were subjected to a parable. This year? Nada. Recognition of Winter-een-mas at all was relegated to the Sillies, which tend to update in one huge batch once a week despite being presented as daily, and which seem to have been almost abandoned entirely. The main strip continued apace as though nothing was happening, albeit focused on Ethan and the rest of the cast, as they prepared for the store re-opening and saw Zeke coming back to “life”. It seems to back up my contention that the Sillies were intended as a respite for people who didn’t like the strip’s Cerebus Syndrome and wanted the “old” CAD back.

Ctrl+Alt+Del is growing up (as is Ethan), and as it does so, it’s putting away childish things like Winter-een-mas. The strip is six years old, and if Ethan was mentally six when the strip started, he’s twelve now and maturing (whatever that word means) fast.

Ethan and Lilah are officially married now, although they’re planning a show wedding for everyone else, while Ethan prepares for (and dreads) GameHaven’s reopening under his leadership. Running a video game store involves a lot of responsibility, and for Buckley, getting Ethan out of that responsibility isn’t as easy as a miscarriage, and necessarily would involve gaining new insights into certain characters, including Ethan. So unless any “need” to have Ethan constantly avoid responsibility were to be brought into sharp focus within the strip, there’s no getting out of this one. Ethan is going to have to take some real, long-term responsibility and undergo whatever character development that involves.

Now admittedly, Tim Buckley’s track record with handling real change isn’t good, and in fact Ethan’s possession of the store came at the end of a lengthy storyline that, until that very last strip, looked to be mere sound and fury signifying nothing, except Ethan and Lilah’s elopement. Tim has plenty of outs: Ethan could get off to a terrific start with the help of his congregation, and/or leave much of the day-to-day operations to Lilah or Lucas. But call me naive, but I suspect not only is this the real deal, and will avoid going towards First and Ten this time, but word of the elopement is going to leak out and certain people will not be happy.

I’d be perfectly happy to eat crow if we go back to the main cast and find the store running better than ever and Ethan and Lilah’s second wedding coming off without a hitch. But between the mere fact we’re having a second wedding, and the passing by of Winter-een-mas… I can’t help but think Buckley’s critics may be the ones forced to eat crow, and Ethan is about to go through some real adversity.

It’s not going to be Order of the Stick, but it’ll be a big improvement over what Buckley’s critics think the strip is. I hope they’re watching. I know I will.

State of Irregular Webcomic: Dispatches from the Afterlife

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(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized gibbering madness and destruction.)

So the destruction of the universe turned out to be, in a sense, much ado about nothing.

But it’s also serving as the impetus for a major change… in the short-term, at least.

After ten days of white turning to blue turning to red turning to black, which looked for all the world to be an artsy way of depicting the birth of a new universe, the black turned out to be… the Head Death’s eyes, positioned along with everyone else in the universe (including people from various points in time) in the Afterlife. So no, the universe hasn’t been reborn yet, and we’re forced to be tortured for a while more yet, wondering when and how it does.

After another week of the Head Death drawing things out by answering people’s questions, strips that all remained stuck in almost every single theme (with the curious and sudden exception of Me), he handed it over to a re-promoted Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs, and upon leaving, everything devolved back to the Death theme alone for no real reason. (Come on, like this strip doesn’t still belong in most of the themes.) Fireballs continues taking questions from the congregation for a couple more strips, before sending it back to the congregation.

So for almost all of January, Irregular Webcomic! didn’t fit my “sixteen-comics-in-one” theory. More than before the destruction of the universe, it was a single, unified comic with a single, unified plot I could follow from day to day. Starting with #2187, though, it returned to having several plots going on at once, with the caveat that since everyone’s dead, they all get the Death theme as well…and since everyone’s hanging out on the Infinite Featureless Plane of Death at one time, it’s really one plot peeking in at various parts of the plane, and everyone’s varied plots, and any two themes can cross over at any moment.

It evokes the dimensions the Irregular Crisis took in the lead-up to the destruction, where various themes started running parallel tracks. But now IWC is equally readable as a single comic or as a collection of smaller ones… and the experience isn’t really complete without the former.

