Webcomics

I’ve quit Sluggy Freelance. Have I found a temporary replacement? (Of course not, with OOTS back up and running.)

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(From Ctrl+Alt+Del. Click for full-sized creamy corn niblets.)

Before I dropped all my RSS feeds two years ago, I was reading Ctrl+Alt+Del largely wondering where Tim Buckley was going with the darker turn the comic had taken with the miscarriage. I was looking to see whether the comic would go for the good kind of drama, maybe even address the points people had raised against the comic in years past, or simply send the comic careening headlong into First and Ten Syndrome. The storyline at the end of 2008, which inspired the creation of the Angst-O-Meter, looked for all the world like the latter until its infuriating ending; the storyline where Ethan takes over Gamehaven was looking like the former.

When I stopped reading CAD, it was launching into a storyline where Ethan decides to make a mate for Zeke, and my last post before my “vacation” where I commented on CAD was a parenthetical statement inside my webcomic-review-one-year-anniversary post (and as such, not tagged as a CAD post when we moved to the new site) where I groaned at the unoriginality of both the plot itself and the notion that Zeke owed his sentience to some sort of mysterious X-factor that conveniently forced him to be forever one-of-a-kind.

Despite this, Ethan managed to make a working she-robot anyway. Rather, it turns out that Zeke’s X-factor (insert Simon Cowell joke here) didn’t give him sentience, it gave him a conscience (or rather, stable sentience, according to a later retcon). Despite all her code allegedly being downloaded directly from Zeke, Embla has much less sympathy for any humans, and much fewer misgivings about carrying out Zeke’s old plans to take over the world, making Zeke wonder whether prolonged contact with humans has warped and softened him in some way. To me, this didn’t make any sense; if all of Embla’s code is a carbon-copy of Zeke’s, she shouldn’t be any different from Zeke at the time of her creation, and she should inherit any empathy for humans Zeke might have (and his stability of sentience, for that matter). And if she only inherited Zeke’s base code, why would Ethan (or Microsoft, considering his X-Box origins) write destroy-all-humans code in there? (Of course, that just gets into the question of how Ethan was able to make Zeke in the first place…)

Between this, Lilah’s reaction to Embla’s construction, and Zeke letting slip about Ethan’s elopement to Lucas (despite that being what he blackmailed Ethan into making Embla in the first place), this storyline looked like another swing towards First and Ten Syndrome, to the extent that Ethan spends the latter part of the storyline fighting off the temptation to drink. Ethan manages to patch things up with Lilah, but Zeke elects to work out his issues by leaving with Embla, cueing Ethan’s inevitable drunken stupor. Between Zeke’s angst in this storyline and its conclusion, I’d have probably brought back the Angst-O-Meter during its progression, and it might have approached it-looks-like-Lilah-ran-off-with-Christian levels at the conclusion. Had you told me then what the next year-and-a-half-plus of CAD would look like, I wouldn’t have believed you.

The storylines we’ve seen since then have been: the sham wedding, which is a platform for Ethan to get involved with his brother’s dealings with the Hawaiian mafia (I am not making that up); a storyline where Ethan comes up with an achievement system for the store and has to deal with one persistent customer’s attempts to game the system; the third “Ethan McManus, Space Archaeologist” storyline; the return of Zeke, rather anticlimactically with an Embla whose unstable sentience finally caught up with her; a short storyline involving Ethan having to make a new role-playing game terrain; and perhaps most tellingly, a storyline where Ethan gives Zeke a new body and takes him to a movie, where he starts playing video games on the big screen, forcing everyone to make a daring escape where Ethan ends up having to go to the emergency room.

Why yes, that last one does sound a lot like a story Buckley might have done in 2005, why do you ask?

If you had to construct a myth arc out of the events that have taken place in CAD since the miscarriage, after the drama of Christian’s attempt to take Lilah back and Zeke running off with his mate, the entirety of its progress in a year and a half, not counting the sham wedding, has been a retreat from some of those events with Zeke returning. What’s more, I’ve skipped the Winter-een-mas storylines, which returned to the main comic, suggesting its 2009 exile to the Sillies was, contrary to what I thought at the time, a one-time deal. It looks like the answer to the question I posed at the start of this post is looking like neither. Rather, Tim is retreating to the state of the comic prior to the miscarriage, except with Ethan running Gamehaven, evidently with no ill effects (aside from his paranoia in the achievement storyline). Indeed, Kate – whose rocky relationship with Lucas was a big subplot during Ethan’s issues with Christian – has completely disappeared with no explanation I can recall.

It begs the question: why did Tim make the comic so grimdark, with vague statements implying the miscarriage was just the beginning, only to pull back and turn the comic back into the fun-loving place it always was? Did Tim start seeing people express frustration with the direction the comic was going, or leaving it in droves, and decide to hit the brakes, realizing that a comic that had already earned enemies out of half the Internet had been alienating the other half since the miscarriage? On the flip side, does the fact that very little has changed for Ethan from his year of angst, other than running a game store, prove CAD‘s haters right, that the miscarriage was just a way for Ethan to skate the responsibility of raising a child, and that Ethan will never, ever, change in any conceivable way?

