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”.
-From the last time I posted on IWC.

Want to know what was happening in the Space theme? You’ll never guess in a million years.

No, seriously. Guess.

The Space people were role-playing their first adventures together.

The Fantasy and Space themes, with their role-playing miniatures representing their characters, have always hewed closest to the idea of representing a role-playing game, and Space in particular has hewed close enough to it that the characters actually noticed the death of Me, but still, I did not see that coming. Not to mention the metaphysical questions it raises concerning the lack of Me.

As for the anticipated resumption of the Irregular Crisis, that doesn’t seem to be happening – at the start of the new year, Me solved his “on the run from Death” problem by settling down “in my own home town, with my only remaining family”, and that seems to have been the last it’s been mentioned. Instead of a resumption of the Irregular Crisis, we seem to be getting a new Irregular Crisis, this one composed primarily of time-travel shenanigans with the 1940s turning into a hub of activity. One of the Martians that buzzed Roswell is being held at Area 51, where the 1980s Mythbusters, after moving to an alternate universe where the Nazis won World War II (suggesting the “scrambled history” may have indeed been major), have shown up, become their own grandfathers, and posed as Martians. Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley have started using their Doctor Who-esque time machine to recruit great scientific figures throughout history to travel to 1940, where the Pirates have turned up, as have Steve, Terry, and Jane Goodall, in a parody of Casablanca to boot (no, I am not making any of this up), and you just know that Cliffhangers, already set just a few years earlier, will get involved somehow, where the protagonists have learned of Hitler’s plans to conquer Europe.

(Mythbusters used to be one of my favorite themes and one of the few I would follow religiously if DMM offered per-theme RSS feeds, but it’s been turning me off of late. The closest we’ve seen of the “real” adult Adam and Jamie have been their Nazi-victory alternate universe counterparts, who just caused a rip in the space-time continuum by bringing unstable explosives to a trip through time; otherwise, it’s been all the 80s versions and their would-be grandfathers. And despite DMM working to preserve a PG rating, the whole “Adam and Jamie become their own each other’s grandparents” thing, besides feeling ripped off from Futurama, has just been painful to read.)

This crisis isn’t, so far, as far-reaching as the last one; Fantasy, Space, Nigerian Finance Minister, Shakespeare, and the part-time themes have maintained their own plots and haven’t gotten involved, yet. And beyond those themes (save Space), several other themes have, eventually, gotten to the point where they have picked up where they left off without any indication that anything happened, only getting diverted recently into the new crisis, namely Scientific Revolution, Cliffhangers, and Steve and Terry. On the other hand, other themes have had their disruptions feed directly into the new crisis, namely Martians and Mythbusters.

The new crisis is far from over, and knowing DMM is likely to continue to build right to the last day of the year. But if it weren’t for DMM’s reluctance to make money off his webcomic, I would think he’s trying to use all these crises to jazz up interest and maintain readership in his comic, using the hope of a resolution to string people along as long as possible. Instead, I’m left to wonder if the man who surprised me by saying my idea of IWC consisting of (then) sixteen comics in one, each of those comics being irregular, had never occured to him before, has gotten tired of the gimmick.

While writing this post, it occurred to me that the comic in which Me dies, effectively the start of the Irregular Crisis, is #1800. We’re now up to #2743, so the leadup to the Irregular Crisis, the Crisis itself, and everything leading up to this new crisis, has taken up a third of the comic’s entire existence. Add on top of that the fact that the multi-comic gimmick evolved over a very long time, starting around #30 and continuing past #100, and we’re fast approaching the point  (in about a year’s time plus) where the multi-comic gimmick as it’s best known, before all the themes started being united by crises, will have lasted only about half of the comic’s existence. As I’ve talked about before, David Morgan-Mar started a webcomic not really knowing what he was doing, only knowing that this newfangled “webcomic” thing sounded cool. The comic was titled “Irregular Webcomic” because he really didn’t anticipate the comic becoming as regular as it became – he’d just throw up something whenever he felt like throwing something up. In fact, re-reading that post, I’m reminded of the mini-crisis in 2007 involving four themes and a Martian invasion.

Irregular Webcomic! has been undergoing a slow Cerebus syndrome for most of its existence, and the point of no return was arguably a stretch from #457 to #793. For all of that stretch, a new Cliffhangers strip appeared, like clockwork, every three comics (which basically meant every three days). It was this stretch that led to Morgan-Mar sending the Fantasy cast off on a quest, because he’d come to realize that themes with ongoing storylines were easier to write than themes without, which benefited themes like Cliffhangers at the expense of themes like Fantasy and Space. Although the Scientific Revolution theme, which until recently was as TV Tropes described it – “an excuse for DMM to write heartfelt annotations about Newton, Halley, Pascal, Pasteur, Linnaeus and their contemporaries” – may have represented a backslide towards more gag-a-day comics with how relatively fast strips were coming out, the other themes without lengthy plotlines have not been heard from at all. Harry Potter and Imperial Rome have seen a grand total of two comics apiece since the reboot of the universe, and Star Wars and Supers have other reasons not to appear very often (Darths and Droids and the fact it’s hand-drawn by another party, respectively).

So perhaps it’s a natural progression from giving all the themes plotlines to trying to create an over-arching plotline for Irregular Webcomic! as a whole. But in trying to give people a reason to read IWC every single day, Morgan-Mar runs the risk of falling into PVP/Goats Syndrome (which I really need to settle on a single name for) by shoehorning some of the sillier themes, like Mythbusters and Steve and Terry, into these ominous, world-threatening plotlines. Most of those same themes successfully went through Cerebus Syndrome on their own terms by embracing their silliness as part of the plotline (though not always to the embedded extent Rich Burlew did), but when I see, say, the complete comic relief character of Steve panicking over the impending unraveling of time itself, I’m not sure whether I should be sitting on the edge of my seat or tipping it over guffawing in laughter.

Morgan-Mar seems to want to have it both ways, having a slapstick humor comic while also giving people a reason to follow the comic as a whole instead of single themes, and he doesn’t seem to be doing a good job of getting the two to work together. And it doesn’t help that the disparate themes are not very compatible with one another, spanning a span of time from the 1400s to the far future (not counting Imperial Rome, Fantasy, or several themes’ trips to the age of the dinosaurs), spanning nearly every genre imaginable, and spanning the entire globe and beyond, so that even giving them a reason to interact with one another to this extent requires inventing ridiculous contrivances.

I’m interested enough in where Morgan-Mar is going with this new crisis to keep reading to at least the end of the year, but fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. I’m not going to keep reading for a delayed resolution that isn’t there.

(If this post comes off a little more critical than I originally intended, well, re-read the title. I was tired by the time I was done.)

I still can’t get over what Rich did three strips ago. He took one of the most clichéd setups in all of literature, one of the most anticipated comics in the entire strip and one almost guaranteed to be hard to read, and gave it a quintessentially OOTSian twist, somehow exceeding expectations, and making it at least a little easier to read in the process.

In the meantime, however, we’ve been getting some long-overdue exposition. But before I relate the substance of the exposition, a note about the tone of the comic recently. Much of the current book has been a throwback to the very earliest days of OOTS, partially a side effect of enough plot points being wrapped up in the third book to render tenuous the connection to any future books, a problem Book 4 exacerbated. A month ago, I suggested that this led to a disconnection from the plot, the plot as an artificial goal without a lot of immediacy. (By the way, something I forgot to mention in that post: “Don’t Split the Party”? Really? I can understand the “we’ve gone to the classical literature well too often” rationale for avoiding the forum-favorite “A Tale of Two Parties”, but did you really have to go with the most uncreative, literal, bland title imaginable?)

However, especially since Tarquin took his helmet off, we’ve seen the good side of getting back to OOTS’ roots as well: a certain informal, fun-loving tone that isn’t afraid to resort to silliness. Partly it’s because the personalities of Elan and Tarquin bounce off one another, but the punchline of 724 is driven entirely by Gannji, and comes entirely from the inherent silliness of trying to pass a can of soup off as a “thermal detonator”. It’s kind of wonky and gives the impression Gannji’s personality is being warped by that of Elan and Tarquin, and it’s a little reminiscent of OOTS past, but in a good way. This same tone has continued into strip 725, where Tarquin’s narration is more than a little reminiscent of Shojo or Hinjo, or even Nale himself. And while 726 starts with awkward dialogue, you can’t help but get a smile on your face when Elan evokes some of his old antics (as much as I’ll have to say about Elan’s seemingly inconsistent character later).

