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This was also posted in the political cartoons thread, were user I dont know identified it as referencing Electronic Tigers although it could be several other strips. I dont know posted:Unless I'm wrong, Electronic Tigers didn't really have a hyper-conservative spiral though. Mike Miller was always like that and explicitly wanted to make a right wing slice of life/gamer comic to counter what he perceived as left wing bias in popular comics of the time. The man's ambition was to create the Fox News of gamer webcomics, which is funny than any joke the strip ever (deliberately) made.
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May 1, 2020 21:51
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The whole point is that it isn't referencing a specific strip, just a general early-00's trend of "short dweeby guy, tall hot girl, vague political themes, author became really lovely".
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May 1, 2020 21:54
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The comics that immediately came to mind in that thread are Sore Thumbs, Electronic Tigers, and Sinfest, but yeah there's a depressingly large number of them. I'm not sure how well those all fight the "right-wing death spiral," though. Sore Thumbs started out being aggressively left (lovely, but left), Electronic Tigers was deliberately right wing because the creator got drummed out of DC for being a giant homophobe nobody wanted to be around, and Sinfest is nominally left, but it went full TERF and the fact that they tend find common cause with literal Nazis should be a red flag but hate is a hell of a drug.
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May 1, 2020 22:10
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Sinfest was always more "well-meaning lightly liberal centrist" and just naturally progressed along that line as one does without any introspection or change. ...also that tweet could also apply to Exploitation Now and that author's further works.
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May 1, 2020 22:24
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Hostile V posted:Sinfest was always more "well-meaning lightly liberal centrist" and just naturally progressed along that line as one does without any introspection or change. No, Sinfest had a serious turn to the... something... at some point and has now wound up in the land of TERFism and anti-Semitism.
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May 1, 2020 23:44
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Hostile V posted:Sinfest was always more "well-meaning lightly liberal centrist" and just naturally progressed along that line as one does without any introspection or change. I could never get into Poe's sprawling fantasy comic but the gag strip he did after sure was a thing.
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May 1, 2020 23:58
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I got curious and decided to check on what Poe's current comic is, and immediately got a faceful of TERF, so yeah I'm sure he and Tats would be best buddies.
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May 2, 2020 01:00
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Poe's also a huge alt-righter in addition to that. I was curious a few years ago about if it was worth checking out Errant Story so I looked at his Twitter and it was full of "VIDEOGAME CENSORSHIP" nonsense and yelling about free speech and that hasn't gotten better.
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May 2, 2020 01:16
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That tweet is unsurprisingly making the rounds among Comics Types, and well... https://twitter.com/Iron_Spike/status/1256078308338470913 That tweet posted:But still, taking them all as a whole, it's pretty wild how many cartoonists whose fans defended them with IT'S JUST EDGY JOKES, YOU'RE THE IDIOT FOR TAKING HIM SERIOUSLY!!! turned out to be... surprise, genuinely lovely people. As the saying goes, "when someone tells you who they are, believe them."
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May 2, 2020 01:54
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Well, thread web comic artists, it was nice knowing you, but I'm getting on the ground floor on this. Statistically, you're all nazis, so shoo.
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May 2, 2020 01:59
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Oh, man. Remembering Chugworth Academy is even worse. I'd wonder what Cheung is up to these days but I will assume it's repellent on several levels.
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May 2, 2020 02:14
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Dawgstar posted:Oh, man. Remembering Chugworth Academy is even worse. I'd wonder what Cheung is up to these days but I will assume it's repellent on several levels.
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May 2, 2020 02:18
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Great. Now I have "Chugworth Academy" in my search history. Even worse, I remember it introduced me to the idea of character boob size charts.
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May 2, 2020 02:24
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Man I think the weirdest/worst poo poo I read back forever ago was like... Sexy Losers?
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May 2, 2020 02:25
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:Man I think the weirdest/worst poo poo I read back forever ago was like... Sexy Losers? Hah, I wish I could say that
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May 2, 2020 02:37
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There's some stuff that I've read about humor under the totalitarian rule of the Soviet Union, where humor was a way of trying out the waters to see if people would possibly be open to criticize the government in private in a way that would be illegal in public. And then it turned out that people telling edgy jokes wound up following a similar pattern, where either the jokes weren't just jokes or they met people for whom edgy jokes were a nice little segue to start radicalizing them. So now I can never judge jokes like that on just whether they're funny, because it could be dog whistling. But it is still plausible that some people are playing around with taboos like they're dumb teenagers. Hostile V posted:It involves porn. Some of it is repellent. It's not super great to talk about. The most I can hope is that no women are getting horribly murdered in that porn. The absolute worst person I know of whose webcomic I followed for a while was Bryon Beaubien, and at the very least, he's been chased off his old haunts to some more obscure corner of the internet. I guess his jokes about Sonic getting molested and/or molesting others as well as being creepy about Amy Rose reflected a lot of his personal feelings about molestation and teenage girls. In retrospect, it's probably a lot better when their secret lovely opinions coming out are just about politics rather than anything more personal.
