Webcomics

Pot, meet kettle.

by

(From Questionable Content. Click for full-sized fangirlism.)

For those of you wondering if Claire had some special quirk that would cause even her… whatever-the-hell-relation-the-guy-with-the-robot-hand has to her… to find her weird, wonder no longer.

Nope, it’s just the old “what would happen if you encountered yourself” trick rearing its ugly head, as Claire proves to be every bit as gaga over Hannelore’s dad as the other guy.

Now I can’t help but wonder if we’re going to be subjected to a week of repeating the same stuff we got when the other guy first showed up (maybe even to the word), or if we’re instead going to learn enough about Claire to realize how different the two are after all, or if the subject is just going to be dropped as a one-off gag.

At the very least, the lack of a robot hand suggests that Claire’s interest is far more academic, perhaps seeing Mr. Ellicott-Chatham more as a great scientist than a great inventor. Perhaps, instead of a repeat of the other guy’s first appearance, we’re going to get a repeat of one of Claire’s own establishing character moments, with a refocused target. That may hint that Claire may come out of it as a more interesting, potentially lasting character than the other guy.

And hey, if it keeps us from getting Yet More Marigold, I’m all for that.

(Hey, get off my case at forgetting the other guy’s name. It’s semi-late, I have a morning class, I can’t be bothered to look it up, I’m a little antsy about another comic going up, I’m just trying to continue The Streak, and yesterday’s Girl Genius post made me forget how long QC can be in height so now I’m just trying to fill out the page. Yes, that’s probably too many excuses.)

If I’m posting on Girl Genius of all things, you know I’m desperate to continue The Streak.

by

(From Girl Genius. Click for full-sized battering ram.)

Oh, Girl Genius, your mastery of puns is unmatched! Of the many, many jokes to be seen in webcomics over the past two days, surely this one has produced the most laughs, enough to power a living steampunk (oh I’m sorry, “gaslamp fantasy”) castle! Truly you will be seen as one of the greats in your command of webcomic humor, one whose secrets generations of cartoonists will only be able to hope to unlock!

Seriously, was there any point to this beyond making a lame, groan-inducing pun? Is there really any significance to the castle being attacked by a gigantic ram as opposed to a big block of wood other than “tee hee, you thought we meant it one way and we really meant it another!”

God, I’m spending too much time on a lame pun in a comic I don’t even read enough of to properly grasp what’s going on just because I’m trying to fill out the page so the comic image doesn’t spill over into the next post…

Hey, when you do a comic like this on a day that a webcomic blogger who’s also a sports fan needs to continue The Streak, this is what results.

by

(From xkcd. Click for full-sized sports calendar.)

I’m sorry, I’m gonna have to call bullcrap on this.

People are talking about basketball deep into April, yet switch to baseball all the way until the Finals roll around? Also, I’m afraid American football is likely to be nearly as if not more prominent than baseball in October.

And what about those countries that aren’t as into soccer? Where’s baseball in Japan, hockey in Canada, or Aussie football in Australia? And is this specific to team sports? Where’s auto racing, golf, or tennis?

Judging by the bonus text, I suspect that what Randall really needs is a cheat sheet for the names of teams in each sport, but I can see how that’d be an unwieldy reference with 30+ teams in each American sport, to say nothing of college sports… and even in soccer most leagues have 20 teams in them…

Apologies if I don’t get Ysengrin’s species right. It’s damn near impossible keeping everything straight in this comic.

by

(From Gunnerkrigg Court. Click for full-sized unsettling thoughts.)

I’ve been more than a little puzzled at how both Antimony and Ysengrin have been treating Coyote’s revelations in this chapter as only a “theory”. Certainly the way Coyote explained his secret would be consistent with his attempting to explain something that’s just an idea of his, but I get the sense that Coyote firmly and solidly believes every word he said, and more to the point, that the audience is supposed to as well. Merely by referring to it as “[his] great secret”, Coyote seems to have been trying to give the impression that he’s presenting facts, things that he knows or has learned, not merely things he’s theorized about – and at the very least, he would seem to be in a better position to know such things than either Antimony or Ysengrin.