Tarquin tells us tantalizingly little that we probably couldn’t have figured out ourselves: After his own attempt at a short-lived kingdom, Tarquin switched to mercenary work with Malack, his old buddy, which he’s been doing for fifteen years. When the Empire of Blood was conquered, Nale tried to be crowned instead, and – evidently with most of the original Linear Guild already in tow – fought his father and killed three of Malack’s children.

Nonetheless, there are some tantalizing elements of even this short, sketchy account (which may become fodder for another prequel down the line). Not only did Tarquin not start out on the Western Continent, Malack was “an old adventuring pal of mine”. If all Nale knows of Tarquin is his adventures on the Western Continent, as seems likely, it’s very possible that Tarquin did not start out as a bloodthirsty general, but an adventurer not unlike Elan – perhaps filling the role of Belkar crossed with Roy. (Worth noting that Elan and Nale’s mother was Tarquin’s first wife, and he’s gone on to have at least four more since – admittedly likely broken by the turmoil of the region.)

Moreover, if Malack has been serving as a mercenary High Priest for at least 15 years, it’s likely that Haley was wrong about the Empress of Blood being a figurehead, at least originally – she’s just grown fat and happy while on the throne (smart enough to kick Thog’s ass, not smart enough to be an effective ruler). (Also worth noting that the Empress of Blood’s two-year reign with no apparent challengers appears to be above average for the Western Continent.)

Oh, and then there’s the future to worry about… Haley’s “note” for Roy has to come into play, so the reunion of the OOTS can’t be as simple as V’s Sending (perhaps (s)he’s physically incapable of cramming a message into 25 words? Roy, Durkon, and Belkar come in guns a-blazin’?), and if Elan’s paying attention he’ll recognize that Haley’s concerns about Tarquin’s evilness will bear fruit as well. And then there’s the prospect of Tarquin knowing what happened to Haley’s father (a thought: might Bozzok’s “friends on the western continent” be related to Tarquin’s other “adventuring pals”?) and supporting the OOTS’ hunt for Girard’s Gate…

I am in no condition to be doing the heavy thinking required to make a blog post, let alone the schoolwork I’m behind almost the entire quarter on. (Let’s just say Thursday wasn’t a very good day for me.)

But… damn if Rich didn’t mostly make up for a mediocre first quarter of the book (and especially a current storyline that’s been dragging a little) with a strip you could tell he was waiting for as expectantly as the general. And damn if that’s totally not how I would have expected the general or Elan’s father to look or act like, and yet totally makes sense in retrospect.

I’ll likely have more to say later, as at this point I’m really interested in the backstory behind what’s happening now (the “Elan’s father = Tyrinar” theories are on life support at this point, but the idea of a connection between them is tantalizing), including why Tarquin put the hit out on Nale rather than the guy who had a vendetta against him (Malack), and getting a character two strips old seriously fleshed out, not to mention furthering the story itself.

(Seriously, Elan? An entire fatherless childhood is worth the one moment you stumble upon him? I shouldn’t be surprised given Elan’s propensity for the dramatic, but damn if it doesn’t suggest he has issues…)

Back in September, I stopped following OOTS and instead started on an archive binge from beginning to end.

Last month, I finished it.

Now, part of the reason for the binge taking so long was because of a side project I was working on at the same time, related to the binge but in retrospect distracting from its intended main goal. Once that side project caused the binge to slow to a crawl, I elected to postpone it until I had more time to work on it. Which, thanks to various other miscellaneous distractions, turned out to be this February, and in retrospect I should have postponed it even longer, because the related effects may turn out to be far more far-reaching (more on that later). But there’s a part of me that wonders if the length of the binge may have been a subconscious response on my part to the sub-par quality of the strip as of late.

In retrospect, I may have just barely missed one of the greatest single stretches in the history of webcomics, the stretch collected in the War and XPs book collection. If, as people have suggested, OOTS’s Cerebus Syndrome can be dated to the trial sequence at the end of the previous book (an increasingly dodgy proposition, as I’ll get to in a moment), and OOTS’s Cerebus Syndrome is a defining feature of what makes the comic great (as opposed to a series of D&D in-jokes), then the Golden Age of OOTS can be fairly exactly pinned down to that one book. A case could be made that you could pin it down to that stretch anyway – everything from about comic #380 to the end of the Battle of Azure City is pretty much one long Wham Episode. It’s almost stating the obvious that the greatest comic in the history of OOTS so far came from that stretch, whatever that comic may be. But in any case, book 4 seemed to be a significant disappointment. As awesome as V’s final descent into madness was, it seemed the exception and not the rule.

Now, OOTS being off its game is a little like The Simpsons being off its game, at least from the perspective of those who kept voting “Never Jumped” for that show on the old Jump the Shark site. OOTS’ worst is still better than the best of a lot of comics (the likes of Dresden Codak, 8-Bit Theater, and Scary Go Round come to mind – those of you who just shouted Ctrl+Alt+Del may remove yourselves now). Still, book 4 was marred by clunky dialogue, questionable characterization, a disturbing density of strips that are painful to read, and a general lack of the heart that characterized previous books. (Book 4 is perhaps more OOTS-dominated than any book since book 1, and is the first book in which the Linear Guild doesn’t directly appear. The unwillingness to go to anyone other than the OOTS for more than ten strips, if you don’t count Super-V’s attempt to engage Xykon and various IFCC shenanigans, may have come off as laziness.)

Of course, the poster child for iffy characterization in Book 4 is Celia, who seemingly stepped right into Miko’s role as the most hated character in the strip. Celia had so many problems that sorting between them proved to be a challenge. Seemingly out of the blue, Celia became a holier-than-thou pacifist idiot, going against her prior characterization in the process, in a seemingly pointless manner, if the existence of a thread asking what the point of her presence was during my absence is any indication. (Tellingly, I know of no similar thread for Roy on the material plane outside the visit to the Oracle.) Celia was not even particularly consistent about being a pacifist – not only did it go against her willingness to zap Nale and Thog, it also went against her willingness to defend the OOTS (“professional murderers”) to Shojo’s court, and she eventually found herself blatantly cheerleading Haley’s slaying of her own former friends like nobody’s business. I’m still partial to my theory that she was just too ashamed of her limited capability in battle, and when Haley asked if it was a conscientious objection, Celia ran with it rather than admit the truth – the only other consistent interpretation is that Celia is perfectly fine with other people killing for her, and if that was the case I don’t think she would have had a problem with Belkar killing a hobgoblin, since it seems fairly obvious that her ploy to escape them is motivated more by a desire to avoid killing, whatever the base of that desire, than the concern for the Resistance she espouses (if that were the case she’d have brought it up right off the bat), not to mention she wouldn’t have stopped the very killing she’d cheered on earlier. (At least my theory doesn’t make her an incomprehensible raging hypocrite.) Rich’s attempts to explain or play off the most blatant self-contradiction, her pacifism, were interpreted as attempts to redeem her, which led to accusations that Rich didn’t understand the real reasons Celia was so hated, her idiocy (itself contradictory – how is someone studying to be a lawyer that naive? I’m amazed she didn’t figure Roy could fly on his own power). Frankly, judging by the fact that Haley gets the last word on Celia with similar words to what the forum was feeling, without even Roy objecting on-screen, I suspect that Celia was intended to be hated.

(Do not even get me started on Elan. I could write a whole post on how he’s been handled.)