I do think Tim has gotten better, and aside from his retreats in his storylines, has made some effort to address the complaints the haters have; as I mentioned in my last post, his video-game commentaries have become almost Penny Arcade-esque, with correctly identified punchlines, near as I can tell (though admittedly, not all of them have necessarily been fantastic). And while the “Ethan the Henpecked Husband” jokes have gotten very tiring, they have hinted that not everything goes right for Ethan all the time (which I would argue was the case even before the miscarriage). And yet… when we started getting several consecutive strips of Lilah tormenting Ethan with her ability to play the Knights of the Old Republic beta, I found myself actually dreading the prospect of another storyline, not so much for the potential content, but just for the need to commit myself to keeping track of everything that was going on and getting invested in the storyline’s events. Considering I read CAD primarily for the storylines, not being much of a gamer, I was fully prepared to announce my departure from CAD despite its aversion of First and Ten Syndrome… until Wednesday’s comic.

While I was rather underwhelmed by Lilah’s specific revelation – Ethan once refused to let her play the Star Wars Galaxies beta – I have to say I am intrigued by the general direction Tim is going with this storyline. One of the biggest sources for the accusation of Mary Sue-dom against Ethan, aside from his leadership of a Church of Gaming and creation of Winter-een-mas, has been Lilah and Lucas’ willingness to stick with him through thick and thin, no matter how many scrapes of his own making he gets into. With both Lilah and Lucas looking like they’re bringing the chickens home to roost, it’s looking like Ethan may finally be forced to face the music. After a year and a half, Tim may have finally swung the pendulum back to the good kind of drama.

Now, if, as I fear may be likely, the storyline ends with everything being restored to normal with no character development for anyone, Lilah and Lucas back to blindly defending Ethan, and Ethan every bit as much of an asshole as before, that may be enough to turn even me off Ctrl+Alt+Del. But if this storyline ends up having lasting consequences, it could serve as a testament to why I keep defending CAD, and to how complex Buckley can really be beneath his occasional belligerence. Expect me to continue posting on this storyline over the next few weeks.

I’m finding myself checking Twitter before Google Reader these days, just in case Eric posted on OOTS and I’d be spoiled.

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized HULK SMASH!)

The Order of the Stick manages to do quite a bit with stick figures, but that’s not to say the format doesn’t have its limitations, and one of them is making close-in melee combat properly dramatic. That’s not to say OOTS hasn’t done this well, or that it’s not simply the fault of the comic medium as opposed to the art style (which forces the fight to be portrayed as a series of static images without sound), but even at its best OOTS swordfights can look like a bunch of people waving swords at each other, which can make even the most beloved strips look strangely static. OOTS‘ best fight scenes tend to involve ranged combat, whether arrows or magic.

The current gladiatorial sequence has illustrated this well, with the most dramatic strip to be set in the arena being one revolving around the lack of combat, and the fight between Roy and Thog looking, to this point, like the two combatants just waving their swords at each other while bantering, to the point where I’m not sure whether there was any actual fighting going on, rather than a standoff.

That is, until this strip. After going into full-on RAGE mode in the previous strip, Thog ditches the swords, and instead just starts throwing Roy all over the place, and the way it is portrayed is simply exquisite, with virtually no words (a rarity for OOTS these days) and lots of close-ups and medium shots. We can feel Roy as he’s thrown around, feel the tension in every blow Thog puts on him. The panels almost seem to come alive before our eyes.

Of  course, it may be that this strip can have this effect precisely because it drops the swords and can go straight into the more inherently active modes of fists and body-flailing. Still, it feels like this is what we came to see when we learned we’d be getting a gladiatorial plot – something more out of a movie than what we’d been getting previously – and it helps add to the dramatic tension at the end of the strip, when not even surrendering can quell Thog’s rage enough to stop Roy from getting hit with a piece of masonry, leaving us all in suspense at Roy’s fate (not that Rich will kill him again so soon after bringing him back, of course… right?).

(Yes, this is an entire month since my last OOTS post, and yet it’s only two comics later. Just be glad Rich is finally at the drawing board again.)

I promise I’m not going to turn this into “TV Tropes: The Blog”. As interesting as that would be.

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(From Irregular Webcomic: Martians. Click for full-sized discounts.)

I bring up this episode of Irregular Webcomic! from earlier in the week because it exhibits a trope I hate: when a seemingly bit character with a mundane life turns out to have an incredibly exciting past that often is more intertwined with the heroes and their present plot than we thought.

You know that ordinary proprietor of the pizza place Ishmael worked for? It turns out he’s actually a descendant of Alessandro Volta locked up by the Nazis in 1933 who was freed by time travellers and started the Reichstag fire, accidentally time-traveled with them back to the 1980s, and then got the idea to start a pizza place from a young Adam Savage from MythBusters.

(I think I may have just summarized IWC‘s appeal in a nutshell.)

Now, you could argue that Morgan-Mar is limited in his LEGO figures and is thus more justified in this economy of casting than most, and a similar case could be made for a related contrived coincidence: that Adam and Jamie not only attended the same college as Ishmael, but (it’s implied in the themes’ previous comic) stayed in the exact same dorm room. Still, I can accept a lot of things stretching my suspension of disbelief, but this is the sort of thing that takes a skilled hand to pull off, and part of what makes it work is often exactly what antics the character pulled off in the past, what led him to his current mundane existence, and how it’s presented to the reader. Typically, if he’s presented as a retired badass first and a simple farmer second, it can work well (even if he’s introduced as the simple farmer first), but not so much the other way around.

