Webcomics

What DC Comics’ revamp really means

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This may be a two-part post, though the second part probably won’t be under the “webcomics” heading. If you’re not familiar with comics history, get a crash course before continuing with Part II of “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis”.

This September, DC will effectively reboot its entire universe (well, not really – more on that in a bit), launching 52 issues to, presumably, replace their existing line of titles with a more “modern” DC Universe. DC previously rebooted its continuity in 1985-6’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, and performed “soft reboots” (performing various retcons without wholesale junking what came before) on roughly 10-year intervals thereafter, in 1994’s Zero Hour and 2005-6’s Infinite Crisis. (The in-story justification for this reboot appears to be the ongoing Flashpoint event.) Perhaps more importantly for the general comics industry, they will also release their comics through digital platforms on the same day they come out in comic book stores.

Back in 2009 in my “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series, I predicted that eventually, the old monthly comic format would fade away, as webcomics and graphic novels replaced newspaper comic strips and monthly comic books. Noting that Diamond had recently induced a contraction of the market and that further contraction to exclude almost all companies other than Marvel and DC was looking very possible, I proclaimed that the direct market existed solely for the purposes of DC and Marvel, and suggested that most of the smaller comic creators would abandon the direct market in favor of graphic novels in bookstores and webcomics. That DC itself is reinventing the company and embracing the web as a parallel revenue stream is a sign even they may be bailing, or preparing to bail, on the direct market. Presumably, they figure that even more than themselves, the direct market really exists primarily to serve Marvel and Marvel alone, who has had a substantial lead over DC for virtually the entire time since the 1960s.

Or at least, it would… if they weren’t keeping the existing monthly comic paradigm.

The monthly 22-page comic is a relic of the days when comics were published on newsstands, when they were magazines that happened to have comics in them. As the idealists of the time who started futzing around with the concept of the “graphic novel” keenly realized, it became obsolete with the rise of the direct market in the 1970s; Marvel and DC continued publishing them mostly out of inertia, while smaller publishers that took advantage of the direct market published monthly comics because Marvel and DC did (and because they were cheaper and, for a time, less exotic than graphic novels). The only reason the comic book industry accepts that comics should be published in 22-page chunks every month is that that’s the way it’s always been done. If the direct market perishes, it won’t continue to be the way it’s done – even when bookstores stock monthly comics, it’s always segregated from their other magazines on spinner racks, reducing the point of pretending to be magazines.

By keeping one foot in the direct market, DC is shutting themselves out of the creative benefits of a move to digital distribution, at an opportune time to do so, coinciding with the reinvention of their universe. By committing to the monthly 22-page comic format, DC has shut themselves out of using the infinite canvas, or even adopting the webcomic model. Perhaps DC is understandably wary of their ability to make money out of the web alone, or whether their existing audience would follow them. But what’s even more baffling than that DC would go the digital route but not take advantage of its possibilities, is that they aren’t taking advantage of this reinvention to move towards the other comic distribution mechanism of the future, the graphic novel model.

Comic books have come a long way from the Silver Age when an entire story could be told in one issue, often leaving room for one or two more stories besides; “decompression” has become the norm, with most stories taking 4-8 issues to complete, and with the greater depth that most comics creators have started looking for, 22 pages has started looking increasingly cramped for an entire story with beginning, middle, and end. This has only furthered the obsolescence of the 22-page monthly comic, so DC could go far by removing the 22-page constraint from their writers and allow them to go as hog-wild as they wish on self-contained stories released less frequently (perhaps two or three times a year) in graphic novel form. (Xaviar Xerexes wonders at the end of this post whether DC is missing an opportunity by not making these comics for kids again, which at least would justify the length as well as the inherent silliness of the whole concept of superheroes. DC’s more “fantastic” heroes haven’t meshed well with the serious stories told with them.)

That DC isn’t doing any of this makes me wonder what the point of this revamp is – it’s worth noting that in 2009, DC Comics was restructured into DC Entertainment to strengthen the connection between comics and other media, making me wonder if the ultimate impetus for this move is to create new properties for media exploitation and reinvent existing properties to be more exploitable. It’s even more baffling that they would keep a foot in the direct market when no one is going to walk into a comic book store unless they’re already a fan of superhero comic books, and even distributing over digital channels isn’t going to be anywhere near as effective at drawing in new “readers” as said exploitation in other media, as Marvel is doing with its line of movies, which are slowly building towards an eventual Avengers movie. Yet by completely relaunching its existing universe, DC risks alienating their existing direct market audience and throwing out one of their biggest assets – as exemplified in the likely end of four or five titles that can claim their legacy and numbering back to the Golden Age.

