Webcomics

Spoilers ahead if you haven’t been reading Gunnerkrigg Court. Especially chapter 31.

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(From Gunnerkrigg Court. Click for full-sized dream discussions.)

It figures that the first full chapter of Gunnerkrigg Court I read as it comes out is quite possibly the most confusing one imaginable to start with.

So… what the hell just happened? Apparently Antimony is out cold and Zimmy and Gamma come in to help her… and start ribbing Kat for some reason? And Zimmy enters Annie’s dream-world where she wanders about with her eyes closed, hanging out with some forest spirit and Kat, and has a white mask for some reason? And she dives even further into Annie’s psyche where the fire-thing inside her has a bunch of stuff sticking into it that apparently leads to her dad, who Zimmy punches in the face? But then Annie and this other guy who has a crush on Zimmy start playing with her, and Zimmy cracks Annie’s mask? And apparently Kat looks like some sort of horrendous monster to Zimmy? And Gamma grabs Kat’s headband before they leave, and now Kat thinks the whole thing was just a dream? Was it all a dream? And what does the title of the chapter have to do with any of this, and why did we start it with events from Zimmy‘s perspective?

It’s hard to figure out exactly what to take from the whole thing with all the nonsense going on around it, and I wouldn’t have decided to write a post about it if it weren’t for the implication that Antimony’s father had something to do with her condition. The implication is that Antimony’s optimism is unwarranted and her father actually has sinister plans for her specifically, but given the circumstances of how Zimmy finds this out, I suspect he’s trying to find a “cure” for what ailed her mother and what could end up killing Antimony as well… even if Annie herself ends up being collateral damage.

The chapter does make a little more sense read all at once, but then it’s not as though there wasn’t a plot when read when it came out.I’m hopeful that future chapters will be a bit more comprehensible, to justify my continued reading of the comic.

(And my fears of how slowly the plot advances have proven warranted. I read two months’ worth of comic in maybe ten minutes.)

Hopefully the last streak-filler-post.

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This is going to take some explanation.

If you’ve been reading Homestuck, you know that over the weekend Andrew Hussie dropped a bit of a bombshell on his audience.

Now, in retrospect, I should have done a post on it on Monday, but I felt that, even with as much as Hussie had already dropped, he was about to drop some more. Part of it was that I was looking for the answer to a question that I had no way of knowing was going to be answered that imminently. Towards the end of the day, I did have the vast majority of a Homestuck post written, but a lot of it was rushed, and by the end of the day there was another page that convinced me even more that the bombshell-dropping wasn’t over.

Instead, we’ve gotten the standard look-around-the-new-character’s-home, and right now any post would be an after-the-fact post, so in effect I’m rolling this up into the post I’d need to put out for whatever this is leading up to. Which I hope isn’t the end-of-act flash…

To think, a couple weeks ago I was going to write a post about my concern about the encroachment of robot racism into the comic.

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(From Questionable Content. Click for full-sized special requests.)

Part of the reason why I started doing full-fledged webcomic reviews again this spring was to rope in more comics for me to follow and do semi-regular posts on, so I wouldn’t be doing OOTS and Homestuck (and nominally, Ctrl+Alt+Del and Darths and Droids as well) over and over. On that, Gunnerkrigg Court and Questionable Content (forever linked in my mind) fit the bill quite nicely, but the Court in particular has not only been advancing the plot as slowly as I knew it would, but has been particularly mind-screwy in the current chapter. As for QC, being a slice-of-life comic, big events happen less often and aren’t as big as with the others, so I haven’t really felt the need to write a post until recently.

Although the three interns Marten has been tasked to train were initially hinted at and speculated as being new full-fledged additions to the cast, it’s only been in the last few comics that they’ve started to be fleshed out as actual characters, especially in relation to each other, as opposed to mere vehicles for Marten’s torment, though Claire’s attitude was apparent before.