I can sort of see Antimony’s position, considering she didn’t sign up for a semi-lengthy lecture on Coyote’s worldview. Ysengrin’s reaction, though, is more interesting; there’s some evidence that his disagreement with Coyote is more a result of denial, a refusal of what Coyote’s “theory” would imply about Coyote or himself, not necessarily having an actual reason to dispute it. And that plays into something that seems to be intentionally puzzling: his turning on and attacking Antimony.

On the surface, Ysengrin turned on Antimony as a result of a perceived slight that he took as Antimony taking Coyote’s side, a slight so minor that the only sane interpretation I would have of it would be the complete opposite. But then you start to wonder why this came in the same chapter that the theory itself was given. Now consider how Ysengrin turns on Antimony: he becomes utterly feral, far more animalistic than almost all of the creatures of the forest have heretofore been, going completely dialogueless immediately thereafter. Finally, consider this comic, where Antimony is shaken that Ysengrin just acted in a way totally unlike how he’s acted before, while Eglamore considers it perfectly in character.

Is it possible that it’s not a coincidence that Ysengrin acted this way immediately after Antimony learned Coyote’s secret? Is it possible that, on some subconscious level, she started seeing Ysengrin as just an ordinary wolf, so that’s what he became? Is it possible that Coyote has led Antimony to start seeing the creatures of the forest more like the members of the Court do? While it would certainly meet the challenge Robert A. Howard set for the Court, it would do so in a way that still paints the Court, in a sense, as the bad guys, a way that suggests that the entire conflict may come down to mind over matter. In any case, Antimony’s sudden reminder of Coyote’s homework assignment suggests perhaps she thinks that just might be the case, and perhaps it’s only in that moment that she started to take what she’d just learned seriously, as more than just “Coyote’s funny little theory”.

The Legacy of Homestuck and the Future of “Webcomics”

by

In the Year of the Kickstarter, where The Order of the Stick and Penny Arcade have seen runaway success on the crowdfunding site (and you have no idea how pleased I was to find out PA didn’t end up passing OOTS and in fact barely even cracked half a million, or only double its goal), it shouldn’t be too surprising to find Homestuck jumping on the bandwagon as well, and it should surprise exactly no one to find out that it stands to blow them both out of the water. Consider that it’s a video game Kickstarter, and it’s a mortal lock. I wouldn’t be surprised to find it challenging the most-funded projects in Kickstarter history, even considering how crowded that category has gotten this year; OOTS is still in ninth place, though there’s an active drive that stands to knock it down to tenth. I really don’t think becoming the fifth project to crack $3 million is out of the question.

Really, the idea behind the project makes a ton of sense. Not only is Homestuck, like the rest of MSPA, structured like an old text-based adventure game, but Hussie’s original plan was to do it entirely in Flash, only switching back to images with only the occasional Flash when the all-Flash approach proved to be too much work. One thing I was struck by, going through this original “beta”, is that Homestuck was originally going to be much more like a video game. Icons appear signalling things that can be clicked, to the effect that upon reaching the command “Remove CAKE from MAGIC CHEST”, you are actually invited to click on the cake and move it to the bed. I was so intrigued by this that I actually started going through and trying to figure out how Homestuck might have played out if it was a video game of this sort, even with some breathing room for player choice, and got through Act 2 before burning out.

On the other hand, that is not what this project is. Rather, it’s an effort to create a sequel to Homestuck in video game form, set within the same universe but probably not using any of the same characters. As such, my interest is considerably weaker than it might have otherwise been (I finally got around to reading Problem Sleuth, and while it started out pretty funny, it just started dragging on and on and on), though I certainly see why Hussie says he couldn’t possibly go that route.