Once you start getting into things like supernatural powers and, oh yeah, time travel, it starts to stretch suspension of disbelief too much for my purposes. Especially when it raises questions like “how does he explain his appearance out of nowhere and his similarity to the guy who disappeared back in 1933?”

It’s a Sluggy Story Arc Climax Party in the Webcomics Blogosphere!

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(From Sluggy Freelance. Click for full-sized epic lateness.)

Pete Abrams is finally wrapping up a storyline that’s been going on for the past two years.

I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of how he’s doing so, however, especially the comics we’ve been subjected to over the course of the week so far. I can’t help but think he’s rushing the storyline to a conclusion because he knows this particular part of it alone has gone on rather long already – at one point he’d promised that we’d learn Riff’s “ultimate fate” by the end of June, and if he meant Riff’s return to “our” dimension, he didn’t quite make that goal.

Let’s start at the beginning, with Monday’s comic, where Abrams threw what looked to be an absolute curveball at his readers: after drugging all the witnesses, rather than head home at the point we had gotten to with Torg and company, Riff would “change history” and prevent Zoe from ever burning. Abrams seemed to be preparing to retcon the events of “bROKEN” substantially, and possibly retcon away everything that happened in the past two years in his home dimension. I was fully prepared to write a post on that comic alone.

For the record? I loved it. It seemed like a fitting way to end this two-year-long epic that I’d spent reading Sluggy Freelance, a way to tie it all into one continuous loop from which the comic would proceed. But then, I started reading the comic from “bROKEN”. You know who didn’t love it? Robert A. “Tangents” Howard, who wrote a fairly lengthy post detailing his worries that Abrams would “pull a Dallas” and render the past two years completely irrelevant, wondering why he would even burn Zoe and put his readership through the past two years of comics in the first place. If that sounds familiar, it’s similar to what I said last week about killing Zoe vs. rendering her a vegetable, with the difference that I wondered if it was a sign Abrams was going to pull a fast one to bring back Zoe in full. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Similarly, I didn’t think Abrams was going to go quite that far and pull, in Eric Burns(-White)’s terminology, a Category 4 or 5 (or even 3) retcon. I figured certain characters, especially Riff, would remain affected enough by the events of the past two years somehow to affect the plot moving forward. I prefer to trust that no matter what happens, story-comic writers know what they’re doing and that, ultimately, everything will serve some greater purpose. But apparently, Howard felt that Abrams had betrayed that trust before and he could do it again. He felt that Abrams had previously negated the events of the “That Which Redeems” storyline, which like most of Sluggy I haven’t read, and that he was perfectly ready to go back into that well.

In any case, all was rendered moot by Tuesday’s comic, in which Riff shows up at Zoe’s house, the night before the attack… and, apparently talked out of it by alternate-Riff, only says goodbye to Zoe before letting alternate-Riff do what he was going to do anyway. So Abrams didn’t even let that twist stand for 24 hours before pulling a “gotcha” and pulling back on it, effectively manipulating his readership and playing them like fools. Howard was not pleased, perhaps because he wasted a post on the original twist only to see it negated. While I sympathize, I also get a certain sense of entitlement from Howard, like he was personally wronged by Abrams’ bait-and-switch. Personally, I was rather stunned and went back to not writing a post, and I admit I felt that was a pretty cheap trick, but I had trusted that Abrams knew what he was doing and wouldn’t obviate whole swathes of material.

And ultimately, the same went for Zoe, because in Wednesday’s comic, as Riff returns to his home dimension (and gets the localized EMP I knew was necessary to prevent him from rebooting in the future), he reveals, in breathless exposition to a bemused Torg, that everything that happened in the last two comics was part of a convoluted plan to get Zoe back, by preventing alternate-Riff from keeping him from bringing 4U City tech to his home dimension by drugging them, then boldly announcing his plan to cause a paradox to get alternate-Riff to chase him into the past, so that he could take a snapshot of the sleeping Zoe and return to 4U City to introduce that snapshot to the vegetable-Zoe, so that Zoe would wake up with no memory of the events of the day she burned and alternate-Riff would see the need to have her follow our Riff back home.

Um… what?

Why do this? Why go to such lengths, over the course of just three comics, to mislead alternate-Riff and, by proxy, give the audience whiplash just to bring Zoe back? Commenting on his own post on Tuesday’s comic with a reaction to Wednesday’s comic, Howard proposes a way to do the whole thing with less misdirection and whiplash by making Riff upfront with his intentions from the start, and while neither Riff has much reason to trust the other, his idea sure seems like a saner, less manipulative way to achieve the same results. Personally, I’m wondering, even given what Riff did, why he has to exposit his plan to Torg of all people, to whom – by Riff’s own admission – nothing he’s saying means anything, and it serves only to inform the audience. Sure, he needs to keep Torg calm until Zoe shows up, but he basically has to give Zoe a substantial amount of exposition anyway, possibly enough for the audience to get the picture anyway; why not give as much exposition as Zoe needs to understand in a much more justifiable context?

