OOTS 672: Not a montage, but the next best thing.

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized metaplanets. Despite the title, this is part of the "monthly" OOTS post series.)

Important note: Comments are turned off for this post until the site reboot goes through. You'll have plenty of time to leave your comments after that.

I already had only a vague idea where OOTS would go entering the next book.

The one thing that seemed certain was that the OOTS was headed for its next showdown with Team Evil at Girard's Gate, and the OOTS is certainly headed there. Team Evil is busy at the moment tracking down Xykon's phylactery, and opinions are divided as to whether it's to hasten their departure (as suggested by Xykon's "as soon as we find it we're leaving!" rhetoric), or delay it (as suggested by the fact that from Team Evil's perspective, the phylactery could be "who the hell knows where!"). I'm in the "hasten" camp (though I don't have that many allies on the forums), especially since the OOTS is already ahead of Team Evil on the road to Girard's Gate by a good margin, and would only get further ahead by any delays to Team Evil. For Team Evil to need to be delayed, we'd need the OOTS to be delayed as well.

If anything delays the OOTS it's dramatic considerations: it makes the most sense for the showdown for Girard's Gate to be the big climactic showdown at the end of the book. That means any other adventures the OOTS might have on the Western continent - presumably, ones performed en route to Girard's Gate - must in any case occur before reaching the gate (unless getting off the Western continent in the book after next is an issue... more on that later). Clearly something is likely to happen to delay the OOTS, and even if they spend some siesta time in Sandsedge (and Books 2 and 3 have both opened with slow periods in towns, and Book 4 opened with a slow period in Heaven) that's not likely to actually be very long in in-comic time. That means one of two things: something happens to them in the desert that delays them, probably substantially, like more bandits, or something happens to sidetrack them entirely, something that at least seems more important than outracing Team Evil to Girard's Gate.

What would be more important than making it to Girard's Gate as fast as possible? A visit to the Western continent means a potential trek through Elven lands, so Vaarsuvius might want to catch back up with his people, but there is no evidence that V wants to return there, that she'd be accepted there, or that the plot would have any reason for her to return there. (Unless Pompey is waiting there...) If anything of that sort happens, it might be during the march off the continent in the next book.

More likely would be Haley's quest to free her father, floating in the background of her character since we first learned of his capture (134?) This book has seen confirmation of the fact that Ian Starshine's captor is indeed on the Western continent, and while the greedy side of Haley's character had already been weakened by her Resistance experience, Celia's "deal" with the Thieves Guild would completely ruin any hope she might normally have of collecting enough money to free her father. What's more, Haley just told Elan the whole story. Plots for one book are usually well-laid-down in the background of the previous book; even in Book 3, which mostly tied up most of the plots from all the previous books, there was still plenty of foreshadowing of the Kubota subplot, if not for its larger irrelevance. Haley terminated Celia's deal on her way out of the Thieves Guild HQ, but as it had paid off absolutely zilch at that point, if you don't think it's coming back to haunt her later you haven't been reading stories very long (or at least you don't visit TV Tropes). A likely scenario would involve the Thieves Guild tracking down Haley in the desert and battling the OOTS, which could leave Haley with a problem only she and Elan can solve.

That problem, though, could really stress-test their relationship (and not just their joint one with the OOTS). It's almost taken as given on the OOTS forums that "Lord Tyrinar", the man holding Haley's father captive, is in fact himself the tyrannical father of Elan and Nale (watch that crest!). What sorts of hilarity might ensue from the complex interplay between Haley, Ian, Tyrinar, Elan, and Nale? One suggestion comes in this comic, which seems to imply that Elan did not exactly tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Therkla to Haley. We do know Haley knows that there was a "ninja chick who had a crush on him, then died", but it's clear that Elan didn't entirely hold to his commitment to honesty he gives in flashback in the same strip. Did Haley not quite succeed in making sure Elan didn't "hate" her for her secret backstory (parts of which are, it's clear to me, being hidden from us for a reason), or had Elan already decided to go ahead and set up future "entertaining dramatic conflict", only in a sneaky way? (These two are perfect for each other!)

(It's only on later re-reading that I realize Elan could have just as easily been referring to Crystal, not Therkla. That could STILL lead to dramatic tension later, though, as it's not clear exactly how relevant Haley found the personal aspect of her rivalry with Crystal, meaning it could be Elan's turn to learn an incomplete version for dramatic purposes.)

Team Evil is more likely to be delayed by Hinjo's elven allies than by Xykon's phylactery. Xykon and Redcloak are under attack seemingly on all fronts: there's the unified Resistance Haley left behind, there's the elves that are meeting with them, and there's the prisoners O-Chul inspired. Between that and Xykon's demand to leave the instant his phylactery is recovered, Redcloak's planned goblin state is teetering on the edge of the abyss. And yet there's also plenty of potential for conflict between these various groups and with the Sapphire Guard once they make their return. In the absence of Team Evil there may only be a power vacuum and civil war in Azure City. And what if Xykon, kept in town by the phylactery, is forced to leave prematurely by the forces allied against him, meaning the elves made the situation worse instead of better?

Which brings us to what will happen at the gate itself. Roy is doing a lot of on-panel plotting here of exactly how the battle is going to go, and anyone with an understanding of dramatic conventions must realize those plans are almost bound to get thrown out the window the instant the battle begins. Xykon will already be at the gate, or something else will happen to muck up the waterworks in a way that renders Roy's planning almost null and void. Not that we won't see his disrupting attack he learned from his grandfather, but we probably won't even see much of an opportunity for pre-battle preparations, and Belkar's much-prophesied demise will happen in a much different way than Roy envisions.

The most likely candidate for that to happen would come from the IFCC, and their various designs on the gate. Although it's intentionally vague, the IFCC seem to be setting the Linear Guild in position ahead of everyone else at the gate itself, beating both the OOTS and Team Evil there in the process. That seems to jive with Nale's original plan, but that would mean Nale would miss out on the whole Tyrinar business, implying maybe there's not a familial relation involved there after all. Unless the Tyrinar business comes after the battle for Girard's Gate, in the sixth book before the OOTS leaves the Western continent... But the IFCC also want "conflict. Destructive unnecessary conflict", and they could decide that "moving their pawns into position" means creating conflict that prevents the OOTS from reaching Girard's Gate too soon, and that could mean an alliance with Nale's father. Besides, the IFCC's real focal point for their plotting as far as the gate is concerned, it's fairly heavily implied, centers on V, and the 45 minutes of V's soul they have.

Which brings us to the absolute bombshell towards the end of this strip that pretty much completely destroys any ideas the people on the forum had regarding the future course of the entire rest of the strip. It turns out that no one - not Redcloak, not Xykon, not the IFCC, not the Linear Guild, not the OOTS, not the Sapphire Guard - may have any idea what the gates are really protecting, that there are some things that the gods may have held back even from the Order of the Scribble (or, alternately, that they held back), things that, at this point, only Vaarsuvius knows. Once again, I preface this by saying I haven't read the prequel books and whatever implications they may have on all this, but it's possible that, if the whole notion of the Snarl is so completely different from what we have been led to believe, Redcloak's plan is horribly flawed at its core (and it's entirely possible for it to be a complete success as far as what he and the Dark One need to do, and still totally backfire) and virtually the entirety of the main plot of OOTS is, as the IFCC would put it, "destructive unnecessary conflict", this time semi-unintentionally engineered by the gods. And what is this planet within the planet, anyway? Please don't spring a Planet of the Apes ending on us and tell us "it's our earth!"

(It's doubtful the Order of the Scribble didn't know this, incidentally, because they would have had at least as much contact with the rifts as Blackwing did, and at the very least, if they never did know it leaves open the question of what exactly happened to Mijung. In fact this could be fodder for another entire OOTS post in itself, reinterpreting the Crayons of Time series and pretty much everything I wrote in my post on the non-interference clause, which may have been adopted for very different reasons than we'd been led to believe. And suddenly the "MitD is an aspect of the Snarl" theory becomes a lot more plausible... because it doesn't become incompatible with any other theories. Also note that I've only offered one theory; others include the notion that the Snarl has somehow "de-snarled", that the Snarl didn't destroy everything it touched as suggested but instead incorporated it into this new world, that the gates actually changed the Snarl's nature, and even that the world Blackwing saw was the OOTS world itself. Considering the popularity of these, not even V may fully grasp the implications, but what will it mean when the IFCC cashes in?)

Congratulations, Rich Burlew. You've done what, when it came to your strip, might have seemed impossible. You've rendered us totally clueless. We may need this three-week break between books as much as you do. And given how many other groups are in different situations at the end of this book, it's either telling of how tight-lipped you're getting about future plot turns, or just surprising, that you didn't end this book with a full-scale montage like the others.

@trent_reznor's plan for turning indie music into webcomics!

New label time. I once had fantasies of becoming a musician, but I can't come up with an original beat to save my life, my voice sounds horrible recorded, and, like most of my fantasies, I liked the fame and impact more than I liked the actual, you know, work. Certainly I might have never had a chance to break out within a year of recording a short demo tape like I fantasized, at least not without getting a gig on American Idol, and I'd probably be the guy you laughed at on the audition shows anyway.