This is largely a result of a weird and somewhat abrupt shift in the relationship between Marten and the interns. Things started out completely uncomfortable between them, with Marten being thrust into a position of responsibility he completely wasn’t prepared for, feeling the interns being in judgment of him and his lack of qualifications. It’s a relationship of subordination, with Marten expected to be teaching the interns knowledge they need to know, and his inability to do so only furthering the gulf between them.

That changed when Marten went to get coffee. I was a little surprised Marten had them come with him at all, rather than wait while he got coffee himself, but it did have the effect of normalizing the relationship between them as Marten, possibly to stall, started asking them questions. I imagine Marten wanted to diffuse the tension between them by trying to have a more relaxed conversation and get to know them better. As such, I don’t have as much of a problem with the shift as I might have otherwise.

I honestly do wonder, though, whether Jeph is trying to turn the Smif College Library into a second social circle for random conversations to be held in the comic, beyond just Marten and Tai (Momo doesn’t count). The Secret Bakery may have been intended for the same purpose, but they’ve been awkward additions to the cast, there haven’t been that many of them (with one of them leaving), and the ones we have seen have been explicitly mirror images of the existing characters. These characters, by contrast, seem like they should mesh into the existing comic better and be more interesting as a whole. As such, they could be welcome additions to a comic I had a number of concerns about when I reviewed it last month.

Although, why is the fat black chick the one that’s received the least characterization thus far?!

And now, time for this week’s GOOMHR moment.

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(From xkcd. Click for full-sized shrinkage.)

I know xkcd is one of my go-to crutches for continuing The Streak, but this comic really struck a chord with me.

My own laundry habits for a long time have been basically as depicted in the “Third Week” diagram, but reversed. After I do laundry, I keep all my clothes in my hamper until I need them, then at the end of the day I leave them on the floor. When it’s time to do laundry again, I empty whatever’s still in the hamper into my dresser, scoop all the clothes up off the floor, and dump them into the washer.

Mom doesn’t like this state of affairs, but as I have a number of old socks and pairs of underwear, taking my clothes for each day directly out of the hamper ensures that I find something high-quality enough that I wore it since the time before last I did laundry. (Assuming I’m correctly interpreting its meaning in the comic, I’m not sure I’d want to wear something directly off the floor. Seems kind of unclean and dirty.)

Naturally, of course, since the comic is so tall I now have to stall to ensure the comic image doesn’t screw up anything below… should I say something about the Norman conquest?

Um… Banana-fana-fo-fana-bo-nana-fana-fo-fhtagn.

I… should really be getting back to work on my schoolwork? So that I can get to a summer of doing what I want, including various blog posts?

Um… the latest SMBC is kind of funny too.

I… should have a webcomic blog review sometime next week?

I’m… wasting a lot of time visiting random webcomic sites looking for an idea for what to put here.

Okay, that’s enough. I’m just going to post it and hope it doesn’t screw things up too much. (I have got to come up with a better solution for this kind of thing…)

I don’t think this post was a great idea in the first place, and it doesn’t help that I had to work on it on school computers where I couldn’t concentrate.

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(From xkcd. Click for full-sized synchronization.)

xkcd has never been one to shy away from introducing new, out-there concepts, or cause you to rethink the way you look at the world – concepts its sizable fanbase is never slow to leap on.

At first glance, this comic would seem to fall into the same category… but then it begins to go off the rails, effectively pulling the rug out from under the audience.

It’s hard to tell what this comic is trying to do. Is there a particular geekly phenomenon it’s making fun of? Is it trying to trick its fanbase, or just having fun, or is it even making fun of itself?

The funny thing about this comic is, it’s entirely possible to actually do something like this, without the nonsense rules that come up towards the end, and indeed self-consciously to avoid those nonsense rules. But any actual attempt to do so would be so geeky that even considering how geeky Randall Munroe’s audience is, the reference would undoubtedly go completely over most of their heads.