But either of these options would likely require at least one or two more comics to complete, and Abrams is basically committed to ending the storyline at the end of the week. So he’s trying to cram the ending into five comics, and in the process a lot of distortion is resulting, with the plot needing to be over-simplified to fit. Part of what we’re seeing is the result of Abrams’ inability to plan ahead; I agree with him that cutting corners in alternate-Riff’s exposition would have been a bad idea, if only for the insights Riff gains into alternate-Dr. Schlock, but did the minimal-point battle against the outsider army need to go quite as long as it did? And for that matter, was today’s strip really necessary? Hell, I bet tomorrow’s strip will just be alternate-Riff taking a few parting shots at our Riff; couldn’t these two pages be used to set up the storyline going forward, or at least build a more natural conclusion?

Regardless, the end outcome is that Zoe is back, with no memory of the events of the climax of “bROKEN”. Among other things, this means she never had the epiphany Oasis led her to regarding her relationship with Torg, so the status quo there is fully restored. On the flip side, she now no longer has her cursed necklace she had for most of the strip’s run, so that status quo has been drastically shaken up. Also, Riff has now pledged to stop being “stupid” and returns to his home dimension with a new mission, which is enough for me to keep reading for just long enough to see exactly where he’ll go from here.

And on a more meta level, I’ve confirmed something I speculated on a while back: that I’m more forgiving of what Abrams does in part because I haven’t sat through the things Howard, as a long-time reader, has. Howard felt that Abrams had retconned events out before and could do so again, so he sat through the recent comics with nothing but dread. I didn’t feel so betrayed, so I was willing to follow Abrams wherever he was willing to go. Now, compare that to what I said in my initial review of Sluggy Freelance, about Abrams alienating new readers by not throwing them any bones to jump into the storyline, and being satisfied by the audience he already has. If Abrams has also alienated longtime readers who have sat through that storyline, perhaps this only underlines how backwards the lack of real support for new readers is, because properly introduced to Sluggy‘s world, they could be bigger supporters of the comic than his existing fanbase is. Perhaps, then, we should chalk this up as more evidence that Abrams is starting to wind down the comic, and doesn’t see a need to appeal to anyone who would only sign up for a couple of years.

Or maybe we should both lighten up and enjoy the storyline on its own merits, like Eric Burns(-White) did.

Unless the event from my last post wasn’t what we thought, how did Riff make these RECAPs?

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(From Sluggy Freelance. Click for full-sized R.E.C.A.P.)

After Zoe was revealed not to be dead, but to be burned to within an inch of her life, I read a theory on TV Tropes that Pete Abrams’ original plan was to outright kill her (as had been foreshadowed for a LONG time), but after fan outcry forced him to back off, he decided to make the fans wish she had been killed.

That theory came to mind upon the newest revelation, that Zoe, though rebuilt, is now a completely empty shell, probably never to be fully “alive” again – to the extent that, unless Abrams pulls a fast one before ending the storyline, it pretty much has the same effect as outright killing her. It takes her out of the story, and it tears Torg and Riff apart over what happened to her.

In fact, this comic almost makes me wonder what the point of not killing Zoe is other than screwing with the audience. Unless Abrams brings her back somehow – and it’s very unlikely he’d find a way to do so that wouldn’t be equivalent to an out-and-out resurrection – he’s achieved exactly the same thing killing her would have, only in a more convoluted way. So what’s the point? Is this a sign Abrams does plan to bring Zoe back at some point?

Maybe my problem is with the screwy science behind how the whole thing would work as described here, even given the science of the medical nanites we’ve already been fed – give her amnesia, yes, make her a completely empty shell, not so much. (It also gets into metaphysical territory over the nature of the soul that I’m pretty sure Abrams is unlikely to get into.) I’m just happy Abrams seems to be wrapping up the storyline and preparing to take Riff back to his own time period, probably with most of his knowledge intact.

And if you’re thinking this is just a way for me to get back to my old post-every-weekday pace… well, you wouldn’t be entirely incorrect. Hey, I need to get back to the modest level of success (which is to say, none) I had in 2009 somehow, and consistent posting is the best way I know to do it…

(Damn, this is a tall comic. I need to type in a lot to prevent it from screwing up the site layout, especially to keep it from interfering with the IWC post from yesterday. Maybe the long title of that post will save it?)

Hey, if I do like Robert A. Howard and post semi-regularly on just the comics I read, I only need to do a new full review once a month or so. If I read as many as he does, that is.

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(From Irregular Webcomic: Shakespeare. Click for full-sized star-crossed lovers.)

This comic is not really as impactful as it should be.

Pre-Irregular Crisis, it had been hinted that Ophelia had a thing for Shakespeare (especially during Loren Ipsum’s original story arc), but aside from a bit immediately following the reboot of the universe regarding Ophelia breaking up with her fiance, the only real references to that subplot depended on knowing why Ophelia kept trying to reinforce and push Shakespeare to do his best.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the audience has largely forgotten that Ophelia had a thing for Shakespeare in the first place. Even if they did remember, this probably comes completely out of nowhere, with the only indication that anything like this was coming being Ophelia sending Mercutio out of the room a few comics back. It’s a “where the hell did that come from?” moment instead of a moment of celebration, and actually makes Ophelia look vaguely out of character.