But that fantasy is at least a little closer to the reach of musicians today, thanks to that great invention that will define the next millennium or at least the next century, the Internet. Which brings me to Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor's thoughts on how aspiring musicians can take advantage of the Internet to break in to at least a limited extent.

Trent's advice in a nutshell: Forget about making any money off your records. Give it all away for free. Put your music on iTunes just to get the iTunes audience, but base your revenue model off selling tchotshkes like T-shirts and other premium content. Basically, the typical webcomics model.

Huh? Evidently Reznor needs to be introduced to Scott McCloud's 2001 theory that all the music industry needed to do was lower prices to the point that it would become too inconvenient to pirate to justify the savings. In other words, it's not strictly necessary to give everything away for free, just really, really cheap. "Ah, but that was just McCloud's attempt to justify his micropayments obsession..." Really? Then why did Xaviar Xerexes recently espouse essentially the same philosophy without noticing it even when I pointed it out to him? Besides, while micropayments have by and large been a complete failure, music in the form of iTunes has been one of the few places where it's worked.

Look, I know a lot of people don't like iTunes for loading down its music with DRM, but that just means there's an opening in the market for someone to come along and try and create an iTunes killer that sells music at iTunes prices or maybe even slightly higher but without DRM. Take a YouTube-like zeal to wiping out pirated music and you just might create a service that, eventually, one of the big boys decides they should move to to reach out to the people who have run away from iTunes to get a DRM-free experience. In the meantime it becomes the hub for music that hasn't sold out to The Man - and those musicians get to make at least a trickle of money off the music itself. Is the lower exposure worth it? I don't know, but I'm sure it is for some.

I don't like the notion of webcomiceers as glorified T-shirt salesmen and I'm not any more happy with the same notion as applied to indie rockers. The difference is, in the latter case, it's not necessary.

Draft Image Upload seems to be back in proper working order, at least in Chrome, not that it'll help Blogger that much.

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

This post is really an excuse to talk about the two prior strips. After all, I've been sorely remiss in not posting on #665, which at long last returned Roy to the land of the living. Not only did Roy originally die in #443, meaning the ostensible main character was dead for a third of the strip's entire existence, but as someone on the forum pointed out, Roy originally died over two years ago, when Da Blog only had a score of posts and I was only recently removed from the residence halls at school. That's only a little more than six months after my original User Friendly archive binge.

Not only that, but with Roy's resurrection and the deus ex machina that returned de-spliced-V to the OOTS, we have reached a state some people probably thought we'd never reach again: the entire OOTS is in one piece and unencumbered by any sort of weird temporary effects, whether negative (Belkar's Mark of Justice, Roy's death) or positive (spliced V). The last time we could say that about the OOTS was right before Haley started speaking in cryptograms, and the incident that caused that was back in #245, meaning a good 63.2% of the strip's existence to this point (nearly two thirds) has been spent with the OOTS dealing with some issue of some sort. It seems almost inevitable that another such issue will crop up soon (albeit in the next book and probably not until the next gate), and the chances are it'll be something fairly permanent (especially given all the death prophecies floating around out there), meaning this brief respite of a whole OOTS changed only in character development from the dungeon crawling group (well, and the presence of Celia) almost seems to be something of a plot hole.

Speaking of death prophecies, re-reading some of my original comments on Belkar's faux-character-development has given me something of a new perspective on strip #666, and an incident in there that tells me I wasn't far off in my reading of the situation: Haley's skepticism about Belkar's new "team spirit". Recall what I said in my original post:

Nudge die rolls, palm cards, "forget" penalties... but you have to sit down to play first. As long as the people at the table see a fellow player across from them, they'll tolerate you. A crooked player is a pain in the ass, but someone who refuses to play at all makes them start questioning their own lives - and people HATE to think. They'd rather lose to a cheater than dwell too long on why they're playing in the first place.

The apparent implication of this speech is that it doesn't even matter if the other players know Belkar is cheating, so long as he plays at all. It's entirely possible that Belkar could continue to be the same stabby, backstabbing jerk he's always been, so long as he gives a rat's ass about what everyone else is doing, and doesn't display a willful ignorance of the rules.

However, I also said that Belkar didn't seem to interpret it this way: he seems to interpret it as meaning that he needs to follow the same moral framework as the rest of the OOTS, whereas I felt he only needed to know what it was. He could be a "team player" without sacrificing one ounce of his personality. Regardless, the effect is the same in more ways than one: sure enough, Haley and Roy know damn well what Belkar is doing (if not the details of it)... but the reason they're not doing anything about it isn't the same reason that Shojo provided. Sure, they appreciate having a "team player" Belkar, but if it were as simple as that they'd probably still keep Belkar on a short leash; they know that Belkar can't do much given the short amount of time he has left.

As for Vaarsuvius... as it turns out, she learns two lessons in one in this strip (which practically begs for Belkar to call out its weepy sentimentality regardless of whether or not it deserves it). The one she's already learned is the lesson regarding blunt force; but while she's already learned about doing small things, Durkon now teaches her about accomplishing small things, regardless of whether they were done in anger (teleporting the fleet) or desperation (saving O-Chul). The first lesson involves a potential future change in strategy for V; the second means she might whine less when confronted by a sidequest or a seeming failure (or at least might decide to do something different when confronted with a situation as hopeless as this).

(Hmm. One: for some reason, the Heal removed the bags around V's eyes that have been present, except during the splice, for the entire book. Okay, I can chalk that up to the "rejuvenating effects of the splice", but I still wonder about long-term implications. Two: did V just use her tiara or head-ring or whatever it is to put her hair into a ponytail instead of supporting her old style without explanation? Huh? Well, it makes me more convinced than ever V's a she at least...)

This isn't about the past. This is about the future.

One year ago last week, I began doing webcomic reviews on Da Blog.

Recently, I've been having a crisis of confidence about the whole enterprise.

This should be obvious enough to anyone who read my 8-Bit Theater review. Quite frankly, I completely stalled while writing it. I found myself trapped in a place where I couldn't say much more than "It's a webcomic, and it's not Order of the Stick. Um... it loves non-sequitur. Um... it... structures its updates well. Um... I got nothin'." Roger Ebert (or even Eric Burns(-White)) I'm not.

Now, maybe that's just a symptom of how dull and repetitive 8BT is. But 8BT really just put into focus a trend that's been dogging me for some time. Quite frankly, I'm not entirely sure what my audience is or what it should be. Am I writing for the average person to let them know what's good in webcomics? Or am I writing for Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere to identify what certain webcomics get right and wrong?

It shouldn't be that difficult to do the former - is a webcomic entertaining and captivating? But not only is the answer to that question dependent on each person's tastes, it's actually a lower bar than a lot of people give it credit for. People in English courses and otherwise preoccupied with deconstructing every layer of meaning out of a story will find things to object to in strips like Ctrl+Alt+Del by nitpicking every ounce of it. But to be honest, most people don't care about all that. All they care about is that it's funny. As long as a comic meets the relatively low bar that it be entertaining (for a humor strip) or addictive (for a strip with continuity), it's probably going to attract an audience. I really don't need to say much more than answer those two questions for you to know whether or not you'll want to follow a given strip. (This is where I keep trying to condense the size of my reviews, yet I keep feeling they're too short.) This may explain some of the popularity of Twilight despite geeks hating it with a passion: it's really a romance novel and no better or worse than any other romance novel, but because it happens to have vampires it attracted geeks who expected a sci-fi story and held it to a standard it should never have been expected to be held to.

(Note that Ctrl+Alt+Del, at the moment, is starting to turn even me off. Yes, of course it's a good idea to give Zeke a mate! It's not like that's a hokey, boring stock plot for man-made life going back to the original novel of Frankenstein! What's that? Why aren't you making a she-Zeke (only now you are)? Of course, it's because Zeke owes his sentience to a myste-e-e-e-erious X-factor that can't be easily duplicated! Because that's completely original and not at all hokey and boring itself, and certainly not a lame attempt to jack up the melodrama you'll probably bust through and give us a she-Zeke anyway! On the plus side, at least we have the beginnings of an explanation for why Zeke could be created by freakin' Ethan...)

A lot of my reviews have been written with an eye towards teasing out the differences between webcomics and other art forms, and with no small eye towards what lessons I myself can learn as an aspiring webcomicker. My reviews have typically been written with this as a base: am I continuing to read this comic going forward, and why or why not? But answering the latter question tends to lead me to present the answers as things that other webcomics can follow.

I don't do a lot of saying, "This webcomic is good and here's why you should read it". I honestly can't answer the latter question. I can only say, "Just read it, I found it good." (CAD is a good example; I started reading it because I found it entertaining - and you can't really explain what makes a joke funny - and addictive, which basically translates to, "I want to find out where it goes from here," regardless of what "it" is.) What I teased out as the reasons why tends to be technical stuff that would bore the average reader and says little about the content of the comic, and is more suited towards Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere, so I end up saying, "This webcomic is good and here's what they're doing that you should be too." At least one other webcomic review blog embraced this whole-hog and frames its reviews as the answer to a question: "What did I learn?" I'm not convinced, though, that this is the best way to review webcomics, or anything.