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May 2, 2020 02:59
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SlothfulCobra posted:The most I can hope is that no women are getting horribly murdered in that porn.
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May 2, 2020 03:11
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Inkspot posted:Great. Now I have "Chugworth Academy" in my search history.  God, what a cursed image/condemnation of other comics
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May 2, 2020 04:07
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Rand Brittain posted:No, Sinfest had a serious turn to the... something... at some point and has now wound up in the land of TERFism and anti-Semitism. Did he add open antisemitism now?
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May 2, 2020 04:28
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Mors Rattus posted:Did he add open antisemitism now? Seems kinda like.
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May 2, 2020 04:46
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MechaCrash posted:I got curious and decided to check on what Poe's current comic is, and immediately got a faceful of TERF, so yeah I'm sure he and Tats would be best buddies. loving ugh. There were plenty of things that weren't great about Errant Story, especially earlier in the run before Poe got into the story groove, but I have fond memories of reading it... and iirc it had a non-binary character that it didn't treat like poo poo!* I can't really recommend it looking back at this point, but it was better than a lot of the poo poo out around the same time and actually had a full story arc with fully developed characters, solid art, etc. It's no more awful than, like, most of what Marvel or DC was publishing. * though iirc it also made their non-binary status a magical medical issue that caused them health problems rather than, y'know, just who they were. Which in retrospect makes sense if he went full TERF.
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May 2, 2020 05:24
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So the latest Sleepless Domain dropped but before hand Mary put out a patreon post that was a single panel preview that was just a shot of 'dine's hands and a blank speech bubble. Needless to say, this happened. With appoligies to both Ms. Cagle and Mr. Spencer. 
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May 2, 2020 07:24
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ConanThe3rd posted:So the latest Sleepless Domain dropped but before hand Mary put out a patreon post that was a single panel preview that was just a shot of 'dine's hands and a blank speech bubble.
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May 2, 2020 09:00
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Happy Noodle Boy posted:Man I think the weirdest/worst poo poo I read back forever ago was like... Sexy Losers? At least El Goonish Shive had and has stuff going on in it beyond rampant transformation. I haven't kept up with it recently but it's cool to see a creator improve in realtime.
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May 2, 2020 15:56
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Man, I've been reading El Goonish Shive since 2006 and looking back at the old art compared to now is weird.
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May 2, 2020 16:03
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Draga posted:Man, I've been reading El Goonish Shive since 2006 and looking back at the old art compared to now is weird.
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May 2, 2020 16:18
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PetraCore posted:Right? It's not just the art, either, Dan's improved drastically as a writer. I have a really soft spot for it because I feel like it grew with me as a reader. I'll admit to having read EGS back when I was in middle school and high school, but I fell off a loooooong while back. It is wild though looking back on what the comic used to be in the early days, what it evolved into as I was reading it regularly, and what it appears to be now. I've actually thought about doing a re-read to catch up, but unfortunately I straight-up do not have the focus or ability to overlook the early bad art and writing to do that kind of archive binge anymore 
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May 2, 2020 17:41
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Is it still the most SFW and wholesome transformation fetish comic on the internet?
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May 2, 2020 23:02
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PMush Perfect posted:Is it still the most SFW and wholesome transformation fetish comic on the internet? Pretty much, yeah. Although it's also shifted more into exploring trans identities in the context of being able to magically change your sex at will.
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May 2, 2020 23:09
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Tenebrais posted:Pretty much, yeah. It's good! I just am not invested enough to read it in drips, I binge what I've missed a few times a year.
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May 3, 2020 01:53
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Lately I've been reading a comic called The Three Little Princesses which is mainly about the misadventures of Peach and Daisy. I've never understood why so many "gamer" comics back in the day wanted to imagine the experience of being a slightly different kind of guy laying on a couch instead of just making a comic about the videogame material that they're actually interested in.
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May 3, 2020 02:05
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SlothfulCobra posted:Lately I've been reading a comic called The Three Little Princesses which is mainly about the misadventures of Peach and Daisy. can't sell it early on it was all about that sweet, sweet t-shirt money, and Nintendo doesn't gently caress around (except when they do) also if you're not a comedic genius it's hard to do a Mario comic--the VG Cats guy actually started with a Mario RPG sprite comic but eventually transitioned to, well, VG Cats
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May 3, 2020 06:18
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PetraCore posted:Yeah, like, turns out the character who was really into recreationally shifting sex to do casual things is not cis. And another one of the protagonists has recently been revealed as being "gender casual", i.e. in their words "mostly male, but enjoys being not male every now and then". Which I suppose is genderfluid?