In short, I’m not entirely sure I get this comic. Is there supposed to be a joke? Does the joke rely on some sort of knowledge I’m not privy to, or am I just supposed to have a vague sense of uncomfortableness as I increasingly wonder what’s going on as the elements of the plan become increasingly nonsensical? If, as some of the “rules” imply, the comic is making fun of the sort of real-life nonsensical rules it initially claims to discard, what exactly is the point? Because if that’s the case, I get the sense it changes what it’s trying to do as it goes along. Or is it just a rehash of the joke from this comic?

And of course, it doesn’t help that it’s so long and narrow that I have to pad out this post to make sure the image doesn’t interfere with everything below it…

Fair warning.

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As you might have guessed, the level of activity on Da Blog the past month-plus has taken a bite out of my schoolwork, and it’s coming up on time to catch up on it.

As such, don’t be surprised to see activity on Da Blog ratchet down considerably. I’ll try to maintain The Streak, but I might miss a week or two on the full webcomic reviews, and engage in more filler.

I will still post on events in webcomics I already read as they happen, though. For example, judging by the fact I can’t get to the MSPA site right now, I have a feeling I’ll be posting on that on Monday…

Yes, this is just filler to continue The Streak, but you gotta admit, that last panel gets downright existential.

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(From Something Positive. Click for full-sized origin stories.)

Click on the name of Something Positive above. You’ll be taken to the main S*P page.

You may notice that most of the first screen is taken up by ads, navigation, and plugging of merchandise and con appearances.

Below that, you get the actual comic.

Below that, you get the latest edition of Randy Milholland’s side project Super Stupor.

At an earlier point in the site’s history, you’d have gotten one or two more side projects.

Finally, below all of that, is the site’s blog.

Now that you’ve seen all of this, I ask you: do you think Milholland would benefit from a PVP-style reimagining of his site?

Perhaps even more than Scott Kurtz, Milholland seems to already be running Something Positive as more of a hub for his own brand than as a site for one particular webcomic. Certainly I imagine taking a cue from PVP here would have to be better than how the S*P home page is laid out today.

(Damn, for someone who’s occasionally seemed to be in the lap of Bengo I’ve been praising Kurtz and PVP quite a bit lately, haven’t I? And I’m not even done! I have more to hammer this point home with!)

I was counting on this review to determine if I was getting soft. I’d say the answer is a resounding “no”.

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(From Goblins. Click for full-sized perceived insults.)

This is a review that I was trying to avoid for a long time.

Oh, I’d heard of Goblins. I’d seen it hover near the top of webcomic ranking sites like Buzzcomix and TopWebComics in late 2008 and early 2009, and I’d seen the effusive praise given it elsewhere. Goblins was one of three comics constantly in the top three spots on Buzzcomix when I was trying to push my own comic Sandsday on there, before the site went belly up for good. Two of them, Girl Genius and Fey Winds, got reviews on this here site. Sure, I reviewed Fey Winds because its Buzzcomix description made it sound like a poor man’s Order of the Stick, but isn’t that a fairly apt description of Goblins as well? All I knew about Goblins was that it turned the traditional “they’re-evil-and-that’s-that” portrayal of D&D goblins on its head by portraying a campaign from their perspective, and that’s a minor aspect of OOTS‘ exploration of the genre.

No, something led me to actively avoid reading the comic, something that made me actively ignore this comic that gave every sign of being but a shadow of OOTS‘ greatness. Had I continued doing webcomic reviews, it would have been a long, long time before I even considered taking on Goblins. But no. Goblins ended up being the runner up in the semi-recent “Webcomic March Madness” tournament. Oh, I hadn’t reviewed either of the winners from either year Comicmix held the tournament, but I already had plans to review Gunnerkrigg Court and Erfworld, and the runner-up the year before was some super-obscure comic called Gronk that more than anything else probably shows how far the tournament came along this year, and I was determined to add at least one comic to my review pile from the tournament.

Let’s hope this doesn’t mean I find myself reviewing Misfile in a year’s time.

