April 28th, 2008
Chapter 1 - Page 25
Good show, Twenty-Seven.
—
I’m changing the way I work my way through the comic. This is to avoid having to present you with a completely unfinished or unreadable page, or worse yet, nothing in the event of my being away, stuffed with work, ill or just having a bad week.
The good news about this is that this means I can build up a buffer 1) at all and 2) a lot faster than I planned and you’ll have a page every Monday regardless of my presence.
The bad news is that I’ll be filling it up with merely inked pages for now, not colored ones, to have color catch up on the progress later, so pages will look a bit… white in the near future.
Thanks for reading,
- Riess
April 28th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Boy, those guards sure are patronizing. I mean, if I was telling a story about how some girl beat me up and everyone clapped afterwards, I might not be too happy.
By the way, why did he release himself and then bind his hands back together? Is re-binding a bigger show of skill that the escape?
April 28th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Torryyyyyyyyyy
They’re clapping for his dramatic reenactment.
Also he unbound and then rebound himself just for the reenactment. It’s partly to show off the fact that even though he’s surrounded he completely outclasses them, as a Nameless.
April 29th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
I noticed that too Squid, I laughed at how clueless the guards were when he unbound and bound himself. Although his reenactment had a few shall we say changes to the real thing.
April 29th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Seriously? Now I’m not sure which is more odd, the guards clapping or the Shakespearean performance for an explanation.
If they hadn’t clapped, would he have cut their hands off? Now that would be impressive if he did that with no weapons while his hands were bound.
April 29th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Tory we are including some comic elements in our, er, comic.
April 29th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Me likey. 27 is quite a funny chap it seems. Though he does seem quite helpless.
April 30th, 2008 at 9:42 am
the second to last panel is still my favorite
the use of lines is just lol
April 30th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
So here’s the conversation we should be having:
Tory: Squid, could you come here for a second? Can you tell me what you’re writing?
Squid: Well, I’m writing a web comic.
Tory: Well, I was just wondering why you would suddenly introduce such a comical scene into a story that has been mostly dramatic and relying on irony for humor. You totally threw off my interpretation of the scene by changing styles like that. Stick to what has been working so well these last few months so that you can build a core of readers, and then pull in the occasional extra element.
[Squid starts crying]
Tory: Are you crying? Are you crying? Are you crying? There’s no crying in the comic industry!
Reiss: Why don’t you give him a break Tory.
Tory: Oh you zip it, Reiss! I grew up reading Spiderman, Batman, Avengers, and the Hulk and if Batman had made a joke in a panel of a Dark Knight comic, the readers would have been all over it. I even did some amateur comics myself and if I went so far as to alter a costume, my friends reading it would scream about continuity. And did I cry?
Squid: No, no, no.
Tory: Yeah! No. And do you know why?
Squid: No.
Tory: Because there’s no crying in the comic industry. There’s no crying in the comic industry. No crying!
Ok, that’s it. Go back to writing up the page for next Monday.
April 30th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
If you haven’t read the archives, I refer you to the very third page.
Actually this reminds me that the archives are still broken, sorry.
But here: http://kirsia.hwcommunity.com/extra/version1/page03.jpg
This was before I was ever involved, and that last panel had me rolling. Sure, we may not switch gears between serious and silly very smoothly yet, but it’s something we’re hoping to get down. I understand what you mean– more people will have a better handle on it if it’s more consistent and they can say “oh this is a DRAMATIC STORY.” The thing is, I’m not worried that working in some plainly silly things now and then will actually put off a lot of readers. I know you have a lot of experience with the print form, but, well, Riess and I have a lot of experience with the online form. I can’t think of a successful dramatic webcomic I’ve enjoyed that wasn’t punctuated with jokes.
Besides, it would be BORING AS HELL if we did it straight 90% of the time, and it’s right there, somewhere, on the tin: “making young adults look silly.”
If we’re losing you in the transition from drama to comedy, ok, that’s a problem, but the solution isn’t going to be removing the comedy. The next few pages are already written.
April 30th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
Just to throw in my viewpoint: The comic as it is now is incredibly serious and dramatic compared to what it started as in ‘03 (even before the first version of the comic started). While it doesn’t adhere to the one-punchline-a-week strip format, it should be comedy, first and foremost, and I hope I’ll never fall into over dramatizing. The drama will be there, and is already inextricably linked to the current version of the script, but if there’s a joke to be made, it should not get in the way of it.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
So far it’s felt like the jokes have been in the writing more than the humor. Take any panel of any comic, web-based or paper, change the text, and you can make even the most serious scene humorous. This was the first panel I’ve seen though (after like 30 pages including the prologue) where the humor was apparent without the text, so it totally threw me. It kind of felt like a guest writer stepped in for a page.
As far as the archives, it’s nice that you added some more links. Personally though, I don’t want to know the whole story ahead of time. I want to watch it roll out. If I read the whole thing already, it wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable.
If nothing else, now you’ve established a precendence in both the text AND the art for how the feel of the comic will be for the remainder of the story.