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May 3, 2020 10:08
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Mikl posted:And another one of the protagonists has recently been revealed as being "gender casual", i.e. in their words "mostly male, but enjoys being not male every now and then". Which I suppose is genderfluid? When you introduce magic, poo poo gets real messy as far as terms go
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May 3, 2020 17:52
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Hey everyone. I've got a few questions for you all. I checked the original MangaStudio 4 files for my webcomic, Blasphemous Saga Fantasy, and it looks like I first committed stylus to tablet in earnest on May 17th, 2010. So I'm coming up on 10 years of working on BSF. I actually started publishing on January 3rd, 2011, so we're a ways off from its actual "birthday," but it's a milestone nonetheless. I'm not sure how to ask this, so I apologize if this comes across as attention seeking or overly dramatic or anything, but y'all seem like the right group to ask about it. Over the past almost-decade, I've found that BSF generally gets ignored. People have asked for recommendations in this thread, particularly for fantasy or funny fantasy type stories, and I've suggested BSF to, I'd say 99% of the time, no acknowledgement. I've also, thinking that maybe the title was putting people off, made a couple of effortposts showcasing some of the best pages, but those both got pretty much unilaterally ignored as well. To compound this, I know some people do in fact read (and presumably enjoy) the comic, but I never see anyone talking about it. My comments are a ghost town and I've never really seen any discussion of the comic online outside of a post here and there over the years of a reader recommending it themselves. Obviously no one's obligated to give me or BSF the time of day, or to talk about where they think the plot is going, but it happens with other comics that exhibit a wide, varying range of technical aptitude all the time, so I'm not sure if I'm doing something wrong. Really, my questions are: what makes you engage with a webcomic in the first place when someone plugs/advertises/recommends it, what makes you keep up with it, and what compels you to recommend it to others and/or discuss it? Having been at this for as long as I have, I'm still just not sure what I'm missing, ir anything. While I appreciate feedback and constructive criticism, I'm not asking anyone to read BSF if they don't feel like it. If you do and can let me know if there's anything you think is missing from it, that'd be great, but if you take the time to let me know what gets you personally engaged with a story to the point that you're invested, I'd love to know that too. If you do already read BSF, thank you! I want you to know what I appreciate that a lot, and this post is in no way meant to diminish that appreciation, and obviously I'd love to hear what you think as well. Fortis fucked around with this message at 18:48 on May 3, 2020 |
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May 3, 2020 18:46
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Fortis posted:Hey everyone. I've got a few questions for you all. I think a big part of the problem is that there doesn't seem to really be a unique hook here. It's... some kind of tongue in cheek fantasy JRPG-ish pastiche? Give me an hour or two and I could probably find literally 100 other comics with a more or less interchangeable premise, spanning two entire decades. It's a very saturated genre and there's a ton of direct competition, you're going to have a hard time standing out from the field. If there's anything there that would make me pick this up over any of the other tongue in cheek fantasy adventure comics I could be reading instead, it takes longer to find than I'm willing to give a new comic. Personally, just speaking from my taste I click through the last few pages and bounce off it because it's way too decompressed for me. Lots of big closeup panels, not a lot of dialogue, action progresses very slowly from one page to the next. I gather that this seems to be some kind of climactic moment but it still feels excessively slow to me. That appeals to some people maybe I guess??? I can't speak for anyone else on this one, but it's not my cup of tea. Maybe if I was fully invested I might be willing to put up with pacing like this, but if I go to the beginning of the comic there's not much for me either. Style is very different, still not especially detailed or unique. The pacing is better, but the banter and jokes aren't landing for me. By way of comparison, two comics that I've picked up from this thread in recent months: People have been talking about Sleepless Domain for a while now and I happened to take a look on this page. The subject material is not super interesting to me but it just happened to be a really weird and visually interesting page, so I took a look from the start and found more weird and visually interesting things. I'm not invested enough to get into the discussions that are happening but I catch up on it every week or so. Someone just mentioned Godslave which has come up before but I had enough free time to give it a proper look. The meat of it is, again, pretty ehhhh. It's a modern day magical superhero thing, not terribly unique. It's not quite as overrepresented but still, I've seen it before. This one comes with a fair bit of intrigue and is upfront about being a really serious deep dive into Egyptian mythology, though, which is enough to make me overlook some of its less inspired parts.
