Webcomics

Okay.

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I’ve been bottling this up all week, but I have a big beef with Buzzcomix. And it’s not so much that they’ve been down for the second time in less than a month. As annoying as that is, because they really need to figure out what this problem is and solve it.

No, it’s the fact there isn’t even a channel to inform anyone what’s going on. The old Buzzcomix at least had a forum. I’m not sure the new Buzzcomix even has any sort of “contact us” link. Not that that would matter while the whole site is down, but not having a forum or anything of that sort means no way of letting us know what the problem is when the site does come back.

Even with the site down, they could let a site like Comixtalk know what the dealio is. I haven’t found anything in my admittedly brief search to indicate that anyone has any idea what exactly is going on. Did Buzzcomix run over their bandwidth? Were they a victim of a DDoS attack? Did someone have pornographic images? Is the site going back up by the time you read this, later today, tomorrow, at the end of the month, after a while to plug security holes, or ever? WE DON’T KNOW!!! And we basically have no way of knowing.

Well, at least we still have Top Web Comics.

So because I lost an early draft of this post Wednesday, yesterday I had to type it up in a “draft” editor that was autosaving but not rendering everything correctly. I had to use regular Blogger to add the strip image.

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(From Something Positive. Click for full-sized pie.)

This is going to be a shorter review than some of my other ones.

Something Positive is funny in a way, because for me, it’s the opposite of xkcd. When I reviewed xkcd I started out doing a limited archive binge, and because I found myself with little to say, I decided to follow along with the strip at the pace it normally updates before reviewing it. It didn’t change my lack of anything to say, but that in itself was something to say. That incident gave me my policy of following along with strips for a spell before reviewing them, which has been taken to the point where I generally don’t necessarily archive binge anymore.

So with S*P, I’ve been spending the past few weeks following along with the strip, and when that left me with very little to say about it, I decided to go back to the beginning of last year and follow along on an archive binge. And at first, that didn’t change my lack of anything to say. At first.

Because I’m convinced Something Positive reads better all at once than as it updates.

Honestly, S*P is an odd duck to categorize. On the one hand, it’s a gag-a-day comic, and even there it’s a bit schitzophrenic. Sometimes it’s making commentary on geek culture, and when it does it can be hard to tell whether Randy Milholland hates geek culture with a passion, is in fact sympathetic, is one himself, or a combination of any or all of the above.

The flip side is when it’s a chronicle of the ordinary lives of its characters, and here, it oddly takes on elements of a storyline comic. Milholland is not shy about allowing his characters to grow, change, and undergo some form of character evolution. It’s tempting to compare it to Seinfeld or the like, but it’s different as well. Several characters have several ongoing plots, which move at a snail’s pace but still actually move. If there’s an appeal to the strip, it’s in waiting for all these plots to move while laughing at the geek-culture strips. It’s easier to appreciate all these shifts if you can read them in a single archive binge, where all the infinitesimal movements are less annoying, and a host of only marginally funny strips can have their humor add up and rope you into the strip.

Basically, the ongoing plots are the most compelling element of the strip, but they move incredibly slowly, so if you don’t have much patience at all that shouldn’t be a reason you follow S*P. Conversely, if you find the geek humor funny you might decide to read it for that reason, but because of the plots that humor isn’t as common as you might like and isn’t always as funny as it should be.

And Milholland has a lot of characters and a lot of plots. It’s even more daunting, and potentially confusing, when fairly minor characters get significant screen time and their own plots largely independent of the (nominal) main cast. During my binge I often had a hard time keeping all the characters straight. (How many red-heads does Milholland have in his cast anyway???) Milholland has a fairly prodigious cast page (though it has some gaps, including Aubrey, who you’d think would be first in line to get an actual page considering she’s one of the original three cast members) but it leaves me with the impression that Milholland has spent a little more time than you’d expect with characters whose connection with the main cast was always a little thin in the first place. (Mike would fall into this category.) This may have something to do with who the fandom has latched on to, but still. And these are just the ones Milholland maintains plotlines for; there are boatloads of other characters that only show up at “Old Familiar Faces” time.

I also have a little bit of an issue with the art, although I think I have more of an issue than I otherwise would with Milholland’s text-laden panels (which Ctrl+Alt+Del is so criticized for) and irrelevant art because recent strips that happened to fall within the time I was following it hammered home the point for me. Two strips in particular, one of which saw a last-minute script swap-out and the other one of which Milholland just couldn’t decide between two scripts. In both cases, the art is exactly the same in both versions. Seriously. Milholland basically could take any four panels of Davan and Aubrey talking and plop in whatever dialogue he needed. He could create the new Dinosaur Comics, even! And they’d probably go on and on about whatever their problems were and how to fix them and some snarky remark and… and there are quite a few strips where the dialogue could be swapped out for something else! It’s tempting for me to ask “why make a webcomic if the art doesn’t matter? Why not go into prose?” but that would disqualify half of webcomicdom, including Dinosaur Comics, which is beloved partly because the art doesn’t matter. (On another note, be sure to check out my webcomic!)

I don’t think I hate Something Positive nearly as much as I’ve made it seem in this review. I can certainly imagine it being an enjoyable diversion for someone, and I did have a few laughs and found myself constantly clicking the “next” button wherever I was in the archive, but I’m not sure I can completely endorse it either. I don’t want to say it’s mediocre at best, but I think I do have some deal-breaker problems with it, or at least a series of smaller problems stacked one on top of another that mixes with just not being quite compelling enough. But I think my state of mind is affecting my judgment here, because of all the stress I’ve been under recently, and because of that there will be no webcomic post next week so I can recharge my batteries, catch up on past stuff, and allow my next webcomic post to be on Order of the Stick so I can stick to a realm I’m comfortable in and already know what I’m getting coming in.

The post time on this post is on Tuesday PT, just before midnight. I say that counts. Even if it actually goes up at 2 AM.

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So I don’t have the results of the Golden Bowl, or the final college football rankings, and the NFL Lineal Title hasn’t been updated, neither has the college title really, and the webcomic post is going to be delayed until at LEAST tomorrow (Wednesday), and I should come clean and figure out the reason all these things, plus myriad schoolwork and my job hunting, are late.

