AAaA Xan
No technique’s perfect! It reads a little weird to be showing Xan here and the Cultist monster a few installments back, before showing their official intro into the canon. But it also would have been weird to push the AaAs to later and have Rachel appearing in several AaAs after she (ahem) left the series. And it was weird to do it the way we did it originally, with these AaAs just sprinkled through the text at regular intervals, and it would also be strange to divide the AaA feature into multiple chunks. I basically don’t see a non-weird solution here. Oh, well!
I’m glad to get a little look at Xan’s philosophy outside of direct responses to Shanna and the big Hurricane conspiracy. He’s an intriguing paradox, a seemingly flat, emotionless character who actually feels quite a lot about many things, but doesn’t always know the right ways to express it. He doesn’t have much time for conventional interactions, with their elaborate etiquettes and all that. But he’ll make his own way.
Points to the readers who noticed the window in the last frame. I don’t really get antsy about referencing real-life brands in comics anymore, but Jason’s impulse was still “better safe than sorry,” sometimes. Still, this is very clearly Not-McDonald’s, not actual chicken restaurant McDougal’s.
I thought it worked pretty well the way you had it originally, for my part.
Personally, I would have considered putting each AaA after the just after the chapter it appeared in, so they don’t interrupt the story, but appear roughly in the right spot, chronologically.
Multiple chunks might have been better. This concentrated batch has the bizarre feeling that an already finished comic is on hiatus/filler.
Its interesting that Xan used skyrims as a unit of satisfaction. Personally, I found skyrim kind of vapid and shallow? But I also feel that way about Destiny.
Huh. I gathered it was more a unit of content or popularity. It has remarkable staying power, though that may have to do with Bethesda offering
an MMO (2014), one post-apocalyptic game (2015), and a hybrid of the two (2018) that was heavily lambasted at launch (I heard it’s better now, but I never cared to play it in the first place). I guess it’s understandable; it’s only been about, what, 10 years now?I like to verify what I’m saying and in so doing I discovered that the MMO isn’t actually made by Bethesda Game Studios. And that other releases seem to be VR Skyrim/Fallout 4 as well as HD Skyrim and mobile titles for both ES (Blades) and Fallout(Shelter). Hey, look, there are 3 Skyrims!
So there was Carmen San Diego!