While continuity can be a barrier to entry to a story, it can also be a tremendous asset, and DC has leveraged its continuity like no other, creating a sense of legacy around their characters. Several characters that were teenagers in the Silver Age have grown into their own identities as adult heroes, with Wally West, the former Kid Flash, even taking his mentor’s mantle as the Flash when his mentor died during Crisis on Infinite Earths. The most famous of these might be Dick Grayson, the former Robin, taking the identity of Nightwing (immortalized on screen during the later run of the 90s Batman animated series) and, since his own mentor’s death a couple years ago, himself taking the mantle of Batman.

However, DC’s approach to continuity and the passage of time has been rather half-assed (how long has present Robin Tim Drake been in high school again? With all these former teenage sidekicks taking adult identities as early as the 80s, shouldn’t the “original generation” of heroes be in their 40s by now?) – they have an interest in keeping the “iconic” versions of their characters, and although the monthly pace of comic books allows much less time to take place than the actual time between issues, the passage of time can’t be held off indefinitely, and for various reasons DC has frittered away a lot of that time.

The reasons for such conservativism are arguably outweighed by the story possibilities it holds back – of the only three characters for whom it really matters all that much (of their next three iconic franchises, two have had at least three different people hold each of their mantles), two, Superman and Wonder Woman, have been portrayed as effectively immortal (although admittedly Lois Lane is another matter), and Batman has, as mentioned, already been killed off and replaced (a move, note, that has been largely critically acclaimed by superhero comic fans, many of them clamoring for Bruce to never come back, despite the seeming inevitability of returns from the dead in comics). But if DC is understandably committed to the iconic versions of their characters, it seems a reasonable compromise is to start a brand-new universe aimed at new readers alongside the existing DC universe, which is then allowed to grow and change dynamically.

Marvel went in this direction with the 2000 launch of the so-called “Ultimate” universe – while wildly successful, there’s evidence a lot of its fans came from existing comics fandom, and the Ultimate universe quickly became as continuity-choked as the mainstream Marvel universe. Still, what’s to stop DC from launching their own “Digital” universe? In fact, DC’s four Golden Age-dated titles are split two apiece between Superman and Batman, and since the end of multiple stories in a single issue DC has tried valiantly to justify the existence of two separate titles. What’s to stop them from putting the “new” Superman in Superman and the existing Superman in Action Comics, or the “new” Batman in Detective Comics and the existing Batman in Batman, and splitting the rest of their line between their universes?

DC has attempted to clarify that this is “not a reboot“, implying that this new status quo will be overlaid on top of the existing DC universe, but they’ve also released material suggesting even the most iconic characters will be revised, made younger, and given new costumes, leading me to ask: why half-ass it? If you’re going to go this far to sweep aside the shackles of continuity, why not cut them off entirely? I personally will watch at least the start of this new initiative with interest, to see what new twists DC puts on their old characters as well as to watch this revolution unfold, and I intend to devote a future post to my own ideas for reinventing DC’s stable, but the way DC is going about all of this, I can’t help but think it’ll bite them in the ass.

AND WHY IS HIS MOUTH MOVING NOW???

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(From The Order Of The Stick. Click for full-sized protected speech.)

OOTS fans are known (at least among their own kind) for how speculation-happy they are, so it’s a rare treat when Rich manages to pull a twist that catches everyone off-guard.

Simply put, no one expected Zz’dtri to come back after Vaarsuvius called him out for being a Drizzt clone. It wasn’t exactly death, but considering how easy that is to fix in this world, getting taken away by copyright lawyers may well have been a bigger guarantee he’d never come back.

This, of course, raises a horde of questions, not least of them concerning Zz’dtri’s chronology during the intervening time, how recently he’s shacked back up with Nale, and other such questions. One rather intriguing avenue it opens up was pointed out by a forum member who matched the aura on the mysterious scrying eye with Zz’dtri’s.

It also shows just how much Rich’s art has changed over the years. Compare the detailing on Zz’dtri’s robe and cape in this strip with that in his last appearance. Although there have been a few times when art changes have been sizable enough to be pointed out, they haven’t been anywhere near as jarring as we see with a character that hasn’t been seen in over 700 strips.

