Webcomics

Fun fact: The code for an overdose of sopor slime on Alternia is 418.

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

Okay Hussie, now I know you’re just screwing with us.

There are no words I can come up with that can add anything to this. The only explanation I can imagine is that this is some sort of practical joke at the expense of the fanbase.

I mean… just… where do you even go with this? What can you do with this beyond the sheer lunacy of the very idea of throwing Vriska AND Tavros into Jane’s Kernelsprite? What’s next, will Roxy’s sprite be prototyped by Eridan and Feferi?

Either the in-comic death of the author is having effects that are spreading into the comic itself, or Hussie is high enough right now to put jelly on a hot god.

Unlike with the green sun, though, I don’t think there was no way it could have been presented clearly.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized anniversary laziness.)

Once again, I goofed up in my reading of a Homestuck flash, and once again I’d like to shift the blame to how confusing said flash was. But I don’t think I can do so entirely, because there’s a lot that snaps together, both about the flash and about all of Act 6, once it’s properly understood, right down to that long-unexplained “wriggling day” reference… while also raising as many questions as it answers.

It seems that Roxy and Dirk are, in fact, native to the time “years in the future” (over four centuries in fact!) when the Condesce/Crocker has ruled for some time and flooded the planet. That explains a lot about what we’ve seen over the course of the act, well beyond just what Hussie points out here. It puts into perspective Dirk’s future tense here vis-a-vis what we learn about the Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff franchise in Act 6-2 (to the point it’s stunning in retrospect that it wasn’t glaringly obvious at the time for that reason alone). It gives an alternate explanation for why Roxy and Dirk know so much about the game, and explains the depth of Roxy’s commitment to the notion of the Batterwitch (and the witch’s copious appearances in the history of said franchise).

On the other hand… besides what it just plain doesn’t explain (namely, the lusii on Jake’s island, and the nature of the childhoods of Roxy and Dirk), and why they would withhold this aspect of themselves from Jane and Jake (I’m not convinced by the explanation Dirk gives), there’s also the fact that it renders the three-year gap the kids are making up completely meaningless. Even if Roxy and Dirk are ultimately the same age as Jane and Jake are at the time they’re communicating, the game is just as objectively tied to their timeframe as that of Jane and Jake. Then there’s the question of whether God Cat is shuttling between two time periods, if he’s screwing with people at two different points of his life, or whether there are two God Cats, and the question of whether the troll Jake saw has anything to do with the troll Roxy saw (which the subsequent intermission seems to give evidence for).

There’s also just how much technological prowess Dirk has contributed to the past, namely the robots sent to Jane and Jake, and the fact that Dirk (and his auto-responder) can control them (and detect their activities) remotely, which seems like it completely screws causality to bits. And then there’s the whole question of how these two time periods got so synched up in the first place, to the point that not only can Dirk serve as Jane’s server player, but so can his auto-responder, which screws up causality even more. (Well, more than it usually is in Homestuck.) The explanation we’re given in the intermission, “Trollian-like technology”, only raises the question of why Roxy and Dirk can’t simply contact Jane and Jake at any point in time they wish; clearly, the two timeframes are synched somehow.

It also suggests some interesting things about the origin of the game in this universe: namely, that Roxy must have hacked it off the Crockercorp servers after the invasion. Moreover, I can’t help but think the company planned on this, and that may help explain how the time periods got synched up, because Jane’s room contains an advertisement for the “alpha” game she’s about to play, but that game appears to only exist in the future. It’s possible that the Condesce imported the game itself from either the kids’ or trolls’ universes – and if the former, that may provide an excuse for how it’s pre-set up for the eventual arrival of the kids, down to what appears to be largely read as an unorthodox method of entry.

What happened in the intermission that just concluded? Well, the Wayward Vagabond was revived by a doomed-timeline god-tiered Feferi almost in passing. We learned not only that no one will prototype their sprite before entering the new session, but that there won’t even be a battlefield when we get there, destroyed by the Courtyard Droll for unknown reasons. We learned some really weird things about how the Scratch works, and it makes the troll session sound really, really unusual, in that it was the post-Scratch session that produced all the players for both sessions. We saw universe-warping god-dogs chase sprite cats. We got names for the two trolls encountered in Act 6-2, and seemed to confirm that they are, in fact, from the pre-scratch troll session.