Part of the reason for the intensity of the hatred towards Celia may have been the fact that, during Book 4, the main plot of OOTS ground to a complete halt, as everyone was more preoccupied with getting the gang back together and their own plot than actually getting to the next gate, and the entire book seemed pointless compared to the rest of the megaplot. I’ve said before that, with only a few changes, the end of Book 3 could conceivably have marked the end of the entire strip, and the general aimlessness of Book 4 seems to back me up on that, suggesting that it really was intended as “halftime” between two very different comics. OOTS Gamer Theory Syndrome was one result, but another was that, once the OOTS got back together, V’s Soul Splice ended (and he and O-Chul reunited with the OOTS in such fashion I half-expected this strip or this one to be titled “Deus Ex Monstro” or “Monstrum Ex Machina”), and Roy was resurrected, the clunky dialogue revved into overdrive, and continued even into the strips I skipped. Rich seemed to have trouble making a seamless transition back to the main plot, resorting to much expospeak during the meeting of the “War Council”, and the whole thing almost felt like starting from scratch, with the whole “lich-and-gate thing” more of an abstract obligation than anything else. (The fact the OOTS was finally in one piece and unencumbered again may have contributed to this feeling.)

And as much as I was excited at the revelation of the “planet-within-the-planet”, I couldn’t help but dread the directions this could possibly go. It had all the hallmarks of a shock-value “everything-you-know-is-wrong” twist, and whether it led to mucho exposition, a Planet of the Apes ending, “Adventures on the Snarl World” (a very distressingly common theory for Book 6), or something else equally trippy, it could not help but lead to something stupid.

And then the next book started… rather jarringly, to say the least. The 1-2 and 2-3 transitions had transition strips that helped ease things, and comic 485 flowed directly out of comic 484. The transition from book 4 to book 5 could have used a transition strip, because it was hard for me to get oriented, especially after a lengthy break, after getting simply plopped in Sandsedge (especially with even more expospeak instead of just letting it be an establishing shot). This is one of the more obvious book transitions Rich has ever done, and along with how suddenly the subsequent random encounter starts, really underlines the clunkiness of Rich’s writing of late – occasionally reading more like an OOTS fanfic. (But that strip is the biggest problem among the strips I skipped.)

And then came the strip that may have singlehandedly subconsciously convinced me to quit OOTS for the time being.

I refer, of course, to the rest of the OOTS’ complete inability to acknowledge Blackwing’s existence. That was a cruel trick to play on V, and I couldn’t help but sympathize with her plight. Now, my extreme negative reaction to this comic probably has something to do with the way I personally process information, but I was far from the only one who had a problem with it – probably most of the forums didn’t even understand what was going on, and those that did were understandably frustrated. (It did not help that, despite mounds of evidence that people can, in fact, SEE Blackwing, people still think they can’t. In retrospect, Rich should not have included the bit where Belkar can’t see the bird.)

But as much as I hated this twist, at least it imposed interesting questions that needed answering. Why wasn’t the OOTS able to acknowledge Blackwing’s existence? What, exactly, happened back at the rift? To what extent was the OOTS memory-wiped – could someone be forced to acknowledge Blackwing’s existence by, say, being asked to remember events where there would be a gaping hole without Blackwing? Surely Vaarsuvius, doubted by his own teammates, would seek, with such an inquisitive mind as his, to get to the bottom of this question?

But no. V makes ZERO on-screen effort to prove Blackwing’s existence or investigate his seeming lack thereof. Instead it seems that the point of one of the most maddening twists in the history of the strip, one that insulted our intelligence and made the OOTS seem like either jerks or idiots, was to turn Blackwing into the “good angel”, to literally strip him of his reality and turn him into V’s imaginary friend, his conscience and guiding spirit in his ongoing character development. Never mind that this could have just as easily been done with a literal good angel, or that the process of setting Blackwing up for this role involved setting up a huge plot twist and then forgetting about it.

Comic, meet wall.

I am not in the camp of those on the forums who claim that #674 was “just a joke”. I certainly hope it wasn’t (and references to the comic since then suggest it isn’t), although reading without an eye to speculation leads to the disturbing conclusion that the sole point of it was solely to illustrate V’s anger management problems, regardless of what about the characters had to be contradicted to get there. First, it’s not funny. Second, the joke relies on the contradiction of previous comics. Third, if the joke is in-universe played on V by the OOTS, it requires unconvincingly derailing all their characters, especially Haley, who’s V’s friend and has, in the past, been more connected to Blackwing (she named the bird, for crying out loud) than V herself has. Fourth, if the joke is external to the universe, it still requires bending the characters unconvincingly, and OOTS is too much of a plot-oriented strip at this point to make a continuity-free joke.

Frankly, I don’t find V’s attempt at redemption terribly convincing either. It seems odd that V would go from being mad with power to engaging in a twelve-step program and trying to distance herself from anything that reminds her of the old V in a couple of days. V’s experience with the Soul Splice was a teachable moment, but what she learned in Xykon’s throne room was that power could take the form of everything at her disposal, not merely brute-force arcane power, and that among the powers at her disposal was people other than herself. V herself later articulates the value of planning, while Durkon lectures her about the value of small victories. All that points to ways she can better use her magic, not anger management issues or other requirements to totally change her personality. V later characterizes the incident in 677-678 as “evoking first and making inquiries afterward” (in typical Vaarsuvian fashion), but it still feels like Rich took a few logical leaps along the way. (And there’s a big difference between “use your allies to your advantage” and “don’t get involved at all if your teammates can handle it even if things would be over a lot sooner”.) I could sympathise very much with Vaarsuvius’ plight and compare it to my own situation (again, more on that later) if I found it suitably convincing. (And it’s likely V’s divorce won’t be as simple as “I will not contest it”, especially being on the same continent as the elves.)

So, what else has happened while I was away? Well, we also got one heck of an unexpected plot twist concerning the much-anticipated liberation of Ian Starshine: the country that originally captured him almost certainly no longer exists. As Rich has been wont to do recently, this tears asunder mounds of forum theories on how said liberation might go down, while opening up whole new frontiers for speculation. It does not necessarily invalidate the once-commonly-held “Tyrinar is Elan and Nale’s father” theory, especially since Nale’s father seems to have been a general, not necessarily the leader of a nation, when Nale was young. I could easily see a story being told of a once-mighty conqueror ultimately undone and left to destitution, possibly by his own favored son. (On the other hand, the idea that Tyrinar’s real name is Ian Starshine, or worse Girard Draketooth, is just stupid – along the lines of the planet-within-the-planet. And equating Ian with Girard just because they both have red hair is stupidest of all.)

Belkar is really bad at pretending to be good. Earlier, he at least gave off the impression that he was reforming, holding off Bozzok and Crystal as though out of a genuine concern for Haley, taking an option that would result in less killing, and even sparing Crystal’s life instead of stealing a kill from Haley. But he becomes substantially more obnoxious about it here, and once the OOTS leaves Sandsedge he basically becomes the same old Belkar as always, only with a few words here and there about being a team player, offset by the numerous times he lets the facade slip. (Sorry, this is not a team player.) This seems to further back up my interpretation of Shojo’s advice as Belkar needing only to know the OOTS’ moral framework, not necessarily follow it. (And if that’s not Belkar’s interpretation of the matter, it may soon be.) The other half of that interpretation – it doesn’t matter even if the OOTS doesn’t buy it – seems also to be happening.

And then there’s the absolute blockbuster – and second speculation-shattering development – that completely overturns the complacency that seemed to come over the OOTS early in the book (come on, reaching Girard’s Gate twenty strips in?) and could be fodder for an entire post in itself: the coordinates Roy picked up from Shojo were in fact the result of a deliberate attempt by Girard to mislead Soon, sending the OOTS right back to square one. More to the point, the rift between the members of the Order of the Scribble may have been deeper than anticipated. Its plot relevancy may have seemed to have faded when Hinjo declared Soon’s Oath expired, but my post on Serini’s non-interference clause now seems more relevant than ever. (Similarly, incidentially, the revelation of the Linear Guild being pawns of the IFCC makes my “Linear Guild is really helping the OOTS” theory surprisingly plausible in a twisted way.)