However, what I’m really here to talk about is something I was struck by in Gary “Fleen” Tyrell’s initial writeup of the Kickstarter. You can read it here, but I’ve copy-and-pasted the relevant bit because it’s so important, and pay special attention to the second paragraph:

Let me tell you a little bit about Andrew Hussie and Homestuck: I have been struggling to read it, because it’s damn voluminous, dense, stuffed silly with music and interaction and games and self- and forward- and back-references and completely, utterly not for me.

It is the opening shot of the native culture of the second generation of internet users — the ones that have always lived there, not those of us that immigrated from the Old (nondigital) Country within our living memory. And here’s a hint for everybody that still remembers the Old (nondigital) Country: there’s more of them and fewer of us every day, so maybe if your livelihood depends on putting content in front of eyeballs in some fashion, you ought to be paying all the attention you can muster to Mr Hussie and the fans whose brains he lives in.

There’s been a lot of question over what medium to call Homestuck; while it’s usually called a webcomic, it ultimately blends elements of webcomics and video games with something completely original. I mentioned in my original review that Scott McCloud would not only refuse to call it a webcomic but would question whether it even took the medium in a good direction to go in. As with “About Digital Comics” (and the very occasional imitators thereof that have appeared since, which I call “digital stage comics” for reasons that post should make clear, and which MSPA might be seen as a variant of), though, I believe it most definitely is a productive direction to go in, maybe even more so.

In Understanding Comics, McCloud mentioned the tendency for new media to be seen through the lens of the old, often borrowing tropes from their parent media before developing some tropes of their own. I had serious issues with the story of Homestuck when I initially archive-binged it (my reaction might be similar to Tyrell’s, right down to the use of the Penny Arcade Defense), but perhaps its real legacy is in its utter redefinition of what we think of as webcomics. It is quite possible that the entirety of what we have been calling “webcomics” for the last decade and a half is little more than the “seeing new media through the lens of the old” stage of a medium we might call “visual online entertainment” for lack of a better term, and in this perhaps Homestuck is its Citizen Kane. And if that’s the case, surely it represents the ultimate realization of McCloud’s infinite-canvas vision, even if McCloud himself might disdain it.

When I questioned how many members of a “greatest webcomics” list would still be on it within ten years if webcomics fully explored their potential as a medium, I had no idea where that potential might lead – which is why I called that series “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis“. And when I suggested that a potential “greatest webcomics” list “would include at least some comics we can’t even imagine today”, Homestuck was precisely what I was referring to, even if I didn’t know it.

I think comic 2261 pretty much lays out Dora’s feelings for Tai before this whole thing started pretty clearly.

by

(From Questionable Content. Click for full-sized coaches needing coaching.)

Somewhat cleverly, Jeph Jacques had the first date between Dora and Tai result in the two of them hitting it off but with no shortage of awkward moments to confuse anyone looking for signs as to the direction of the relationship. That said, it’s by now apparent that most of those awkward moments were the result of Tai’s uneasiness about the entire notion of the relationship; she revealed in the previous strip that, even as she was asking her out, she was worried that Dora would say no. (By the way, I felt it was somewhat abrupt the way we cut to Tai and Dora starting their date from the day they decided to start a relationship, and when combined with this revelation I can’t help but wonder whether we skipped a week of strips somehow. I certainly would have loved being able to break down exactly what happened when Tai asked Dora out.)

I get the sense that Tai almost doesn’t feel worthy of a relationship with Dora. She’s constantly worried, looking for every potential portent of bad tidings, worrying that this might be too good to be true. As much as Dora’s own dating history (and the circumstances of the start of the relationship) may be hanging over her head in this relationship, just as likely to bring it down, if it does, is Tai’s own neuroses about the relationship and whether or not it’s actually real – a sort of turnabout of what ended Dora and Marten’s relationship, which would make a nice bookend to their respective starts.