I’ve long figured, in my own mind, that checking all my myriad RSS feeds shouldn’t take too long. I mention my RSS reader from time to time on my webcomic posts, and I am of the position that having an RSS feed will greatly accelerate the day I review your comic. I may well be reviewing Sluggy Freelance this week if it had an RSS feed; instead it could take a month or more.

Well, webcomics aren’t the only thing on my RSS feed – I have eight or nine feeds on sports alone and those are just the ones still updating. (One of them has an odd little problem; it seems IE7 can detect the items on there, but isn’t detecting new items, not even slotting them in the old items’ slots.) I have plenty of other feeds as well, covering more topics than you can shake a stick at, and many of them are blogs. Ideally not only would most of them be short, I could read at least some of them at home, and not waste time I could be spending doing stuff that actually requires an Internet connection.

Commonly, however, they often link to longer articles. Or I could get stuck reading a bunch of stuff I’m not interested in, or doing a lot of scrolling through the feed. And on both the posts and the longer articles, I’m often moved to comment, or at least look at the comments, and that can involve as much effort as writing a blog post.

One thing I like about Irregular Webcomic! that’s almost as novel – maybe more, for its impact outside webcomics – as its structure is its RSS feeds. Yes, I said feeds, plural. One feed contains just a link to the comic, with a list of themes it’s in. Another feed contains the comic itself, and a third feed contains the comic and its complete annotation. I don’t have much use of the lesser feeds for a webcomic, but imagine if Blogger allowed readers all these options.

Blogger allows you two choices of feed, “short” (first paragraph or 255 characters, though I suspect strictly the latter, with no paragraph breaks or images) and “full” (entire posts). The choice of feed is a philosophical choice: you could be on the side of making sure people trigger your hit counters and see your ads, or you could make it more convenient for them to read your blog as long as you’re giving them a feed. But believe it or not, some people may prefer a short feed, if they have less interest in the topic and don’t want to commit too much time to reading a bunch of crap they’re not terribly interested in, and scrolling past all of it.

If I had to quibble with any feed’s decision on how much info to put in their feed, it would probably be Sports Media Watch‘s short feeds. I always click on anything SMW puts up, even if it’s something I read already in a place like Awful Announcing and I don’t need to know anything more. But I can imagine how the topic might be just a little too geeky for other people and they don’t want to dwell on it too much. If something doesn’t interest them in the title and first sentence, skip it. (And Paulsen has pretty short posts. AA would benefit from a short feed, for that matter, even though I wouldn’t use it.) Conversely, there are some things I’d rather see in short-feed form that publish as long feeds, yet I can see how people would be interested enough in the topic to want a long feed.

So anyway, that’s been my chief distraction: too many feeds to check. I haven’t been able to follow webcomics without feeds, and I haven’t bothered to fix feeds that aren’t working, and I dread it when I add a new feed, which I do sparingly. And it all monopolizes time from other stuff. Even the semi-frivolous business of Da Blog has fallen by the wayside to the almost completely frivolous business of checking stuff.

I may re-prioritize some of my feeds and re-organize my folders to clear out some of the cruft and most frustrating stuff, and I’m going to try to focus more on more important stuff… but I’ve told myself that before. The problem is that checking feeds is relatively low-intensity, so it marks good rest time, but I just need to reduce the time it takes somehow.

So. If you want to stick it to Microsoft with the exception of your operating system, click here for the Random Internet Discovery, which I may have more to say about later. And I guarantee at least two posts on Wednesday. Of course, that’s contingent on me getting enough sleep now…

(And I have a serious beef with Buzzcomix. It’s one thing to have your site suspended twice in a little over two weeks, but to not even have a channel to let people know what’s going on, especially when the old site had a forum…)

Part of the reason I’m making this post is for the same reason as yesterday’s IWC post.

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(From Ctrl+Alt+Del. Click for full-sized crash landing.)

So the latest “Ethan McManus: Space Archaeologist” storyline is finally over, and I’ve gone back and read through the whole thing.

In light of recent events in the main story line, Ethan’s characterization in this story is rather interesting.

First of all, the decisions made by the CAD fans are themselves rather interesting; the first decision was between skipping out on a bill for destroying another clone when coming out of his own clone vat, and simply negotiating for a solution. Now, the Ethan I know, at least from the first story, would probably skip out on the bill, but the fans voted for him to try and negotiate on a solution (which led to him hitting on a robot), and I can’t help but wonder if that affected his characterization for the rest of the story.

First, Ethan is far more talkative than I would normally perceive him to be. Of course, one of the knocks against CAD is Buckley’s penchant for loading up his panels with dialogue, but even when the real Ethan talks a lot it tends to be in relatively simple terms. Here he lays on the exposition with the best of them. And when he needs to, he’s rather combative and can lay on the bad puns. For once I could actually see how Ethan could have wound up in the job of an Indiana Jones ripoff. (IN SPACE!)

In the latest news post, Buckley notes he was shocked that, “given Ethan’s broken arm and general ineptitude,” the fans would (in the last choice) vote for him to sneak out of the mercenary ship on his own rather than wait for his helper robot. I suspect two factors went into the decision that Buckley didn’t plan for: the fact that, with his “general ineptitude”, Ethan himself would probably fight it out… and paradoxically, the fact that Ethan didn’t really show much of that “ineptitude” over the course of this story.

Granted, it’s been a while since I’ve seen any other version of Ethan, and negotiating with people who want to kill you and engaging in an expository conversation in a sci-fi setting don’t necessarily translate to playing video games and dealing with customers, but it’ll be interesting to see if this presages the arrival of a more “responsible” Ethan when we return to the main plot, perhaps one cooked up in response to some of the CAD haters’ complaints.

Though depending on the execution, that could move the Angst-O-Meter up or down…

No comment on Darths and Droids finishing Episode One.