And most weirdly of all, we got Hussie’s author avatar getting killed off by Lord English… and proposing marriage to Vriska. Yes, Hussie is indeed prone to trolling his fanbase.

I think I’m getting sick of Hussie’s penchant for these sorts of “everything you know is wrong” shocking swerves. “Roxy and Dirk are actually from the future! The guy making the comic in-universe is dead!” It’s just a random twist thrown in to make us ooh and aah at his ability to pull off a twist, with the former complicating things as much as anything. It’s the sort of thing that has me seriously considering dropping Homestuck. We’re two sub-acts in and I still don’t feel as connected to these characters as I have to the kids and trolls. I’m mostly holding out hope that they will finally show up in the new session soon. You have no idea how relieved I was when the intermission started – back to the characters we’ve actually been following for nearly three years! I never intended to be a regular reader of Homestuck, and if the kids and trolls don’t show up soon or the new characters don’t give me a reason to care about them, I may be one no longer.

Wha… what’s this? It… it’s an ACTUAL WEBCOMIC REVIEW on Da Blog! Oh, happy day!

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(From The Non-Adventures of Wonderella. Click for full-sized resurrection interruption.)

For whatever reason, despite – or perhaps because of – their popularity in comic books and among nerds, superheroes are not that popular of a subject for webcomics.

Oh, there are webcomics, even reasonably popular ones, about superheroes; it’s just that none of them have ever reached the level of popularity of a Penny Arcade or xkcd. Moreover, even fewer play the concept entirely straight; at the least they tend to be painfully self-aware of the tropes of the genre. Either it flirts with other genres, deconstructs the trappings of superheroes, or is constantly joking about those trappings, perhaps all of the above.

So perhaps it’s not too surprising that perhaps the most well-known superhero webcomic is a straight-up parody.

It’s kind of hard to describe The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, and not because it’s just completely random. No, Wonderella is hard to describe because it’s undergone considerable evolution over the course of its run, without really changing much at all. That may or may not make any sense, but it never underwent anything remotely approaching Cerebus Syndrome, yet the characters and nature of the humor underwent considerable evolution regardless.

Wonderella is a superhero who, well… does anything but go superheroing, and she’s not even above doing a little of that, though rarely in the typical fashion (I can probably count the number of times she’s actually depicted on-panel using her alleged powers on one hand). She doesn’t particularly care much for it either, preferring to lie around and get wasted, and often borders on the sociopathic. The only person she doesn’t completely mistreat is probably her sidekick, although her relationship with her archvillain can take on vaguely romantic overtones. At least in the strips that made the comic popular, she’s also incredibly entitled, is only concerned with how much she can milk her brand for, and is utterly ignorant and uncaring about anything that happens in the broader world, especially outside the United States… in other words, she’s what a conservative thinks a liberal cariacture of an American is. As such, many of these strips take on a rather satiric tone.

I speak of “the strips that made the comic popular” because I’ve noticed a definite shift as the comic goes along. Now a good number of the strips that come along are parodies of other things. Wonderella’s sociopathy is still there, and she still tends to be rather ditzy, but seems to be considerably toned down, and certainly seems to be less often the focus. I’m also seeing something closer to straight-up superheroing cropping up more often. There are some similarities throughout the run of the comic, especially Aaron Pierce’s penchant for rather surrealist humor, which could take the form of a seemingly stream-of-consciousness procession in the earlier comics, and all in all the shift is probably imperceptable if you’re not looking for it, but it’s definitely there.

Wonderella is funny enough that I originally intended to write this review to make clear that, despite what may have come across in some of my past reviews, I don’t have anything against pure humor comics without much story, so why can’t I get excited about it now? It’s not that it’s bad, or even that it’s not good. Perhaps it’s just that it’s not consistently funny enough, not consistently laugh-out-loud funny, to maintain my interest, especially considering it updates only once a week, meaning it has the same problem that befalls all comics with that infrequent an update schedule (no jokes about Order of the Stick, please). You might think that means it doesn’t take that much additional toll to add it to my RSS reader, but what it really means is that I’m not really receiving enough bang each week to really justify it.