(Although that doesn’t quite apply to the new hairstyle, which I’m not sure if I’ll ever get used to…)

Rich Burlew will NOT be upstaged by some random Australian guy!

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized champion.)

Dammit, Rich, stop confirming wild forum theories, you just encourage more and wilder theories.

As with “the white-haired guy in prison is really Ian“, I’d dismissed the theories proposing that the “champion” Roy had to face in the arena was actually Thog – half the time I had thought they were actually joking. But actually going this route raises some interesting questions.

Don’t get me wrong, I had every expectation the Linear Guild would show up in this arc at some point – I just wasn’t sure how. The only way I could think of seemed too contrived, as though they’d arrive like a deus ex machina out of nowhere at a random point. Now, however, they’re present in the minds of the OOTS before they’re present physically. Simply put, this was not supposed to happen.

Although the Guild escaped in the middle of the Battle of Azure City, no one except themselves (and their secret allies) knew of it. Elan even told the Empress of Blood’s court that Nale was dead. Now, if Thog is not only alive, but just a few feet in front of them, it stands to reason that Nale and Sabine survived the destruction of Azure City’s castle as well, and that should get the minds of the Order members spinning.

One of the first things they’ll do is ask a lot of questions of Tarquin. Thog was already part of the Guild when Nale fought his father, and if any OOTS member got a good enough look at the Wanted poster that got them in this mess, they’d know that. That means Tarquin has had a known associate of Nale’s in his possession for, by the forumites’ calculations, 9 months. How aware was he of that? Is there a particular reason Tarquin has kept him alive so long? Does he know whether Nale or Sabine are around as well? Did Elan convince him that Nale wasn’t with Thog anymore, or did his claim that Nale was dead only make Tarquin more suspicious?

In any event, once it turns out that Nale is, in fact, alive, something tells me the OOTS will have some hell to pay…

One problem with the multi-comic setup: The only major development since my last post has been Fireballs explaining the situation with Me, who then got recruited by the Halley-Newton group. Oh, and Shakespeare got involved.

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(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized potato salad.)

Few webcomics have the balls to spring a twist so huge on their audience it forces them to reassess everything they’ve been through before.

So give some credit to Irregular Webcomic! and its Cliffhangers theme, which used the occasion of its 3000th comic to drop an absolute bombshell on its audience: Erwin, the bumbling Nazi straight man to Haken’s Col. Klink-esque military commander, has been working for the other side the whole time.

I’ll admit, the reveal didn’t have the impact for me it probably should have at first, because the source was Ginny (also now revealed to be his wife), who hasn’t exactly come across as trustworthy in the past. But this comic, which features a past Erwin springing from jail and explaining his backstory to the 80s Mythbusters, suggests that at the very least it should be taken seriously at the moment (you never can tell with Nazis), which works out to be a surprisingly interesting, if relatively obvious, twist on the old trope of the bumbling recurring villains. I imagine either comic probably caused a good chunk of IWC readers to look back at all of Erwin’s previous appearances looking for clues and contradictions – and it’s worth noting that his blurb on the cast page says that he “restricts his individual thoughts to making scathing social commentaries on Nazi policies”. And that Morgan-Mar has teased an Erwin/Ginny relationship before.

Well played, Mr. Morgan-Mar (even if he won’t see this until next month). Well played.

I blame the conversation between Elan and Tarquin for the slowdown.

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized firing squad.)

Everyone who reads Da Blog knows about my love affair with The Order of the Stick. I’ve called it one of the best webcomics ever made and able to stand up among the great works of literature. Yet I’ve realized recently that I could poke holes at most of the story. Of the five books that have been published in whole or part online, only the third is one I don’t have significant problems with calling the “real” OOTS. The first book is mostly D&D jokes, the second book is a bridge between the first and third, and my issues with the fourth and fifth have been well documented. (Seriously, we’ve spent close to a YEAR of real time in the Empire of Blood!) So it’s tempting to wonder if my love for OOTS is really a love for OOTS as a whole, or just a love for the fantastic third book.

But the second, fourth and fifth books have also contained hints of what makes OOTS so great (and I’ve spoken as such about the fourth before as well), and the most recent comic is probably one I would point to if asked what it is that Rich Burlew brings to The Order of the Stick that makes it so great: dramatic timing, and characterization.

