Annotated 9-13
Click the image to be taken to its original source, the very loosely autobiographical Hijinks Ensue, whose author, Joel Watson, graciously agreed to this cameo. I wanted to get David Willis in there too, but I just couldn’t plug him into the plot.
Remember when the most controversial things about Joss Whedon were that his fandom acted cultish and his shows tended to get cancelled sooner than expected? (I had already covered the “cultish Whedon fan” angle in Penny and Aggie.)
AAAANYWAY, “the day it all went so strange” has a different meaning in retrospect. You might think at this point– and some readers did– that HR had only meant to test a VR system and he had built the life-support system after the Five lapsed into comas. But no, he was ready for the comas; he just wasn’t ready for not being able to end them. What he really wants out of this video is none of the goofy chatter we’re seeing here, but some psychological insight into the Five and their corresponding “game avatars.”
I remember this being the page where I instantly stopped reading the comic. I’d come back every few weeks to see if it got back to the adventurers, but once it was clear it was going to stay here for a while, I just deleted the bookmark and moved on. I intend to do the same this time as well, but the commentary may keep me around.
To me, this is basically the equivalent of those webcomics where the author lost their buffer and just starts posting raw text, and the art serves no other purpose than to obfuscate that fact. This is raw plot exposition and it’s…I mean christ, just LOOK at all that text! To me, back then and now, this is worthless and stops the story dead.
I honestly can’t remember when I came back into the fold, but it was very much after all this was over with and its telling that I never once felt I needed to read it in order to have a solid footing on what was going on.
I suggest reading it this time. You might pick up on some additional characterization for the five. Plus, you call that a wall of text? All together, it wouldn’t even fill up one of the panels. You’d be blown away by the wordiness of certain elvish wizards.
Or your average Subnormality strip. (Which at some point started using ‘Comix with too many words’ as a tagline.)
I won’t bother arguing here for the merits of the sepia scenes, but I don’t think we stayed with them for as long as you might be expecting.
Plot exposition? I am not sure about your labeling there doesn’t exposition have to exposit? The first panel is entirely chatter irrelevant to the story basically just there to set the scene as them being presenters. The second panel just alludes to something going strange and him watching coverage in hope of getting some inspiration about it. The third, well I suppose it tells us about an VR system but as we know it isn’t directly relevant to the comic, it basically just serves the purpose of telling us they work on VR.
Yeah, “I don’t like all the text” would at least be comprehensible. “This is raw plot exposition”–what? The closest thing anything in this comic comes to plot exposition is one line indicating there was a specific day it all went so strange, and that struck me as pretty clearly implied by “H.R. has a bunch of people in jars.”
The comic mysteriously didn’t go on to be about whether it’s time for menage a trois metaphors in marketing.
You mean to say, you hoped this wasn’t the comic it turned out to be, and you’re going to keep feeling it was wrong for it to be what it was?
Isn’t that… sorta futile?
Also, who sets up that level of expectations for something they’re reading?
Don’t you know expectations are what unhappiness is made of?
What T. means is that he could not find a way to drop a gratuitous Transformers reference. If he had, Willis’ cameo would have written itself.
When in Arkerra-time did the five arrive? Just prior to meeting in Gastonia? Or well back in their backstories? Trying to figure out how much Arkerran time has passed with them being part of it
When you roll up a new character, you give them a past. Some of the five have more significant pasts than others, but at various points, all of them except Best meet people who knew them before their introductory Chapter 1 scenes. So the only thing that makes sense to me here is that the changes were retroactive.