That previous post pointed out that comic #277, which introduced the rift and non-interference clause, depicted something that could be seen to be deeper than it made it sound – a team on the verge of becoming mutual enemies – and in that light, this revelation isn’t as much of a stretch. Still, what would lead Girard to basically assume a paladin, of all people, would break his oath? Did Girard just underestimate the power of a paladin’s word? Was Girard just that paranoid? Given the reference to “the power of the Snarl” (not the power of the Gate, and readers of the Start of Darkness prequel will know the difference), was said power such that nothing else could overcome the lust for it, such that it was the real motivation behind the breakup of the Order of the Scribble, not defense? Was Soon, in fact, just the sort of person to make Girard think would break his oath? Perhaps Soon’s classic exegesis of redemption to Miko came from more personal experience than we thought – perhaps Soon wasn’t very much unlike her. At the very least, it’s always bugged me that a (by all appearances) ordinary paladin, who predated the order of paladins he founded, somehow became the lord of Azure City (also predating the Sapphire Guard), for what we thought were reasons that weren’t to be put in the official histories. Between this and the “planet-within-the-planet”, it’s starting to look like the Crayons of Time series may have gotten just about every single thing wrong; its sole purpose was notifying the OOTS about what they “need to know”. We may be in for a lot of exposition if and when the OOTS meets Serini (I still doubt Girard would still be alive after all this time, life-extending spells aside, and scratch my head at the OOTS seemingly assuming he is, while NOT assuming the same about Serini).

Or was it Girard that wasn’t very much unlike Miko?

So Miko is assigned to pick up these people who have done something that threatens the fabric of the entire universe. Along the way, she hears much more about their dastardly deeds. Exactly what these people are planning she doesn’t know, but they can’t be good, and they certainly don’t go down quietly once cornered – and the party leader even scans as strongly evil. Oh, but that was the lich’s crown interfering, everyone in the party really isn’t evil, with the possible exception of the halfling with the lead sheet – and all those dastardly deeds were actually done by their evil twins, and once they know what the charges are they go along willingly, if not quietly, and if with mounds of gold. (Okay, in retrospect given later revelations Miko could have introduced herself in a less threatening fashion, but at the point she engages them she’s got mounds of evidence they’re up to no good.)

And while Miko probably shouldn’t have dismissed their calls for rest and asked them to sleep in a muddy ditch, they do bilk her for everything she has when they do find an inn. Then they ask her to evacuate the inn because “professional killers” are after the leader, then the inn explodes with her inside, then she catches a member of the party gloating at her demise, and the leader turned female, and reacting insincerely to the hotel bill being paid. And then the leader, who’s been hitting on you for this entire time, tells you off and you have to drag them back to Azure City in chains.

Then you catch them trying to escape once there, and the halfling (who, reportedly, she’s confirmed to be evil at this point) actually has, while baiting you in the process. Then, after a long and arduous chase, the rest of the party actually defends the vile creep and saves him from death, apparently off the hook for their known crime. But wait – here comes the clincher…

So it’s sometime later, and you just happen to be at a watchtower when an evil party shows up, and in this evil party is the same lich the party claimed to have destroyed. So, to sum up, the Order of the Stick, who’s been involved in a number of suspicious circumstances besides, destroyed a gate, something that holds together the fabric of the universe, but claimed it was an accident and they were keeping the lich’s plans from coming to fruition anyway, a lich they killed, except the lich isn’t dead (well, dead-dead). They don’t detect as evil, but the party leader initially did before they were prepared for you to do so, for a frankly ridiculous reason. Xykon actually asking them to destroy the gate is only “probable”, but anything else that would seem likely still doesn’t speak well of the Order of the Stick. Being dead can be something tough to ascertain, but generally you should know when something has been completely destroyed. The Order of the Stick, according to #371, claimed to have “destroy”ed Xykon, and they didn’t. Why would they unless they wanted to give the impression that Xykon wasn’t a threat? Sure, the argument is riddled with holes, but from the big picture it’s amazingly plausible from Miko’s perspective. The main questions would be why the Order would have acknowledged Xykon’s existence (couldn’t know Miko hadn’t heard of him, perhaps?) and why they still came along willingly…

…until you find out the man you’ve accepted as your lord has not only been “fak[ing his] senility just to avoid being assassinated” but breaking the laws willy-nilly, to the extent of rigging the trial to acquit the Order of the Stick, who he’s conspiring with to send to Girard’s Gate in violation of Soon’s Oath, which he expresses contempt for. At this point, would you expect Miko to get more confused, or for things to make a lot more sense for her? Not even Hinjo buys Shojo’s argument that he was “doing what was best for the entire city” and working for its “safety”. At this point, Occam’s Razor might actually suggest Shojo was trying to get all the gates destroyed so he and Xykon could use the Snarl to take over the world – indeed, that Shojo exactly fit the profile Girard was afraid of.

While Miko did have her own quirks that made things worse, just as Girard probably did, every conclusion she came to (at least before her fall, when every aspect of her worldview falls apart, so you might expect her to go batshit insane) was at least partially reasonable given the available evidence. This, then, makes her fall and death all the more tragic, because she had no way of knowing better. Perhaps, then, Soon was prone to getting into circumstances that didn’t speak well for his character (and certainly his lawfulness) if you were working from incomplete information, and Girard extrapolated that out into thinking he was bound to break his oath eventually. At the very least, Girard may well be, character-wise, the chaotic equivalent of Miko, utterly blind to the worth of others (in this case, considering “Lawful Good” an oxymoron), utterly uncompromising (by not seeing any need to compromise, especially if Chaotic Neutral), quick-triggered, and absolutely full of himself.

But probably the best strips in the book so far have probably come from the Team Evil interlude, and they haven’t been lacking in plot twists. Rich completely ignored a multiple of 100 for the first time in strip #700, which nonetheless stoked more speculation on the identity of the MitD… unless you’ve read Start of Darkness and realize just how important Tsukiko really is becoming to Xykon, and how much trouble Redcloak doesn’t realize he’s in. Meanwhile, Redcloak – his goblin-state-consolidation plans cut short by V’s attack and Xykon’s response thereof – has elected to cut to the chase and proclaim that Azure City is Azure City no longer. Even once Redcloak leaves, it’ll be tough to oust the goblins – but on the other side, Redcloak seems to be setting in motion a backup plan for if and when his Plan A fails (evidently too cowed by Xykon to abandon Plan A entirely), suggesting two supposed allies are rather deep in a high-stakes game of chess… (And on the list of semi-major characters introduced as no-names, Jirix – who was dead when we last saw him – joins Kazumi, Daigo, Tsukiko, O-Chul, Hinjo… let’s just say Rich is fond of that trick. Also, the relevance of SoD to the main plot of OOTS has increased considerably in the past 200 comics.)

Finally, regarding this strip, the anachronisms on the poster tell us this has nothing to do with anything Nale may be doing now. Meanwhile, it sounds unlikely these two will actually get to the point of turning Elan and V in now, unless V’s plan doesn’t work, though that doesn’t mean there won’t be a lot of other people getting in their way. But it would be pointless to spend what’s about to be four strips on these two only for them to immediately disappear with no real impact… I’ll stop now.