Most of this comic cross-cuts between two different plot threads. The first is Tarquin’s frustration with Enor and Gannji’s refusal to fight each other, and Elan’s exasperation with his father for making two best friends fight, for Elan’s supposed amusement. The other involves Enor and Gannji’s refusal to fight each other.

To be honest, right up until the comic before this one, Enor and Gannji were little more than barely-fleshed-out unsympathetic antagonists – maybe even bumbling fools, despite their success at bringing in Elan, Haley, and V. After the mistaken-identity business was sorted out, and after Gannji extorted Tarquin out of some of the bounty, they wound up in the same bar as Roy and Belkar and started a barroom brawl by attacking Roy. That got them thrown in prison, with Tarquin refusing to clear their names, so they’ve spent the better part of fifty strips verbally sparring with Roy and Belkar in anticipation of a meeting in the gladiatorial arena.

In all that time, “Gannji” and “Enor” could very easily be replaced with “Nale” and “Thog” without much in the way of changes, except that Enor’s a bit more articulate than Thog. They’ve essentially been comic relief for other characters to play off of, empty antagonists to get on our heroes’ nerves. And with Roy being ranked and Enor , all the characters – and the fans – were anticipating a Roy-Enor showdown that would, essentially, be the culmination of this confrontation with this pair of minor villains. That is, until it turned out that would in fact be facing , which oh-so-coincidentially (not) happened to be Gannji. (That leaves Roy to face “the Champion”, who’s been undefeated for many, many months. Which does not bode well for Our Hero.)

The prospect of having to fight each other has suddenly turned Enor and Gannji a lot more sympathetic (even Roy feels sorry for their plight), and this comic makes their story a lot more tragic than it had been. After standing around fake-fighting poorly for a while, Gannji proposes an unthinkable solution: he’s willing to let Enor kill him, reasoning that Enor can survive longer without him than Gannji can without Enor, planning for Enor to cut his tail off and get him resurrected once he escapes. Enor refuses, even proposing to sacrifice himself, since Gannji could deal with life without him better than Enor could without Gannji. Finally, in the antepenultimate panel, Gannji kneels down and closes his eyes, awaiting his fate from Enor, who’s been convinced that “this is the way it has to be”.

This is one more in a long tradition of Rich’s well-fleshed-out, sympathetic antagonists. Rich has shown repeatedly his refusal to accept a strict division between Good and Evil of the sort that D&D seems to require. For example, no OOTS character has provoked more discussion than Miko, she of the self-righteous, jumping to conclusions, ever-suspicious sort. Her inability to withstand or accept the collapse of her worldview is arguably as important and powerful a plot as the main plot, and the closure of that plot provided by her death is one of the more celebrated OOTS moments, which is saying a lot. Tarquin himself could be seen as an example of a fleshed-out antagonist. The two main antagonists, the Linear Guild and “Team Evil”, haven’t been fleshed out nearly as much, unless you’ve read the Start of Darkness prequel and experienced Redcloak’s own tragedy, which reaches its nadir at the end of that book but isn’t over yet.

Rich expertly arranges this comic’s main plot threads to rise and fall with each other. As Gannji proposes that Enor kills him, Tarquin asks his assistant to get ready to kill them. As Enor refuses and the two negotiate who’s going to kill who, Elan pleads with Tarquin not to make them fight each other. Finally, as Enor finally gets ready to kill Gannji, Tarquin orders them both killed, and the final panel shows a bunch of soldiers firing their bows – which just adds another layer of tragedy to the strip, as even Gannji’s plan comes too late for either of them. (The cliffhanger ending leaves open the possibility of either or both surviving – but the forum consensus is that Gannji is much more dead meat than Enor.)

That isn’t to say this strip is perfect – we haven’t cared about Enor or Gannji for long enough for this strip to have its maximum impact, it doesn’t tell us anything about Tarquin we didn’t already know, and this plotline in general has dragged on so long it’s starting to push out more plot-relevant parts of the book (besides Girard’s Gate, didn’t we have a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it segment involving V’s divorce?), and I now suspect Rich is starting to try to accelerate (or “rush”) through the end of it. But it hasn’t been without its virtues, and one of them will be the subject of a future post.

Get out of my head, Randall.

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(From xkcd. Click for full-sized ghost in the machine.)

I’m sick, it’s very late and I’m probably not very coherent right now, but it’s not as late as it was Tuesday night.