It makes her decision to run to the coffee shop and wring an answer out of Dora all the more head-scratching; she was strong enough to take control of the situation and get Dora to agree to the relationship in the first place, yet doesn’t have the confidence that Dora would accept an invitation for a date when she’d already accepted the notion of a relationship? Tai’s character is turning into an interesting case study; she’s clearly a take-charge kind of person who’s enough of a leader to be Marten’s boss to begin with, and those qualities have remained at the forefront with Dora multiple times in recent memory, yet she’s a complete bundle of neuroses in terms of navigating the actual relationship. Part of that, as she reminds Marten in this strip, is her own experience, or lack thereof, of meaningful relationships, but still, I can’t help but wonder whether her pep talk to Dora might as well have been directed at herself.

I almost always seem to have trouble coming up with titles for these webcomic blog reviews.

by

I have been reading the Webcomic Overlook for close to four months and in all that time have remained completely stymied by the same problem: I have no idea what to say about it. I mean that quite literally: I find absolutely nothing remarkable about any of El Santo’s reviews.

In some sense, perhaps that’s a good thing; El Santo doesn’t really have any of the idiosyncrasies of a Robert A. Howard or even an Eric Burns(-White). He simply goes forth and reviews webcomics, completely unremarkably. That’s not to say he simply reports on webcomics in a completely boring style; far from it. Most of the time, his style is as playful and laid-back as the best of them, yet capable of deconstructing a webcomic when circumstances warrant. In that sense, he’s not entirely unlike Websnark, except he doesn’t get quite as neurotic as Websnark or even Tangents can get.

Nearly four years ago, Eric Burns(-White) identified several different definitions of the word “critic”, and if he strives to be the “scholarly” type of critic and YWIB exemplified the “negative” type of critic, then El Santo is perhaps webcomics’ foremost example of the “reviewer” type of critic, possibly, though I’d need a more knowledgable outsider’s take on this, the answer to the challenge set forth in the comments to that post. That characterization of Websnark may surprise anyone who read my original response to that post, but unlike Websnark, Tangents, and me, El Santo never comments on current events in comics he reads. He strictly writes a review on how good the comic as a whole is and whether or not he recommends it, occasionally doing some scholarly analysis of why it works or doesn’t work (and occasionally getting quite snarky at something he doesn’t like), and then he generally doesn’t touch it again. If Tangents was the first to succeed at treating webcomics like literary novels, El Santo is, if not the first, certainly the most prominent to treat them like movies.

Although El Santo’s style comes across as rather breezy, when compared to how Websnark and Tangents do the same sort of actual “review” review, he’s substantially closer to the latter than the former. The main thing that separates them is that, while both of them will start by saying something on some tangentially related subject that they eventually bring around to the subject of the review, El Santo does so with a bit more levity, while Tangents tends to stay more deadly serious. I made fun of Howard for that tactic, but with El Santo it’s more a part of his appeal and charm. Beyond that, both of them break down the elements of the comic and what makes it tick, or not tick.

(Considering how Websnark almost never did any actual reviews except in connection with some current moment – though my inability to find them wasn’t helped by the fact they never did get around to fixing their old archives – it’s hard to say it had a style.)

El Santo bills his main reviews as “ridiculously long”, but I never get the sense that they’re really that long. It’s not like he’s launching into a detailed dissertation on every aspect of a webcomic; I’m not even sure they’re longer than my own reviews. They’re certainly longer than what Websnark and Tangents engage in, but that may say more about them – and thus, the state of webcomics criticism – than about him. For the most part, El Santo fills out his reviews with detailed descriptions of the plot (as opposed to the brief descriptions of the concept Websnark or Tangents would use) that he’ll sometimes use as a jumping-off point to talk about his thoughts on the comic’s evolution and aspects of the comic, coming back around to more general aspects towards the end. One of my few quibbles with him is his reliance on formula, tending to focus on explaining the plot and using that as a jumping off point for analysis rather than using the analysis as a jumping off point for explaining the plot as I would do.