• The year in sports is a massive disappointment. Not really. I predicted a Dolphins-Vikings Super Bowl, and we did get one team that wasn’t exactly a “name” team, and the Steelers kinda sorta pulled the same trick they did three years before, though not quite as surprising. But who would have guessed that the Vikings would have actually been a name team by the end of the year? Or that we’d get a Super Bowl that people were hailing as the best ever one year after Patriots-Giants? The national championship game in college basketball did go back to being a laugher, but while North Carolina didn’t go undefeated, far from losing in the Final Four, they won the whole thing. Neither the Cavs nor Spurs made the NBA Finals, and LeBron to the Knicks is still a very real possibility, but the new hot idea is teaming LeBron and Dwayne Wade somewhere. The Stanley Cup Finals turned out to be Red Wings-Pens again, and America tuned in as much as they ever do for hockey, but if it’s Red Wings-Pens a third time I think we will start to tune out. Philadelphia made the World Series again, and the Red Sox lost in the first round, but far from not making the ALCS, the Yankees won the whole thing.
• Tiger Woods did indeed fail to win a major, though he didn’t miss much time, but no one could have predicted what happened to him by year’s end. Jimmie Johnson did indeed win another Sprint Cup in a laugher – NASCAR really needs to review the Chase idea to see if there’s something about the structure of the Chase that Jimmie is exploiting. But far from not making a major final, Roger Federer made every major final, and won twice. There were five undefeated college football teams at season’s end, not three after Week 4, but I picked two of them – but I sure as hell didn’t pick what happened to USC this season, and while it was a down year for mid-majors in general, we got two BCS busters and the closest any mid-major team has yet gotten to making the national championship game. The Arena League, who I may have had in mind when I predicted one league would completely cancel a season, folded entirely, but MLS seems strong as ever, and the IRL isn’t cutting back at all, even adding a title sponsor. But NASCAR may well pass it backwards anyway… and the UFC certainly attracted a lot of attention for UFC 100. These are stories to watch for the next decade.
• We don’t know what’s happening with the Olympics or NHL contracts, but we do know they won’t be in Chicago. Rio won’t be all bad for American television, but still.
• “The Saints challenge for the NFC South” indeed! “The Lions are at least respectable”… not so much, though I will say right now that the Browns or Raiders will make the playoffs in the 2010 season. Brett Favre did retire, but then he unretired again, but the Jets hold their own playoff destiny in their own hands. Matt Cassel joined the Chiefs and Super Bowl contenders they are not, but it’s still too early to say he (and thus, Tom Brady) was entirely a creation of Bill Belichick. (Wasn’t he injury-rattled this year?) The Pats are back in the AFC East driver’s seat, the Cowboys are in the playoffs, have shook off the December blues, and could take the division, and Vince Young is officially Tennessee’s quarterback of the future.
• I actually made three different predictions for the year in politics. Sadly, the first one seems to be the closest to coming to pass. Troops aren’t even entirely out of Iraq yet, though we have stopped paying attention to it. Most of Obama’s stimulus plans are gimmicky (Cash for Clunkers, anyone?) and don’t provide enough PR boost. The politics of the last eight years don’t change and in fact get worse, because they involve cultural factors bigger than any politician, and can only be changed by the people taking part in it – us. (In retrospect, Obamamania is a symptom of a persistent problem the Left has these days, of assuming that if we just elect enough right-thinking politicians, everything will be hunky-dory. It blinds the Left to politics’ limitations and to other avenues to change, which led the Right to beat them at what used to be their own game this year with the tea parties and town halls, as well as the reasons why electing the right politicians can be so hard.) The Left still loves Obama, though some people don’t find him leftist enough, and the tea partiers don’t find many in their own party rightist enough, which scares me in terms of what the politics of the next decade will be like. I don’t normally make New Year’s resolutions per se, but mine is to try to do something to change the state of politics in this country before it’s too late. Interestingly, the tea partiers and people like Glenn Beck make Ron Paul’s views more mainstream, while the GOP base still defends what Bush did as president, so my “fascist-anarchist” GOP prediction isn’t far off.
• The Internet’s metamorphosis this year basically amounts to the rise of Twitter; it doesn’t seem to be benefiting from the recession as much as I thought, though the rest of my prediction may yet come to pass this year.
• Because of that, webcomics haven’t exploded yet, though we may yet see a new golden age in this coming decade. Sandsday won’t be part of it though, and I still intend to revisit my State of Webcomics Address.
• The people who read my webcomics criticism, including what amounts to semi-big names in webcomics, like it, but there aren’t enough of them. I didn’t really do much to attract new audiences to politics other than the Sandsday global warming series. I’m effectively repeating this point for the coming year.

One of the challenges of needing to sell webcomic merchandise – and there are a lot of challenges for selling merchandise – is finding a place to sell them at. Many if not most webcomics sell merchandise through print-on-demand outfits like Cafepress, but sometimes that’s not the ideal approach, especially when production of many things gets cheaper per-order as more of them are ordered, and especially when many such places have an iffy reputation for the quality of the resulting merchandise. What’s more, print-on-demand shops are usually intended for reeeeally amateur operations – you could sell T-shirts and mugs with your kid’s random crayon drawing on it at CafePress. I’m not sure that sends the best message when Girl Genius is selling merchandise at the same site as “Billy’s T-Shirt”.

Last week Rich “Order of the Stick” Burlew announced he was opening up Ookoodook.com to sell his merchandise, instead of using, in his words, “a game manufacturer who was just doing me a favor by retailing my stuff” in APE Games, a partner in the new site. But Rich also intends the site to sell products not only from himself, but from “other independent and self-publishing creators”, and that “[w]e hope this new venture will allow us to spotlight other self-published products that you may not be aware of yet by working with their creators directly.” The site seems intended for publication of a wide variety of material, so long as it’s unlikely to sell through traditional retail channels, but it still seems fit for webcomics to take to it like a glove. If webcomics have their own ad service, why not their own store?

Ookoodook isn’t perfect – it appears you need to handle production yourself, implying your product needs to already exist, and the only other webcomic to sell merchandise on the site, Schlock Mercenary, hasn’t even advertised its existence – but I can’t help but wonder what it presages for webcomics.

(Not from Dinosaur Comics. Click for full-sized… well, it’s already full-sized, for real this time.)

I don’t read Scott McCloud’s blog regularly, and right now I’m still leaning towards not starting. But a common topic there (and at Comixtalk) involves developments related to the potential of the basic, core idea of webcomics, especially those raised by McCloud himself in Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, and especially especially the notion of the infinite canvas.

I’ve pretty much always found the infinite canvas, in practice, to be mostly of use in artsy and experimental works. Things that make the creation of a work more “practical” are generally embraced more by experimental artists that aren’t concerned with making money, but rather with the purity of a work. During my Webcomics’ Identity Crisis series, I explained that the infinite canvas wouldn’t take off unless McCloud’s other Reinventing-proposed revolution, micropayments, also took off, since that was probably the only way it could make money, certainly while maintaining the purity of the format. Micropayments probably aren’t taking off anytime soon, so the infinite canvas looks to be fairly doomed, but if micropayments and the infinite canvas were to take off, what form would it take?

Back in February, I was convinced that the sorts of models McCloud proposed in Reinventing were problematic in their own right, as they focused too much attention on the form, away from the work itself. That makes them inherently more applicable to artsy, experimental fare no matter how good the market for the infinite canvas gets. For the infinite canvas to really take off as more than a gimmick it needs to offer a superior experience to the reader; it must be applied in a way that the reader gets the advantages of the infinite canvas without having the model become a piece of art in itself, because that will cause people to scream “artsy” and either walk away or study the form itself without regard for how good the work is. The medium cannot get in the way of enjoyment of the work.

Things like this or even this, while praiseworthy for (at least in the former) doing things not strictly possible in print, don’t really fit McCloud’s vision of the infinite canvas, viewing the screen as a “window”, which aims to free artists entirely from the trappings of print. Most applications of McCloud’s vision, such as they are, often control how the reader views them in such a way that you view one panel at a time, ignoring how overlapping panels can sometimes be used in print. (For example, take a look at the first two panels of this and think of a true, McCloudean infinite canvas you’ve seen where that would be possible.) But the best way to apply that is probably a click-and-drag interface that – at least without a touchscreen or something like that – might be more user unfriendly than your average “really long page”.

I’m concerned that even McCloud’s notion of the screen as a window and of the spacial model might be too limiting. It’s not possible to view all of the space at once when the infinite canvas is applied the way McCloud wants, so we have to zoom in on part of the space and work our way around it; the one-panel-at-a-time approach is just the simplest way to do that. Distill that to its basic elements, and remind yourself that the purpose of this is to further the cause of comics, and you realize that all that resource-hogging zooming and sliding and moving and twisting and shouting and grooving and all that jazz is just another gimmick that’s not part of the story itself and therefore takes your attention away from it – a gimmick that doesn’t benefit readers or creators that just want to entertain, since they have to think about arranging everything.

Which is why I think the application of the infinite canvas that has the most potential is the format used in these two comics from February, which McCloud linked to in March.

In some sense, it actually involves turning the screen, not into a window, but into a stage on which events happen. It’s an intuitive design with a simple click-click-click interface (no sometimes-difficult scrolling) that doesn’t start a bunch of unnecessary animation (seriously, read some of these and try and keep your focus on the story), so the emphasis remains on the story itself. At the same time it not only fits the goal of the infinite canvas – to, at least partially, free comics from the restraints and contortions of the page – it opens up a variety of new frontiers (some explored in the above-linked comics themselves) for things that can be done with the “panel” that, at the very least, wouldn’t have the same effect in print, but despite taking some cues from animation (and not “juxtaposing” panels side by side as in McCloud’s definition) it’s still fairly convincingly comics, replete with all the aspects of comics’ “unique visual language”. (One important factor in this: the reader controls the pace at which he reads, with some assistance from the author “pacing” them from “panel” to “panel”.) Apply this model to a good story, slap a paywall on it, and maybe the infinite canvas might take off in the way McCloud always envisioned.