It does still captivate the audience’s attention, but it’s nowhere near as big a moment as it should be, and not all of that is Morgan-Mar’s fault. Watching two LEGO figures make out isn’t even as good as two stick figures.

(And in case you’re wondering, I can write a post about this comic despite it no longer being the current comic by the time it goes up because it should still be the current comic in the Shakespeare theme. You haven’t forgotten about IWC being several comics in one, have you?)

At least she doesn’t need to flash him anymore.

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(From Ctrl+Alt+Del. Click for full-sized white lantern ring.)

I’ve been intrigued by Ctrl+Alt+Del‘s development over the past couple years (most of which I missed). I’ll have more to say about it later, but Tim Buckley has apparently decided to back away from the OMG HUGE CHANGES that were inflicted on the comic in 2008 and 2009 and threatened to send it careening headlong into First and Ten Syndrome, and the comic has become downright Penny Arcade-ish in its gag-a-day video game commentaries, right down to often needing to refer to the news post (now posted directly below the comic) to figure out what the heck is going on. (If it weren’t for the site design and art style, this comic could easily be mistaken for a PA comic.)

This, though? This comic is just lazy. It almost doesn’t matter what the setup is, it’s basically an excuse for Tim to throw out that punchline, one that I would argue is already getting tired.

This doesn’t change my opinion that CAD is underrated – looking at some semi-random moments in the recent archive before making this post uncovered a number of laugh-out-loud moments – but I think it does illustrate one of the reasons why it’s so hated. Tim has mostly abandoned his tendency to resort to violence as a surrogate for a punchline (aside from the Players, where it’s the sole reason for their existence), but he doesn’t seem to have completely abandoned his need for a surrogate for a punchline.

Now Websnark’s back too, so it’s 2009 all over again!

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(From Sluggy Freelance. Click for full-sized epiphanies.)

Over two years ago, during my previous webcomic-reviewing existence, I reviewed Sluggy Freelance, an occasion I took more to bash Pete Abrams for his refusal to throw any but the tiniest of bones to new readers of one of the oldest webcomics on the Internet. I decided that Abrams was apparently content to settle for the readers he already had and had no interest in recruiting any new ones to keep the fanbase strong and fresh. Then I wrote:

Sluggy deserves every ounce of praise it gets; I sometimes found myself looking at various points in the archive and reading significant stretches with interest. … And I’m intrigued enough by the current story arc, which promises to be a milestone one, that I’m planning on keeping on reading Sluggy until this arc’s conclusion. But I don’t have much of a reason to keep reading Sluggy beyond that. With my overcrowded schedule, I just don’t have time for another strip that demands an Order of the Stick level of attention, certainly one with so massive an archive, so much of a need to comprehend all of it, and so little help in doing so.

Because of what happened that summer, I never got around to finishing the story arc at the time. However, recently, as I started preparing to start up webcomics posts again, I finally did get around to finishing “bROKEN”.

And then spent the rest of the night reading the remainder of the archive up to the then-present moment.

“bROKEN” ends with a heck of a cliffhanger – the discovery of Zoe’s cursed necklace separated from her body (implying her death, right after Oasis inadvertently led her to realize the sexual tension between her and Torg), and the live Riff turning up in an alternate universe, where he’s promptly shot up in the final panel of the storyline. This put things in such an unbalanced state that I immediately decided to keep reading to see this storyline resolved. Needless to say, it hasn’t – Torg and some friends spent the rest of 2009 and all of 2010 working for an arch-villain as a cover for getting more information on Hereti-Corp and Oasis, and Riff is still stuck in the dystopian, Brave New World-esque alternate universe.

The present storyline has involved Riff and alternate-universe versions of his friends staging a revolution against said dystopia, but it’s really the recent events involving (SPOILER ALERT) Riff getting detailed exposition from the alternate-universe version of himself that really has me riveted, especially given the promise of resolving the storyline it offered. Although it’s clear this isn’t the future of the “main” timeline, the similarities – including those Riff doesn’t know yet – are striking enough that I’ve been waiting with baited breath for Riff (and the comatose-as-far-as-we-know Zoe) to return to the main timeline, and start working to keep it from becoming its own version of 4U City, in more ways than one. Sluggy has me riveted enough that I’d probably keep reading even beyond the tying-up of the last loose ends from “bROKEN”.

So imagine what I felt upon reaching the current strip, when Riff realizes how much like his alternate-universe counterpart he’s really been… only for Alternate!Riff, upset that “our” Riff brought his wife to him despite his pleas, to “reboot” him, putting him right back where he was at the start of the adventure, without even the knowledge gained through the exposition, his quest for redemption seemingly snuffed out before it began. I was silently going “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!” That’s a rare feat for a comic; I’m not sure if I’ve even done that for anything that’s happened in Order of the Stick, which I tend to read from a more detached viewpoint. I hold out hope that this turns out to be a psyche-out or something, or Rammer or a remorseful Alternate!Riff re-supplies the exposition, but I’m also fearing the worst.

