|
GunnerJ posted:Thanks for the info, friendos!
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2023 22:50
|
|
So basically he's the Tony of that comic, except not sorta written out after some big (quasi) redemption/justification moment, instead the author just gave up.
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 03:33 |
|
|
Splicer posted:Are you surprised they have the same hair colour? I've never actually read the comic, I've only seen it referenced in various webcomic threads when everyone was originally going sour on it. Just a little surprised to recognise the author name.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2023 23:08
|
|
|
Wait, SFP was Brennan Lee Mulligan the bird facts guy and Molly Ortsberg the GLAAD nominee according to google??? Talk about a glow up for both of them. The Girl from the Sea was good imo, and I like his comedy on game changer. Then again the comic started 2012, and they’re both in their thirties now… so SFP was early 20s? and early 20s milquetoast college era first writing attempts isn’t historically great unless you’re idk Mary Shelley.
|
|
#
?
Jul 31, 2023 23:26
|
|
|
coolusername posted:Wait, SFP was Brennan Lee Mulligan the bird facts guy and Molly Ortsberg the GLAAD nominee according to google??? Talk about a glow up for both of them. The Girl from the Sea was good imo, and I like his comedy on game changer. Yeah it is, by all accounts, the worst thing either of them has worked on. Which is not that bad, in the grand scheme of things.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 00:23
|
|
|
SFP also had the scene with the people whose bodies were deleteriously altered with their superpowers having a group therapy session and it was all a very heavy handed trans/dismorphic metaphor and it was handled so amazingly awkwardly. https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-61-3/ Like, this reads like an alt-right comic making fun of trans people, it was really not a good go. But like, yeah, everyone has rough things in their careers especially early on, and this all only sticks out because of how strong the comic started.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 00:23
|
|
|
I remember the comic being really hard to read after the 2016 election. It rang pretty hollow from that point on.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 00:57
|
|
|
Tiny Myers posted:Honestly though, despite SFP's problems, it really did have some surprisingly strong poo poo in it IMO. Like I agree it was WAY too loving ambitious but it still nailed some really strong emotional moments and asked some interesting questions, which makes it all the more sad that it fell apart. I'm not sure you could do what SFP was going for without adressing #MeToo and how that relates to vigilantism. It's entirely too obvious a connection to explore.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 01:32
|
|
|
Oh wait, so he's SFP's Jerrick? Maybe? Hm.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 02:49
|
|
|
GunnerJ posted:Oh wait, so he's SFP's Jerrick? Maybe? Hm. If you can believe it, far lamer than Jerrek.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 04:17
|
|
|
SFP: How do we use our superpowers to improve society without resorting to force and violence? IDK develop an app I guess
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 04:53
|
|
|
Also: you don't, you resort to violence, and that's good actually
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 04:55
|
|
|
i didn't read SFP but almost every time i see a page from it i get angry at it
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 05:30
|
|
|
FlocksOfMice posted:SFP also had the scene with the people whose bodies were deleteriously altered with their superpowers having a group therapy session and it was all a very heavy handed trans/dismorphic metaphor and it was handled so amazingly awkwardly. See this is like, a perfect example. This entire scene is so loving trite. To me it honestly feels less like a trans metaphor (though I agree it draws that parallel, accidentally or intentionally, in a really lovely way) and more like a pastiche of feminist circles and their difficulties with intersectionality, but it clearly doesn't understand those problems. To start off, the black woman character says some horribly insensitive kneejerk poo poo to the pretty light-skinned girl, yet isn't immediately thrown out of the room. In my experience with feminist spaces, it's largely black women who are the most insanely patient and articulate people, especially with skinny attractive white girls, because they HAVE to be otherwise they're treated as angry and unreasonable for poo poo that others would get away with, because racism. Then you have the page linked in your post - an entire page dominated by some incredibly dumb poo poo about a character who looks like a Dalek feeling unsafe because of the microaggression of someone saying "bodies". Which... doesn't have a real world parallel!!! It feels like, as you said, an alt-right joke conflating trans people with tumblr otherkin discourse or something - someone