Or perhaps it’s the fact that I just can’t get into the newer comics the way I could the old ones. That may sound like I’m accusing Wonderella of jumping the shark, but honestly I can’t really detect any decrease in quality to go along with the shift. But it no longer seems like Wonderella is the focus of her own comic, but more a conduit for the larger sorts of stories Pierce wants to tell. A lot of the time in the parodies, you can swap out Wonderella for someone completely different and it’ll read much the same way. It’s possible that, like many webcomic artists, Pierce ran out of stories to tell with his original concept and branched out into whatever stories he wanted to tell that he could shoehorn Wonderella into. Which I guess really does sound like I’m saying it’s jumped the shark, but I really do feel like the more recent comics haven’t really slipped that much from the older ones, though it is the case that Wonderella is less interesting as her sociopathy becomes de-emphasized. Still, the newer comics just aren’t quite my cup of tea.

Would I have put Wonderella in my RSS reader back when Wonderella’s sociopathy was still the focus? Maybe, but the fact remains I can’t get into it now. Wonderella has lost its heart, the reason for its appeal in the first place, and what’s left is something of an empty shell. Perhaps that’s something you might still find funny, but for me there’s nothing there, nothing to make any sort of impression on me, certainly not coming once a week.

ComicMix “Webcomics March Madness” Tournament Blows Up

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I’ve become fascinated with the “March Madness”-style tournament the ComicMix website has been running, partly because such a structured excersize is right up my alley, but also because it’s blown up into something no one could have ever anticipated, one that’s gotten multiple webcomickers’ competitive juices flowing, helped by the increasing cash prizes for comics making the Final Four. I only ever heard of it because of various webcomickers’ linking to it.

The site did much the same thing last year, but that stayed fairly self-contained and saw several fairly obscure webcomics having considerable success. That’s far from the case this year; the only comic in the Sweet 16, let alone later rounds, that I didn’t recognize is something called Romantically Apocalyptic, which knocked off the likes of Girls with Slingshots and defending champion Erfworld before finally falling to Goblins in the Elite 8, in a George Mason-esque run that would be like if a 14-seed in the NCAA Tournament somehow reached the Elite 8. The very first round saw every contest get more votes than the final round last year, and it’s only gotten more so from there; one particularly important creator has been Andrew Hussie, whose linking to the tournament has caused the site to repeatedly crash (which seems to be the case with everything MSPA touches). I’m positively scared of what they’re planning next month. I can’t imagine what this thing is going to look like next year, but I’ll probably be following it closely every step of the way.

When the final four came down to MSPA v. Gunnerkrigg Court and Goblins v. Order of the Stick, I figured for all the world that this gigantic showdown would, against all odds, come down to the two comics I currently regularly follow (although more on MSPA next week), MSPA and OOTS. However, in the end, that didn’t end up happening; Goblins managed to survive against OOTS, while the showdown between MSPA and the Court came down to an earth-shattering, apocalyptic, site-crashing showdown that, when the dust cleared and the site came back up, ended with the Court prevailing by a grand total of forty-six votes.

Now the final battle is in progress between Goblins and the Court, which if you wish and are familiar with the comics, you can take part in (or at least follow) here. Neither are comics that I myself have reviewed, but they’re both comics I’ve considered. In fact, I’ve had plans to review the Court and Questionable Content in some order since 2009, and when they met in the Elite 8 I decided to use the result of that matchup to at least help determine which to review first. Now, however, I’ve decided that the winner of the tournament, whichever it is, will be the subject of a review in two weeks’ time. Both I intend to review before the end of May, but this will determine which gets the immediate spotlight, and which I end up delaying until next month.

What? Of course I’m still a webcomic reviewer. Why are you laughing?

They changed it, now it sucks.

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(From xkcd. Click for full-sized Mary Poppins act.)