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(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized better things to do.)
Getting this out of the way so I don’t have to worry about making sure I get a post out for the rest of the day…

So after about a week of whiteness fading to blueness fading to redness fading to blackness, the entire sequence led to the blackness turning out to be the Head Death’s eye. Despite what most people probably expected, it wasn’t the birth pangs of a new universe; instead, everyone is hanging out on the Not-So-Infinite and Not-So-Featureless Infinite Featureless Plane of Death, which survived the death of the universe.

This helps explain the themes that were and were not part of this crossover… as Supers is hand-drawn, even if it had crossed over with anything it’d be impossible for it to mesh with all the LEGO figures in this sequence. But Espionage has been seen to use the IFPoD as well, even if it’s interacted with no other themes and even if getting roped into this crossover would delay the main plot too much.

There’s still some question as to what will happen next… will everyone ultimately get returned to some revival of their universe? Is the rest of the strip just going to be various misadventures in whatever comes after the IFPoD? Wait… what if what comes after the IFPoD is just a carbon copy of the previous universe and everything proceeds as if nothing happened, yet something happened?

My head hurts…

A note on webcomics popularity as it relates to Da Blog

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Extracted from today’s Fey Winds review, as the review was maybe twice the size of any of my other reviews, half of it was about Buzzcomix, and this part in particular was off-point.

I have started to develop a theory that there are three basic tiers of webcomic popularity. Tier 1 comics are generally the comics you rattle off when prompted with the word “webcomic”. Penny Arcade. Something Positive. Sluggy Freelance. Order of the Stick. xkcd. Dinosaur Comics. Megatokyo. Even relatively smaller comics like Gunnerkrigg Court and Irregular Webcomic! Tier 1 is very wide – no one would compare, say, The Wotch with Penny Arcade by any measure, but I put it in Tier 1 anyway because it doesn’t need to advertise on sites like Buzzcomix and TopWebComics.com. If it’s selling T-shirts and people are actually buying them, it’s probably pretty safely a Tier 1 comic.

Tier 2 comics are those comics that regularly populate the top of sites like Buzzcomix and TopWebComics. They’re not popular enough to stop pressuring people to vote for them, but they are popular enough that they get a lot of votes. While it would be nice to get a nice, orderly ranking of the top webcomics in all of webcomicdom from these sites, practically speaking there’s little motivating Gabe and Tycho to ask that much work from their fans, even for the bragging rights. Instead Buzzcomix and the like are actually far more useful to people not in my unique situation (needing ideas for webcomic reviews), pointing people towards good webcomics that have attracted a small, but devoted following, but which have not yet achieved the popularity to go beyond that but are well on the road to doing so. This group is very small; I don’t define it as going beyond even the top 50 of these sites, if even that (probably top 25 should be the cutoff, at most), but Fey Winds pretty clearly belongs to it.

(Rather anomolously, Girl Genius is a Tier 1 comic that still receives Buzzcomix and TopWebComics votes. Goblins‘ recent success against it on Buzzcomix suggests it too may be moving into Tier 1.)

Tier 3 comics are everything else; these include, but are not limited to, the comics that feel the need to regularly change their status lines. It too is very large, including everything from comics seen only by their creators and some friends to comics with a close-knit group of people backing it. In some instances, the only thing keeping a Tier 3 comic from being Tier 2 is just not putting themselves on Buzzcomix (to the extent that some strips could easily blur the line between Tier 3 and Tier 1). In fact, the size of Tiers 1 and 3 compared to Tier 2 is such that I should and probably could divide both 1 and 3 into one or more pieces, and there probably is some “Hall of Fame” subclass within Tier 1. (And it’s very subjective; I consider Misfile a Tier 1 comic because of when I was introduced to it, but it might belong better in Tier 2.)

But this is a distinction that works for my purposes, and it’s clear that Buzzcomix popularity is a stop along the continuum to becoming a truly great and popular webcomic. I review Tiers 1 and 2 comics for Da Blog because they meet a certain popularity threshhold (though to be in Tier 2 for that purpose Top 10 on either list might be needed), and Tier 3 tends to be taken more on a case-by-case basis, with a Tier 3 comic generally needing to be good to get the “fat envelope”.

Seriously, why do so many comics I encounter have no RSS feeds? Even the venerable User Friendly and Sluggy Freelance have no RSS feeds!

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(From Fey Winds. Click for full-sized tree hex of knowledge, apparently.)

I have said in the past that I do not review comics that are neither popular nor good, because they do not deserve the attention. So I’m willing to savage a webcomic if I deem it popular enough that people need to be warded away from it, but bad webcomics with no readers should be allowed to wither like they should do naturally.

The flip side is that I am willing to review a webcomic no one’s heard of if I think it’s fantastic. So if you want me to expose your webcomic to the masses, you can e-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com. If I don’t like it, you’ll get a “thin envelope”: an e-mail with my suggestions for you. If I do like it, or at least think it has a lot of potential, you’ll get a “fat envelope”: a full-sized review on Da Blog.

The thing is, Fey Winds – despite a ridiculously bare-bones site layout with nothing except a news post, some fan art, and the comic itself (no cast page, no RSS feed, no “world” page despite a promise of it on one page that required a brief description of an aspect of the world), despite having next to no exposure in the broader webcomics community that would convey that mystical quality we call “notability” – is a comic I’m reviewing because it falls in the “popular” category.

That’s because I discovered Fey Winds by way of Buzzcomix.

I’ve talked about Buzzcomix in the past – the vote-powered webcomic ranking site (well, one of at least two), once thought completely abandoned but recently revamped back in August with a whole mess of new features. One of these was a “status” line that would appear below your comic’s entry – similar to previous description lines, but with the important changes that a) you could change it without entering your profile, and more importantly, b) when you changed it, your new “status” would appear at the bottom of the screen in a running ticker alongside other webcomics that had recently changed their statuses. Which meant just by changing your status, you’d be guaranteed at least a shot at exposure for anyone who dropped by Buzzcomix for the next twenty-four hours or so. Needless to say, constantly changing statuses became a favorite fallback for several wannabe webcomiceers desperate for the sliver of exposure the line promised, and complete no-names littered the ticker, because no webcomic that already had the exposure, that was anywhere near the top of the list, would stoop to such shameless tactics. (You probably haven’t noticed, but I’ve been changing Sandsday’s status line with each new strip. 🙂

Word of the new Buzzcomix has spread in fits and starts, with the result that early on, there was some bumpiness in who was on top – after being fairly consistently in the upper eschelon on the old Buzzcomix, Girl Genius, to take one example, was completely missing for the first month or so – although once the Foglios and their fans got their act together, GG went right to the top and stayed there for a while. It’s since been dethroned by Goblins, which at least has warranted a TV Tropes page – of course all you need for a TV Tropes page is a fan or even creator who happens to frequent the site. (Unless said creator isn’t a complete self-promoting jerk.)