I think I need to go back to my heady early days when David Morgan-Mar was praising me for my review of Darths and Droids, and even six months ago when Robert A. Howard was praising me for my review of Tangents. If you read my Darths and Droids or original OOTS reviews, you see that a key element of the former is a deconstruction of the key elements of the strip, attempting to tease out exactly what it is that makes it tick (a similar element to what made my Tangents review stand out, in fact - I think my review of the Floating Lightbulb might be my best review in a while for this same reason). It's almost a "just the facts, ma'am" approach to reviewing webcomics, as long as it's also balanced with an attempt to find out whether or not I like it, and if it's popular, trying to find out why that is (indeed my original OOTS review is little more than straight description). I took my original inspiration from Websnark and it's the Websnark model I need to at least try to return to.

I think my real problem comes when I try to review something I don't like. I've said this in the past, but I don't like making an impact on anything, and whenever people seem to think I want them to change their sites they often belligerently respond with variants of "it's MY site and I can do what I want". (This is one reason why my Tangents review seemed to go horribly wrong after Robert A. Howard himself showed up - even when he took me seriously it freaked me out a little bit.) One of, in my opinion, my better reviews is my Dresden Codak review (which I think did a better job than the similarly negative, but more disconnected, 8BT review - I probably should have re-read my DC review once I decided to make my 8BT one negative), which broke down everything that I saw as going wrong with the strip. Does that mean I want Aaron Diaz to change any of it? Not necessarily. If that's the way he wants to take the strip that's the way he wants to take the strip. I'm merely reporting on what I see as wrong with it, for the benefit of shoppers who are considering adding to their webcomic plate (or starting one). But even in that review, there's an element of "what did I learn?" in there, trying to take lessons from Dresden Codak and apply them to webcomics in general.

Part of the difference is that originally, and lasting all the way through my post on art in webcomics, the general statements I was making were directed towards the webcomic community. But as I had run-ins with Robert A. Howard, and (in February) with David Morgan-Mar over a slow patch in Darths and Droids (the latter of which I'm not sure will subside until Attack of the Clones does), I needed to defend the negative statements I was making towards webcomics that I didn't actually expect any action on, and I decided I was really writing for Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere to help them avoid the pitfalls. If I'd reread my Dresden Codak review I'd have seen that sometimes the problems are just too endemic to fix, and I wasn't always making negative statements to help anyone "avoid pitfalls" at all. I need to restate my mission: I'm writing reviews to deconstruct a webcomic's elements to determine whether or not I like a given webcomic and why, with an eye to observe a webcomic in motion and with an audience of potential webcomic readers first and the webcomic community second, with maybe a tertiary audience of Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere.

But first I need to rest my brain from the heavy work I've been putting it through, especially given the class I'm in at the moment and the paucity of work I've done for it. So it's likely that - with the exception of a post when the current book of OOTS ends - there will be no more webcomic posts until late July at the earliest. I'm hopeful that with this re-examination I can return to my roots and create webcomic reviews more on par with what I've written in the past. I may even re-review some comics I've given subpar reviews to, though that's likely more of a long-term project. (For me to give a more meaty review of Girl Genius than the one I originally gave, for example, I'd probably need to go on a fairly lengthy archive binge.)

By the time I do return to webcomic posts, though, it will be a rebirth of sorts in more ways than one, because in all likelihood I should have completed a relaunch of Da Blog and the web site, which could be perhaps the most major development to come to either before or since, finally taking Da Blog and the website off of Blogger and Freehostia. (Not that my new file manager completely fixes all the problems I had with Freehostia's.) One development that will result from this will be the merger of Da Blog with the web site, allowing all my major online presence (outside Twitter) to be housed under one address and one banner title, instead of awkward names like the Morgan Wick Online Universe or the Morgan Wick Sites.

I don't intend to give away too much right now, but one reason this relaunch hasn't occurred already is because I intend to blow up some of my more common labels into full-fledged sub-sites (and the software I'd need for that isn't as up-to-date as I'd like). For example, my sports posts should be merged with the Morgan Wick Sports section of the site. As a result, my webcomics posts will become an entire site of their own (still connected to Da Blog though), with the potential for a comparable level of support material you might not necessarily expect from a blog alone. So I'd like to ask you: what would you like from a webcomics review site? I definitely hope to include an index to my reviews to aid in finding them, and maybe links to better organize access to the Webcomics' Identity Crisis series, but what else might I include to take advantage of having an entire site devoted to webcomics as opposed to a blog, even a glorified one?

By way of analogy, I could look at the web site of a movie reviewer, such as Roger Ebert's site. That site contains reviews (obviously); the Answer Man column, answering people's questions about the movies, which might not be terribly portable to webcomics, which I wouldn't be qualified for because I don't read that many webcomics consistently, and which would be more of a blog feature anyway; the Great Movies columns, which might manifest into a list of links to the good webcomics and webcomic blogs; the Movie Glossary, but we already have TV Tropes, though a guide to some of the terms I use might still be useful, akin to Eric Burns(-White)'s own glossary; "people", a home to some biographical vignettes, suggesting it might be useful to help tell, say, Phil Foglio apart from Tim Buckley apart from Rich Burlew and Randall Munroe and David Morgan-Mar and Ryan North and Tom Slidell and Jerry Krahulik and Mike Holkins and Scott Kurtz, though that might be a lot of work for little gain (and again, might be more of a blog feature pending the execution)...

...the blog of someone not named Roger Ebert for some reason; "commentary", not always by Ebert himself or about movies, and probably close in concept to Da Blog itself; guides to film festivals and the Oscars, the former of which isn't completely applicable (concepts like Zuda perhaps?) and both of which are more appropriate to blog posts (though things like sub-indices might be appropriate); "editor's notes" that are basically comments by the author of the aforementioned blog; "one-minute" (short) reviews; and the equivalent of "letters to the editor". There's also places to search the review archive and get movie times and tickets (again not applicable). Are there any things I could add to a new webcomic review site other than straight-up lists of links? What do you think?

Whatever comes of it, let us plow forward into the second year of my webcomic reviews... and hope it comes out better than the second half of the first.

I finally get to pick a fight with an established webcomicker! Because slamming Dresden Codak wasn't as fun.

(From 8-Bit Theater. Click for full-sized inevitable hopelessness. Which is a good way of describing 8BT itself, actually.)

So, it's been long enough. After a brief stint with doing actual webcomic reviews, I got bogged down in all sorts of other stuff, and so I haven't been doing actual webcomic posts for a while. And it's high time I sat down and got back into the thick of things. Especially given how close I've been coming to putting something off to the point of eternal regret.

Because I never got around to reviewing 8-Bit Theater.

That may well be my eternal shame as a webcomics reviewer. In all my posting about identity crises and sports ratings and April Fool's jokes and global warming series and missing sports graphics and stressful classes and personal neuroses and complaints about Draft Image Upload (very very close to becoming irrelevant by the way) and overload of side projects and other obsessions, I never got around to reviewing 8-Bit Theater.

I don't mean to say it's the greatest webcomic in the history of the universe. I don't even like 8-Bit Theater. But after I used Komix to subscribe to 8BT with an eye towards eventually writing a review early this year, and seeing it move to a new system and something vaguely resembling an actual RSS feed while Komix' proprietor was on vacation, and putting off writing the review for one distraction after another, I'm not going to let 8-Bit Theater, which ranks high among the ranks of the Tier 1 comics, pass into oblivion without my having reviewed it.

What's more, because I'm catching it as it makes its big finish towards the end, I may be getting an unrepresentative sample. One thing that struck me as I was reading it day-by-day originally is that it seems to leave off one plot thread and start up a new story so fast you're wondering how we got from there to here. When Black Mage says in a recent strip that "this whole goddamn adventure has been nothing but pointless build ups to pay offs that never happen", most people can't help but think there's an element of truth to it. But as I start to re-read it I can't help but wonder if this is actually cross-cutting between different groups and plotlines that makes sense in context. Still, it can come off as complete nonsense to the uninitiated. Even within a plot, there's a lot of hopping around back and forth between different stati quibus, and keeping track of what's going on can be especially difficult when reading it one page at a time.

So, what else? Well, um, 8BT is interesting in how it structures its updates. It uses the one-page-at-a-time approach of Girl Genius and Gunnerkrigg Court and doesn't really ever stretch it out like Order of the Stick, yet it's better than the first two at making each update stand out in its own right.

And.

Um.

Yeah.

8BT reminds me of xkcd in a way in that there's not much I can say about it. Reviewing the updates I originally followed "live" in an archive binge leaves me without much to say either. In fact 8BT leaves me questioning my own ability to go on with my webcomic reviews, just because I'm having trouble properly analyzing it, and that may say a lot about 8BT in and of itself. The characters almost seem to be interchangable cyphers for the most part, without much in the way of distinguishing them or making us care much about what's going on, which makes it all the worse that it can be a little hard to keep track of what's going on even when you read it all at once. (With the possible exception of Black Mage, and I swear and hope to God I'm not just saying this to echo what Robert A. Howard said recently, which I just read as I write most of this.)