I should add a caveat: it’s possible I’m caring about this storyline for all the wrong reasons, hoping more for it to just resolve already than feeling anything for the cast, and recent weeks have been rather confusing as Riff and company have been struggling to beat back an outsider attack on the city (as well as with a meddlesome AI). A while back Robert A. “Tangents” Howard wrote of his frustration with the storyline, and it’s possible that if I’d never abandoned my RSS feeds and had to sit through reading it day-by-day for two years I’d feel similarly to how he does, or at this point, like I’d just watched the season finale of The Killing. (That said, I can’t agree with him that this lacks any “emotional potency” as a conclusion, as up until the last row of this strip it seemed to mark some very significant character development for Riff. Also, the Irregular Crisis has been just as slow and I don’t feel the same sense of just-end-it-already, though that slowness may be the result of spreading it across multiple themes.)

I wonder if “bROKEN” marks the start of the sequence that leads to Abrams winding down this comic that has been his livelihood for over a decade. What little we learned about Oasis in that storyline, the maybe-death of Zoe, Torg’s subsequent attempt at revenge, Riff’s motivation when (if?) he returns to the main timeline, all seem to suggest that Abrams is setting up the pieces for the great conflagration where the bleep really starts to hit the fan. It certainly would back up how little he seems to care about new readers. If so, I hope the prize is worth the wait, and that Abrams doesn’t waste too much time getting there.

On Mary Sues and spoony bards

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized make-out session.)

The concept of the Mary Sue used to be so simple.

Way back in the days of yore known as “the 1980s”, when the Web was but a gleam in the eye of a few idealists and, as far as those few people who had even heard of the Internet were concerned, it was Usenet and nothing else, the term “Mary Sue” arose in those fledgling fanfic communities that were springing up even then to describe a certain type of character endemic to such stories, one instantly recognizable the instant you saw it, so long as you weren’t the one who wrote it. She was the flawless, brilliantly unique, perfect character who hijacked the story, turned all the other characters into drooling fanboys, and generally acted out the author’s every fantasy.

Then someone decided to start looking for Mary Sues in actual fiction, not based on any other franchise. After all, why shouldn’t the same idea apply to any kind of fiction? It’s not like being in a fanfic is a requirement of being a Mary Sue, is it?

Wellllll, it didn’t work out that way. For one thing, it turns out that a good part of what makes a Mary Sue a Mary Sue is related to being in a fanfic. It’s in how the character completely takes over the story, which implies that there is a story to take over, and it’s in how the character hijacks the other characters into fawning admiration for her. If the situation is that way from the start, is there really any “hijacking” going on?

Take that out of the equation, and you really do rob the Mary Sue of a lot of its identity, and you need to create surrogate criteria for characters that have a similar effect. You also run into another problem: until the advent of webcomics, most original fiction had to go through some sort of barrier to entry, meaning that most writers of such tend to be better than writers of fanfic. In fact, the mere fact that they do create a universe of original characters rather than take a set of characters that’s given to them almost automatically puts them a step ahead of most fanfic writers. I’d argue that there are really only two excuses for writing a fanfic: if you’re saying something about the characters and setting themselves, or, much less defensibly, if creating original characters would only lead to a charge of being a rip-off. Even if such writers do create what might be called Mary Sues, they tend to be a bit better at hiding them.

And then you have characters like Ethan of Ctrl+Alt+Del, so commonly accused of Sue-dom, but why? It seems to be mostly because Lucas and Lilah stick with him through thick and thin, which seems to me a pretty weak justification for a charge as serious as Mary Sue-dom. I could see it if Ethan were presented as consistently in the right, or if his “flaws” were, to use TV Tropes’ phrasing, presented as “endearing”, but pre-miscarriage Ethan’s antics seem to be to often be presented as being in the wrong, and that Ethan isn’t always supposed to be presented as the sympathetic character (and those times when he is implausibly successful often aren’t intended to be taken as seriously as the haters do). That Lucas and Lilah continue to stick with him may say more about them than about Ethan. But, of course, what does it say about them, and about how the whole strip is written?

Suddenly you start having a lot of arguments over what does and doesn’t count as a Mary Sue. Does it just have to be a representative of the author, or does it even need to be that?  How much of it needs to be in the flawlessness, or would a flawless character who has a lot of bad s**t happen to him regardless count? How much of it needs to be in being uber-powerful, or would the planet-juggling Silver Age Superman count? How much of it needs to be in how much goes implausibly right for them, or would MacGyver count – or for that matter, a suite of characters who routinely beat the odds but not any one character? How much of it needs to be in hogging the spotlight, or would Harry Potter count?

Or perhaps the definition is just in being a model of perfection? But that opens a whole ‘nother can of worms, because there are a gazillion models of perfection, and in some instances you’re not going to be able to incorporate all of them into a single character, and besides that clearly isn’t why Ethan elicits the accusation. There seems to be a sense that all of the above play some part in defining what a Mary Sue is, but how much and in what proportion is seemingly impossible to pin down.

And then there’s the question of gender, whether to use terms like “Marty Stu” to describe male Mary Sues, or if the term “Mary Sue” really does imply a gender bias that one is unlikely to admit to. Four years ago Robert A. “Tangents” Howard charged the accusation of Mary Sue-dom of sexism, that many accused characters wouldn’t have been called Sues if they were male (to the extent that he felt “Mary Sue” really meant “halfway competent female protagonist”). I intended to write a response, but no sooner did I start my webcomic reviews than Tangents started the long, slow transition to its current state, and by the time it had reached the point that I would have had anything to link to, I was already transitioning away from webcomics posts.

