Annotated 49-35
FB: WAYS TO MEASURE FOOT SIZE: 1) Paris point 2) barleycorn 3) centimeter 4) number of coronaries induced
With this last villain speech, Flo was venting some of her own frustrations straight onto the page. Guilded Age was her first completed large-scale work. Both of us had pinned plenty of hopes and dreams onto it. Some of those it accomplished, but in other ways, to be brutally honest…it fell far short. It never became any kind of video series or game. It barely made a consistent profit for us, and certainly not a living. Our stories were full of flaws, most of which I’ve documented in the annotations as they’ve come up…the ones I know about and agree with, anyway.
And they paled in comparison to the stories that we once imagined they would be. So when HR rages at the Five, and by extension at Arkerra, for failing to live up to his ideals, he is somewhat also Flo, raging at how all her creations seemed to come out gnarled and wrong compared to her expectations. In Plato’s World of Forms, there is a perfect version of Guilded Age: every joke lands like a shot from Cupid’s quiver, the plot is seamless, the action is as exhausting and exhilarating as the best sex you could ever have, et cetera. It’s better than ours in every way except one…but that one aspect is crucial.
It does not, cannot, actually exist. It assumes a mind-meld, between me and Flo, between us and the Waltrips, and between the whole team and all of you. It assumes we have infinite knowledge of all the things we care about. It assumes everyone reacts in the same way to a certain joke or dramatic moment. And it assumes we never ever screw up.
The real world thwarts every artist as soon as their paintbrush first taps the canvas. This is the artist’s dilemma. We say “Be dissatisfied! Your work can always be better!” And that’s true. But being dissatisfied for always is not good self-care. You gotta weigh your integrity as an artist against your health as a human. You gotta give it your best shot, try as hard as you can…and then know how to let go. I’d done a few series before this, so I’d had more experience with that issue than Flo…and I’m a pretty chill person in general. She had more frustration to exorcise through HR, and only a few installments left to do so.
“Stop lecturing me, Toe-Dad!”
Classic Dumbing of Age crossover potential there
Yeah, I was too lazy to find an appropriate link.
Don’t know if this will achieve anything, but for me, Gilded Age is near perfect. I have no complaints whatsoever or can’t imagine many ways in which it could improve. Even when T has pointed out here things that he regrets, I can hardly see them as mistakes. Maybe it is difficult for the creators to see it because they’re so aware of the sometimes almost insurmountable hardships and disagreements they faced and it taints their own perspective. However, I believe that something good can come out of hardship and even the crumbling of a friendship and it is a true pity that it never caught on with a larger audience as it deserved.
Guilded age certainly has the chops needed to become a game or video series. It’s one of the few that I still read regularly, and the fact that I’m reading it the second time through certainly speaks to its staying power. But… well, those are some really high hopes for a webcomic.
I admit it’s easier to say this with the benefit of hindsight, but I’m only aware of two webcomics that got any sort of animated series off the ground, both with… limited success. I know of another two that got their own games. There are famous, successful print comics that have never been adapted to another medium. While aiming high is certainly admirable, if Flo went into this with the *expectation* of that level of success from a webcomic… well, she was setting herself up for a massive disappointment.
Interesting perspective. Guilded Age was always, in my mind, one of the very few webcomics that “made it”. Even more so, I’m relatively confident one can count webcomics with that kind of longevity, reach, *and* amount of reshuffling of artists on a single… foot of a lumberjack after a severe chainsaw accident.
Or, you know, a Skyrim giant after a finally-sufficiently-leveled character takes a stab at it, for Alchemy purposes.
YOu told your story all the way through to the end, and had a lot of people following every minute. Sounds like a success, at least artistically, to me.
Yes, this. I can’t count the number of wonderful webcomic series that I have read that never got to the end. Heck, “Templar, Arizona” barely got to the MIDDLE, and I loved that one hard. I honestly don’t know how any independent artists make a living through their art these days. It’s heartbreaking, basically. That said, I think it reflects really well on all of you that you were able to, practically and artistically, make it through to the completion of the series. Flo’s frustration is understandable none the less.
I’ve heard that some trans artists find that their dissatisfaction with their work pre-transition seems sort of foreshadowy in hindsight, as just not coming out the way it should, like it’s secretly at odds with its own self or something.
I dunno if that pattern applies here, though.
That *could* be a factor for Flo, but only Flo could answer that one. I’m as cis as they come, though, and I definitely wrestled with the “great expectations” a lot when I was starting out.
I can certainly see some things in the story which I’d like to be “fixed”, but half of those don’t seem to be faults to most other people, and some of the things T has pointed out are hard for me to see as needing improvements. This stuff is highly subjective, and I think it’s all really good. Better than most other webcomics I know of. But of course most people commenting here are long-time readers, so this feedback is somewhat biased :)
I guess if someone paid you to do it again (maybe this time for release as a book), with a few month’s time to rearrange the overall arc etc., you’d probably find a bunch of things to improve that aren’t obvious to most readers but would result in a better overall story. But I guess it’s like the old saying: The perfect engineer, given infinite resources and time, will produce exactly nothing. There’s *always* something to improve.
No idea whose sentence that is, but I think it applies not only to engineers but also to artists and a lot of other professions. You can always make your current draft just that little bit better.
I sure hope you can eventually make something this way that does pay the bills.