Oddly, 8BT may have actually been a bit funnier in its very early strips, and maybe a bit more distinguished in its characterizations. Some of its jokes are actually funny, and the strip managed to balance a gag-a-day format with a continuing story, though it did have a habit of making the sort of joke way too endemic of sprite comics: "Look! I can't draw and sprites have limitations so here's an explanatory caption to show what this is supposed to be!" And everything tended to be all over the page with side jokes all over. As for characters, Black Mage was the evil one, Fighter the dumb one, Red Mage the munchkin, and Thief... well, here's where the trouble began, probably. Thief was basically a storehouse of all the jerk-y traits the other three didn't have. He's supposed to be greedy and hoarding gold, but that doesn't really tell you much. They were all fairly one-dimensional (as characters and visually).

It's easy to see why Red Mage and Thief got mixed up, since they were basically "someone who wants more stuff" and "someone who wants more gold"; Fighter out-and-out decayed, becoming less and less of a complete buffoonish dumb idiot and starting to show slightly more intelligence whenever Brian Clevinger needed a line that didn't make sense for the other three to say for whatever reason. Then occasionally trying to run too far the other way to compensate. So they all became, basically, "we're jerks and Black Mage is pure evil". Even Fighter became too consumed by his stupidity to be an effective counterpoint to the others' jerkness, and leaned more towards the other Light Warriors than, say, White Mage in those instances when he snapped out of it. One wonders if Clevinger made him "he's really a good guy - but he's friends with pure evil because he's too stupid to realize otherwise! Get it? It's funny!" in a last-ditch effort to maintain the distinctions, the same reason Red Mage developed an odd cross-dressing fetish (which just made Thief look even more generic).

In fact, let's save you the trouble of actually having to read 8BT yourself, as here's a pretty good summary of the strip:

(Click to see full-sized version. In a week's time it should be inline with the page at close to actual size.)

I guarantee you that strip is more funny than almost all of 8-Bit Theater, and probably a lot better as well.

In my full-fledged Darths and Droids review I said it was no insult to call 8-Bit Theater a poor man's Order of the Stick. I see now I was wayyyy too kind. 8BT isn't even as good or compelling as Bob and George, which may be partly the result of having characters that should by all rights be the villains as the protagonists to the extent that you hate them more than rooting for them. Not even Ethan from Ctrl+Alt+Del is as bad as these guys! OOTS' Belkar is, but you root for him more than you root for even Fighter! Of course, maybe the real problem is that the former has Lucas and Lilah while the latter has the rest of the OOTS to balance them out, while the closest thing to balance the Light Warriors have, White Mage, hates them as much as anyone else and only pops in and out. Another possibility: Belkar is funny when he's doing evil things while the Light Warriors are funny when bad things happen to them. (To be honest, probably 90% of the actually funny jokes in 8BT are just Fighter being stupid.)

I'm not sure why people attack CAD so much or why John Solomon went after B&G when 8BT is far more deserving of the vitriol. I want to make clear: this isn't an anti-sprite-comic review. I read and enjoy Bob and George (which, having ended, is ineligible for a review) and I don't even see sprite comics as a crutch for an inability to draw, as Dave Anez and Clevinger have mad Photoshop skillz to tweak their sprites the way they want to. The problem is that in Clevinger's case, he seems to have put too many skill ranks in those and not enough in "being funny" or "having a decent story", and Anez has a few in at least the former. Like CAD did for video game comics, 8BT started a trend (well, furthered the one started by B&G, much like CAD accelerated the trend started by Penny Arcade) of bad sprite comics by people who only see a way to get into comics without having a lick of art skillz, or even a reason to get into comics. Unlike CAD, I can't discern Clevinger's secret to his success, and my leading hypothesis is a bit distressing: geeks like the kind of non-sequitur nonsense Clevinger specializes in. If more CAD strips were like the Chef Brian strips it might be as beloved as xkcd.

On the other hand, if I find out 8BT in any way inspired The Order of the Stick, then all is forgiven. Though I'll still rib Clevinger for Rich Burlew showing him how it's done.

Hope DMM didn't break things by trying to do "IWC on a Postcard" for 2317, assuming he was trying to do so, especially right as he went on vacation...

(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized charitable act.)

So most of what's happened up to this point in the Steve and Terry theme since the reboot of the universe turns out to have been an extended flashback that just ended (in what may have supposed to have been June).

Which is rather interesting in terms of fueling the "did the universe reboot to the beginning or not?" debate. All signs now seem to point to "no, except for Space". Still, the fact that so many comics went into flashbacks with so many different approaches and explanations still seems to hint that the Irregular Crisis is not yet over, especially as regards the implications in themes such as Space and Cliffhangers.

What does it say when you learn moral lessons from Xykon, and he's RIGHT?

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized second chance(s).)

Curse you, Rich Burlew.

I was all set to have a nice, enjoyable weekend where I could focus on finishing off some assignments for one of my classes, and you had to go and put up this whopper last night.

Uncharacteristically for this comic, and perhaps to its detriment, it engages in a bit of moralizing, but it's all to further the greater goal. In the end, V's real "ultimate power" may come without saying any words at all. This is a major moment in the story of V's character, on par with taking the soul splice in the first place.

V really learns two lessons here, both related in a way, and they're both put into stark comparison with each other in this strip. The one Xykon preaches to him is how quixotic V's quest for "ultimate arcane power" really was all along, how one-dimensionally V saw power, how it ultimately wouldn't ever be enough, and against someone who really grasped power, wasn't enough. This seems to both support the idea of the soul splice representing the Four Words, though perhaps for unexpected reasons, and suggest that if it wasn't, then when the prophecy eventually does come true it'll come with a twist. ("I'm going to multiclass.")

Hmm. Maybe the real four words were "My power EXCEEDS yours!"

The other lesson provides the forces of good's response to Xykon's characterization of power, and if anyone here is likely to vocalize it it's O-Chul. It's this lesson that V takes to heart in her holeside epiphany. Some forumites, before this strip, suggested that V's run-in with Xykon showed the value of teamwork (after all, Redcloak and Tsukiko did most of the critical dirty work), but what V learns here is slightly different - baby steps, perhaps - and more fit to her situation. It's learning not to think entirely about himself all the time. In that one moment, V realizes there's a greater good going on here, and while self-preservation may mean resuming getting out while the getting's good, the right thing means letting someone get a few more licks in on Xykon. In an odd way, while forum speculation for a while suggested that V and Belkar marked a study in contrasts as they flipped places on the alignment scale (one half fake, but still), the real contrast may be that while Belkar is faking character development and becoming a team player, V is getting the real thing. Maybe they could become real buddies now.

(It's also worth comparing V to his good friend Haley, who recently said she "takes responsibility for her own actions," defending why she wouldn't crack down on Belkar at all. In a way, it makes perfect sense that if V was going to make friends with anyone it would be Haley with their respective look-out-for-number-one tendencies. And now, both are starting to grow out of those shells in varying ways.)

It's here that V gets her redemption from his failure from earlier. Out of spells and trying only to make it out alive, V indirectly caused the death of several fleeing soldiers as the Battle for Azure City was drawing to a close. When this was revealed, it may have seemed a hastily-conceived way to explain V's apparent character derailment in the 500s (check out that book V's holding at the end). But this is an almost identical situation, except here V figures out how to pitch in without any spells and while putting himself at great risk.

The rules of story indicate O-Chul pretty much HAS to get some major damage in against Xykon now. Imagine this scenario (rather plausible without the early plot holes): O-Chul kills Xykon, returning the favor V just paid him, but doesn't finish off the phylactery. Vaarsuvius and O-Chul leave, but for whatever reason don't take the Monster in the Dark. Patrols come around, and while Vaarsuvius is powerless to hold them off, O-Chul isn't. So, V gets out alive no matter what he did at the hole in the wall, but by doing something for the greater good gets someone else to help him out and actually comes out better in the deal. And suppose they subsequently find the Resistance - V gets a chance for some further literal atonement for her failure from earlier. It may have ruined the reunion of the Order, but taking off to fight Xykon may prove to be the best thing to happen to them, and to Vaarsuvius.

What's the difference between About, Cast, and New Reader pages?

It's a topic brought up by a webcomics.com post that seems to conflate them. To be sure, a conflation can help some to understand why they're reading old Websnark posts where Eric Burns(-White) calls out webcartoonists that don't have a cast page ("dude, it's a cast page! It's not the Great Artifact that will bring about the Age of Transcendence!"), but it seems some don't agree.

Whether or not you conflate them probably depends on your specific circumstances - for example, do you have a gag-a-day comic, or a story comic? If you do conflate one or more you can probably label it with anything it fills the role of. Regardless, I would draw the boundaries like so:

• About: Basic information about the comic, and optionally, about the author. A quick and dirty way to get acquainted with the setting or the concept. A comic FAQ might fall under an "about" header.
• Cast: Information about the cast, their personalities, and where they are in the story.
• New Readers: A more advanced form of the About page, explaining "the story so far", reducing the reader's need for an archive binge. May contain links to relevant storylines, for example, if the reader wants to "experience it for themselves".