The big difference this year, of course, was that the tournament attracted the attention of big-time webcomic creators, and few pushed their comic harder in the tournament than Goblins‘ creator. I’m fairly certain that’s the only reason the comic made it so far. Certainly that’s the only reason Goblins would knock off OOTS in the semifinals, because Goblins was plugging itself in the tournament while Rich Burlew wasn’t even acknowledging its existence and OOTS‘ own fans were ambivalent about pushing it in a tournament with a cash prize (which the top two creators ended up donating to Child’s Play anyway) so soon after the comic’s Kickstarter success. (Yeah, when the other half of the final four is Homestuck and Gunnerkrigg Court, it’s a little late to start worrying about taking away a spot from a comic that needs the exposure more.)

Oh, I gave it time. I sat through years and years and years of comics holding out hope that by late 2008 the comic would improve to the point it would deserve the praise heaped on it. I sat through every excruciating “joke” from the comic’s early storylines. I sat through the incomprehensible fight scene that didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the comic (and still doesn’t have much to do with it). I sat through the flying deus ex machina. I sat through all the contrived, out-of-nowhere discussions of D&D racism. The fair-warning page at the start of the archives says that the very earliest Goblins pages date to 2001, but it reads like someone just discovered OOTS (or hell, even DM of the Rings) and wanted to jump on the bandwagon with their own comic mocking D&D. At this point we’re looking at the homeless man’s Order of the Stick.

Maybe, I thought, it’s unfair for me to try to assess this comic fairly when I’ve already been exposed to and become a fan of OOTS. Maybe all I see is the stuff I’m already familiar with from OOTS and I just dismiss it because of that. Hell, maybe if I had read Goblins first, I wouldn’t find OOTS all that impressive because I’d find everything to be a retread of stuff I’d already read in Goblins. Or maybe not. Considering a good chunk of the point of this comic could be distilled into a single scene of OOTS‘ Start of Darkness prequel, I doubt reading Goblins first would ruin my enjoyment of OOTS. (Seriously. Read pages 9-12, maybe 9-15. 4-7 pages of a print-only OOTS book encapsulates everything you could get out of early Goblins.)

The comic went through Cerebus Syndrome before the encounter set up on its opening pages was even finished. When that happened to OOTS, it remained a humor comic that happened to advance a plot at the same time for quite some time, and even when the plot moved to the fore it continued to use humor to add levity to a situation. With Goblins, what humor remains seems horribly out of place, the vestiges of the early jokes (like a goblin named “Dies Horribly” in nonstop panic mode after being named by the clan’s fortune teller) clashing oddly with the serious plotlines. Remember how I was worried about being able to get through Gunnerkrigg Court‘s drama after its first few chapters? With Goblins, that feeling never went away. I dreaded every time I went to continue my archive binge. Part of it was the drama I had to deal with, part of it was that I was guaranteed to run into something that made me facepalm.

Oh, the comic did improve, becoming simply the poor man’s OOTS, but that’s not saying much. The main characters, who end up forming an adventuring party of their own, became much more fleshed out, and from some of the early jokes the comic picked up themes of predestination and what makes a leader. But it still didn’t improve enough to overcome its early issues, and those issues sometimes threaten to bring down the whole enterprise.

It’s 2008 and Thunt still can’t draw a comprehensible fight scene. And he’s not afraid to drop massive infodumps. And the bad guys are almost cartoonishly evil (though Goblinslayer does seem to subscribe to the Tarquin school of fame). And the comic runs into the same pacing problems afflicting most comics releasing a single page regardless of content density with every update, somewhat more self-awarely than, say, the Court but compounded by Thunt’s propensity to jump between somewhat loosely connected plot threads, which itself is compounded by those pacing problems. Even updating twice a week, I bet the comic advances its plotlines at most as much as Fey Winds does/did in the same time span. The comic takes a year and a half to play out a single battle, admittedly the rough equivalent of OOTS‘ Battle of Azure City, but that played out in substantially less time.

And if that wasn’t enough, I have just two words for you: Goblin! Boobies!