(I hope I haven’t just made Fey Winds jump the shark by introducing Nicole Chartrand to TV Tropes.)

So, for some time, I would visit Buzzcomix to change Sandsday‘s status line, and on my monitor, I would always see the top three comics, and because of the vote quantities involved and how long they stick around (early in the new Buzzcomix the top of the rankings would completely shuffle around every month when the last round of votes expired, though that’s already tapered off) the top three comics would stay fairly consistent: Goblins, Girl Genius… and Fey Winds.

Now, by the time I started writing this post Fey Winds had already been knocked out of the spot by Misfile, Buzzcomix itself got suspended by its host a week ago and lost all the votes when it returned and FW was slow to recover, sinking all the way to or so for the past week, and Fey Winds owes a lot of its Buzzcomix popularity to the use of incentives (the instant a new incentive and comic was posted Fey Winds shot back into the top 20, and my guess is it’ll be back in the top 10 by the time you read this). Still, lots of webcomics use incentives to prop up voting, and they can’t crack the top three. But what attracted me to Fey Winds enough to tell myself to check it out some time was not its high ranking, but its status line: “Fantasy adventure with 100% of your weekly dose of snark. Now with 50% more story!” (The second sentence has since changed to “Now on Chapter 4!”)

Well this is interesting, I thought. “Fantasy adventure” with a good dose of “snark” and humor? Pray tell, had I found the new Order of the Stick (only with actual art)?

Erm… no.

First of all, the “snark” is a lie, and I accuse Nicole Chartrand of false advertising. There’s some snarkiness and even pointing out of tropes in some of the very earliest strips, like in Chapter 1, but very little. As the “Now with 50% more story” line implies, Chartrand has dipped her comic headlong into Cerebus Syndrome (even though her world already had some quantity of story arc running through it, I use it here to denote that the strip has become much more serious and the stakes raised as we learn boatloads more about the characters). But that, in turn, hints at my real problem with the strip:

Fey Winds is moving its plot along way too fast.

If you intend on reading the strip for yourself later, turn away now, because I’m about to summarize the entire “intro” chapter, which explains much of the concept: Once upon a time, a sorcerer introduced… something… into a long-running, devastating war. It’s unknown whether the Sylphe is “a spirit, or a construct, or the child of a god,” or something else, it’s just known that “armies, towns, cities, lives” fell before her, until she unexpectedly turned against her master – going against anything anyone had thought her capable of doing – and helping restore the countries she helped destroy, then disappearing, leaving only a series of powerful MacGuffins for her to be remembered by, “sought out by thieves, kings, and wholesome adventure-type folk… like us!”. (Emphasis in original.)

We’re then introduced to the cast: Larina, some sort of runaway from “a big elven sanctuary in the mountains” (“she never told me why she left, but then, I never asked”), who has a Stone of Possession on her forehead she picked up while investigating some sort of magical spring, which occasionally “shunts her spirit out of the way and possesses her with the soul of a random wandering ghost”; Nigel, whose story is that he’s a “Kaderrian mercenary” who encountered an “ugly witch and ugly daughter on his way home from a mission”, had the latter fall for him, he rejected her, and the witch cursed him to follow “someone who was a girl, but not a girl, and neither human, dwarf or elf.”

That happens to describe our narrator and main character, called “Kit” by the other characters, who was (stay with me here) a fox until she attempted to raid a chicken coop belonging to a witch, who “tried to turn me into a warty were-toad. Lucky for me she was completely senile” and turned her into a humanoid instead. Larina taught her speech, gave her clothes, and told her the story of the Sylphe; Nigel (who’s “a little creepy, and always seems to know what [Kit’s] thinking”) “taught [her] about swords and fighting – and the three of us have been traveling together for a few years since.”

Did you catch all that? Good, because practically none of it (especially the mysterious parts) is still extant for the current strips. Some of it was abandoned almost immediately (for example, Larina’s “possessed” self is a “fangirl” calling herself Belinda who takes over more predictably, when Larina takes some sort of blow to the head), but in order: the Sylphe is/was pretty firmly a golem; so far as I can tell, Larina has lost her gem to one of the Sylphe’s makers; Nigel is actually a golem himself; and Kit somehow had the spirit of the Sylphe inside her, and her actual origin has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what we were told back in the “intro” chapter.

There are still a few lingering mysteries (why was the Sylphe able to rebel against her masters? Why did Larina flee her home in the first place?), but the general feeling is that most of the questions are resolving themselves, barely 100 comics into the strip’s existence and while it’s only in its fourth full chapter – as though Chartrand is losing interest and rushing to the meat of the story she wanted to get to all along. Now, it’s possible – nay, likely – that what’s going on here is closer to how Order of the Stick overthrew virtually its entire premise about a hundred comics into its run, and what we’re seeing is only the beginning of what Fey Winds will become, not the end. It’s also possible that part of the problem I’m having has to do with Fey Winds’ weekly update schedule (and closer to biweekly earlier in its run), and that I need to keep in mind that Fey Winds is, after all, already over two years old. OOTS wrapped up its first book, and resulting overturning of the premise, only one year into its run!

Still, there’s the pacing a strip has to consider on its own update schedule… and then there’s the pacing the way a significant portion of your audience is going to read it. I’m willing to accept that for someone reading the strip as it’s come out, the current events have completely shaken them out of their comfort zone and have turned Fey Winds into something completely different than they were used to. Still, I can’t help but wonder (as someone who, like what could turn out to be a majority of the audience Fey Winds could still have, read the story to this point in an archive binge): couldn’t Chartrand have waited just one more chapter before shaking things up? Even the start of Chapter 3, before they reach the tomb, contains a number of hints of various things that get at least partially resolved in that very chapter.