So, an About page is about the comic, Cast is about the cast, and New Readers is about the story. Burns(-White) loves cast pages because they can so easily serve as a filter to reveal info about the comic and the story. Cast pages can obviate the need for New Readers pages, but About pages don't obviate the need for Cast pages without turning into Cast pages, especially when you consider the pages' relative utility to old readers.

(No, you did not just stumble into the Floating Lightbulb by accident.)

Oh, I'm close to coming up with my own solution to the draft-image-upload situation. Very close indeed.

(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized doors! Why did it have to be doors!)

There's... a lot of stuff going on here. There's so much going on that I even have more titles than I know what to do with.

First, a lot of the thinking I had in mind for what would happen after #653 is completely busted. Rather than a lot of talking, we got an action sequence. Truth be told, I probably should have done a post on #655, which was pretty weighty in its own right. So let's see, Redcloak loses an eye and Xykon's on the verge of losing his phylactery to someone who was a complete no-name before the current book. That's not an important strip to pay attention to at all.

Yes, I am going to fulfill the April OOTS post I owe you, only with a week left in May. That was a brilliant strategy, wasn't it?

So in order of what happens in this strip: See those X's in Panel 2? So Jirix was worse than a background character, but may have saved... someone's life. As we'll soon see, possibly not Xykon, maybe Vaarsuvius, but perhaps most likely is just ruining O-Chul's.

V still has at least a couple of spells left. That screws up some of the thinking that I, at least, had in mind.

Xykon's phylactery is loaded with protections, as we find out the first time someone tries to break it... which probably suggests Xykon was not as close to being destroyed in the tower as we were once led to believe. So what happens when the time comes to actually break it near the end of the story? Or does Xykon actually survive the end of the story?

Third-to-last panel almost seems designed to address some of the more out-there and deus-ex-machina theories held by forumers... so why do I think it's going to lead to forum speculation about Qarr popping in despite very little for him to do?

Cleverly, O-Chul's last panel in this strip is him at the exact moment of him getting hit with the lightning bolt, and it's clear in the last panel that he's down, but we not only don't see him we don't even see Xykon. Is he dead? Negative hit points? Zero hit points? Even in positive hit points but too weakened to go on?

And now what happens? It would be stupid for someone to just crack open the door and render this little dilemma moot. Does V stick around for a while in the room or something? Does he hop out that huge hole in the wall, if that would be effective in any way at all other than getting a lot more scratches? Maybe Qarr really does hop in and do something? V ain't gonna die here, because if she was she would be dead already... unless Xykon's dealing with O-Chul has its own impact, like turning the MitD against him? It's like Rich is playing chess with his audience!

And what about the rest of the book? We have at least one more strip of V running around like a chicken with his head cut off, that's 657. Possibly a second, but I could at least see us moving on after the next strip if the circumstances are right. Then we have to zip back over to the main body of the OOTS for the return of Roy. That's at least two, maybe three, strips. We need a strip for Roy himself to make his triumphant return, then at least one strip to assess the situation, and maybe a strip for looking forward or to serve as transition. That takes us to 660 when you combine the two maybes. Heck, maybe the OOTS will even meet back up with Hinjo and his group.

Because it doesn't look like we're going to get the exposition I anticipated for this stretch, you might think that means we're using fewer strips. And you would be wrong. We've already burned two in the tower for different reasons than I anticipated. We have a bunch of establishing shots to burn as well (such as where Redcloak went and what V's doing), and if the Linear Guild is going to show up in this book we need to see them soon. That's a minimum of two (the LG and the end-of-book montage) and probably more, taking us to 662 or more.

An average of the last two books' duration would suggest that the current book will end at or around the auspicious number of 666. We don't have a lot of strips to answer all the questions that are best answered in the current book. Where do the OOTS go from here? What's the Linear Guild doing? What will V do if and when he escapes? Are Xykon and/or Redcloak affected by these events? Where did Redcloak go with that Word of Recall? Will Roy tell off Celia? Will the OOTS replace V? How did Redcloak know about soul splices and will V find out? Is there special importance to the island both the Sapphire Guard and OOTS wound up at? Is the sky blue? Is grass green? All that and more, tonight on a very special episode of the Order of the Stick!

So this post isn't quite as long or in-depth as I originally had in mind. Again, Rich kind of ruined things by going as far away from the exposition as possible. I can't help but shake the feeling I'm forgetting something by rushing through this post, on either end of it. But at least in my own mind, I'm fulfilling my end of the deal, and that's all that matters.

Blog of Webcomics' Identity Crisis: The End of "Free Content"?

A "case in point" on the thought-provoking nature of the Floating Lightbulb: Today Bengo argues that webcomickers should stop thinking of themselves as giving content away for free.

He makes some good points but since he emphasizes preparing comics for later print distribution, I suspect that Scott "Infinite Canvas" McCloud would scream bloody murder at him...

On top of everything else, Draft Image Upload is STILL screwed up.

(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized Swiss chocolate.)

So... if the Joneses are still on their way back from the Underworld...

...but at the same time are rescuing each other from the Nazis...

...what impact will that have if they collide?

More evidence the Irregular Crisis isn't over yet...

By my standards, I think I'm a month late with this.

In February, at the end of my "Webcomics' Identity Crisis" series, I said this about The Floating Lightbulb:

I'm probably going to do a review of the Floating Lightbulb itself one day, and when I do I'm probably going to say that Bengo is a more cerebral John Solomon. Bengo doesn't hate all webcomics - though the Floating Lightbulb doesn't do much in the way of actual reviews at all - but he certainly seems to hate most of the personages in mainstream webcomics. In his eyes, most big-time webcomics creators are self-promoting jerks who probably cheated to get to the top and as such are bad role models, and most webcomic bloggers are ego-strokers, often with rampant conflicts of interest, who shill the same comics over and over again. Not every webcomic blog gets this charge, not even biggies Tangents and Websnark; mostly the vitriol goes to Gary "Fleen" Tyrell and [Xaviar] Xerexes, proprietor of Comixtalk.

Shortly thereafter, Bengo wrote a post explaining, among other things, that he didn't hate all mainstream webcomics, he just reserved his vitriol for those grouped under the names of Dumbrella and Halfpixel. And even though he never mentioned me by name and I'm still not sure if he even knows of Da Blog's existence, I started to panic and planned to start this post with a comedown, stating that maybe I'd overstated his hatred.

Well, earlier this week he banged out a post that seemed to show where I might have gotten the idea he was a curmudgeon. Apparently a large number of webcomic creators are engaging in an e-e-evil plot to mislead Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere in order to maintain their own standing and keep webcomics mired in a cesspool of mediocrity. Oh yes, what they disseminate is nothing but a mess of LIES! But they won't succeed, oh no, even now their kingdoms are falling, and soon the curtain will fall away and THE TRUTH SHALL BE REVEALED! They can't keep it down forever! Ha ha ha, ha ha ha, aha ha ha ha ha hahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!!

(This isn't the first time I've sat through Bengo putting his tinfoil hat on, either. He seems to think that people who think Scott Kurtz is "nice" are victims of an elaborate charade and front so dead-on and uncanny he should be an actor, not a webcartoonist! Because it can't possibly be that Kurtz is just a complex, contradictory - GASP! - human being who feels nice in some circumstances and egotistical in others! Not that Kurtz being an arrogant jerk who thinks he's Scott McCloud's heir as Representative of All Webcomicdom but always ends up putting his foot in his mouth in doing so is exactly a secret...)

I don't want to give the impression I find TFL the conspiratorial ramblings of a madman. In fact, TFL is one of the better, or at least more interesting, blogs you'll find when it comes to advice for aspiring webcomickers. About a year ago, Bengo started trying to research webcomics in preparation of a new project he hoped to do with his wife Pug. Distressed at the paucity and contradictory nature of information, he started the Psychedelic Treehouse website as a storehouse of his findings, and started keeping a running log in TFL. Bengo nonetheless plowed on and ultimately contributed to two webcomics and a side project, while continuing to look for information on what to expect on the financial front. He became so distressed at the information in the HalfPixel group's "How to Make Webcomics" that after a bad interview with Dave "Sheldon" Kellett and Brad "Evil Inc." Guigar, he wrote a scathing post casting severe doubt on the book's business model that made him a lifelong enemy in Kurtz and is largely singlehandedly responsible for much of TFL's popularity, such as it is (which is to say "more than that of Da Blog").

The metaphor implied by the title is probably the most succinct summary of most of TFL's contents. Well, kind of. Sort of. Actually, according to an informal overview I did, only a little more than half Bengo's posts were classified as "ideas webcomickers can use, perhaps to increase their revenue or help their art, sometimes taking their cue from things existing webcomickers are doing. Often this takes the form of cool stuff on the Internet people can use. Other times it's highfalutin' ideas, concepts and classifications that would make Scott McCloud and Eric Burns(-White) blush." The rest, for the most part, is split fairly evenly between actual webcomic reviews, mere observations about the webcomic community, or ripping into people Bengo hates.

