El Goonish Shive

This conversation is now about how the card game tournament should have been a pastiche of Hearthstone instead of MtG. Discuss.

You'll notice that usually the most on-topic I get lately is one sentence at the end of a post that is decidedly mostly off-topic.

I blame the MSPA thread.

edited 21st Nov '14 4:16:30 PM by RaichuKFM

So who wants to bet they have to stop Lord Tedd sometime this decade? Maybe even before they graduate High School.

This decade in story, or this decade in real time?

'cause the former is, what, 30 years in the latter? Maybe?

This decade in real time.

No dice then :P

To return to a previous subject, I have a knee-jerk reaction to finding gay men icky but I know that's an illogical emotion.

I'm honestly happy to see my favorite webcomics get more trans friendly. I'm looking forward to a possible Tedd-centric arc about his gender identity.

You could try desensitising yourself. Start slow, with some yaoi featuring really girly-looking guys and work your way up to bara from there.

Oh that reminds me, I need to change my avatar.

I'm actually pretty desensitized towards cartoons and especially gay sex.

When it comes to just normal shows of affections between real gay men, I cringe.

Oh, well in that case the next time that happens you need to stop, look deep inside yourself, identify which bit of your psyche is causing the problem and punch it in the face.

The solution: Get equally outraged at PD As from straight couples.

If it bothers you don't look.

Comic!

NP!

See? I'm not the only one who is cautious about Luke. And Grace doesn't even know everything that the readers know.

Also, wait a minute... panel five... Justin suddenly knows that he may have magic? Did I miss a comic or something? Or is this a reference to his old illusion abilities that haven't been used in over a decade?

He thinks that Luke thinks he has magic, because Luke came looking for him and given what they have recently learned about him this seems a likely reason as to why.

He exhibited Super-Strength in his fight with the fire dude. He doesn't know it's from a mark; presumably he assumes it's a result of his anime martial arts training.

In today's installment, we ask questions. Lots of questions.

I know it makes sense that she would have said that, but maybe Grace would have been more helpful telling that last bit of info later. Like, after Justin spoke to Luke.

I suspect that wacky hijinks are in the coming, particularly since Justin has shown a fondness for plans that involve such things.

Wasn't avoiding this pointless recap the entire reason Grace sent that paper airplane to Justin in the first place?

Pointless recap? It seemed to me like it served the purpose of showing Justin deciding what he'd do, and then taking it from there.

You know. Because it did.

blah blah blaaaaahhhhh

There's a few ways to look at today's comic, I think.

One is that this discussion feels natural - given the circumstance, I can imagine the two characters in question saying all this.

The other is from the reader perspective - we've been over this already; why is Shive saying all of this again?

Since I'm all about trimming panels, panels 2 and 3 could have been eliminated entirely, and panel 4 could be slightly reworded to flow as a better response to panel 1. That would have helped a bunch.

I agree with 32.

Yesterday's comic could have been replaced by a C&P of panel 2 from this comic, with the text changed to "One explanation later...", and today's could have been much shorter.

Spending a page and a third showing Justin working out suppositions, another page explaining those suppositions to Grace, and yet another page juggling those suppositions into a plan... It's all a bit much.

Wait, Daremo agreed with my criticism about wasted panels?

I believe this clip is appropriate:

I'm starting to think that storylines could be 25% shorter if Shive started using "One explanation later" panels.