I continue not to read xkcd, but when it changed the look of its front page this past weekend, I was willing to accept it as part of the April Fool’s joke of the early version of the “Umwelt” comic that day.

When the actual comic (which I’m sure Scott McCloud would have a lot to say about) came out the following Monday, I was willing to accept it as a continuation of the joke and as a way to get the coding needed for the comic to work to work… even if the look had now spread to the archive pages.

Now another comic has been posted. And the new look is still there.

The same cramming of the upper-left links into the corner (making it look less rationalized and formal), the same spacing out of the news space below the title (and cramming of the title itself), the same airy look on the navigation buttons, and worst of all, the same large type on the buttons and permalinks and simplifcation of the formatting on the latter. In short, the same ugly new look that seems to be designed more for your grandparents than anyone else.

Look, my philosophy is, saying “it’s not that big a deal” is a double-edged sword: if it’s not that big a deal, why are you being so stubborn about it? It’s times like these I really don’t like Randall’s propensity never to say much about his comic…

The Sad Decline of Comixtalk

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O Comixtalk, how art thou fallen, light of the morning.

Comixtalk started life as Comixpedia, an online magazine dedicated to “comics in the digital age”. As such, it strove for the same level of in-depth interviews and analysis of comics as a medium that you would expect of a print magazine, with some names you’ve probably heard of contributing columns. Before there was Websnark, Comixpedia strove to be the site of record for the webcomics community, taking the medium as seriously as it deserved to be taken and serving as the backbone of the growing community.

Or, so I’ve gotten the impression from its entry on the current Comixpedia, old Websnark posts, and its own flashbacks. By the time I encountered Comixtalk in 2009, it had largely abandoned the more “magazine”-like aspects of its format, instead serving as a news blog, rehosting and rebroadcasting blog posts from all over the webcomics community with Xaviar Xerexes’ own posts as the backbone. Supposedly, only the best, most important posts found their way onto the front page, but while I found the “webcomic blog aggregator” format useful enough to add to my RSS reader – it often exposed me to interesting things or topics I’m not sure I would have ever encountered otherwise – there sometimes seemed to be so little rhyme or reason to what posts made the front page, and the workload implied for Xerexes seemed to be so great, that I reached the conclusion that certain blogs were simply given a rubber stamp to have all their posts put on the front page automatically. As such, I planned to wait until I had reached the point that my own posts had achieved the same status, and then write a post detailing my issues with Comixtalk, that would then be reposted to the Comixtalk front page. You see, the plan was totally brilliant.

As it turned out, I only had one post posted to the Comixtalk front page before Xerexes ended the blog aggregator format late in the year, citing high server bills. And now? Now it’s basically a poor man’s Fleen. And while it lacks some of the cutesy names Fleen sometimes indulges in, it doesn’t update nearly as often.

Oh, for a while Xerexes tried to put up an update every day, but right now you tend to get lucky if you get two full-fledged updates a month. And when you do get them, or other posts, they’re basically Xerexes putting up some big piece of webcomics news or something he found somewhere on the Internet relating to webcomics and often giving some sort of personal opinion on them. It’s really become just another personal blog talking about webcomics, at best a bulletin board for various happenings Xerexes comes across somehow. Even if I was interested in any of the news he posts about, it updates too rarely and is too mixed with more frivolous matters for any of it to draw me in. It barely even makes enough of a sustained impression on me for me to get invested in it, and that’s not a good thing. It’s moderately interesting if you’re interested in Xerexes’ rarely-posted opinions, but if you’re looking for a reliable, comprehensive source of news (or even opinion on it) from around the webcomics community? You’re best off looking elsewhere.

That’s a bit of a shame. Comixtalk used to be the one must-go place for webcomics aficianados like myself for smart opinion about webcomics, and to see it reduced to the state it’s in is quite disappointing. My impression is Fleen now has a bit of a monopoly on reliably reporting and pontificating on webcomics news, but I’m not sure it’s as reliable about that as it could be. Admittedly I’m probably a bit hesitant about wholeheartedly embracing Fleen as a result of my documented fondness of the old Floating Lightbulb blog, but the fact that Comixtalk doesn’t provide anything you can’t get at Fleen (with a few occasional exceptions)? Or that the closest I can think of that any other blog does to what Fleen does is occasional news posts at review blogs like the Webcomic Overlook?