All of those three categories, to some extent or another, furthers the same goal as the first: educating aspiring webcomickers. Bengo reviews webcomics so we can learn from them, his recent posts on webcomic traffic trends were made with an eye to trying to find out why so aspiring webcomickers wouldn't fall into the same traps, and he doesn't want anyone looking to Scott Kurtz as a role model or have their business plan ruined by "How to Make Webcomics". This isn't just generic stuff you can find anywhere else on the Internet, either. Bengo pretty much assumes you're looking to enter webcomics for the long haul, and make some money from it at the same time, and maybe even join the Tier 1 Pantheon of Popular Webcomics. I can't vouch for the effiacy of any of the advice Bengo gives - I'm afraid I would have to classify his comics as Tier 3 and unreviewable until proven good (or at least potential-filled) - but there's a lot of stuff you won't find anywhere else (by which I mean you won't find any competing or affirming advice) and a few things where Bengo seems to be downright pioneering, daring to go where no one has gone before. Where else are you going to find stuff like this?

All of which means TFL has a rather interesting clientele in that it is written primarily not for the general public at large, but for aspiring webcomickers. What really makes this interesting is that a blog written entirely for aspiring webcomickers would ordinarily go entirely into the advice pool. Bengo writes for a specific subset of that clientele, yet he's also calling out the webcomics community at large for their practices that derail aspiring webcomickers. I think the closest thing to an equivalent I can think of would be Bengo's mortal enemy at Halfpixel at webcomics.com, yet even that site doesn't really go into current events or reviews or that sort of thing, yet despite the tagline of "webcomics news," TFL isn't really a news site either (by which I mean it's not much of a news site at all). (The tagline used to be "Webcomics Eureka", which was a little more accurate if a little redundant with the title and not entirely sensical.)

Now so far, my webcomic blog reviews have been of review sites, so I should probably say a few words about TFL's reviews. Briefly, they tend to focus on obscure webcomics, and somewhat surprisingly for TFL's normal subject matter, they tend to be rather basic, focusing on such things as what the setting is, what the format is, how good it is with mechanics, and what Bengo likes and what he thinks could be improved. They're short, general, and to-the-point, without too much of the rambling or dwelling on specifics of the Burns(-White)/Howard/Solomon/Wick crowd.

The Floating Lightbulb is the closest thing I've yet found to the Order of the Stick of webcomics blogs, in that it's hard for me to find anything (well, much) bad to say about it. If Bengo's insights into webcomics are vindicated - which really only happens when you become popular, as people either deconstruct your arguments or tell people how much you helped them; it's damn near impossible to do what the opposite of vindication is, since you generally don't get popular if you're wrong, and in any case Bengo may be well on his way - TFL (and Psychedelic Treehouse) could become an absolute must-read for anyone looking to jump into webcomics, as well as anyone else examining the field. And the Webcomic Blog List is not only a useful form of webcomic blog promotion, it's a useful resource for anyone looking for webcomic blogs to read, such as someone like me who's looking for more webcomic blogs to review.

The one big elephant in the living room where TFL is concerned is Bengo's sometimes-obsession with Dumbrella, Halfpixel, and their cohorts, which can come off as just trying to drum up attention by picking fights and proclaiming "everything you know is wrong!" (If Bengo decides to respond to this post in any way, I fully expect him to go on another possibly-conspiratorial rant about all the damage Kurtz and Co. do to webcomics just like all his others.) When Bengo isn't ripping into the self-proclaimed "role models" of webcomics, his posts are thought-provoking and insightful. Even when he is they can be enlightening and affirming. Either way, you're guaranteed to get your recommended daily allowance of brain food just about every day.

The Floating Lightbulb is, pending verification of Bengo's advice, most highly recommended. And I'm not just saying that to get on the Webcomic Blog List - TFL's on my RSS reader for good. As I said back in February, I'd bet anything Bengo would rip me and Da Blog to shreds, both for lavishing praise on him and focusing too much on popular webcomics for my own good (and maybe echoing Robert A. Howard's critique on top of that).

V's first question after recovering from the shock, assuming the fight doesn't continue: "How in the Lower Planes do you know about soul splices?" Hey, now that the robe's red and eyes're normal again, maybe Redcloak recognizes her as an OOTS member.

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

Technically, I still owe you an OOTS post for April, and this doesn't count. But it does give me some ideas for a full-fledged OOTS post, which I was planning to have next week... assuming I can get a post I was planning for this week in by then. Because it's been too long since I reviewed another webcomic blog.

Yes, Blogger-in-Draft is still making it impossible to upload images and forcing me to go back to old Blogger (screwing people who had made Draft their default dashboard and can't go back no matter what they try), why do you ask?

But anyway, since I normally make posts on Big Events and the forums are down as usual, I might as well make some comments here.

First, reflecting back on my original post on the splice, for two reasons. First, Burlew did a good job of keeping us on our toes with the splice. I started out thinking that, despite the power level, V had a good chance of hanging on to it into the next book; then it was revealed that V would lose splices one at a time and I thought that meant it made the most sense for them to all be lost within the current book; then plotlines started getting used up left and right, and things kept happening to V and he never lost a splice to them, and I started thinking there wasn't enough room for two splices to be lost in the relatively small time left in the current book. Then he decided to take on Xykon.

The pattern established with Haer(t)a seemed obvious: use an epic spell that would see the spliced caster appear "in the background" behind Vaarsuvius, then that caster would have their splice lost. While all the plotlines were being wrapped up, V had already used Ganonron's epic spell, so every time something happened that might ordinarily cause a splice break, I figured that meant V had one more teleport in her. And there was enough portent in V's decision to run to Xykon to figure that last teleport had arrived.

It would have been bad enough, in my view, for V to lose Ganonron alone and thus the ability to teleport away from the scene of the crime. I can certainly see the logic in Haer(t)a being the only lone splice lost - to establish that a splice could be lost at any time, to take her spells off the table, that sort of thing. But the fact that Jephton was not able to get off an epic spell doesn't sit well with me, and tells me that either Rich couldn't find a place for a third epic spell (a second "Epic Teleport" doesn't count) or changed his plans at some point after #643 - possibly, given the suddenness of the last two strips, just lost patience with the splice. Certainly I could have seen Ganonron lost but Jephton able to get off an epic spell against Xykon before he was lost - it seems Rich couldn't figure out what to do that would be big enough to give that shadow shot. (Some forumites suggested Jephton be given a completely ineffectual joke spell, though, so even that's not a show-stopper.)

Second, after the previous strip I figured that since Xykon had just fired off two Energy Drains and might have more in store, severely weakening the splices (seriously, if Jephton lost all his epic spell slots after the first, he might well be lower level than V after the second) the prudent thing for V to do was get out while the getting was good. Therefore, I figured something would happen to prevent V from leaving. Survey says... not really. I can see going for the Bixby's Hand after the energy drains, but staying in the game after Xykon neutralizes even that? With your next move being a simple Disintegrate?

It actually makes an odd level of sense, but in a way I doubt Rich intended. While it's possible that either V, Rich, or both weren't thinking the circumstances through (less likely than you'd think in the former's case with two more clear-thinking souls along for the ride with the most to lose), I prefer to think that this is V's pride and hubris rearing its ugly head again. V really does believe "my power... EXCEEDS yours!" and he can still defeat Xykon with brute force even after evidence comes up to the contrary, only realizing the prudency of retreat once it's too late. (That pre-current-book V's style of pounding on a problem until it falls fits the situation is an idea worth considering as well.)

I'm holding off on most of my future predictions until next week, and even then I'll want to hold off on some because I have a between-books state-of planned for when the current book ends. But for now I have only this: I think we're more than set up for the remainder of the book between any Team Evil-Vaarsuvius discussions and any discussions surrounding Roy's resurrection. We're already about halfway through the "20-strip cooldown period" I've identified at the end of each book. I can easily see three strips or more to wrap up the battle and have some catching up to do and tie up loose ends here, plus at least three strips to cover Roy's resurrection, throw in the usual splash page at the end - that's seven right there, out of about ten - and since we haven't seen any of the Linear Guild in the book so far, if they're to have any real substansive role in the next book - and it's becoming a fairly firm consensus they will, for reasons relating to Elan's and Nale's family - or just appear in this one, they better show up soon.

And if there's any importance to Roy meeting V's "subcontractors", could it be the knowledge that V could have lost them and remain trapped in Azure City, life status uncertain?

Image upload hasn't been working on Blogger in Draft since at least last weekend's Darths and Droids post. If they won't fix it, I will.

(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized diary of death.)

Well, the idea that every theme would reset to the beginning, and my idea for the last episode of IWC, appears to be dead.

Instead, we get the first appearance of "Me" in over four months, seemingly unaffected by the chaos enveloping IWC in the meantime.

If I may say so myself, I would suggest that David Morgan-Mar would need to do a lot of lawyering to claim he hasn't violated his original "someone dies!!!" strip. "No ghosts"? "No witty banter with the Head Death before returning"? Well, technically the Me that got killed didn't become a ghost, and technically this isn't the same Me that had "witty banter with the Head Death"...

Honestly, I'm not sure what to expect from IWC for the rest of the year, or the rest of its existence.

I'd tweet this if I had a tweeter. Or maybe comment on OOTS.