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May 3, 2020 19:41
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Fortis posted:Really, my questions are: what makes you engage with a webcomic in the first place when someone plugs/advertises/recommends it, what makes you keep up with it, and what compels you to recommend it to others and/or discuss it? Having been at this for as long as I have, I'm still just not sure what I'm missing, ir anything. Speaking personally, as someone whose taste in comics ranges is somewhere between voracious and all-encompassing, I think the big distinction for my top favourites is deep, relatable characters. The more I can feel for the struggles of the protagonist(s), the more the story sticks out to me, and the more likely I am to want to talk about it with others. That's the reason I got more engaged in, say, All Night Laundry than The Property Of Hate. Both have very inventive settings and explore ideas you don't see a lot of in stories, and the mechanics of how their worlds work are something of a puzzle to solve. But Bina, a socially-awkward young woman struggling with her direction in life and the way she parted ways with her girlfriend, is just plain more relatable than The Hero, a little girl that got lured into the strange world and bounces between varying degrees of bullish confidence and terror as a child would. I do follow Blasphemous Saga Fantasy, and have for the last two years or so. But I think the main reason it hasn't managed to grab enough of my attention to bring up more is that for that entire time the story has been in a flashback, following different characters than the story had been about when I was reading the archive, who all lived hundreds of years ago and I've got very little reason to care about them. It's to the point that I've actually forgotten what the actual protagonists' names are - though this is partly unfortunate timing, it's worth noting that 20% of your comic's run, in real-time terms, has not involved any of its cast. Speaking of real-time terms, that's also something to consider along with what Straight White Shark said about being decompressed - the story is moving very slowly in real time. In the month of April, the Katar has threatened the flashback-heroes, and told Grrg to teleport them somewhere else, which he did. This is... not a lot to chew on over the course of a month. A slow update rate doesn't necessarily kill a comic, but you do need to make each update decently chunky in terms of things to think about - Order of the Stick is a slow-updating comic, usually hitting a page every week or two, but look how much is going on in one page. And this is right at the start of an arc before any actual action is underway. Tenebrais fucked around with this message at 20:07 on May 3, 2020 |
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May 3, 2020 19:56
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Tenebrais posted:I do follow Blasphemous Saga Fantasy, and have for the last two years or so. But I think the main reason it hasn't managed to grab enough of my attention to bring up more is that for that entire time the story has been in a flashback, following different characters than the story had been about when I was reading the archive, who all lived hundreds of years ago and I've got very little reason to care about them. It's to the point that I've actually forgotten what the actual protagonists' names are - though this is partly unfortunate timing, it's worth noting that 20% of your comic's run, in real-time terms, has not involved any of its cast. Yeah, I can definitely understand this. If I'm being honest, I have sort of come to hate this loving flashback. I thought it would be over quickly(ish) but there's so much ground to cover. We're almost at the end, but yeah, it's been way too much. I want to prune it down but I cannot even begin to figure out how to do that until it's finished. The good news is we're almost done. I don't know how long that means in real time but the end is in sight. Thank you for keeping up with the comic in spite of this. edit: Just saw what you added, and yeah, it's definitely a problem. I've been kind of terrified to take an extended break from the comic, but that might be what I need to actually sit down and write this all out so I'm not padding as much. Straight White Shark posted:I think a big part of the problem is ... Thank you, this gives me a lot to think about. I do think the pacing could use a lot of work (although I'm not sure what I can do about it other than improve it moving forward) and I guess I do need to maintain some perspective when "RPG Pastiche" is basically as old as webcomics itself. EDIT: The more I think about it (combined with all the thinking I've been doing about it over the last year or so), you're both definitely right about the pacing, particularly of this part of the story. I'm going to take some time to step back and figure out what I can do to address the pacing moving forward. Fortis fucked around with this message at 22:00 on May 3, 2020 |
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May 3, 2020 20:08
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My advice would be to finish the flashback chapter first (if there's less than, what, maximum 20 pages remaining) to get a natural point for a pause.
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May 3, 2020 22:12
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Cat Mattress posted:My advice would be to finish the flashback chapter first (if there's less than, what, maximum 20 pages remaining) to get a natural point for a pause. Yeah, for sure. There's also the fact that finishing the flashback actually makes it kind of a non-issue; the chapter itself, despite towering over everything before it in terms of page length, is a pretty quick read. For anyone reading the archives, it's going to be much less egregious than it has been for the patient souls reading along in real time. That being said, it could probably use some editing. I am pretty sure I can combine pages here and there and bring it in line with the other chapters further down the line. I do also think that moving forward, I'm going to have to think about the experience for anyone reading serially. I've been skewing towards the archive reading experience, which probably explains why so many people catch up with the story every few years... but that might also be why I never see anyone talking about it. Fortis fucked around with this message at 22:23 on May 3, 2020 |
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May 3, 2020 22:17
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