He seems to be most in his comfort zone when talking about a humor comic or a comic he hates, as that’s when he’s at his snarkiest, but that’s to be expected; what’s impressive is his ability to switch to extremely serious analysis of a good dramatic webcomic, maybe even in the same review. He’s almost found a way to take the Websnark approach and evolve it into a more professional (for lack of a better word) form. I get the sense that his review style has evolved as it’s gone on, with him finding his voice and a review style that works for him and does the medium more justice; he was plenty snarky even in his five-star review of Gunnerkrigg Court and didn’t go on so long about the plot (admitedly at a time when it didn’t have much plot). Beyond his focus on plot exposition, he might be the closest of the three to my own reviews stylistically, and those early reviews even more so.

I can’t say we have a common taste in actual webcomics – I have to disagree with his calling Scary Go Round one of the best webcomics of the last decade, and how dare he blaspheme Order of the Stick by only giving it four stars (and then only because it does what it does with stick figures)?!? Considering our shared enjoyment of OOTS, Gunnerkrigg Court, Questionable Content, and even Darths and Droids, my tastes seem to run more in parallel with those of Robert A. Howard, though I don’t know if I would like The Wotch or some of the other comics of that sort Howard has reviewed in the past or whether he would like Ctrl+Alt+Del (or at least that comic’s early days), though I do get the sense that both Howard and El Santo would really like Homestuck (El Santo even gave its predecessor Problem Sleuth five stars).

That, combined with the fact that as snarky as El Santo can get, he doesn’t really give me an actual reason to read his reviews (unlike Websnark), makes me ambivalent about adding the Webcomic Overlook to my RSS reader full-time. He’s not giving me a reason not to, so it’s staying on my RSS reader for now, but the Webcomic Overlook is just sort of there to me. Perhaps I’d get a kick out of his comments on current happenings in webcomics now that I’m not reading Comixtalk anymore, but I wouldn’t read it just for that if I found I liked Fleen.

Bakson busy bakson.

by

Even if I wanted to write an actual post, I’m too tired after a long day with small meals to do so.

But even if I could, I’d probably be pouring into the new OOTS book I just got. (Mom tells me I should be saving for a new laptop. Psh!)

Coming sometime Friday: a post on Gunnerkrigg Court, Questionable Content, or the webcomic blog review I’ve been promising all week.

In case you’re wondering: Yes, I am only dipping my toe into the cesspool of PVP-land to continue the streak.

by

(From PVP. Click for full-sized anticlimactic revelations.)

Jeez, Max, it’s 2012. It’s not like the staff of PVP are a bunch of redneck homophobes. I don’t know if you have a problem with your lifestyle and that’s why this is so hard for you, but in this day and age I don’t think most people are going to think twice.

Hell, as Kurtz points out in the news post it’s not like this is even news to some of them. Now if you had a boyfriend and you were running off to get married, that might be something noteworthy.

(Random comment that came to mind while writing this post: Do we know where the PVP offices are? I thought it might be Seattle because Kurtz has a business relationship with the Seattle-based PA guys, but I seem to recall a storyline a while back that made a big deal about them being in Seattle as though it were a trip…)

On a completely unrelated note, goddamn do I hate Windows Update.

by

(From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Click for full-sized unnatural selection.)

Sometimes I think SMBC is a little too mean-spirited for its own good.

Oh, those kooky alternative medicine users, with their disdain for things like “evidence”! It’s not as though a substantial portion of what was once considered “alternative medicine” has since become backed by that “evidence” thing, with acupuncture being the most famous example! And it’s not as though a lot of what’s considered “evidence” for mainstream medical practices today is surprisingly sketchy, or as though science in general as practiced today isn’t surprisingly prone to subconscious researcher biases!

And it’s not as though the record of what constitutes valid “evidence” is centered around the Western cultural record to the exclusion of other cultures, and is subject to Western cultural biases! And it’s not as though the practice of science itself is based on the fallacy that it’s possible to isolate and atomize the effects of any one thing in exclusion to any other thing, an atomist view that a lot of “alternative medicine” is fundamentally opposed to!

Christ, I’m not even into this kind of thing, but the least Zach Weiner could do is know his opponents.

(And damn I hope reading the Comics Curmudgeon regularly doesn’t turn me into a John Solomon clone…)