(And if McCloud is concerned about turning comics into a slideshow he should look at his own The Right Number and ask himself what makes it different from a glorified PowerPoint slideshow with fancy slide transitions turned on.)

There is one reason and one reason only I am reviewing Scary Go Round, and that’s because it just ended, and as such I review it right now or not at all. By putting this out this late in the week, nearly a week after the last strip, I’m technically violating my “don’t review ended comics” rule; I was actually considering putting it out Monday. As such this will be very different from my other reviews in more ways than one. I’m going in knowing absolutely nothing about the story, and I’m reviewing it almost entirely from an archive binge perspective.

Here’s my description of the first chapter: A comedy horror mystery.

Yes, Scary Go Round, like a lot of webcomics, got off to a slow start with a story about Rachel, reassigned to resurrect the school newspaper, stumbling on the paper’s former staff stuffed into a cupboard, which turns out to have been carried out by a sentient gas that was a former member of a science club. While Rachel, the whole time, makes wisecracks to her more straight-laced friend Tessa, and while the characters appear to be paper cut-outs that barely open their mouths. It’s head-slappingly stupid enough I braced for the worst from the rest of the strip.

As it turns out, after two stories of this sort of Scooby Doo-like antics, the strip shifted focus to the characters of Tim, Ryan, Shelley, and Amy, almost junking Rachel and Tessa from the strip entirely; there’s only one more Scooby Doo-like story after that. Shelley, killed off in the second story, gets resurrected as a zombie in the third, and then seemingly for good in the fourth, and the strip at this point could best be described as Sluggy Freelance meets Questionable Content, maybe even with a little Gunnerkrigg Court and Something Positive mixed in. (QC’s Jeph Jacques even did a guest strip for SGR.) Fundamentally it’s a slice-of-life story where the characters seem to take the fact that every day of their lives they’re surrounded by wacky stuff (like portals to alternate dimensions and weird black diminutive monsters that want to eat people) in stride, simply firing off wisecracks at it all. The story evolves in focus eventually to Shelley and Amy in particular as Tim and Ryan retreat for different reasons in late 2003, and pretty much stays there for the rest of the strip.

A note on characterization. I’m trying to get away from the notion of this space as a resource for Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere as opposed to simply a review site, but I have to say a few words about how the characters were portrayed in early SGR. I understand that you write what you know and you put a little of yourself into each character, and you want to give your comic a defining attitude, but it’s generally a bad sign when all your major characters share an attribute, like wisecracks and snark as in the early SGR, and it is in fact their defining attribute to the extent when you strip it away the characters become two-dimensional cyphers. There are differences between the characters, but they don’t shine through very well. Allison, to his credit, took more steps to separate his characters as time went on, particularly making Shelley downright sassy (if the final strip is any indication), but is it just me, or is the Shelley who’s constantly looking for adventure in the post-reboot SGR more consistent with the Amy of the first quarter of the strip than the Shelley she got drunk at least twice to drag along on wacky adventures? The later Amy seems rather demure for someone with tattoos all over her body.

There were several points in this early portion of the archive where I thought that, like Dresden Codak, John Allison was hiding some part of the archive from me as an old shame. Apparently that’s because most of these characters were part of a previous, less wacky strip dating back to 1998, but there’s almost no evidence of this on the site itself – the archive dates back to 2002 and outside the blog, there’s no mention of this earlier strip, only a “since 1998″ note on the about page. The first place I learned about the existence of this earlier strip, in fact, was none other than TV Tropes. If I had to guess, the reason the existence of this strip is hidden is because of the 2007 reboot of the strip to be more new-reader-friendly, but that doesn’t explain why “first” still takes you to 2002 with the only direct mention of the reboot being the about page, and after reading the first quarter of the strips, I find Scary Go Round remarkably new-reader friendly considering its wackiness, as the status quo doesn’t really change much.

That is, until Shelley dies… again.

At that point, Scary Go Round went through its own version of PVP/Goats Syndrome, or trying to put your strip’s ridiculous elements through Cerebus Syndrome and succeeding only in making them even more ridiculous. SGR was never gag-a-day, never really tried to get rid of its humor, and never really deconstructed its ridiculous elements to my knowledge, but at this point it did start to become necessary to keep a scorecard to keep track of everything, and it sure as hell became more and more ridiculous. Here’s all you need to know about SGR from this point forward: the cast page has a fish-man (apparently as a regular part of the cast), a “nautical inventor”, a goblin infestation in Tackleford, a space owl, devil bears, Shelley’s sister Erin, who “Grew to her (comparatively) enormous size after drinking something her sister stole”, and Rachel, who was killed and subsequently sold her soul to the devil. Oh, and according to TV Tropes Shelley makes this “death” thing a bit of a habit of hers. The first storyline after the relaunch (or at least the link to the relaunch on the About page) involves Shelley, the mayor, and Shelley’s reporting partner Mike going insane, and a giant green bee stalking the British equivalent of the county fair, and generally makes very little sense.

Quite frankly, I think SGR was better in 2003, its first full calendar year, and early 2004 than it was as it went along and got wackier and wackier, even though I haven’t read most of that. For what it’s trying to do, early SGR is rather servicable; later SGR is too wacky to take seriously, and as the cast page appears to be frozen at a point in time before the reboot, it seems to me that the final story is as continuity-choked as what SGR had pre-reboot. In fact, I can’t even follow some conversations or even make out the meaning of some lines, especially in later strips. Just as Bobbins begat Scary Go Round, so Allison is planning to make SGR beget another new comic. If he ever decides to go the wacky hijinks path SGR embraced – and I’m not sure he should – I hope he looks back at what he had in 2003, and tries to recapture the magic he had there, and not find himself showing Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere everything you need to know on what not to do.

What often isn’t said is that this tendency doesn’t go away all at once, but in fact, tends to slowly dissipate over time, with the accompanying cynicism increasing separately. At no time in history has this been made more clear than in the past 50 years. Time and again, it has been people in their 20s that have changed the world – people with enough learned cynicism to know the world as it is but enough residual idealism to feel that isn’t the way it has to be.

It is this group – the generation of people in their 20s – my generation, the Digital Generation – that has sought to explore every aspect of what the Internet could be, often without regard to the potential concerns and problems raised by the older, more cynical generation. Whether it’s blogs, YouTube, or really any number of things, my generation has colonized the Internet and made it our own, revolutionizing the way we live in the twenty-first century, without worrying too much about that little “money” thing, or the effect their experiments will have on the institutions they’re replacing.

Such is the case with webcomics. The unprecedented creative freedom of webcomics have led them to attract many would-be comic strip creators away from the newspaper, right when comic strips were most needed to fill the role they filled so capably back in the days of true competition within a market, and as I explained in the “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series they are on the cusp of doing the same for comic book creators. But it has still been difficult for webcomic creators to find a revenue stream. I don’t think webcomickers should be glorified T-shirt salesmen, but that and the sale of compilation books (seemingly unnecessary when all the strips are available online anyway) have so far been the main sources of income for webcomic creators. That helps explain why so many popular webcomics are gag-a-day comics: ongoing, dramatic storylines don’t lend themselves well to pithy T-shirts. (Order of the Stick is the exception that proves the rule, because while it has a dramatic storyline, it’s still ultimately a humor comic, and its books mix “deleted scenes” and behind-the-scenes info with the old strips and have all-new storylines in two cases.)

The Floating Lightbulb, in my opinion, was always a must-read for aspiring webcomickers, regardless of whether you agreed with Bengo’s advice or his seeming obsession with Scott Kurtz and his ilk. But if there’s one thing about TFL that disillusioned me more than any other except maybe said obsession, it was the fact that a lot of Bengo’s advice, especially of late, basically concerned increasing ROI on T-shirt sales. The message I got from such posts was that even the best webcomic in the world wouldn’t be financially successful if it wasn’t a vehicle for presenting T-shirt ideas. Bengo has said he wants quality, but the way he’s willing to compromise quality for money suggests that, if anything, webcomics may actually have less room for creative freedom than their print counterparts, at least as far as making money off them is concerned. At least in print, you’re paying for the story itself.