Clearly, I’m not the only part of the webcomics community that has slipped tremendously since 2009.

Don’t worry, I’ll have a less lame excuse to continue the streak tomorrow. Look for an MSPA post, god willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

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

At some point this year, I fully intend to do a full review of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Most of the time, I would probably describe it as a modern version of The Far Side, with more off-color humor.

This comic, though, I would probably describe as something more akin to a poor man’s xkcd.

With more off-color humor.

In fact, this comic is one that I would not be remotely surprised to see as an xkcd comic. I don’t know whether that says more about xkcd, SMBC, or this particular comic…

(For the record, and just as another tease, I haven’t changed my stance on xkcd – and I’ve realized that even without the same volume of overly technical jokes it’s often had a reputation for, I still find myself going to the forums to get the joke – and I don’t think I find SMBC a superior product, nor am I likely to start following it… but I don’t want to commit myself to that at this early date, either. How’s that for you?)

This Week in Kickstarter #5

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  • The HuMn Wallet? FrackNation? David Lynch Documentary? Child’s play. Meet the real poster child for the Double Fine effect: Wasteland 2. In its origins, it’s rather similar to Double Fine, this time being a sequel to the forerunner to the Fallout games, complete with a whopping $900,000 goal, a mark that, not that long ago, only two projects in the history of Kickstarter had ever achieved. More astonishing? It’s already passed its goal and become the fourth million-dollar Kickstarter, shooting past the OOTS drive into third place, with a month to go. Double Fine itself got more of a late push than I thought was possible in its last 24 hours, setting the final mark at $3.3 million, a mark I’m fairly sure will stand for a pretty long time… by which I mean “a month or so”.
  • But wait, there’s more! Meet The Banner Saga, which set a lofty $100,000 goal and has already locked up two-thirds of it within the first twenty-four hours or so, with a month still to run. Even allowing for considerable slowing, I fully expect it to lock up a quarter of a million dollars. The effect of Double Fine’s ending (and possibly the launch of Wasteland) also seems to have reinvigorated FTL, which has raised an additional $40,000 in the past week; $150k once again seems in reach, and possibly more. Idle Thumbs isn’t making $30,000 goals in two hours like when it started, but it did make close to $10,000 since I last checked a week ago and could get a substantial late push in its last 48 hours.
  • Meanwhile, the new Elevation Dock is probably the intriguing Geode, which made nearly $200,000 in its first week-plus. The Digital Bolex raised a whopping $283,000 in its first week, but seems to have ground almost to a halt; it’ll still be one of the top ten projects in the top-heavy Design category. The HuMn Wallet should be over $200,000 by the time you read this; with two weeks still to go, it should easily be one of the top 25 projects in Kickstarter history. The ZBoard got another spurt of backing that propelled it substantially over $200,000.
  • The David Lynch Documentary only raised $25,000 this week, so who knows if it can even meet its current $150,000 stretch goal. What Makes a Baby has become the second-most funded project in the history of the Publishing category (that I know of). Erfworld Year of the Dwagon finished with a whopping $84,981, which does much to make it look less like a yawning chasm from Womanthology to the rest of the Comics category than it was before. Finally, Goats appears to be the newest beneficiary of the OOTS effect. It hasn’t blown away its goals, in fact it’s already hit its last 72 hours, but it has slowly and steadily climbed into the top ten projects in the Comics category, and induced Jonathan Rosenberg to restart the comic.
  • Money has arrived in Rich Burlew’s bank account and orders have been placed for the first few things funded by the drive itself.

I THINK I caught everything in the flash this time. Naturally, I’ll probably turn out to have missed something really obvious.

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(From MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck. Click for full-sized aquatic dwellings.)

Andrew Hussie seems to be making a habit out of ending each sub-act of this act by making it look like the protagonists of this act are complete red herrings when it comes to the main plot of the comic.