On a similar track to that lead-up to the destruction of the universe, the various themes are starting to fall into parallel tracks, for obvious reasons. Everyone wants to either just plain escape the afterlife (and the Cliffhangers appear to have already done so), or restart the universe. Mythbusters, Shakespeare/Harry Potter, Martians, and now Steve and Terry all have parallel plans developing to restart the universe, most started within the last week or two, with the potential for more to come, while the Head Death’s meeting with the Paradox Department proceeds apace. All evidence is that the universe is going to be recreated, and we’re going to have a front-row seat for the new Genesis.

But it’s very possible Irregular Webcomic! will never be the same again.

But I can’t wait to see how we get there – and what IWC comes out the other end as… if anything.

Two graphics examinations

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I was planning on doing several state-ofs on webcomics I’m reading today. You can blame my inability to find anyplace quiet enough on campus for me, perhaps partially attributable to my growing inability to handle any disturbance to the quiet – or noise, as the case may be – for the fact that I mostly goofed off today instead. (It doesn’t help that it seems most people seem to have forgotten what used to be inextricably linked to libraries – a “quiet” rule – even at the school library where it used to hold relatively well; less than a year ago I was called out for breaking it.) I’m keenly aware of the risk of it happening again though, so I’m going to try to at least get a start on one tonight, so I have a reason to already be in the mood tomorrow.

Because I don’t want that to be my only reason to post today, two graphics packages I want to look at now. I don’t know what it is with the holder of the NFL primetime package and the need to change up the graphics for the Super Bowl. CBS didn’t make a single change to its package for Super Bowl XLI, and the closest thing to a change Fox made compared to the playoffs was to swap out the “NFL on FOX” logo for an “XLII FOX” logo whenever the banner didn’t show. I could understand it for ABC at Super Bowl XL (even they didn’t used to do this) because they were rolling out their new adaptation of the banner for all sports. (It was the only time they could do so for the NFL, and in less than a year it was made obsolete when ABC Sports was folded into the ESPN brand, but whatever.) NBC… what is the point of spiffying up your graphics?

It’s definitely not a long-term change, because it was back to normal at the Pro Bowl. I’m not necessarily criticizing the banner itself, because it’s basically the old one with slicker graphics and animations, but it’s kind of pointless.

ESPN, meanwhile, rolled out a new banner for its tennis broadcasts. You may recall that ESPN’s first attempt at adapting the banner for tennis, back at Wimbledon, didn’t go well. I suggested that ESPN take a cue from the presentation of tennis scores in other countries and simply list the number of sets won and the number of games won in the current set, rather than the awkward-looking take they went with. ESPN didn’t do that, but there’s little to complain about in the new strip. The score of the current game takes up the bulk of the strip, with the set-by-set score relegated to a side space. It’s almost the reverse of what most tennis boxes have looked like in this country, where the game score has been subordinated to the match score. In fact, the match score gives way to present updates of games on other courts, as well as break, set, and match points, deuce numbers, and for the duration of any tiebreak. Stats are presented by causing the game score to give way to the stat numbers, and the match score to give way to an indication of the stat displayed, but when indications like upcoming schedules and the time in both Melbourne and someplace in the States appear above the banner, I wonder why the same couldn’t be done for stats.

However, I have a couple of quibbles. First, the order of the players for display of the game score switches places for each game, depending on who’s serving, in order to maintain the “Server-Returner” order (a knock on the Wimbledon strip). This might be useful to differentiate each game as a separate game, but that might be kinda pointless. But more to the point, it doesn’t look much like any other strip ESPN has. In a sense, it evokes the new Monday Night Football banner, which also has more of an emphasis on squareness than ESPN’s other, parallelogram-based strips, but it doesn’t look a heck of a lot like that either, and it doesn’t have the MNF banner’s distinctive feature of containing all extraneous graphics within itself. It’s about as good as ESPN could have hoped for, though there’s still room for improvement, and certainly an improvement over the Wimbledon banner that was so awful I can’t really find a video of it anywhere.

