State of Irregular Webcomic: Dispatches from the Afterlife

(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized gibbering madness and destruction.)

So the destruction of the universe turned out to be, in a sense, much ado about nothing.

But it's also serving as the impetus for a major change... in the short-term, at least.

After ten days of white turning to blue turning to red turning to black, which looked for all the world to be an artsy way of depicting the birth of a new universe, the black turned out to be... the Head Death's eyes, positioned along with everyone else in the universe (including people from various points in time) in the Afterlife. So no, the universe hasn't been reborn yet, and we're forced to be tortured for a while more yet, wondering when and how it does.

After another week of the Head Death drawing things out by answering people's questions, strips that all remained stuck in almost every single theme (with the curious and sudden exception of Me), he handed it over to a re-promoted Death of Insanely Overpowered Fireballs, and upon leaving, everything devolved back to the Death theme alone for no real reason. (Come on, like this strip doesn't still belong in most of the themes.) Fireballs continues taking questions from the congregation for a couple more strips, before sending it back to the congregation.

So for almost all of January, Irregular Webcomic! didn't fit my "sixteen-comics-in-one" theory. More than before the destruction of the universe, it was a single, unified comic with a single, unified plot I could follow from day to day. Starting with #2187, though, it returned to having several plots going on at once, with the caveat that since everyone's dead, they all get the Death theme as well...and since everyone's hanging out on the Infinite Featureless Plane of Death at one time, it's really one plot peeking in at various parts of the plane, and everyone's varied plots, and any two themes can cross over at any moment.

It evokes the dimensions the Irregular Crisis took in the lead-up to the destruction, where various themes started running parallel tracks. But now IWC is equally readable as a single comic or as a collection of smaller ones... and the experience isn't really complete without the former.

On a similar track to that lead-up to the destruction of the universe, the various themes are starting to fall into parallel tracks, for obvious reasons. Everyone wants to either just plain escape the afterlife (and the Cliffhangers appear to have already done so), or restart the universe. Mythbusters, Shakespeare/Harry Potter, Martians, and now Steve and Terry all have parallel plans developing to restart the universe, most started within the last week or two, with the potential for more to come, while the Head Death's meeting with the Paradox Department proceeds apace. All evidence is that the universe is going to be recreated, and we're going to have a front-row seat for the new Genesis.

But it's very possible Irregular Webcomic! will never be the same again.

But I can't wait to see how we get there - and what IWC comes out the other end as... if anything.