feeling unsafe because of a piece of language that applies to 99% of people and is thus unrealistic to avoid, yet forcing others to try. Yet it's somehow played completely straight. And then... you have this page. https://strongfemaleprotagonist.com/issue-6/page-62-3/ And... honestly? This resonated a LOT with me. Not to overshare too much, but I was never pretty like my peers. My face is ugly and looks worse with make-up, which I can hardly stand wearing in the first place. My body is awkward, big, matured too quickly for me to know what was happening. Not fat, to any goons snickering about that, I have a normal BMI (BMI is worthless) and I see doctors frequently yet have never had one voice concerns about weight. Yet, not the right bone structure or body fat distribution to be considered "pretty". Clothes typically fit poorly on me and only further highlight my distance from femininity. I'm ugly. I've known that for a while. I hate the way people rush to say "no, don't say that" as if it isn't an immutable part of me. I hate that this is a part of my life where it is socially acceptable to lie to my face, as if I am too stupid to notice the ways in which I am treated differently from conventionally attractive women and always have been. As if I haven't been told I'm ugly plenty of times by those untethered by social obligation. At a certain point, you stop wanting to hear "you're beautiful", especially from people visibly living a far different life than you because of their beauty, and you start wanting people to give a poo poo about the other parts of you, instead of treating beauty as the only important thing about you and thus trying to find some way it can still technically apply. Among the mud and silt you have little glimmers of emotional resonance like this. That's what continually fascinates me about "bad" webcomics and media, I guess - the sincerity that so often goes into the writing. Sometimes you find a diamond in the rough, and you can't help but wonder how brilliant it could've been with enough polish. Anyway, oversharing over, I hope something cool happens on Wednesday. Tiny Myers fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Aug 1, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 06:10
|
|
|
SFP had a straightforward premise for a YA indie graphic novel: quirky, relatable* girl likes misunderstood pretty bad boy but it's wroooong; in the meanwhile self-exploration and self-discovery. * middle-class overachieving kids, i.e., the target audience of YA books Romance and personal growth were the initial main themes, title be damned; heavy-handed social commentary (and pretensions to radical critique) are hardly uncommon in YA. If it had run a few issues and then concluded gracefully it'd just be a discreet "Award Winning Independent Graphic Novel" line on Mulligan and Ostertag's CV (and be well-regarded, if rarely remembered). I don't know if that was originally the intention and then it pivoted, or if Mulligan as writer really had no idea where to take the narrative, but I'd diagnose its issues (and successes, whilst it lasted?) as stemming from there.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 06:47
|
|
|
The sad thing about SFP is that it set itself up poised to do things pretty well, and for every time it fumbled it had a really good moment. It had an entire arc about if a superhero getting vigilante justice on people who escaped the justice system was in the right or not, but it... it concluded it with "I dunno." It asked "you have all the powers of superman, but how can you fix institutionalized inequality itself?" and the answer was "Oh, what about like, an Uber, but it's for abused women trying to leave their partners, and you can call a superhero to escort you away from your partner? There, I saved the world!" It had Lord Boy in it. There are hundreds of storytelling fumbles in the world, and they aren't usually worth thinking about. SFP is one that stays with me because it started with such a STRONG throw and the catch ended up with everyone tangled up piled over one another in the bleachers call the ambulances we have injured spectators.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 11:18
|
|
|
Gnome de plume posted:SFP: How do we use our superpowers to improve society without resorting to force and violence? IDK develop an app I guess Yeah I started reading a little bit of it and thought the "all the superheros who could solve world hunger or whatever were mysteriously offed" angle was intriguing, but it was tied to "therefore it's pointless for super strong people and mind readers and such to try to be heroes because we can't really fix anything" which, like... really? 
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 11:35
|
|
|
GunnerJ posted:Yeah I started reading a little bit of it and thought the "all the superheros who could solve world hunger or whatever were mysteriously offed" angle was intriguing, but it was tied to "therefore it's pointless for super strong people and mind readers and such to try to be heroes because we can't really fix anything" which, like... really? 