Fey Winds proper (outside the “intro” chapter) only turned two years old this November, as Chapter 4 started, and was only a year and a half old when the part of Chapter 3 that engaged in the shaking-up started. Would two years of the strip introduced in the “intro” chapter really have been too much? (This is especially important as, like Girl Genius, Fey Winds releases a page at a time no matter how trivial the page may be, and coupled with its start-of-chapter splash pages, this suggests that Chartrand has plans to release her comics in a book later, meaning even more of her audience will be reading her strip all at once.)

Besides, having read the comic since its return from holiday hiatus, I’m thinking a weekly schedule may be too slow for most people given the content-per-comic ratio. For a comic with this much plot to release at the rate it does, when some comics (even now) are little more than one-shot jokes, is almost excruciating. At least most of the time, Girl Genius has more story per page and releases on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. Order of the Stick also tends to have more story per page than at least some Fey Winds comics (until recently, updating “three times a week without warning”) and people complain about it going too slow! (If Chartrand is going for the pacing of Gunnerkrigg Court, which she links on her “Links” page, it’s worth noting that comic also releases on a M-W-F schedule.)

No wonder Chartrand has started moving the plot forward faster! Had she started with a decent buffer and released just two pages per week, she could have spent longer with a funnier comic, still might be further along with the plot here in early 2009 (or at least two years-plus into its run), and the ensuing story would be richer for it. And I wouldn’t wonder if the “intro” chapter was completely superfluous. (Considering the changes she makes when the story begins, the “intro” chapter could have been more consistent on its own merits as well.) As it is, the weekly schedule is a hard habit to maintain without an RSS feed.

Since I’ve been babbling on for some time, I’ll make some general comments on the strip itself to close things out quickly. First, a quick note on the content-per-comic ratio; it is certainly tempting for some beginning webcomic-makers to put as little as possible in each strip to entice repeat visitors, but it tends to be more maddening than anything else. I criticize the strip’s descent into Cerebus Syndrome, but the “wacky hijinks” stage of the first two chapters wouldn’t even have a chance at my RSS reader (assuming, you know, it even had an RSS feed), and the ramping into gear of the plot is really a help in that context, to the extent I’m probably going to keep following it for just the near future, if only through the very beginning of Chapter 5 to pick up on the loose threads of the end of Chapter 3. So far the plot isn’t compelling enough for me to stick around longer, and more importantly the pace of updates may mean I just decide to catch up when the mood strikes me, rather than following it all along week-to-week. The brief forays into anime-inspired art for certain moments are something of a turn-off – generally, no matter what your art style is, you shouldn’t shift it too often (or too much) and you should have a good reason when you do.

Fey Winds isn’t bad, but once again it is crushingly mediocre. It comes off as, well, as some wannabe artist (who gives off a “valley girl” vibe in her news posts – and yes, especially considering the rest of her site, Chartrand is definitely an artist first and writer second, and we all know what that means) deciding to jump on this here “webcomics” bandwagon. I’m not saying it needs to be Order of the Stick, but there’s a lot that’s unpolished and somewhat amateur about it; in more refined hands, the plot could be somewhat compelling, even if the brief flashes of humor (which, especially lately, come off as unintentional and more “oh, that’s kinda funny” than actually laugh-inducing) were still retained. In addition to pacing, Chartrand could stand to learn more about what comic artists call storytelling, something she seems to have gotten better at since some excruciating and confusing moments in the first two chapters. (Moments that, as with Dresden Codak, suggest that sometimes in webcomic art, less really is more.)

There’s a lot of potential in Fey Winds so far; if I were judging it solely on the basis of its art it might be one of the prettiest webcomics on the Internet (and perhaps the need to make art of that quality is why FW runs on a weekly schedule when the pace of the story would seem to dictate updating more often), but then again if that were the only basis xkcd and Order of the Stick wouldn’t even be in the conversation. Still, the story that’s been told so far is actually pretty decent, if not yet must-see, even though those spurts of humor come off as more of a sales gimmick than as something Chartrand would do just as part of the process of writing the story (though that may be a misconception). Certainly I’m seeing no structural problems with the dialogue or anything clunky or excruciating like expospeak (this being a possible exception). But for as decent as the story is, it still falls into some beginners’ traps, not the least of which is the sense I get that the eventual story was still very much a work in progress when the “intro” was posted, even besides the parts that were intended to be discarded later all along.

Fey Winds has a lot going for it, but right now it’s hardly the best webcomic you’re not reading (despite what some fans may claim), and it sure as hell isn’t the new Order of the Stick. Or even the poor man’s version.

I abandoned webcomics posts in the leadup to the election, and now it and RID may be the only two remaining regular features. Go figure.

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

I think I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for these OOTS posts, and I’m going to have to stop making them every month at some point. I’m thinking when I hit the one-year anniversary of when I started making them.

I have basically two left. One I sort of missed the window on because of Tangents, and which I’m not particularly interested in anymore because it was a little convoluted and weak and stupid. The second is the one I’m giving you today, and it too is a little crazy and stupid.

Part of the reason the current book has kind of been pissing a lot of fans off may be, paradoxically, that it is too OOTS-centric.

Honestly, “Team Evil” may be more popular than any single member of the Order. Xykon is downright snarky for an Evil Overlord, Redcloak is something of a tragic figure, the Monster in the Darkness is entertaining, and the demon roaches are always good for a side laugh. Checking in on their happenings used to be a regular feature in the lead-up to the Battle for Azure City. But we’ve only gotten one relatively brief check-in on them since, and O-Chul was the real star of the show there.

That may indicate that Team Evil may be in the process of being de-emphasized as villains, but if so, it’s not at all clear who’ll replace them. The Linear Guild, the only other major villain group (and entertaining in their own right – honestly, the three or four least interesting recurring characters might be members of the Order), have been completely unseen since their escape during the battle, the only real clue as to their remaining plans being Nale’s mention of “sneak[ing] off and capturing another [gate]”. Were it not for that, and the fact that an entire strip like this was dedicated to the Guild’s escape (and a few lingering questions, like just how Sabine is Haley’s opposite), one might think Rich had just written the Guild out of the strip entirely.