This time, though, I’m not sure how he can get out of it. Jane didn’t manage to prototype her Sprite, no thanks to God Cat, and doesn’t even seem to have entered the Medium (though she does appear to be transported somewhere). At that point, a massive invasion force descends upon the planet bearing familiar markings, interspersed confusingly with “years in the future” flash forwards showing the planet being flooded. The only way I can see to get out of this is either time travel, or a psycheout – in some way indicating that most of the events of this flash didn’t actually happen. I suppose he could get all four kids into the Medium while avoiding the invading or occupying forces, but there’s a certain finality to this flash, like anything following up on it directly would have to take place after the invasion already succeeded, and certainly not moments after it starts. (Maybe it’s the subliminal messages towards the end.)

(Incidentially, this invasion force suggests to me that this universe’s Betty Crocker is not the Condesce from the troll universe we’re familiar with, if only because it’s hard to see how she could have acquired such an invasion force unless she and that force were native to this universe. She certainly couldn’t have brought it with her from the old troll universe – she’s the last survivor of that universe’s troll race, other than the twelve we’re most familiar with.)

One question this flash raises for me is the role of the two-person session being planned by the two trolls who have been keeping contact with this new group of kids. Are they, in fact, of this universe, agents of the invasion out to mislead our heroes (and the readers) into thinking they’d be successful? Conversely, might that session represent the actual session that John and company will find themselves placed into, for good or ill?

Another thing I’m thinking about that suggests that almost all of Act 6-2 could be rendered non-canon if these kids aren’t red herrings is that, re-reading parts of the comic earlier, the notion that Roxy would be Jane’s server player seems to have been predestined, even though the events of Act 6-2 seemed to swap Roxy out for Dirk (and later his auto-responder). Perhaps the chain that would have led to Jane entering the session in this sub-act was always meant to fail. Perhaps the copy Roxy hacked from Crockercorp was defective, and this was their real plot against Jane.

Also, would it be possible to look back over the events of the past sub-act and find a plan in God Cat’s actions that might hint at the events to come, if we do continue from the end of this flash?

Who called it in the title of his post on the previous comic?

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

As much as I’ve complained about the OOTS comics that I’ve read in real time since I started reading it as such, I’d have to say Vaarsuvius has probably been the best part of the comic in that span, for the ongoing tragedy of her moment of weakness.

V may well have regretted signing her deal-with-the-devil before, but until now she could at least claim the problems with it related entirely to her and her own hubris. She accepted a deal from fiends that was, in fact, successful at saving her family, but then destroyed her relationship with that family so she could use the same power for whatever plot-furthering purposes she could, except she never could. She accepted it because she was desperate to prove that arcane magic could solve all her problems, and she came out of it learning of the value of other people’s contributions, as well as knowing what her own role is.

But she also accomplished one major, though entirely unnecessary, thing, and curiously, despite it being the pinnacle of her time under the Splice, she never seemed to be too broken up about it until now. She regretted the Soul Splice, not the Familicide. The forumites knew what it said about her, the fiends knew what it said about her, but curiously enough, V himself doesn’t seem to have grasped the enormity of what he’d done until he realizes that humans were killed. One-quarter of the black dragon population? Their scales aren’t all shiny, so their destruction was just and necessary. For all the lessons she’s learned, V hasn’t yet learned the lesson she hasn’t had reason to, but that lies at the heart of the entire comic, regarding the arbitrary nature of the alignment system.

Regardless, now we can continue the story of her time under the Splice I started when she accepted it. The Splice may have started as a typical Faustian deal, though for unusual reasons, but Rich managed to turn it into something entirely his own. V almost lost sight of why she accepted the deal in the first place, becoming drunk with power and heedless of the consequences of his actions, manipulated by the spliced souls to be sure, but still entirely in control. Everything that happened in the second paragraph happened, but V is now learning the flip side of those lessons: that ultimate arcane power, wielded without caution, can have unintended consequences. Immeasurable innocent blood is now on his hands, and she may never be able to repay the debt from that moment of weakness.

On the other hand, the bill may soon be coming due on the debt from the Splice itself…