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 12:22
|
|
|
The superpowers are not great a framing device for a serious exploration of ethical use of force. They work better as a framing device for being a type-A young woman from Small Town, USA who finds herself uncomfortable with all the brass rings she is told she is holding. The subtext is more relatable than the text. When Alison rebels against a life course of being a superhero, it's a 2010s YA perspective on a a 2000s outlook that did not survive the GFC. She refuses the call! She does not go into a graduate programme in consulting or finance (as an increasing share of Ivy League graduates did across the 2010s). She's still going to ace her classes - she's not a failure, after all - but she rejects aspiration (and then flounders with guilt about wasted potential to Do Good). To mitigate her guilt she goes volunteering or engaging in activism (where she is always immediately given a sinecure leadership position anyway; she notices the hostility this generates and it's depicted as unfair). Pintsize the nerd stays the course because tech continued to do well (powers being adjacent to conventional unattractiveness, with the notable exception of the titular protagonist, is a recurring theme in earlier SFP). But by the later 2010s, as real-life corporate culture did become more DEI-aware (and, ahem, more Gen Zs did age into the job market), Alison returns to tech in a non-tech role (as many do as content writers, marketing, etc., now fully embracing the "solve the world's problems" rhetoric in a hip workplace). Hence the "there's an app for that" take on social consciousness and women's safety. Feral, an almost parody of a juvenile delinquent, is jadedly reconciled to getting serious about getting a job and going clean and Alison is just wracked with middle-class guilt for her. You, the only person without a degree that I know, are actually reconciled with a lovely menial path in life? This is then treated with rhapsodic praise for her noble sacrifice that doesn't actually do or change anything. And all that whilst hormonally zinging between boys and parties, because no duh. Who do I want to kiss most, the cerebral theatre kid I knew in high school who knew all the edgy literature and talking points, and then I start my own first-year readings and now figure he was always patronising, shallow, and full of poo poo? The would-be finance bros I meet in college, all posturing about how manly they are? Ugh, all of these are so shallow and unreflective and non-introspective - how the least threatening artsy boy I can find? ronya fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Aug 1, 2023 |
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 15:22
|
|
|
It's amazing how much of the comics supposed message rang hollow because they chose to make Allison a conventionally attractive white girl. And then they self-owned by putting a bow on it without really addressing it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 15:45
|
|
|
Clevin (Clevin)
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 16:04
|
|
|
That is a fantastic and biting retrospective of SFP. I think the comic had a real problem with wanting to be about Power in a way that really also speaks to the self-image of the people involved in the world the comic actually described; these have to be massive and universal problems, society-shaping questions rather than simply questions shaped by society.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 16:50
|
|
|
I know we're way off track but I was thinking of this earlier and got reminded again about the time in a SFP flashback we learn how Patrick's evil mom one-handed grabbed a French Bulldog by the throat, lifted it up, and snapped its neck before tossing it to the side like a loving JRPG boss killing your cleric. Maybe there's some things there we can port into Gunnerkrigg....
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 19:58
|
|
|
This is fun, which webcomic are we going to critique next Also pik_d posted:I don't know what's going on anymore
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 20:27
|
|
|
Nuns with Guns posted:I know we're way off track but I was thinking of this earlier and got reminded again about the time in a SFP flashback we learn how Patrick's evil mom one-handed grabbed a French Bulldog by the throat, lifted it up, and snapped its neck before tossing it to the side like a loving JRPG boss killing your cleric. The total inability of late SFP to have a stable tone or sense of how much it was caricature vs serious realism was… wild.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 21:06
|
|
|
one rare and memorable counterpoint to the clevin/jerrek creator’s-darling phenomenon was zebra girl, where a smug and mysterious recurring antagonist gradually becomes less important in the story until he literally dies of irrelevance that comic had a great arc of development, it’s a shame that RL problems kept the creator from trying new projects
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 21:29
|
|
|
Yeah, Zebra Girl was great. I don't know what you mean about real life problems though - isn't his newest comic project launching in just a couple months? He's been hyping it up since April, I think, so definitely a slow start, but I've been looking forward to seeing what he does next.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 21:48
|
|
|
Oxxidation posted:one rare and memorable counterpoint to the clevin/jerrek creator’s-darling phenomenon was zebra girl, where a smug and mysterious recurring antagonist gradually becomes less important in the story until he literally dies of irrelevance I mean he also had a main character gradually and indefinitely inflate the boobs of every women in the surrounding area because he was just so "pervy", and described that as an "in universe" justification for why he draws boobs so big because he likes drawing boobs so much. Which was then played off in a really off-handed manner as opposed to a horrifying violation of bodily autonomy. Make no mistake, I liked Zebra Girl a lot over its run, but it was not exactly free of the foibles that people seem to complain about in this thread all the time.
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 21:56
|
|
|
Fecha posted:This is fun, which webcomic are we going to critique next have you heard about the legacy of Dominic Deegan
|
|
#
?
Aug 1, 2023 23:32
|
|
|
I'm we're just making GBS threads on old webcomics at this point, how the hell is Sluggy Freelance still going? Last time I read it was a decade ago, after it had been "wrapping up" for a year or two (something about being in a world where people's souls are visible, and a jump from prehistoric civilization to early-mid 1900's in that dimension?), and I just checked recently and it's. Still. Going. Jesus gently caress how long does it take to wrap up?