First a clarification: I stand by most of what I said in my original xkcd review yea so many years ago. I don’t think xkcd is compelling enough for me to come back to it three times a week. It’s more disorganized even than most gag-a-day comics; each strip exists in its own right, but even if Randall Munroe were to write the greatest comic in the history of history, it still wouldn’t keep me interested enough to check out any other strips. No matter how much consistent quality xkcd puts out, it’s still more of an editorial cartoon for geeks than anything else.

Recently, if I have nothing else to do and/or don’t feel like doing anything too “thinky”, I’ll mosey on over to xkcd. It’s good for a quick laugh to pick up the day, and I’ll also trawl the recent archives for other recent, quick-hit strips. xkcd consists of a bunch of isolated incidents that can occasionally rise to the level of being quite funny, and often thought-provoking. But I’m just not sure it’s enough to keep me coming back for a single isolated incident three times a week, and unlike, say, The Order of the Stick, I can certainly go long stretches without knowing what the latest xkcd happenings are. Since I’m not as well connected in the social web as most people on the Internet, I suspect much of what’s keeping xkcd going is its reputation as a meme factory.

But I just had to mention that on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, I was in the middle of a semi-unplanned 12-hour all-nighter to compose a paper for a philosophy class. Working on something I don’t necessarily enjoy for 12 hours straight isn’t really my forte, and I occasionally drifted over to other mindless activities.

One of which was checking xkcd and seeing a joke about the Allegory of the Cave.

I am convinced Randall Munroe is somehow connected to the essential life force of the universe.

Funnily enough, he’s been speculated to be Ian, he’s called Ian in 758 right after the key line and mentions being called Red before three years of captivity, and while catching up I still didn’t recognize him as Haley’s father before this strip.

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized family reunion.)

If you only follow my webcomics posts, you may not know why there have been, well, none of them recently, which is that I’ve developed more of an emphasis on schoolwork recently. And between that and my football posts, I stopped reading OOTS for a while as well over the last few months.

So I missed this.

For all that it’s a revelation of Tarquin’s full Machiavellian plots (Haley was right about the Empress of Blood after all!) in a way not even Elan can ignore and that not even the people who had anticipated something like this could have expected, I would have made a post on it solely because of the penultimate panel, where Tarquin names among the former names of his empires the place we already knew was holding Haley’s father, which we had thought entirely dead and I had thought had been definitively shown not to have had anything to do with Elan’s father. A theory that had been treated as almost canon by the forums, then near-definitively squashed, swung all the way to very nearly confirmed in a single strip, even a single panel, even a single line, even a single word.

With how slow the early part of this book had been going, this might well be far and away the best, most exciting strip of the entire book to this point, and only the original revelation of Tarquin’s identity even comes close.

So as Elan slowly realizes that Haley was right about his father all along, he confronts Tarquin, they duel for a while, and after Tarquin gains the upper hand he reveals that he still plans to help Elan (who, the above-linked strip reveals, he believes to be the leader of his adventuring party). When they resume the conversation, it’s almost entirely about story structure, the sort of conversation you would expect of two people who spend too much time at TV Tropes, and is to the effect that Tarquin is entirely comfortable with his role as the bloodthirsty tyrant doomed to be overthrown by what he now realizes is his own son. I nominate this for the best, most mind-blowingly awesome fourth-wall-bending moment OOTS has ever had, maybe in the history of fourth-wall-bending. A fourth-wall-bending moment is critically important to the plot precisely because of its fourth-wall-bending.

This strip is critically important to the plot not only for its insights into Tarquin’s character, but because of the oracle’s prediction for Elan. Prior to this strip, it might have seemed that the only possible interpretation of that prediction would have had to do with the ending of the strip as a whole, and for all the twists (“Elan dies, or ‘ends’, happy”) and turns that the forum applied to that prediction, it was always in that context, and any speculation about it was somewhat muted as a result, certainly compared to V’s “four words” or Belkar’s death. While Elan did ask “Will this story have a happy ending?”, this strip still suggests an alternate interpretation: that the story of Elan’s overthrow of Tarquin would have a happy ending, and so Elan would get a happy ending that wasn’t necessarily connected to the main plot of OOTS. Which really doesn’t bode well for that main plot.

