Things We Almost Did, But Didn’t – Part Three
Big thoughts about the nature of reality were part of our ambitions for the comic from the start. As you all know by now, Guilded Age has two “realms” of reality… arguably three, if you count the layer that Phil and I and you readers occupy. And then there was that business with the Realm of Being… but no, let’s settle on three.
Phil and I and all of you are on the highest level, and to us, both Arkerra and Sepia World appear to be fiction. To those in Sepia World, Arkerra appears to be fiction (more or less).
At one point early in Guilded Age’s development, I considered adding another layer to this cake: a world that would think of Sepia World and Arkerra as fiction, but still itself appear to be fiction to you and Phil and me.
Mongo and Wordsworth would be fictional cartoonists telling a story about their favorite game, Kingdoms of Arkerra, but making up stuff like Carol’s personal life and the basement with the tubes and tagging their posts with “you can’t sue us because it’s satire.” They would also regularly interrupt their narrative to draw one-off jokes about other video games.
Had we followed through on this, I think the borders between their reality and Sepia World would have started breaking down, much like the borders between Sepia World and Arkerra broke down, which probably would mean Hurricane Studios would snuff them out for getting too close to the truth. You can see a few scraps of that idea in Joel Watson’s scenes.
This kind of comics-about-comics is a well-worn genre, but it’s still possible to be original with it, and Phil and I had had a lot of fun with it in our earlier project Sketchies. Still, Phil was never very into this pair, and I’m glad he wasn’t now, for a few reasons. One, it’s a little too cute. Meta gets tiresome quickly when it turns into “oo, look how clever we are” at the expense of entertaining, and this had a lot of potential to be that.
Two, these guys were closely modeled on Tycho and Gabe from Penny Arcade. When I proposed this in 2009, we still thought of that duo as basically nice fellows who’d made it big, but in the 2010s, their tendency to double down on offensive, punching-down humor alienated many people, including us. It’s sort of like what happened to Twitter.
And three… we got enough backlash just from introducing Sepia World; can you IMAGINE what we’d have to deal with if we introduced Deluxe Extra Ultra Sepia World another few months later?
Just flip it. Nothing below the waist, because these guys are the stars of a puppet show in Arkerra. Like Punch & Judy, but geekier.
No, do BOTH. They are part of a puppet show in Arhkerra, and their characters in the puppet show are cartoonists who write about Sepia World. It’s all a big cycle.
No wait. That’s incredibly stupid. Never mind.
Mongo could be mistaken for Penk’s player.
Mongo only pawn, in the game of life.
I sort of thought Mongo was a prototype form of Xan at first glance.
I see what you did with their hair, there.
Wow for a guy that reads webcomics I’m shocked to realize I haven’t read Penny Arcade in yyyeeeeears.
The second to last paragraph, does it mean there was some sort of controversy or just a change in comedic style getting tasteless?
There may have been other stuff but the biggest I remember was the dickwolves controversy.
Less the initial controversy, and more Gabe’s everchanging and usually highly tone deaf reactions to it. (One minute he’s defensive, next he’s conciliatory, then he’s taking back the apology.)
There were a few instances back then. They have gotten better. “Gabe” in particular sought help and later acknowledged that some mental issues (that he now treats with medication) were causing him to lash out.
That’s good to hear, both for his not being a jerkass to others, and for his own sake.
Oh, he’s still very much a jerkass to others, it’s just that they’ve found a way to package that as “roleplaying” and sell it to D&D aficionados.
That said, the dickwolves controversy was utterly ridiculous from the get-go.
Premium World, your for just 15 meta bux per eldritch month (or 60$/week in normie-tongue).
“Meta gets tiresome quickly when it turns into “oo, look how clever we are” at the expense of entertaining”
If only the rest of the internet would realize this.
Sadly, I can only agree about Penny Arcade. I followed them for over a decade, and laughed my ass off more often than not. But after a while, it just stopped being funny any more. The humor left, the art style turned…I’m not sure what the hell, but it wasn’t appealing to me. And Tycho’s commentary, which had always been the #1 draw for me, either left or got hidden somewhere. I still dig up a few of the old archives on occasion, which contain some real gems.
Just click on the circle with ‘txt’ in it above the strip and you’ll see Tycho’s commentary. If that’s of use to you, if you don’t like it anymore prolly not.
Thank you, if I ever get around to those parts of the ‘Net again, I’ll check it out.
Yikes. I thought I was glad you didn’t do moony-eyed Syr’Nj, but I’m even more gladerer you didn’t do this.
Speaking of the layors of realities in this comic, one mystery that was not touched on was who were the countless? Who were the “madmen” that H.R. was talking to that inspired his ultimate master plan to become a god in Arkerra?
What would you have done for their art style, I wonder….
No Hector?
“… can you IMAGINE what we’d have to deal with if we introduced Deluxe Extra Ultra Sepia World another few months later?”
Yes. Yes, I can. *shivers*
I remember almost jumping ship when Sepia world was first introduced (“you mean it’s just a video game?!?!”) Glad I stuck with it. But I can imagine that comic in comic thing would of been enough to get me to take the leap.
> You can see a few scraps of that idea in Joel Watson’s scenes.
That name isn’t ringing a bell for me at all. Googling isn’t helping, as I either get this page, or a real person by the same name.
Joel Watson is a real-life web cartoonist, and he shows up early on in Sepia World, at the gaming convention (on this page http://guildedage.net/comic/chapter-31-page-14/). He’s the guy Shanna tells not to be a hero, and who gets approached by the hitman when he’s unpacking at home (here http://guildedage.net/comic/chapter-33-page-6/).
Thanks! That was too far back that I didn’t remember the incident, and the name didn’t mean anything to me at the time. Too bad there’s not a good way to search by character tags.
http://guildedage.net/tag/joel/
It’d be really nice if there was a page with a list of all the tags. Like if you went to /tag/ you could scroll through an alphabetical list, and click on the tag you wanted.
And check out this note from one of the Joel Watson scenes…calling out a Mongo and Wordsworth we wouldn’t know about for years:
I was actually going to leave this comic eventually because it was fun but I wasn’t getting into it. But when the Sepia world came when HR was introduced. I became intrigued and from that point on you had me glued. I for one am very happy for it HR was an awesome Villain I shall remember him and the power he had over there world and ours.
I think it’d be cool if you made these two Sepia World KoA players, linked to World Rebellion characters. And, every now and then while you’re re-running the comic, add a rough sketch of these two commenting on what’s happening on the current page, as if they’re in the middle of a quest.
“Where are you, man?! This huge, one-eyed pile of crap is gonna TPK, if you don’t get out here with your drum! … Are you afk?”
“I’m back! I’m back! I have my drum! … Whoa! That thing looks like what I just flushed. I hope nothing bad happened ’cause I wasn’t here with my drum!”