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 03:24
|
|
|
Sludgy Freelance was one of the first webcomics I ever read and out of respect for that I will read it to the end if it ever finishes. I think he cut back on how often he updates but IIRC he was incredibly consistent about it
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 03:29
|
|
|
christmas boots posted:Sludgy Freelance was one of the first webcomics I ever read and out of respect for that I will read it to the end if it ever finishes. Wow, I went to look at the website and hell if they haven't been updating consistently this whole time. Really incredible dedication. I've never read it. myself.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 04:20
|
|
|
I was really into sluggy when I was really young and I even got that all-holiday bun-bun stuffed animal knocking around somewhere in the attic I think. I tried rereading it a little while ago out of nostalgia and the early arcs, at least, REALLY do not hold up at all anymore. When nerd humor was new, when monkey cheese humor was legitimately worth SOMEthing by virtue of its dadaism (instead of becoming a new series of repeated signifiers that we use for their familiarity, the exact opposite of its original shortlived intention), when weird meandering complex storylines were something I had the youth to follow, yeah, Sluggy was fun! But like. Oh man. Lots of really outdated humor about things that Aren't Actually Funny To Joke About After All, lots of painful slapstick, lots of "this is a nerd thing! you recognize nerd thing!" and that was funny back then because I DID recognize nerd thing, and it was 1998, and it was so rare to see someone joking about nerd thing! But now we live in the era of funko pops and the MCU and Ready Player One and you just... can't do it anymore? I'm tired of recognizing nerd thing. Just like. It has this specific flavor, with all the varied cast and all the ~crazy characters~ and the constant jumping between serious and silly, it is so aGGRESSIVEly dated. Turns out we finally find out why it's called Sluggy Freelance though it's that bun-bun was the god Sluggy, the god of destruction or whatever, and he went "freelance." Ok. Sluggy Freelance is basically a Homestuck I think.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 04:51
|
|
|
Sluggy Freelance is the Days of Our Lives of the webcomic world. It's never really been good, but it remains impressive just for how long it's kept running with a regular output and for all the crazy bullshit the author crams in.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 05:09
|
|
|
I always assumed the main character's name was Sluggy and I only realized today that wasn't the case.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 05:41
|
|
|
No the name was part of the very early trend of give your comic a completely random name because that's funny because it's irreverent. And it WAS funny. It was irreverent! It's just, that kind of humor has an incredibly short shelf-life before you stop generating actual humor from random things and the randomness becomes a branded humor. It's why dada keeps coming back and dying off just as fast, the human instinct is clearly written. look at the backrooms. The idea of a haunting liminal space made of the horrors of our modern world? They turned it into a wiki game and now every floor of the 1000 rooms of the backrooms has a wiki page with a list of the monsters you can run into in there. Humans see the backrooms (unknowable liminality, it's fascinating because it's unexplainable) and went "wow, that's so creepy... I better figure out the rules of it really fast." Humans think randomness is hilarious because we seek order unerringly. It makes random humor impossible to maintain for more than very short bursts because the moment you start creating it you will start creating patterns and linking those patterns to patterns and then, just like that, your humor isn't that it's random (funny because unexpected) but convoluted ("funny" because 3 layers of self referential tautology).
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 05:54
|
|
|
I don’t think Questionable Content will ever end
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 06:24
|
|
|
FlocksOfMice posted:12 year olds see the backrooms (unknowable liminality, it's fascinating because it's unexplainable) and went "wow, that's so creepy... time to dump the back of my notebook into it."
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 06:27
|
|
|
Fecha posted:I don’t think Questionable Content will ever end probably not, QC is impressive in how unrelentingly palatable and innoffensive it's managed to remain without sliding down the drama chute like every serial long-running comic with no preplanned endpoint SFD and the 2016 election was brought up, QC feels like the author looked at that (and everything since) and said "absolutely fuckin not, this is sticking as slice of life with interpersonal drama and that's it" and it's managed to retain enough quiet readership to sustain itself in that slot of "at least there's one comic where the author doesn't need to process hellworld through their characters"
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 07:28
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:That is a fantastic and biting retrospective of SFP. FlocksOfMice posted:lots of "this is a nerd thing! you recognize nerd thing!" and that was funny back then because I DID recognize nerd thing, and it was 1998, and it was so rare to see someone joking about nerd thing! But now we live in the era of funko pops and the MCU and Ready Player One and you just... can't do it anymore? I'm tired of recognizing nerd thing. Speaking of lovely webcomics, did anyone ever read Something Positive? God, what a miserable comic. I'm sure it'd be too bigoted in hindsight to read anyway but I remember petering out around the time that the author said "lmao I baited you into thinking these two characters would be romantically involved but because they're based on me and a friend of mine they literally never will be, gottem, anyway here's this new character based on my irl girlfriend" because that just felt so unfathomably petty and spiteful to your readers.
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 07:45
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 03:33 |
|
|
Dude also has 12 thousand Patreon subs Jesus Christ I wouldn’t stop either Also, new page I guess
|
|
#
?
Aug 2, 2023 08:05
|
|