I get the sense that what Howard had hit on was the fact that we hold men and women to different standards of perfection, and specifically, often seem to hold women as inherently more perfect than men. The image of perfection for women is sweet, all-caring, beautiful, all ponies and sparkles – a lot like the fanfic characters that gave rise to the term. A female character who lives up to those ideals is unrealistically perfect; a male one, too girly (and thus inherently flawed, ergo, not a Mary Sue). On the other hand, the image of male perfection is of a badass who mows down anyone who gets in his way. We don’t call characters who live up to those ideals Mary Sues, we make lists of Chuck Norris Facts about them (and even if they started as parody, I sometimes wonder how serious they’ve become).

It does seem like there is a standard by which a male might be called a Mary Sue (or Marty Stu, or Gary Stu) that might not necessarily apply to a woman, just as the reverse might be true. Besides Ethan (whose unsympathetic portrayals might be better noticed on a woman), the example I would cite would be Rayne Summers of Least I Could Do. Perhaps Rayne’s most defining characteristic is his status as an utter Casanova who sleeps with women like they’re going out of style. If we were to reverse this situation, with a woman sleeping with men left and right, we wouldn’t call her a Mary Sue, we’d call her a slut, maybe even a whore. Which brings me to Elan of Order of the Stick.

Well, actually, I need to talk briefly about the main OOTS cast’s other nominee for Mary Sue-dom, Belkar, he who, before O-Chul’s display of badassery, was OOTS‘ resident Chuck Norris. Despite being an utter sociopath, Belkar doesn’t show much of any other shortcomings in battle (no pun intended), and besides being a complete badass when not Mark of Justice’d, tends to get all the best lines and one-liners, to the extent of being much of the fandom’s favorite character despite his ostensible role in the comic. He might be the model I would point to for what a truly Sue-ish Ethan would be like. Still, it’s quite clear no one is willing to put up with him except insofar as he can be controlled, and his uneasy truce with the rest of the OOTS seems to form a key plot thread and source of development for the comic. Elan, on the other hand…

Look, I’ve run into at least two people who are utterly sick of Elan’s stupid antics and think they monopolize the strip’s humor quotient and take away from the plot. I’m not talking about that, though it is relevant. I wouldn’t say those antics are the funniest things I’ve ever read, but I wasn’t driven into a rage begging Rich to stop with the stupid-Elan jokes either; I even get a kick out of Elan being even more genre-savvy than the rest of the group. In fact, if Elan had more of those antics I might be more forgiving of him as a character.

What’s gotten to me about Elan is that, in the past, he’s gotten not one, not two, but three women swooning over him, despite (ostensibly) having the IQ of a brick. Now obviously, the stick-figure format doesn’t get across features that might change my opinion, and I’m obviously not the best judge anyway, but taking away the goatee from Nale’s “realistic” police sketch doesn’t leave me with an image I’d call “ruggedly handsome”. But near as I can tell, that’s not really his appeal to the ladies (well, aside from Therkla) anyway, judging by how Haley defends him to her father: “Elan is the best man I’ve ever met. Sure, he’s a little dumb sometimes…But he’s… I don’t know. Pure. Honest. Better than I am, that’s for sure. He makes me a better person just by being around, and I like feeling that way.”

As sickening as it might be to hear Elan described like he’s Tim friggin’ Tebow, Haley isn’t alone; the general consensus among forumites is that Elan is the one genuinely good character in the OOTS, if not the whole cast. Think about that for a minute. Like many writers, Rich Burlew tends towards flawed, morally ambiguous characters; rather than simply go for simplistic fantasy archetypes, Rich tends to give his characters complex, contradictory personalities that make them more interesting as characters. But Elan seems to have avoided this stick (no pun intended), instead becoming a paragon for everything good and sweet (though not being above “seduc[ing] female bad guys“). Is this starting to sound a lot like the fanfic characters that gave rise to the term Mary Sue? What if I told you that, aside from his romantic liasons, while Elan gets on Roy’s nerves, literally every other member of the OOTS leapt to his defense when he was kidnapped?

Elan’s saving graces, the traits that save him from being an overly perfect figure, are supposedly his utter uselessness in combat and the aforementioned stupid antics – at least one of which falls under the “endearing” exception. But the former hasn’t been all that relevant since Elan picked up his level in Dashing Swordsman. As for the latter, they’ve become decidedly inconsistent, ever since Rich saw fit to give Elan more “character development” in the fourth book that amounted to removing one of the last things that kept him flawed. Elan spent the fourth book thrust into the position of leading half the team, with V going crazy and Durkon more prone to defer, and went through his own plot arc with his involvement with Therkla that may have put him through the wringer in the short term, but led him to “mature” coming out of it, giving him some experience of the “real” world that dragged him a little ways out of stupidity, only that was one of the few things keeping him interesting. (While I’m on the subject, one of my issues with the fourth book is the way, with the main plot stalled, Elan so stole the spotlight of his half of the OOTS with a plot that ultimately went nowhere that he completely overshadowed the real plot development of that half, V’s descent into madness.) Elan has returned to acting the goof in this book, sometimes, but I wonder if that’s Rich realizing his mistake on some level and trying too hard to overcompensate, to the extent that it now seems out of his present character.