Nonetheless, I kind of wonder if the Guild’s influence is in fact being felt in everything going on now, or if we will in fact see them by the time the gang gets back together, and the reason for that is a result of my wild theory:

The Linear Guild is secretly helping the OOTS.

Nale heard of his brother’s existence and decided loyalty to his brother (he is admittedly Lawful) meant assisting the Order’s cause under the guise of opposing them. With Sabine’s help, he tends to know more than any of the Order do at any given time, almost to the point of being omniscient. In fact, maybe Sabine is the real player here trying to help Haley.

Now, there’s actually very little to back up this theory, and at least a little to oppose it, and it’s kind of masturbatory for me to devote an entire post to this. The point of the Linear Guild is that they are a set of Bumbling Villains(tm) whose schemes (unlike, and as opposed to, Team Evil) are never any true, real threat, and always fail spectacularly in an entertaining, comedic fashion. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to note that when Vaarsuvius noted the serendipity of the timing of the Linear Guild’s kidnap-Roy’s-sister plot in making sure the OOTS was in the right place at the right time for the Battle of Azure City, s/he was more right than s/he knew.

(My Latin teacher, incidentially, recently let it known that he absolutely hates constructions like “they” or “him or her” or especially “s/he” in sentences that could describe anyone of either gender, and wishes people would at least pick a gender for each specific instance, if not be consistent with which one. Personally, I pronounce “s/he” as s-he. In any case, I wonder how he’d react to Vaarsuvius…)

Every single thing the Linear Guild has done has ended up helping the OOTS in some way. It’s uncanny. Consider:

  • When the OOTS first “accidentially” met the Linear Guild, in that pivotal 43rd strip, and the Guild roped the Order into their scheme to crack open the Talisman of Dorukan, it nearly resulted in the death of the Order – but instead it introduced them to Celia, who in turn, accelerated their path to Xykon and indirectly may have helped make that “final” confrontation come a lot sooner in other ways. (Remind me to add a discussion of Celia’s present behavior to the OOTS post docket.)
  • As I mentioned in a very, very early OOTS post, when Sabine disguised herself as a blacksmith and sent the OOTS on a quest to find the starmetal, she arguably saved the OOTS from dissolution. And is it possible that she secretly knew the starmetal was real and that the OOTS had the means to succeed where others had failed?
  • As Vaarsuvius mentioned, Nale’s contacting Roy the instant they left the Oracle kept them busy for long enough not to go running halfway around the world while Xykon wiped out the Sapphire Guard and won the game. With a little assist from a drunk wizard, of course. If Shojo still has an able teleporter after the incident the OOTS ends up not having to spend another few days in the City.
  • Haley brought up another example during half the OOTS’ second trip to the Oracle: It’s because of Nale that Haley got her voice back, and that Haley finally got with Elan. Oh, and if Nale doesn’t leave Elan in jail Elan never becomes a Dashing Swordsman.

I could easily see a scenario where whichever gate the Linear Guild captures, between the other two groups Team Evil gets there first in plenty of time, but gets delayed enough trying to dislodge the Guild that the OOTS can show up and foil both their evil plans. If the almost-canon belief of the fans that Elan’s father is holding Haley’s father is true, I could see the meeting of the bunch, engineered by Nale, end up helping Elan, Haley, and the OOTS at the (apparent) expense of Nale and the Guild. I could even see a scenario – and this ties in to the prediction at the start of the discussion – where the eventual reunion of the OOTS happens because of the Linear Guild in some way. And even if my overall prediction is untrue, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Linear Guild and OOTS come together to stop Xykon’s plan at the final battle.

Maybe Elan wasn’t unintentionally ironic when he said, “Meeting the Linear Guild is the best thing that ever happened!!“

Okay, so for the delay this was a ridiculously short post. But no worries. The post I have planned for this Tuesday has been in the works for several weeks.

Forget being a webcomic review that’s not about OOTS, CAD, or a DMM production, it’s a UF review that doesn’t use the phrase “nag strip”! D’oh!

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(From User Friendly. Click for full-sized principled treatment.)
I told you we would break out of the rut of only three or four different comics being reviewed! I told you!

In a sense, User Friendly was my first webcomic. Well before I had an inkling of what any webcomics were beyond maybe Penny Arcade, before I even had Da Blog, back in 2006 I started going through the User Friendly archives. At the time, I didn’t even see UF as a webcomic, but as a newspaper comic, even if only in “alternative” papers. (Perhaps that was because I had seen UF strips on the walls of my mom’s old job. Or because I had seen UF book collections and would have been taken aback at the very idea of webcomics – comics released only online in their first run – at the time I saw them.) The project quickly monopolized a large amount of my time, but I never had even the slightest bit of intention of going through the entire archive. I just wanted to see the strip take shape and read through the archives just to the point where User Friendly had found its status quo, where User Friendly became User Friendly.

I never found it.

Now again, UF was not only my first webcomic, it was the first comic I attempted to catch up on through the online archive, whether print-based or online, and I never attempted to start reading it on a daily basis for any length of time. So it’s possible my perspective was skewed by reading everything all at once (not to mention UF‘s reliance on ongoing storylines), and helped by how briskly I sped through the archives – even though the UF archive project started monopolizing my time, I was scared at how close I was getting to the present at the speed I was going at. (UF has been going for a while and has been running daily for ten years, but the archive’s a bit less daunting than that sounds because each strip is brisk and quick.) Still, no matter how far into the strip’s run I got, UF never felt like it had found its status quo. Miranda and AJ finally settled their “will-they-or-won’t-they” in 2003 or 2004, and it still felt like way too early in the strip’s run to resolve that plotline, even though AJ’s crush had been a background plot point for years.

Why was that?