Haley puts the kibosh on directly confronting Tarquin now, citing the unlikelihood of putting him away for good, and instead runs to free her father, which is how we get to the current strip: Haley rushing into the block where Ian is held, talking with Roy and Belkar, and practically gang-tacking him. It gets only a couple of panels and hardly compares to Tarquin’s Empire Strikes Back moment, but it still manages to capture the emotion of the occasion. I expect the next strip to go all-out with the emotion, but this is a momentous enough occasion in its own right to make up for the previous missed milestones.

OOTS has officially picked up at this point. Tarquin’s unmasking got it going, and the past dozen or so strips have ratcheted up the tension considerably, despite a good number of them just being Elan and Tarquin talking. And the best part is, I caught up in time for it to just be getting started. I’m intensely interested in the next two strips and where they could be going. When I left, the strip was starting to bog down again, but for the first time in quite some time (since at least V’s turn to evil, possibly since the Battle of Azure City) OOTS feels like the strip I signed up for.

I really need to get my writing muscle back in shape.

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(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized memory lapse.)

So most of what’s happened up to this point in the Steve and Terry theme since the reboot of the universe turns out to have been an extended flashback that just ended (in what may have supposed to have been June). Which is rather interesting in terms of fueling the “did the universe reboot to the beginning or not?” debate. All signs now seem to point to “no, except for Space”.
-From the last time I posted on IWC.

Want to know what was happening in the Space theme? You’ll never guess in a million years.

No, seriously. Guess.

The Space people were role-playing their first adventures together.

The Fantasy and Space themes, with their role-playing miniatures representing their characters, have always hewed closest to the idea of representing a role-playing game, and Space in particular has hewed close enough to it that the characters actually noticed the death of Me, but still, I did not see that coming. Not to mention the metaphysical questions it raises concerning the lack of Me.

As for the anticipated resumption of the Irregular Crisis, that doesn’t seem to be happening – at the start of the new year, Me solved his “on the run from Death” problem by settling down “in my own home town, with my only remaining family”, and that seems to have been the last it’s been mentioned. Instead of a resumption of the Irregular Crisis, we seem to be getting a new Irregular Crisis, this one composed primarily of time-travel shenanigans with the 1940s turning into a hub of activity. One of the Martians that buzzed Roswell is being held at Area 51, where the 1980s Mythbusters, after moving to an alternate universe where the Nazis won World War II (suggesting the “scrambled history” may have indeed been major), have shown up, become their own grandfathers, and posed as Martians. Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley have started using their Doctor Who-esque time machine to recruit great scientific figures throughout history to travel to 1940, where the Pirates have turned up, as have Steve, Terry, and Jane Goodall, in a parody of Casablanca to boot (no, I am not making any of this up), and you just know that Cliffhangers, already set just a few years earlier, will get involved somehow, where the protagonists have learned of Hitler’s plans to conquer Europe.

(Mythbusters used to be one of my favorite themes and one of the few I would follow religiously if DMM offered per-theme RSS feeds, but it’s been turning me off of late. The closest we’ve seen of the “real” adult Adam and Jamie have been their Nazi-victory alternate universe counterparts, who just caused a rip in the space-time continuum by bringing unstable explosives to a trip through time; otherwise, it’s been all the 80s versions and their would-be grandfathers. And despite DMM working to preserve a PG rating, the whole “Adam and Jamie become their own each other’s grandparents” thing, besides feeling ripped off from Futurama, has just been painful to read.)

This crisis isn’t, so far, as far-reaching as the last one; Fantasy, Space, Nigerian Finance Minister, Shakespeare, and the part-time themes have maintained their own plots and haven’t gotten involved, yet. And beyond those themes (save Space), several other themes have, eventually, gotten to the point where they have picked up where they left off without any indication that anything happened, only getting diverted recently into the new crisis, namely Scientific Revolution, Cliffhangers, and Steve and Terry. On the other hand, other themes have had their disruptions feed directly into the new crisis, namely Martians and Mythbusters.

The new crisis is far from over, and knowing DMM is likely to continue to build right to the last day of the year. But if it weren’t for DMM’s reluctance to make money off his webcomic, I would think he’s trying to use all these crises to jazz up interest and maintain readership in his comic, using the hope of a resolution to string people along as long as possible. Instead, I’m left to wonder if the man who surprised me by saying my idea of IWC consisting of (then) sixteen comics in one, each of those comics being irregular, had never occured to him before, has gotten tired of the gimmick.