(From Darths and Droids. Click for full-sized old friend.)

Honestly, I don't understand Sally at all anymore.

A couple of weeks ago she was dismissing not only Jar-Jar but the entire game as incredibly "childish".

Now not only is she back in the game, but - despite still dismissing Jar-Jar as "stupid" - she's going back into the same well of incredibly ridiculous characters.

Is she growing up, or isn't she? And is she just now a device to invent everything ridiculous you can find in Star Wars, whether or not it makes sense for her to have a character from which to do so?

If it weren't for David Morgan-Mar's large buffer I'd think he was responding to my last IWC post.

(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized things beyond mortal ken.)

So by all appearances, my theory that IWC just underwent a permanent reboot to the beginning has been shot to hell.

The funny thing is, though, every theme that has had at least two strips since the reboot - Space, Shakespeare, Martians, Cliffhangers, and Steve and Terry, especially Space, Martians, and Steve and Terry (Cliffhangers seems to want it both ways) - has backed up the idea of starting over from the beginning.

So the likeliest idea is that - uh oh - the Irregular Crisis isn't over yet and there's still more madness yet to come.

But I like the idea that the last four months of the Fantasy theme, the entire destruction of the universe, stay in the afterlife, and brief flashback to a tavern, has all been part of an extended flashback sequence and we're only now picking up the plot thread from this strip.

Although... is that the Balrog I see in the last panel? Is Kyros not telling the whole truth?

Rich probably had this strip's title prepared before he even knew much about the circumstances.

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

The Order of the Stick - with the exception of a living Roy - is in one piece once again. The great, overriding problem driving much of the action of the current book has, at long last and at much cost and after many story months (and a year and a half real time), been solved.

And - with the exception of the heartfelt reunion between Elan and Haley at the end of this strip - it's largely an afterthought, its main purpose seemingly to frustrate Vaarsuvius with another case of a problem being solved without her.

An Order of the Stick split in twain? Anymore, that's child's play. We've got a Vaarsuvius powered up with more power than he could ever imagine... and no place to use it, driving him further and further into the mouth of madness. There's the real story at this point. The reunion of the Order is the end of a story, but V's journey is only beginning, and this reunion is only a part of V's larger story.

This seems to be underscored by what Roy does in this strip: make contact with the two remaining souls spliced to V. They, and V, have kept the Order (except for Belkar, but he doesn't care) unsuspecting of V's new nature so far, and they'll probably do so for a while by the rules of drama. With everyone there, Roy's resurrection seems to be imminent, so if that's going to have an impact other than Roy knowing there are two souls spliced to V, it better have one fast.

I've vascillated for a while on how long V is going to hold on to the two remaining souls - would it last into the next book, or end right before this book did? Paradoxically, when V lost the first splice it moved me from the former camp into the latter, not the other way around, to best make V's story self-contained. But as the opportunities for a lost splice have dwindled recently (and as the reunion of the Order has been treated as an afterthought), I've moved back into the former camp, and depending on what happens next I could still be moved back to the latter camp.

On another note, it'll be interesting to see what Rich does with the remaining 20-plus strips in the current book. Normally Rich ends the book with a relative cooldown from the hot, plot-advancing action immediately preceding, if the past two books are any indication. But there's a lot of space to fill and I don't think Rich can fill it all with talking and resurrection. Rich does often fill this space with set-up for the situation for much of the next book, not just in the final strip, and I'm beginning to think V has one more teleportation in her, considering she still hasn't lost a second splice despite already using a second epic spell.

The Order's back, but Rich is already thinking about the next book.

My departure from Irregular Webcomic may not be long in coming.

(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized inverse cube law.)

I've been waiting for nearly three weeks for some indication of exactly what happened when the universe was recreated, and I may have gotten my answer.

I wondered for a while if there would be some historical "glitches" that would continue the theme of the Irregular Crisis, until I read the Pirates theme from beginning to end. After that, my main hypothesis was that all the themes that had started in medias res in some way (which is to say, almost all of them except Espionage, with the caveat that Harry Potter and Star Wars are out of order and order of events doesn't matter in other, more gag-a-day themes like Shakespeare) were rebooted from the beginning and would be carried up to about the point when Irregular Webcomic! had taken them up originally.

Death of Inhaling Hatmaking Chemicals' explanation doesn't really contradict that hypothesis, and it seems to suggest there won't be any glitches that require a furthering of the crisis storyline, the "scrambled history" serving as an excuse for any accidental inconsistencies Morgan-Mar may introduce. Like this. Or this.

On the other hand, it could prove to be a case of overconfidence and saying "it's probably nothing" to something that very much is something...

Or it really is nothing, and merely a reference to the influences events on the Infinite Featureless Plane of Death have on the new universe, such as in the new Scientific Revolution theme, or with the Cliffhangers' heroes having dropped to Charon.

Regardless, were it not for the curious disappearance of the Me theme from the list of themes after the white-blue-red-black transition, I'd wonder if a reappearance of Me was in the offing, and perhaps a (possibly fictionalized) account of Morgan-Mar's life up to 2002 in the works... setting up a truly great final strip (whited out to avoid interfering with or otherwise influencing Morgan-Mar's plans):

"Hey, there's comics on the Internet! Ha ha ha! What a waste of time."

Hey, I didn't say it was going to be original...

It's Webcomic Sunday (or is it Monday?) here on Da Blog. Think of it as a makeup for the paucity of posts last week.

(From Darths and Droids. Click for full-sized stupid childish game.)

I have to say, this strip caught me off-guard because I'm only used to the kiddy, making-stupid-stuff-up, "meesa" fun-loving Sally of Phantom Menace.

In a sense, it's a little odd because we haven't seen all that much of Jar-Jar here. The last time Sally showed up, it was to mention how much "fun" the mysterious fantasy game played between movies was from Ben's perspective - presumably, a role-playing game like this one. Was she embarrassed by the stupidity displayed by Ben and Annie in chasing down Amidala's assassin? There's a hint of Sally being ashamed of how she played in Phantom Menace, but she's still making up stupid stuff in the same strip, and she seemed enthusiastic enough when the campaign started, but on the other hand she's had maybe one line in character...

A quick check of Wikipedia shows that Jar-Jar does have an important role in the plot later, as the representative that serves as Palpatine's patsy in granting Palpatine Hitler-like emergency powers. But in the movie, Jar-Jar is merely acting as Senator in Amidala's absense, while they're co-Senators in Darths and Droids, so the Comic Irregulars could - though it's a long shot - have alternate plans in mind. Especially since Jar Jar only makes a cameo in Episode III.

Still, it's interesting to wonder if Sally's disgruntlement with the game here leaves her open to manipulation by the GM later... or even if she deliberately derails the game and the GM's plans and sets up the plot of the next four movies without being present for any of them.

Eventful day in webcomics I follow, as we still have two more posts to go.

Apparently the ball's in my court now. But I wonder if it ruined the original plan.

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

If you're here for Sandsday's Global Warming series this post will make no sense.

So I finally got around to coming up with an idea for an OOTS post that didn't require me to constantly put out updates on the current state of the strip, especially important with how slow the strip has updated over the past month-plus. (About two strips a week by my calculations.) And I get completely distracted with research for the activities going on in Sandsday now, so I only get around to actually writing it when I'm more than a week behind schedule. I may lay off on the webcomic posts for the rest of the month and return only for OOTS towards the end.

So let's go back, back in time, before any of the events covered in the strip itself, before even the events (well, most of them; again, I don't actually have either of them) in the prequel books.

To the beginning of the OOTS-verse? Hardly. To the end of the group generally known (but in-strip only by a strip title) as the Order of the Scribble, when the gates were freshly sealed and all that was left was to decide how to protect them.

Each of the five surviving members of the group has their own ideas for how to protect the gates, and the disagreement becomes so acrimonious that it's a couple seconds away from bloodshed when Serini proposes a compromise. Each member retires to the site of one of the gates and protects that gate in their own way. Soon protects his gate with the honor of his paladins, Girard with his illusions, and so on. That's pretty much familiar to OOTS fans, and important for understanding the entire plot, including events still to come.

Serini also proposes a non-interference clause, that her soon-to-be-former teammates agree not to interfere in each other's gates. "We'll set up some kind of monitoring divination to tell if someone else's gate is broken, but that's it. No spying, no 'just checking in' visits, no nothing." The clear fear is that someone might visit someone else's gate and pick up with the fighting to impose their method of protection on the gate, or at least tell them how to run it.

Much as it tries, I don't think strip #277 does a good job dramatizing the conflict between the Scribblers at this point, devoting only two and a half panels to it; Shojo's narration almost seems to glide right past it, but it contains clues that the former teammates are almost downright enemies at this point, intending to impose their will on the others by any means necessary and burning with hatred, which is why I'd be shocked not to see one of the remaining prequels devoted to the Scribblers. So Serini's non-interference clause is an enforced cease-fire: each member gets their own domain. Any member entering the borders of that domain is effectively invading, possibly even declaring war. This is a protection against anyone destroying a gate's protection out of spite or at least interfering in how it's run. Because the members vow not even to contact each other, they have no way of knowing whether or not another member is coming in peace - repeated subsequent mutual violations of the oath by Dorukan and Lirian aside.