User Friendly is a strip for which the most accurate way to describe it is as a kitbashing of several existing works, including some that postdate it, but even that doesn’t really do it justice by making it sound like a ripoff. It’s so much like Dilbert that it’s not so much the Internet‘s Dilbert as it is the Canadian Dilbert. Except the cast is large and consistent enough to also take on aspects of being more of a webcomic version of The Office (before Jim and Pam, there was AJ and Miranda!). On the other hand, the crew at Columbia Internet get into so much wacky hijinks that it’s also kind of like PVP, if PVP had never left the magazine offices and was about an actual technology company rather than a gaming magazine.

Indeed, perhaps the most fitting comparison for User Friendly is to PVP, right down to the mascot. Where PVP has Skull, User Friendly has Dust Puppy, complete with his own side cast bringing their own wacky hijinks, only Erwin and Crud Puppy are a bit more integrated into the daily life of the office (especially Erwin) than Shecky and Scratch. The diverging directions the two strips have taken are telling: while PVP let Skull become emblematic of the strip, Dust Puppy’s screen time has been significantly reduced over the years. For being the strip’s mascot, he probably appears much less often than any other “regular”. He tends to pop most often in standalones, watching TV with AJ, or when UF goes on one of its long (and infamous) “trip” storylines. Crud Puppy has become more of a general emblem of Ultimate Evil; Erwin has essentially become the office’s computer, providing an excuse for Illiad to set off a dialogue involving anything on the Internet without needing to find a full two characters to play off each other.

But if there’s one truly profound difference between User Friendly and PVP, it is in the art style. PVP regularly changes perspectives from panel to panel, and UF… doesn’t. Illiad isn’t up there with the worst abusers of copy-and-paste, but he’s at about Ctrl+Alt+Del level. The problem, when you compare him to CAD, is that, except in the Sunday strips, there are no color backgrounds or characters, making the monotony more apparent (say what you will about Tim Buckley’s use of Google Image Search for backgrounds, it’s better than the alternative), and more to the point, Illiad’s characters barely open their mouths – seriously, they never open more than a pixel or three when people talk (with occasional exceptions, such as Stef in profile).

(And please don’t make me once again fall back on the “this strip uses B^U too” argument, okay? UF‘s hated enough for it not to help. Thanks.)

Where User Friendly‘s use of copy-and-paste is most apparent is in an area that merits another comparison to another comic, because in quite a few ways, User Friendly is the Doonesbury of geek culture. This becomes most apparent in Illiad’s exterior shots of places like Microsoft and SCO and EA, which are very reminiscent of early Doonesbury‘s effectively copy-pasted shots of places like the White House. The artistic portrayal of the actual characters and how they talk is not unlike that of early Doonesbury as well, but Garry Trudeau has learned how to mix up his perspectives – even on those exterior shots of the White House – and Illiad still maintains that single-perspective look, occasionally broken up by extreme close-ups so he can claim “see, I shake up my perspectives!” (but mostly to squeeze in more dialogue).

(Then again, Doonesbury was maybe twenty years old by the time Trudeau finally figured perspectives out.)

Comparing UF to Doonesbury (or I suppose at this point, Dilbert meets Doonesbury with a dash of PVP added) provides a neat way to segue to the actual content of the strip itself, because – especially in its single-panel Sunday strips – UF is very much an editorial cartoon. Now, I’ve previously described xkcd as an editorial cartoon for the Internet, but no one would mistake it for User Friendly. xkcd tends to talk about memes rolling through the Internet, or the happenings of online forums. In short, xkcd tends to limit its satire to the Internet itself, or when it’s not doing that, on everyday things people do. UF is a lot more savage, taking on things Big Corporations do that tick a certain class of geek off.

Actually, that “certain class of geek” may hint at one reason why User Friendly, like Ctrl+Alt+Del, has attracted a hatedom that might be out of proportion to its lack of quality. Only unlike CAD, it’s not so much a result of people misunderstanding what the strip is about, except in not understanding it before they encounter it. Most of the geek strips that litter the web – Penny Arcade and its ripoffs – tend to center on gaming culture and its related realms. (You could argue there are quite a few that delve into D&D and its ilk, but most of them aim to be more like Order of the Stick, telling stories based on the D&D milieu and keeping their appeal relatively broad.)

UF does have AJ as a gamer representative and most of the cast has some gamer cred, but UF is fundamentally a strip about and for the IT industry. (Tech support industry, when Greg is the focus.) Its humor is geared towards IT professionals who like seeing Microsoft get skewered, like going “yay Linux!”, and want to see the annoying marketing guy down the hall get his comeuppance, not the gamers living in their mothers’ basements that read Penny Arcade and the like. As PA itself once said, it’s not for you. (I should make it clear: UF isn’t what xkcd is cracked up to be, either. It’s certainly worth a laugh from time to time, even from me, and most of the jokes are at least marginally acessible to any geek.)

Earlier… I guess it was last year, now, wasn’t it? – Eric “Websnark” Burns(-White), back when he was still doing his “State of the Web(cartoonist)” series, went into talking about UF expecting to utterly savage it and write a “you had me and you lost me” on it, and instead wrote at length about how UF wasn’t bad, it just hadn’t changed from when it started and the schtick was growing old. Actually, now that I re-read it, that was what Burns wrote when he first snarked UF at the very beginning, when he still out-and-out hated it, or at least didn’t like it, and it’s pretty much common knowledge among UF haters. What he actually said last year was basically what I said in the last paragraph. But anyway, there’s nothing wrong with remaining exactly the same over the years, with next to no character development. Peanuts essentially played that to perfection. So have most of the gag-a-day strips in the newspapers, to the point of never even letting their characters age.