While writing this post, it occurred to me that the comic in which Me dies, effectively the start of the Irregular Crisis, is #1800. We’re now up to #2743, so the leadup to the Irregular Crisis, the Crisis itself, and everything leading up to this new crisis, has taken up a third of the comic’s entire existence. Add on top of that the fact that the multi-comic gimmick evolved over a very long time, starting around #30 and continuing past #100, and we’re fast approaching the point  (in about a year’s time plus) where the multi-comic gimmick as it’s best known, before all the themes started being united by crises, will have lasted only about half of the comic’s existence. As I’ve talked about before, David Morgan-Mar started a webcomic not really knowing what he was doing, only knowing that this newfangled “webcomic” thing sounded cool. The comic was titled “Irregular Webcomic” because he really didn’t anticipate the comic becoming as regular as it became – he’d just throw up something whenever he felt like throwing something up. In fact, re-reading that post, I’m reminded of the mini-crisis in 2007 involving four themes and a Martian invasion.

Irregular Webcomic! has been undergoing a slow Cerebus syndrome for most of its existence, and the point of no return was arguably a stretch from #457 to #793. For all of that stretch, a new Cliffhangers strip appeared, like clockwork, every three comics (which basically meant every three days). It was this stretch that led to Morgan-Mar sending the Fantasy cast off on a quest, because he’d come to realize that themes with ongoing storylines were easier to write than themes without, which benefited themes like Cliffhangers at the expense of themes like Fantasy and Space. Although the Scientific Revolution theme, which until recently was as TV Tropes described it – “an excuse for DMM to write heartfelt annotations about Newton, Halley, Pascal, Pasteur, Linnaeus and their contemporaries” – may have represented a backslide towards more gag-a-day comics with how relatively fast strips were coming out, the other themes without lengthy plotlines have not been heard from at all. Harry Potter and Imperial Rome have seen a grand total of two comics apiece since the reboot of the universe, and Star Wars and Supers have other reasons not to appear very often (Darths and Droids and the fact it’s hand-drawn by another party, respectively).

So perhaps it’s a natural progression from giving all the themes plotlines to trying to create an over-arching plotline for Irregular Webcomic! as a whole. But in trying to give people a reason to read IWC every single day, Morgan-Mar runs the risk of falling into PVP/Goats Syndrome (which I really need to settle on a single name for) by shoehorning some of the sillier themes, like Mythbusters and Steve and Terry, into these ominous, world-threatening plotlines. Most of those same themes successfully went through Cerebus Syndrome on their own terms by embracing their silliness as part of the plotline (though not always to the embedded extent Rich Burlew did), but when I see, say, the complete comic relief character of Steve panicking over the impending unraveling of time itself, I’m not sure whether I should be sitting on the edge of my seat or tipping it over guffawing in laughter.

Morgan-Mar seems to want to have it both ways, having a slapstick humor comic while also giving people a reason to follow the comic as a whole instead of single themes, and he doesn’t seem to be doing a good job of getting the two to work together. And it doesn’t help that the disparate themes are not very compatible with one another, spanning a span of time from the 1400s to the far future (not counting Imperial Rome, Fantasy, or several themes’ trips to the age of the dinosaurs), spanning nearly every genre imaginable, and spanning the entire globe and beyond, so that even giving them a reason to interact with one another to this extent requires inventing ridiculous contrivances.

I’m interested enough in where Morgan-Mar is going with this new crisis to keep reading to at least the end of the year, but fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. I’m not going to keep reading for a delayed resolution that isn’t there.

(If this post comes off a little more critical than I originally intended, well, re-read the title. I was tired by the time I was done.)

724 also has a throwaway line that crushes my “Nale really knew of Elan all along” theory.

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized perky eyes.)

I still can’t get over what Rich did three strips ago. He took one of the most clichéd setups in all of literature, one of the most anticipated comics in the entire strip and one almost guaranteed to be hard to read, and gave it a quintessentially OOTSian twist, somehow exceeding expectations, and making it at least a little easier to read in the process.

In the meantime, however, we’ve been getting some long-overdue exposition. But before I relate the substance of the exposition, a note about the tone of the comic recently. Much of the current book has been a throwback to the very earliest days of OOTS, partially a side effect of enough plot points being wrapped up in the third book to render tenuous the connection to any future books, a problem Book 4 exacerbated. A month ago, I suggested that this led to a disconnection from the plot, the plot as an artificial goal without a lot of immediacy. (By the way, something I forgot to mention in that post: “Don’t Split the Party”? Really? I can understand the “we’ve gone to the classical literature well too often” rationale for avoiding the forum-favorite “A Tale of Two Parties”, but did you really have to go with the most uncreative, literal, bland title imaginable?)