And then… there’s a moment where the paladin-goblin Big Ears is cornered by this big goon with this huge weapon that apparently is incredibly evil. So the goon brings down the weapon on him, and he starts to get up, and the weapon’s glow gets brighter and brighter until it becomes this complete wall of text explaining the history of the weapon. Thunt literally pulled an entire page of pure exposition out of his ass to save this character.

Do you see why I was dreading every time I went back to the archive binge?

I do begrudgingly admit that Goblins has some reason to exist, but that’s not saying much. At this point, Goblins‘ biggest issue has to do with its update schedule and how slow its plot advances, especially since a lot of its other issues ultimately tie back to that one. For example, Thunt tries to juggle three or more plotlines at a time (as many of two of which are only barely connected with the main plot and have been dragging out their promise of a resolution and tie back to the main plot for a long, LONG time now), and the update schedule already means one group is going to be in the spotlight for an extended period while the others fade to the background and wait their turn, and none of them are going to advance very much.

Yet the comic just finished six uninterrupted months with one of them, the adventuring party that attacked the goblin camp at the start of the comic, to the point that Thunt had to put up a blog post reminding people of the plot he was returning to, the one immediately preceding that uninterrupted stretch. That group has itself been in a dungeon crawl with its own alternate universe doppelgangers since February of last year, which you really just want to get to the end of while it’s happening. It doesn’t help that the adventurers are the comic’s least interesting protagonists, not because of their origin as joke antagonists, but because of the way their characters have evolved, especially Minmax, who started out as a buffoonish parody of overly-“optimized” characters (like a poor man’s Pete from Darths and Droids), but has since become merely a well-meaning dimwit, and it just doesn’t mesh well, especially his weird pseudo-romantic subplot with the yuan-ti travelling with them. (Not that the other group is much better; after all, Saves a Fox practically verges on Mary Sue territory.) Meanwhile, we’ve barely seen the alleged main cast at all in the two and a half years since that aforementioned protracted battle ended.

Hell, just last week Thunt posted some filler and announced he would be doing more of it next week and at the end of each month, while admitting his update schedule is already too slow to advance the story at any reasonable speed, suggesting he’s running into the same problem that afflicted Dresden Codak: his art takes too long for his own good. The fact that at least he’s updating twice a week instead of only once only means that his artwork isn’t as good as that of Fey Winds or Dresden Codak, or as detailed as the latter. In effect, he’s getting the worst of both worlds.

So in the end, while Goblins does have some redeeming qualities, ultimately it’s the sort of comic I wouldn’t have been surprised to see John Solomon target, and it’s certainly a far cry from the greatness that is OOTS. It has been an utter chore to get through, and when all is said and done I’m just glad to be done with it.

Because sometimes, you just can’t beat overkill.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized red alert.)

For me, one of the most confusing parts of Homestuck came shortly after I started reading it (as in, at the exact time I wrote and posted my original review of it), when Karkat voiced his worry that, by skimping while creating it, he “gave your whole universe cancer”. That much I could follow, at least as a pun on his astrological sign. But then he claimed that Jack Noir quite literally was the cancer (as opposed to, say, the bomb actually called “the Tumor”), alongside a preview of his “Red Miles” attack on the universal frog from the end-of-act flash, and he lost me there. Jack Noir is a game construct, one Karkat himself worked with in his own session, who showed every desire to carry out the most important action he did in the kids’ game – kill the Black Queen and take her ring – in that session. What, exactly, changed that turned him into the cancer afflicting the kids’ universe while he himself was in the Medium?

There may be a clue in the revelation that the “Red Miles” attack – which has been compared to swollen blood vessels in a tumor – is, in fact, a power inherent to the ring itself, not any of its prototypings in the kids’ session, indeed something the Draconian Dignitary can carry out when the ring can’t be prototyped at all. If the original Red Miles attack was in some way emblematic of Noir’s status as the cancer, perhaps that suggests that that status is in some way related to his possession of the ring – and perhaps it also points to what that way may be. Perhaps in sessions from cancerous universes, Noir is successful in obtaining the ring, while in non-cancerous ones he isn’t; perhaps the ability to use Red Miles is only available in cancerous universes; perhaps both, or something else entirely. Certainly there’s no reason to think the Scratch magically erased the universe’s cancer in any way.