I was going to comment on one other (national) strip at one point, but damned if I can remember what it was now. Instead, please enjoy how not to design a score graphic, from the Portland Trail Blazers.

I personally think the centralized approach, which ESPN tried for MNF the first two years, has potential, but this isn’t it. The main sin is this: each team’s score naturally invites comparison to the other team’s score. The easier you make it to tell which team has the lead, the better. That’s the thinking behind the weird “bar” TNT has introduced on its new NBA box. You do not put each team’s score on opposite ends of your box or strip!!! Especially when they are separated from the time by the team logos, which makes them look lonely as the only changing element compared with its immediate neighbors. (And it only gets worse when individual stats are displayed.) I know what the Blazers were going for – emphasizing the “opposition” – but something compact like ESPN’s “orb” would have worked for that purpose just as well. Or Versus’ graphics. Or The Score’s efforts. This strip would be greatly improved just by switching the place of the score and team abbreviation with that of the logo, but the time and especially the shot clock still take up way more space than they need. I’m not a fan of spelling out “QUARTER” either. The Blazers should have just let the professionals at Comcast SportsNet design their graphics.

(In general, when teams have their graphics designed by people not good enough to get jobs working for national outfits or nationwide regional sports networks, they tend to get painfully experimental, when they don’t blatantly and clumsily rip off other networks’ graphics as is the norm in the NFL preseason. The Yankees’ YES Network has one of the better team-designed graphics, and it’s very conventional – and the Yankees and YES are big enough to afford national-quality designers. (Also worthy of praise: the Orioles and Nationals’ network, MASN; the Red Sox and Bruins on NESN; and if the Padres designed Channel 4’s graphics they did a good job, but still couldn’t help but experiment a little.) When the Cleveland Indians got their own network in SportsTime Ohio, their first season was spent with a fairly conventional strip – then they decided to get experimental, and stuck a box in the lower-right that disappeared when the ball was in play (setting baseball graphics back to 1995) and displayed the logo of the team at bat when no one was on base.)

Blog of Webcomics’ Identity Crisis: The Dark Cloud in “Good News”

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Ursula Vernon’s Digger is moving to its own site, and Vernon treats it as a cavalcade of good news. Even the secondary announcement that Digger is becoming free is arguably burying the lead:

It will also be going off subscription, and over to advertising–Graphic Smash is pretty much abandoning the subscription model. I’m pleased that we’ll get more traffic as a result, and that people will finally get to read the whole archives for free, but I also find myself wanting to do something nice for all my faithful subscribers, who quite literally paid my rent a couple of times–without them, Digger would have been abandoned long ago, and I owe them big time for having sustained me and my comic so wonderfully and well. (emphasis added)

As it stands, there are already only three active webcomics that are still running on the subscription model at Graphic Smash, and Digger is one of them. If the remaining two become free as well, as may be implied here, it’s a bad sign for anyone else looking to put their webcomic behind a subscription wall.

Random Internet Discovery of the Week

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My eye is pretty much back to normal. Sometimes I think about stopping or restricting the RID because what comes up rarely interests me, and then come days I’m thankful it’s one fewer day of posting I need to worry about.

I don’t know what to make of this. You may notice I say that a lot about the RID…

Because if I had any readers, this would be much-clamored for by now. I know I’ve been wanting it.

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The speed with which this happened both impresses and … what’s the word… humbles me. (I mean, I’m being listed on this site scarcely a week after Evil Inc.!)

Thanks to Komix!, you now have an RSS feed, of sorts, for Sandsday, which you can access here. It’s a bit of a stopgap until I can figure out how to get a real RSS feed. (For one thing, if you use this RSS feed you have to put up with the Komix interface.)

The strip has an entire landing page at Komix, and you can utilize the Komix features with Sandsday if you feel the need to. (There’s even a discussion board if you want it.)

As it’s become obvious that Buzzcomix is likely NOT coming back, I’m clearing both links to it from the strip page (I don’t need the Buzzcomix Reader link anymore anyway) and replacing it with a link to Komix. Tomorrow? Link graphics.