The story of webcomics is the story of Web 2.0 in general, only arguably further along. Webcomics and the webcomics community, at the core, have always been less about the works produced in the medium than the promise and potential of an idea. That simple idea was the idea of putting images side by side to tell a story, and putting the resulting story on a Web page. Dreamers like Scott McCloud evangelized about the tremendous potential of this idea, speaking of infinite canvases and micropayments and all sorts of cool stuff. Once the finances were worked out, people said, webcomics would be a revolution.

The reality has so far fallen far short of the promise. Some strips, like Girl Genius, The Order of the Stick, and Gunnerkrigg Court have been critically acclaimed and produced works worthy of the best (or at least critically acclaimed) of any medium, but even they have been bound by the comic book format; the infinite canvas, in the lack of a reliable payment scheme (as I chronicled in “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis”) has proven to be a gimmick at best. With people everywhere shunning paywalls of any kind and preventing the creation of real demand for compilations as anything other than a charitable excersize without “DVD extras”, and the ad market slumping while webcomics aren’t popular enough to make a lot of money out of a slumping ad market even for the most popular of webcomics, the most successful comics, as Bengo has pointed out, have been those gag-a-day strips that serve as meme factories so they can get people to buy more T-shirts.

I decided to institute a star rating system for my new webcomic review index, and it reveals that with the exception of OOTS, Sluggy Freelance, and (depending on your definition) the David Morgan-Mar comics, the most popular and successful comics (that I’ve reviewed so far, but I’ve reviewed most of the really big ones) are decidedly mediocre. There are a lot of two-star and two-and-a-half-star comics on there, including Penny Arcade, xkcd, PVP, Dinosaur Comics, and even Ctrl+Alt+Del, which I actually like and read. (That’s before we get into the 8-Bit Theaters and Dresden Codaks of the world.)

The idea of a new Golden Age of artistic experimentation and accomplishment has driven many webcomic promoters. But a disturbing number of webcomic creators, especially those first exposed to webcomics by PA or CAD, have been driven by a different dream: slapping together comics and earning fame and fortune with minimal work instead of getting a real job with real skills. Webcomics are the geek’s version of the black community’s dream of basketball or rap superstardom: many will enter, few will win. Thus far too many webcomics are crappy video game comics that basically copy-and-paste the CAD formula (already heavily hated) onto personages from the creator’s own life.

It may actually be worse when those people actually achieve webcomics stardom, because the reason they got into webcomics into the first place was that they desired the attention that comes from fame and not necessarily because they had genuine artistic concerns, so the fame often goes to their head. If you don’t believe that I have two names for you: Scott Kurtz and Tim Buckley. Say what you will about Bengo’s obsession with Kurtz or the Internet’s hatred of CAD, but the fact is that neither creator has really endeared himself to very many people. (Well, Kurtz endears himself to people who praise or agree with him or who he’s trying to impress, but still.)

Buckley’s control-freak tendencies and desire to live in his own little fantasy world where he’s the greatest webcomicker evar and everyone loves him is well known. Kurtz’s problem is different: he’s not living in a fantasy world necessarily (and he’s even self-depreciating about his own foibles), he just talks out of his ass a lot. Kurtz has been known to pick fights with various other webcomickers and webcomic bloggers for seemingly no reason, sees himself as the new Voice of All Webcomics even if others would rather he wasn’t, and has occasionally revealed a protectiveness against pretty much any other new webcomic that might conceivably steal one penny – or even one hit – from his own comic. (That didn’t stop him from co-writing a how-to book for aspiring webcomickers, so perhaps it’s no surprise that part of Bengo’s beef has been accusing the Halfpixel foursome of cooking unrealistic and unsupported numbers to inflate expectations in Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere so they won’t challenge the established webcomickers like themselves.)

The proliferation of crappy video game comics is probably to be expected as a result of Sturgeon’s Law, but for some reason some of them have actually attracted a decent-sized following, and that, combined with the face people like Kurtz tend to present, has led the creation of a sizable group that seemingly hates webcomics in general, most prominent among them probably being John Solomon during his 15 minutes of fame. That the webcomic community rushed to the defense of many of the comics Solomon reviewed only allowed him to paint the community as an insular group that praises everything all the time uncritically, and when Solomon revealed an appreciation for such strips as the Court, OOTS, and to a limited extent PA (by contrast to other, inferior tag-team comics) it led some people to hate on them for the sole reason Solomon liked them. Thanks in part to Solomon, some even within the community have joined in the hating of bad video-game comics, and some have turned on the Kurtzes and Buckleys of the world, but they still exist, new Voices of All Webcomics have yet to appear, and sweep out the crap and the egos and you don’t have much left. You’re left with just the idea. And that idea has become shrouded by all the excess baggage.

Bengo doesn’t share my enthusiasm, expressed during “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis”, that an increasingly hostile comic book market to small publishers has put comic books on the cusp of a new flowering of greatness. In his eyes, the people that would flock to webcomics are instead turned off by all the crap and egos. Personally, I wouldn’t normally expect comic creators to hold the crap and egos produced by the medium now against the medium as a whole… but consider the following potential obstacles for an aspiring webcomicker:

• Having Scott Kurtz or some other prima donna creator pick a fight with you for no reason.
• Webcomic blogs can’t find your comic and won’t review it in the morass of other crap, so it doesn’t get discovered by the webcomic community. This is especially a problem for comics that release all in one installment, because of certain webcomic blogs’ policies not to review comics that have “ended”.
• The general public (outside the webcomic community) sees webcomics (if they’ve heard of them) as a bunch of crappy video game comics made by arrogant college students and doesn’t find your comic, even if they wouldn’t otherwise need the help of webcomic blogs. This makes it especially difficult if your comic doesn’t appeal to nerds.

This last point seems especially salient considering the potential Scott McCloud saw in webcomics in Reinventing Comics. McCloud thought webcomics could appeal to more audiences than comic books heretofore had, appealing to women, minorities, and lovers of genres outside superheroes. He also thought webcomics could become much more mainstream than comic books were at the time. And the viral nature of the Internet meant that someway, somehow, even if the old gatekeepers didn’t like your work, if it was quality, it could find an audience.

But once again, here – as elsewhere – webcomics have fallen far short of the potential evangelized by their supporters. The Web is a marketplace of ideas, but it doesn’t change human nature, and that means stereotyping. If comic books have suffered from the notion that “comics are for kids” and “comics = superheroes”, webcomics may be starting to suffer from their own stereotypes, at least in some corners – stereotypes that have already irredeemably sickened web prose fiction, which became almost wholly identified with fanfic, which itself became almost wholly identified with bad fanfic. Because there are no barriers to entry, someone looking at a random webcomic is not likely to be impressed, and even the faces of webcomics, comics that have managed to shake the stench of Sturgeon’s Law to some extent, are Penny Arcade and xkcd, not Girl Genius or The Order of the Stick.

There is a silver lining for webcomics: slowly but surely, all media are starting to migrate to the Web in some form. That means they will all be subject to Sturgeon’s Law to some extent. (I’ll discuss some of the implications of that fact later in the week, but it won’t be a webcomic post.) Every medium will run a risk of becoming identified with crap. The barriers to entry are greater for art forms that require more and more expensive stuff, so more good stuff and less bad stuff will make it through in those media that combine moving images with sound – the descendants of movies and TV – and webcomics could remain very low on the totem pole as a medium, ahead of only prose, podcasts, and music. (And as it gets easier to create a simple webcomic like I did with Sandsday, webcomics could even fall behind podcasts and music!) Still, eventually we’ll get used to the fact, as the ever-popular blogosphere already is, that there’s a bunch of junk out there, and we’ll just have to follow what we’re familiar with and hope word of mouth will lead us to the other good stuff. When that happens, maybe – maybe – webcomics will be able to play on a level playing field. But to do so, it may need to completely jettison any memory of its video game legacy.