I explain all this because understanding it is especially important for understanding subsequent events - especially when it comes to judging Shojo, and whether the ends really did justify the means.

First, we have to ask the question: does Serini's non-interference clause hinder the effort to protect the gates against a threat that might attempt to unlock one gate, then another, then another? In theory, no. That's why Serini slipped in the "monitoring divination" to alert the others if one of the gates gets cracked: so that the remaining members could potentially buttress their own defenses, or possibly even send in their own protection.

The problem in hindsight is that the divination doesn't appear to provide details. Shojo had to send paladins to investigate the destruction of Lirian's Gate, and scried to take a look at the ruins of Dorukan's dungeon, and neither told him anything useful - certainly not as much as an unplanned visit from Eugene Greenhilt did. Shojo couldn't publicly use the information he picked up from Eugene, as it was basically hearsay, but he could bring the Order of the Stick in on trumped-up charges to talk things over, and establish the threat to the other gates more clearly.

What the Order of the Stick can do that the Sapphire Guard can't is check on the status of the other two gates, so the next question we need to ask to understand what's going on is: Why does Shojo feel the need to do that? What, exactly, does Shojo hope to gain from it?

Shojo tells Roy that "Without concrete evidence of a threat to all the gates, [the paladins] wouldn't consider checking on the other two." Because the first they hear of Xykon and Redcloak is from the OOTS themselves, and that only establishes that they were responsible for what happened at Dorukan's Gate (not necessarily Lirian's), and the only way Shojo knows that Xykon is still out there and still a threat is because Eugene told him, for all they know the destruction of the two gates were isolated incidents and have no bearing on the other three.

Presumably the other two gates, having their own divinations, are aware of what happened to those first two gates and made their own investigations - though given Girard's age and race it's unlikely he's still alive to stand guard at his Gate to respond to them, and therefore unclear whether anyone is - but it's impossible to know that for certain, or what they found out, or what preparations they might be making, or whether that's sufficient. So the first part of what Shojo wants the Order of the Stick to do upon reaching one of the gates is to find out if they can corroborate that there's still a standing threat out there, to tell them what Shojo and the OOTS already know but can't tell the paladins.

But Shojo wasn't around when the Order of the Scribble broke up. He doesn't see why the proprietors of each gate can't support each other. If for whatever reason, say, Girard's Gate isn't set up to defend itself from Xykon and his minions, why shouldn't Shojo send support? After all, the fate of the world is at stake, right? So the second, more implicit, part of sending the OOTS is to stall for time: make sure that Xykon doesn't achieve his goal before Shojo can learn a damned thing about him. (Besides, what better way to corroborate that Xykon's still a threat than a second round of first-hand evidence?) In fact, one gets the impression that - at least from Roy's perspective ("the week AFTER we finish off Xykon") - the real purpose of the investigation is not really "investigation" but nipping the problem in the bud. That's why Roy goes to the Oracle first to make sure the OOTS go to the right gate, not just pick one of the gates at random.
All that means that when Roy subsequently accidentially rules out Soon's Gate as a choice when asking the Oracle which gate Xykon will attack? It's not really his fault. If it's anyone's fault, it's Shojo's.

The Order of the Stick wasn't hired to defend Soon's Gate, yet - even if Shojo isn't confident in the ability of his paladins to handle the situation, he doesn't have enough concrete evidence to make any preparations for battle. Shojo hired them to go out to another gate, come back, inform Shojo of the situation, and then Shojo could use that evidence to make sure the Sapphire Guard was ready. Shojo doesn't really have a quicker path, so whether or not he'd considered the possibility that Xykon might attack his own gate while the OOTS were investigating another was kind of irrelevant, unless the kind of evidence he had in mind was the aforementioned first-hand evidence. In any case, he has an early-warning system, right?

In that sense, even before her attempt at redemption, Miko is really the savior of Azure City and perhaps the world, because she, not the OOTS, meets Xykon first-hand and warns of the coming invasion, even if it was in Xykon's plans all along. In fact, if Shojo was confident in his paladins' ability to handle the situation, it was well founded, because ultimately, the Order of the Stick has no impact on the operative part of the battle, for the gate, and if they have any it's negative, by giving Hinjo someone to talk to about the gate's location and be accidentially overheard by Xykon and Redcloak making their battle plans. Here's a summary of how that part goes down:

Yes, Xykon does get decloaked because of Haley's quick thinking, and slowed down by Roy, but Xykon just kills him and makes for the tower anyway. (Incidentially, re-reading the former strip for this post was the first time I ever really realized that "Team Evil" is in fact used in-strip.) I doubt the Sapphire Guard really needed Roy, or even Xykon's decloaking, to help them stall for time and get set up - they were likely ready before the battle started, and it doesn't do them much good anyway. So the gate is effectively saved by the ghosts of paladins past attacking Xykon, and Xykon struggling to hold them off until Redcloak shows up - and Redcloak, incidentially, shows up because a catapult shot, not one of the OOTS, killed a hobgoblin, and despite an attempt at a diversion from Haley, he runs basically unopposed into the castle.

Redcloak comes up with a plan that mostly succeeds in taking out the ghosts with the exception of Soon himself, who has Xykon and Redcloak on the ropes when Miko shows up and blows the gate - and how does Miko break out of prison? Tsukiko (who has zero interaction with any of the OOTS except irrelevant interaction with Belkar until the current book) causes enough damage to the prison for Nale to break the Linear Guild out and leave Miko alone, which also happens to be enough damage for Miko to make her own escape - again, zero OOTS involvement. Unless you want to count what Miko overheard that led her to lump Shojo in with the alleged OOTS-Xykon conspiracy and resulted in Shojo's death - again, making matters worse from the outset, but if Miko doesn't end up in prison, skip the first phase of the battle for the tower, and end up blowing the gate, and instead gets afflicted by the Symbol of Insanity or maybe joins O-Chul in the first attempt to blow the gate, then Soon's plan works, Xykon and Redcloak are destroyed, and the plot cuts short right then and there.

As for the rest of the battle, Team Evil wins pretty handily there, with the effect that the non-Roy OOTS contingent is pretty much lucky to be alive, so the OOTS weren't much help there either. The OOTS, effectively, were spectators for most of the battle. The OOTS take out the first-round elementals but not without them blowing a hole in the wall (so the goblinoids would have won the battle that much quicker), Roy slowed down Xykon, Vaarsuvius put up a defense at the breach (which kills hobgoblins but ultimately just plays into Team Evil's hands), Belkar saves Hinjo from an assassination attempt, Roy saves Vaarsuvius from one of the Xykon-decoys, Belkar takes out another decoy and uses it to take out more hobgoblins, V is helpless when everyone files into the breach (and V ultimately causes more deaths on the Azure side), Durkon saves Hinjo from another assassination attempt, and Elan saves their butts by convincing the hobgoblins they're all dead. So the OOTS cause more damage to Team Evil's side and save Hinjo's life multiple times, but ultimately have next to no real effect on Team Evil's plans until Haley starts resisting, and even then it's minimal until whatever point that the city is retaken. What effect they do have, as outlined above, is negative.

Shojo didn't need the OOTS to defend Soon's Gate (if anything he would have been better off with them elsewhere), and they weren't of any use in defending the city, except that the Sapphire Guard's situation would have been far worse if Hinjo had followed Shojo to the grave. Likely the city would have been left in the hands of someone like Kubota even after whatever point the city got retaken, but that assumes both Shojo and Hinjo were taken out in the middle of battle, hardly a sure thing especially with Shojo's deception and age requiring him to take a passive role.

There's one other thing we need to consider, and that's the fact the Sapphire Guard doesn't disseminate any information about how the other gates are defended to its paladins, something that makes no sense to Redcloak. That, it's made clear, is the non-interference clause rearing its ugly head again, because if each gate defense group knew the details of the other gate defenses they could exploit any weaknesses in them. Since they're not going to be contacting each other, they have no need to know each other's defenses anyway. And although it might appear from this post that the non-interference clause hindered the goal of protecting the gates from threat in the long run (ie, now), it's here that it provides one advantage: keeping important information from falling into the wrong hands. Redcloak attempts to interrogate O-Chul into learning the secrets of Girard's Gate, but it ain't gonna work.

(This also makes clear that although Redcloak has extensively read Serini's diary, it hasn't provided him with this end of the story, the exact reason why the Scribblers took one gate per member and defended them so differently, and why they haven't come out in force to crush him already. He's just been an unwilling beneficiary - and victim - of it.)

Serini's compromise is arguably one of the major driving forces of the entire plot of OOTS, at least following the destruction of Dorukan's Gate, and it's interesting that both Shojo and Redcloak have essentially discounted it out of a lack of knowledge and appreciation for the exact circumstances (or in Redcloak's case, knowledge of the compromise at all). That suggests that if and when we do get a prequel book on the Order of the Scribble, we should take it as a sign that someone that does have such an appreciation is coming soon. In any case, there's a pretty good chance we can expect it to rear its ugly head again at the remaining two gates and send the plot off in directions currently unexpected.