A quickie, I know, but I wanted to point out something that might be more insightful than it seems.

Zach, if you’re not going to include the red-button panel on the RSS feed, at least provide an alternate feed with just comic links.

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

I don’t have much more to say about Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal than I did back in March. I was trying to avoid saying too much about it then, to avoid giving away too much about the review now, but what is there to say? It’s a modern The Far Side crossed with xkcd, to the point that, while the comic I reviewed in March may have been xkcd–like, I have since found a number of comics in the archive that are out-and-out the same as an actual xkcd comic; compare this SMBC, only a year old, to this xkcd. But that’s not necessarily a knock against it, and in fact I’m about to say something that may come off as blasphemous:

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is, in fact, a better comic than xkcd.

xkcd is the vanilla ice cream of webcomics (much as I hate how “vanilla” has become synonymous with “plain” when it isn’t, it just doesn’t change the color of ice cream): it’s safe, inoffensive, and wholly middle-of-the-road and unremarkable. It plugs out a new comic three times a week without affecting much of anything whatsoever. In this analogy, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is more like chocolate ice cream: just as middle-of-the-road, but with significantly more flavor. Zach Weiner isn’t afraid to go with off-color humor in every other webcomic, make his opinion on religion very, very clear, or be far nerdier than almost any xkcd comic I’ve ever read. SMBC simply has more bite than xkcd ever had, and the result is that it’s more consistently funny than xkcd. Few comics have had me giggling as much as SMBC did while I was reading it.

But when I started reading it as it came out, I found that there, it had the same problem as xkcd. It doesn’t provide enough bang for the buck for me to consistently follow it every single day. Often it’s just a single panel, or a short progression of panels, and there just isn’t enough there to make an impact.

This may partly be because the comic is read better several at a time, but it may also be because the comic is pretty hit-and-miss, and may in fact have declined in quality just within the last year. It may also be a comic you can’t have too much of. Certainly if you’re the sort who hates Ctrl+Alt+Del, there’s certainly ammunition here for you, as the vast majority of comics will generally hit one of a few points: jokes about naughty bits, religion, academia, “graph jokes”, and at least for a while, out-of-order jokes, with the chronologically earliest panel moved to the end to change the experience of the comic. So you could say the comic is repetitive and that Weiner falls back on a few crutches.

On the other hand, it is a daily comic, so you probably can’t fault Weiner for resorting to those crutches, especially since it’s a strict gag-a-day comic with no continuing characters or storylines, meaning for all its repetitiveness, it can still shift topics on a dime. Besides, it still has those moments of humor that can reach a higher level than xkcd. I wouldn’t say SMBC is for everyone – if you get offended by certain sorts of jokes about God and religion (especially Christianity), SMBC isn’t for you, and the same goes if you’re offended by jokes about certain parts of the human anatomy. If neither of those weeded you out, and you happen to already like xkcd, I’d give SMBC a shot and see if it’s right for you.

That may sound like damning with faint praise, and you may have noticed that this post reads substantially shorter than other recent reviews. Well, I never liked xkcd that much, though my opinion of it has softened as time has gone on, to the point that I’ll admit that SMBC never quite reaches the sublimity that the occasional xkcd comic can. As such, I find I don’t really have an opinion about SMBC that much and I’m not confident of the opinion I do have. I’m conflicted about it, because I certainly enjoyed it, but I’d certainly never read it on a regular basis. It’s not really for me. Maybe if it’s for you, you’ll enjoy it and have a new favorite comic, but I’m going to go back to reading Order of the Stick, becoming addicted to Questionable Content, and trying to finish Erfworld before it comes back from hiatus.