Sturgeon’s Law may explain all the crap in webcomics, but how to explain all the egos that (at least to Bengo) are seemingly attracted to webcomics like moths to a flame? It turns out that, at least in our dog-eat-dog society, most people are predisposed to jerkdom. I myself may admit that I might come across as a jerk in real life. Under the old ways, the jerks were weeded out or reformed by the need to network and negotiate to get anywhere in their desired careers. But that’s no longer necessary to put your wares on the web with no barriers to entry, where you can talk to anyone you still need to network with in a purely utilitarian mode and hide behind the abstraction of text with no face-to-face contact, with ready-made audiences on many sites where you don’t have to talk to anyone, and with some people willing to promote your work without even knowing what you’re like as a person.

But none of that really gets to the heart of the matter as far as Bengo is concerned: To him, the webcomics community itself is the problem.

Jonathan Rosenberg started Fleen to have a webcomic blog unencumbered by a creator who runs his own webcomic on the side. In Bengo’s eyes, he didn’t succeed, since Dumbrella was almost as much a dirty word at TFL as Halfpixel. As far as Bengo is concerned, a lot of the webcomics community is either consisting of people who ultimately want to promote their own wares, or driven by those people and blinded to those people trying something new, instead led around in circles to keep propping up the same old Penny Arcade and PVP and Ctrl+Alt+Del. Moreover, because of the small size of the medium it can throw the moniker of success onto people who really don’t deserve the term, people who in actuality are wallowing in mediocrity whether aesthetically or financially.

But in Bengo’s eyes, the root of this isn’t far from that of webcomics’ density of prima donnas. Any new idea is going to come with a good dose of idealism, since idealism is the only way new ideas are born, but also some of the lower aspects of human nature, simply because rules for professionalism haven’t been established. What’s more, an idealism about the potential of a new idea and a blindness to the faults go hand in hand. Idealism is a double-edged sword; it allows you to try something that’s never been done before, but that can be because it blinds you to the problems that are the reasons why the skeptics are skeptical in the first place, both potential and practical. What’s more, the latter problem is often compounded with youth, who owe their idealism to not having experience with the problems. Especially since youth often comes with a seeming immaturity, or at least inexperience, that compounds the problems of human nature. Sometimes this is itself defended as idealism, sometimes it’s just subconscious, but always it can hold the idea back from acceptance by the old gatekeepers.

When Bengo rather condescendingly claims that what sets webcomics further back than other fields with some of the same problems is that “many people are young and lack the critical skills to recognize these realities”, it’s tempting to dismiss it as an old fogie yelling at the kids to get off his lawn. After all, he’s effectively claiming that he is the only one capable of properly sizing up the webcomic landscape – an outsider who’s barely spent a year immersed in the webcomic community. Anyone else is just too blinded by their youthful idealism. (After all, it’s not like Scott McCloud has a career in comics dating back to the 80s.) They’re too wrapped up in an insider mentality, can’t see the forest for the trees, they’re blind to what everyone else thinks of them. They think everything’s coming up roses for webcomics but only because they’re shielded – whether subconsciously or by demagogues – from the Truth(tm).

I think Bengo may be misreading the motives of some observers – many webcomic promoters don’t care that the fact of webcomics is in rough shape, because they only care about the idea. They’re not blind to webcomics’ problems because they “lack the critical skills” to ferret them out, they’re blind to them because that’s not where they’re looking. And that’s a good thing – better to look at the webcomics doing good things for the medium than the demagogues. But Bengo’s concern is for an aspiring webcomicker who’s either young and set to ruin their lives following an avalanche of bad advice, bad role models, and their own inexperience, or more experienced and trying to avoid getting wrapped up in a scene that produces a bunch of jerks – and where the financials might not have been figured out to the extent people think.

Bengo thinks webcomics are even smaller than those within the community give it credit for – and shrinking, with even the top webcomics enjoying less success and less self-sufficiency than they sometimes get credit for. Many webcomics creators, in his experience, are not just egotistical but private and unwilling to give hard data. The number of truly artistic, great webcomics – especially those noticed by the successors of Websnark, the mainstream webcomic blogs – can probably be counted on one hand. The number of webcomics that have had even fleeting breakout success outside the webcomic niche are even fewer. The webcomic community is still more committed to the potential of an idea than the actual realization of that idea. Much of the webcomic blogosphere consists of not so much coverage of actual webcomics but coverage of technological developments that might, one day, if we’re lucky, have an influence on the future of comics. (Comixtalk seems to prefer to see itself as a site for coverage of “comics in the digital age” than a webcomics blog.) Even webcomic reviews have, since Websnark near-fell off the face of the earth, concentrated less on the comics themselves and more on how lessons from them might apply to Aspiring Webcomickers Everywhere.

Say what you will about his conclusions, or even dismiss them entirely as someone too jaded to realize how times are changing and bitter about not succeeding the way “better” cartoonists did, you should still be sobered by Bengo’s announcement that he would be leaving “webcomics” entirely, feeling the term too poisoned, and urging others to isolate their sites as much as possible from the “scene”. And cheerleaders for the idea may want to listen to what Bengo had to say before that, directly to them:

I’d be alarmed that an open-minded, truth-seeking sort like myself would enter webcomics, study it round the clock for several years, and find it mostly over-blown, in love with itself and falling out of fashion. I’d be even more alarmed that there are quality comics with quality accounting who far out-perform the alleged self-supporting titles, providing a valuable reality check to the people peddling your bright webcomic career along with your lottery ticket and Brooklyn Bridge. The ignorance deficit — the difference between what most webcomic people know and what they need to know — is so gaping, the typical aspirant’s chances of success are rotten.

During Bengo’s farewell series, Scott Kurtz left a series of comments so mean-spirited and trolly it may have been hard to believe he was actually responsible for them. But that can’t be said for his tweeted response to Bengo’s announcement he would be leaving the “webcomics scene”, which regardless of what you may think of Bengo and his conclusions, has to be a wake-up call to anyone:

I think @krisstraub and I forced a man to quit webcomics. I’m proud. Proud of what we’ve acomplished [sic].

Really, Scott? You’re proud that a man who wanted to enter webcomics, who saw the potential of the core idea of webcomics and wanted webcomics to be the best that they could be, someone who could have – for all we know – been one of the great forces and driving figures to help webcomics achieve their potential, instead saw a cesspool of jerks and crap and decided it wasn’t worth the trouble? You’re proud that you forced a man to quit “webcomics”?!? How could you, self-proclaimed Voice of All Webcomics, possibly be proud of driving someone from it? Is it just because he didn’t bother kowtowing to you and dared to challenge you and your infallible statements? Is it because you think he’s bitter about not being good enough and you see him picking a fight with you for no good reason, oblivious to the fact you’re making yourself as bad if not worse, and taking webcomics down with it? Or perhaps we should take your nonspecific phrasing at face value, and decide this is one instance of you letting slip your real goal, that you don’t really want webcomics reaching their potential, that you don’t want anyone escaping the cave to discover the true mediocrity of your work, that you’re willing to bring down an entire art form so you can remain self-proclaimed king of it?

This one statement, more than any other – even any from Bengo – is telling about the state of webcomics today, held back by those who would wish that Sturgeon’s Law continued to hold as much as possible, that it would remain a niche small enough for their own delusions of grandeur to seem realistic, that its reputation could be sullied enough that it could remain their own little club. It’s possible that one day, when the history of comics on the web are told, we will say that once upon a time, there was a community of people, led by those who created the early successes and tried to ensure there would be no others, who produced a body of work and built their own insular community around it known as “webcomics”, and their actions nearly set the cause of comics on the web back years, and their community initially attracted those who would defend the idea, but decided that to avert the fate of the idea being slaughtered in the crib, they would have to distance themselves from it and start over, ditching the roots that “webcomics”, an outgrowth of the dumb Internet culture of the Web’s childhood and adolescence, laid down.

I would love to come back in a year, at next year’s State of Webcomics Address, and say that this period of webcomics history is not quite as bleak as I just described, that we have found a new Voice of All Webcomics that can rescue it from the damage Kurtz and his ilk are doing, that Bengo’s description of the potential missed opportunity facing us did not turn out to be as tragic as he feared. I’d even like to be able to say the state of webcomics wasn’t as bad as I made it seem even now, that Bengo was wrong all along, that webcomics’ own quirks – even its propensity for egos – were good enough to grow and thrive in the context of the Internet. But not only am I not holding my breath, I’m not sure if I’ll even know the answer from the webcomic blogosphere.