But with all that, what really drove me to write this post is the present update (and my thankfulness that Rich’s recent slow update schedule allows me to write this post on it). I’ll admit, this is one of the more entertaining strips of the book and certainly one of the most entertaining strips of the Linear Guild confrontation thus far, but damn if it doesn’t also underscore how Elan’s being written these days. Because this strip hints that Elan may have just seduced Sabine. Let me repeat that. Elan just seduced a friggin’ succubus. One whose present love interest is his own evil twin who’s out to kill him. I mean, I’m running out of things to say about all of this. What’s next, is Elan going to wrap up the entire plot of the strip all by himself?

I will say that this sort of mapping of traits from an archetype to a particular character is certainly an inexact science – as I indicated above, the whole point is how uncertain the concept of a Mary Sue has gotten – and none of the above has taken away too much from my enjoyment of the strip, or even, at times, Elan’s antics. But it has definitely gotten on my nerves and stuck in my craw for some time. This marks three straight books with a subplot centered on Elan (and the second book is the only one that really lacks it), and this one is going on for nearly a hundred strips and over a year real-time, despite apparently being of tangential relevance to the hunt for the Gates and despite numerous other plot hooks that I would ordinarily think would be resolved in this book. Elan hasn’t gotten to the point of overshadowing Roy as the main character of the OOTS… but this book is making me wonder.

The most pivotal week in the history of webcomics

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I’m slowly working my way back to doing regular webcomic reviews – look for some down the pike, starting with a review of Comixtalk, once I finish my studies for the quarter – and not a moment too soon. We’re in a heady period for webcomics, a turning point in their development. This has been an eventful week.

First was “Dating-Guy-gate”, when Least I Could Do‘s Ryan Sohmer accused Canadian network Teletoon of ripping off his concept for another series. The facts of the matter are very complicated and the whole thing has a good chance of going to court, but the upshot of the whole affair was a Kickstarter effort to film a LICD pilot (I’m incredulous that Randy Milholland had to set it up for him because Kickstarter is limited to Americans for some reason), which proved wildly successful. This could be a momentous moment for webcomics, and Sohmer is in a uniquely qualified position to lead the charge. While I have a feeling that, once I finally get around to reviewing it, I will absolutely loathe LICD for its alleged sexism and allegedly Mary-Sue-ish main character, there are few webcomics I can think of that are better suited for translation to television, or any other medium.

Most other gag-a-day webcomics are either too decentralized to support even the sort of plot for a 30-minute show (Penny Arcade, xkcd), or would have trouble appealing to even a broad enough audience for a fairly focused cable network, especially a problem with video game comics (as with previous efforts of Sohmer’s Blind Ferret Entertainment, PVP and Ctrl+Alt+Del). Least I Could Do is one of the few popular gag-a-day webcomics with broad enough subject matter to actually attract the interest of TV networks. In fact, I don’t know how much Sohmer would be considering American outfits, but I could easily see LICD fitting right in alongside the animated comedies on Fox’s Sunday night lineup – on an American broadcast network, alongside such titans as The Simpsons and Family Guy. If LICD could pull that off, it would become, by far, the most famous webcomic in the world overnight.

(Translating a story webcomic to the big screen poses similar challenges. Most story webcomics, especially former gag comics that underwent Cerebus syndrome, have an odd mix of humor and seriousness that would be difficult to market or portray on the big screen. Even a comic as story-focused as Order of the Stick would be difficult to translate, but even Girl Genius has an odd enough balance to give Hollywood execs pause. The equivalent to LICD in the story webcomic community, from the perspective of how easy it would be to translate, would probably be Gunnerkrigg Court – a story that has drawn more than a few comparisons to Harry Potter. But as we’ll see, there is another way to turn a webcomic into a movie…)

Next came DC’s announcement of digital day-and-date distribution for its revamped universe, which has led more than a few retailers to cry doom. As well they should; DC makes up about a third of the comic book market and is probably responsible for much more than that coming through their doors. That many are calling this move inevitable does not make it any less of a stake in the heart of the direct market, or any less one of the bigger ones. We’re likely to see many more would-be comic book creators make the move to graphic novels and webcomics.

Finally came what could be the biggest news of all: One of Penny Arcade‘s old spinoff concepts has been optioned by Paramount to be made into a feature film. Forget a show that could have languished in obscurity on a Canadian cable channel: this could see millions of Americans flock to movie theatres and make Gabe and Tycho millions of dollars, not to mention (as with the LICD animated series) pave the path for more webcomics to see the silver screen.

And that’s before we get to the detente between print cartoonists and webcartoonists at this year’s National Cartoonist Society Reuben awards.

These are baby steps: even if LICD gets made into a series it could be on some obscure or Canadian-only channel, this isn’t Penny Arcade itself but an idea they threw out there once, and both are far, far away from actually being made. But I get the sense that this is a turning point, a milestone week, in the history of webcomics. If even one of these projects get made it gives webcomics by far their broadest exposure they have ever had, and between that and DC’s colonization of the digital market could lead to a huge influx of new people into webcomics. We may look back on this past week as the one that webcomics started to bloom, started to move out of their extended adolescence and into the full-blown adulthood (or, if you’re more like Bengo, out of childhood and into adolescence) that would confer upon it the respect and corpus of literature due any other medium.