However, especially since Tarquin took his helmet off, we’ve seen the good side of getting back to OOTS’ roots as well: a certain informal, fun-loving tone that isn’t afraid to resort to silliness. Partly it’s because the personalities of Elan and Tarquin bounce off one another, but the punchline of 724 is driven entirely by Gannji, and comes entirely from the inherent silliness of trying to pass a can of soup off as a “thermal detonator”. It’s kind of wonky and gives the impression Gannji’s personality is being warped by that of Elan and Tarquin, and it’s a little reminiscent of OOTS past, but in a good way. This same tone has continued into strip 725, where Tarquin’s narration is more than a little reminiscent of Shojo or Hinjo, or even Nale himself. And while 726 starts with awkward dialogue, you can’t help but get a smile on your face when Elan evokes some of his old antics (as much as I’ll have to say about Elan’s seemingly inconsistent character later).

Tarquin tells us tantalizingly little that we probably couldn’t have figured out ourselves: After his own attempt at a short-lived kingdom, Tarquin switched to mercenary work with Malack, his old buddy, which he’s been doing for fifteen years. When the Empire of Blood was conquered, Nale tried to be crowned instead, and – evidently with most of the original Linear Guild already in tow – fought his father and killed three of Malack’s children.

Nonetheless, there are some tantalizing elements of even this short, sketchy account (which may become fodder for another prequel down the line). Not only did Tarquin not start out on the Western Continent, Malack was “an old adventuring pal of mine”. If all Nale knows of Tarquin is his adventures on the Western Continent, as seems likely, it’s very possible that Tarquin did not start out as a bloodthirsty general, but an adventurer not unlike Elan – perhaps filling the role of Belkar crossed with Roy. (Worth noting that Elan and Nale’s mother was Tarquin’s first wife, and he’s gone on to have at least four more since – admittedly likely broken by the turmoil of the region.)

Moreover, if Malack has been serving as a mercenary High Priest for at least 15 years, it’s likely that Haley was wrong about the Empress of Blood being a figurehead, at least originally – she’s just grown fat and happy while on the throne (smart enough to kick Thog’s ass, not smart enough to be an effective ruler). (Also worth noting that the Empress of Blood’s two-year reign with no apparent challengers appears to be above average for the Western Continent.)

Oh, and then there’s the future to worry about… Haley’s “note” for Roy has to come into play, so the reunion of the OOTS can’t be as simple as V’s Sending (perhaps (s)he’s physically incapable of cramming a message into 25 words? Roy, Durkon, and Belkar come in guns a-blazin’?), and if Elan’s paying attention he’ll recognize that Haley’s concerns about Tarquin’s evilness will bear fruit as well. And then there’s the prospect of Tarquin knowing what happened to Haley’s father (a thought: might Bozzok’s “friends on the western continent” be related to Tarquin’s other “adventuring pals”?) and supporting the OOTS’ hunt for Girard’s Gate…

Like father, like sons.

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized Darth Vader impression.)

I am in no condition to be doing the heavy thinking required to make a blog post, let alone the schoolwork I’m behind almost the entire quarter on. (Let’s just say Thursday wasn’t a very good day for me.)

But… damn if Rich didn’t mostly make up for a mediocre first quarter of the book (and especially a current storyline that’s been dragging a little) with a strip you could tell he was waiting for as expectantly as the general. And damn if that’s totally not how I would have expected the general or Elan’s father to look or act like, and yet totally makes sense in retrospect.

I’ll likely have more to say later, as at this point I’m really interested in the backstory behind what’s happening now (the “Elan’s father = Tyrinar” theories are on life support at this point, but the idea of a connection between them is tantalizing), including why Tarquin put the hit out on Nale rather than the guy who had a vendetta against him (Malack), and getting a character two strips old seriously fleshed out, not to mention furthering the story itself.

(Seriously, Elan? An entire fatherless childhood is worth the one moment you stumble upon him? I shouldn’t be surprised given Elan’s propensity for the dramatic, but damn if it doesn’t suggest he has issues…)