User Friendly‘s problem… see, when Burns(-White) did his “State of the (Web)cartoonist” on Illiad, he remarked on the contrast between PVP being criticized for drifting away from simple gag-a-day strips, and UF being criticized for not doing so. I think the difference, and the reason why I never felt that UF ever really became UF (oddly, considering I mentioned earlier that it never found its status quo), was that UF became set in its ways too early. UF never really grew out of adolescence; it essentially froze in time at a point where it had yet to reach maturity, and so when I had my archive binge in 2006, I kept waiting for it to finish rounding into shape, waiting for it to take those last few steps in its evolution. And it never came. Maybe that’s because there are a few dangling threads Illiad leaves maddeningly untouched, but it’s like there’s a germ of a greater webcomic lurking inside User Friendly and that if Illiad hadn’t decided “okay, this is the comic I like” so quickly, UF could be a far greater comic strip for the experience. Couple that with its general timelessness (both in its characters and its subject matter) and the reliance on story arcs (the real reason I never got a sense it found its status quo), and UF is really a lot younger comic strip than its years.

User Friendly isn’t bad. I’m sure in certain subcultures, its humor is rip-roaringly hilarious. It’s just that… it just isn’t good. Certainly not good enough to make my RSS reader, if it were even modern enough to have an RSS feed. It’s decent enough that I can chuckle at some of the jokes, and find myself hooked enough to go through the archive for longer than I intended, but it’s not good enough to draw me to it. It’s just cripplingly mediocre, and that might be one of the most dreaded things you can say about a webcomic.

Da Blog’s Predictions for 2009

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Because a lot of sites I visit are putting up predictions for the new year, so am I, and I’ll check back in at year’s end to see how I did:

  • The year in sports is a massive disappointment. The Super Bowl pits the Dolphins against the Vikings. North Carolina, after an undefeated regular season, loses in the Final Four and the national championship pits UCLA against UConn. The game is a laugher. Cleveland beats San Antonio in the NBA Finals; the Knicks just barely miss the playoffs and LeBron James signs a contract extention to stay in Cleveland after winning his first championship. Mike D’Antoni agrees to a buyout soon thereafter to coach LeBron in Cleveland, condemning the Knicks to a decade of mediocrity. The Stanley Cup Playoffs pit the Calgary Flames against the Montreal Canadiens, and America tunes out. So does Canada when it turns into a four-game sweep that’s not that close. Neither the Red Sox nor Yankees make the ALCS, and one of them misses the playoffs as Tampa Bay and Philadelphia square off again in the World Series.
  • Tiger Woods comes back too soon, finishing second in the Masters, and misses most of 2009, raising concerns he may retire. Jimmie Johnson wins yet another Sprint Cup in a laugher, and by the end of the season he’s winning races basically by showing up, with all the teams quitting. Rafael Nadal is the only player to win at least two majors of either gender, and Roger Federer never makes a major final. USC, Cincinnati, and Alabama are the only three undefeated teams by week 4; they stay that way through the end, and USC routs Alabama in the national championship. There are no BCS buster mid-majors. At least one minor league cancels either the 2009 or 2010 season, and at least one MLS team folds. The IRL cuts back drastically on the 2010 season, and doesn’t so much pass NASCAR as NASCAR passes it backwards. By 2012, though, the IRL is back to 2008 levels, and returns to ESPN in 2018. UFC effectively becomes NASCAR’s replacement as one of the four major sports, and shows it wasn’t moving to pay-per-view that killed boxing.
  • The Olympics moves to ESPN and ABC after landing in Chicago. NBC immediately pulls out of the NHL following the 2009-2010 season. ESPN becomes the exclusive cable home of the NHL (beyond NHL Network) after 2011.
  • The Saints challenge for the NFC South, and the Lions are at least respectable. Brett Favre retires and the Jets become the new Lions. Matt Cassel bolts from New England to join the Jaguars, who instantly become a Super Bowl contender. Tom Brady comes back a clearly different player, and the Pats begin a slow slide into mediocrity. The Cowboys self-destruct and don’t even challenge for the playoffs. The Titans trade Vince Young to Houston in the offseason.
  • Barack Obama finds himself frazzled by the vexing economic crisis and various foreign crises. Troops are out of Iraq by June, but by August Iraq is effectively ruled by several cabals of warlords. Obama uses the money freed up by exiting Iraq to institute his own version of the New Deal, but it doesn’t work very well. Meanwhile little actual “change” happens, even from the politics of the last eight years, and when Obama calls in the military to break up a food riot in November, many in his own party compare him to Bush, and the “netroots” begin forming their own nascent political movement for 2012.
  • By 2012, that movement has gained enough steam to attract attention (and support) from both major parties. However, the economic crisis has only gotten worse and the US has effectively become a vassal state of China… and the Republicans, as a result, prove far more resilient than expected after adopting a bizarre fascist-anarchist policy, a strange kitbashing of the politics of Ron Paul and George W. Bush. Before 2020, World War III has erupted, and America is Nazi Germany after the GOP win the 2012 elections, the last to be held under the Constitution of 1776. The 2016 Olympics become America’s 1936 Munich Games, and come complete with a past-his-prime Michael Phelps being dragged back to the pool. The world comes out of the war with the economy back on track, but set back to the Middle Ages if not before. China, India, and Japan become the new “modern” world powers with Depression-era technology, set back from reaching 1950s-era technology by the ravages to the environment. The Amazon becomes a desert; Canada and Russia become the world’s new breadbasket.
  • The Internet undergoes its latest metamorphosis. By the end of the year, it is as good at watching video as the average television. In the short term, it only benefits from the deepening economic crisis. When the Obama administration passes a universal broadband bill, it sparks an Internet revolution, and blogs become the new MySpace, since you can at least theoretically make money off them. Internet advertising finally becomes viable, if only because nothing else is.
  • Webcomics undergo an explosion during this time. A Penny Arcade TV series is commissioned for Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block by year’s end. By 2010, a Girl Genius movie is in development, and rumors of an Order of the Stick movie persist as well. Sandsday becomes the biggest new thing in webcomics, and by year’s end I’m fighting off TV series offers of my own.
  • Da Blog attracts two huge followings in particular: people looking for webcomics criticism, who singlehandedly make it ten times more popular than Websnark ever was, rendering my getting a real job unnecessary, and people looking for straight-dope political analysis. Da Blog plays a significant role in attracting new audiences to politics, healing the rifts of our political landscape, and shaping the aforementioned nascent political movement.

And that just left me incredibly drained and depressed. I think it’s better if I don’t try to predict what happens, and just try and enjoy the ride. You should try it some time.