Yay for holidays: If you’re wondering why I didn’t post anything for the last couple of weekends, it’s because I’ve been enjoying the mid-semester break (oh, I’m sorry: Study Week). I spent most of it asleep. Before you judge, I’d just like to mention that I got as much sleep by sleeping in the last week as I did in the preceding month. So yeah. I also read quite a few long runners in the time I spent conscious. I’m always hesitant to start a long runner because I like to read a work from beginning to end in as short a time period and as few sittings as possible, preferably one continuous sitting lasting several hours (yes, I have too much free time). Since I can only read somewhere between 500 and 850 strips in a free day (allowing for distractions and other stuff), that means comics with more than 2000 strips like Questionable Content and Misfile take me a good three or four days apiece to finish up. In some weird inversion of what you would think it also makes it a lot harder to talk about them simply because of how much you can talk about. But I try. Questionable Content everybody! Enjoy.
Questionable Content
[Trope Page] is a slice of life webcomic centred around Marten Reed and his growing collection of friends. And Yelling Bird.
It’s about as slice of life as slice of life can get. If you ignore the talking robots and the whole things about Hannalore’s dad living on a space station (which is a lot easier to forget than I just made it sound), it shows a group of perfectly normal people going about their lives and the interactions and developments that go on between them. Pretty much sits smack bang in the middle of the Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters.
The first few hundred strips are plagued with comedy and indie rock references, and just serve as a general introduction to all the important characters. Then, as the tropes page so eloquently puts it, “everything changes”. Well, not everything, just most things. Okay some things. Alright, a few things. Fine, a small number of very important things change. Happy? (yes) After this change things take a while to settle down and then they stay in a character driven state of stability for over a thousand strips before, again, everything changes.
And Change is not a bad thing in this case. Far, far from it. By the time the second wham came along it was starting to seem like the comic needed it. I mean, sure there’s conflict and drama, but major changes were few and far between and let’s be honest, you can only get so many strips out of any given relationship before it gets old. Take the indie rock references for example. I can say with complete honesty that I didn’t get a single one. Not one. They all went straight over my head, leaving me confused and more than a little annoyed at not getting the joke (on the other hand, I do take a weird pride in the fact I got most of the metal references so I suppose I’m being a tad hypocritical). While it changed the tone of the comic as a whole, it was a good change. The comic ended up being easier to understand and a lot more interesting because of it.
As far as the drama goes, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The ‘real’ drama (you know, the important stuff that actually changes things) seems to be a bit heavy at times and completely absent at others. That’s why the two major plot developments (the ones mentioned above) are potholed as Wham Episodes. They come completely out of the blue with no warning whatsoever. Sure, once you think about them they make perfect sense in context and even link up with a few things you’ve seen before, but being taught that one and one makes two doesn’t mean you saw the quadratic rule coming (and god help you when you first lay eyes on differential calculus). For the less mathematically inclined, that means that the foreshadowing was... not lacking per say, but definitely not as well done as it could have been.
At the same time, the drama is really engaging, although I’ll be damned if I can figure out why. The best I can come up with is that after spending so much time with the characters (we are talking about 2000+ strips here) and you become emotionally attached to them and you want them to be happy (or at the very least you want something out of them). Hell, I spent a week really bummed out and mildly depressed ‘cos I reached the second wham on a Sunday night (or Monday morning, take your pick) and didn’t have a chance to keep reading until Friday. That was also the point I realised that my sympathy for the characters may (and I stress may) have become empathy. If it has, then that is an achievement to be admired, but even if it's not, it's still pretty impressive that it can suck you in like that.
While we’re on the topic of characters though, I have to speak about a few that I find... superfluous [adj. excess: more than is needed, desired, or required]. The AnthroPCs (i.e. the talking robots). Their sole purpose (until Momo’s upgrade, at least) is comic relief, and while QC can be pretty damn funny at times, the comedy is of a secondary, maybe even tertiary importance. You may laugh while you read it, but it doesn’t seem like humour is the reason you’d read it, or maybe that’s just me. But even if comedy was front and centre the whole time, they just aren’t funny. Pintsize particularly, is both the worst and the best of them. He’s the most vocal and noticeable of the lot of them and gets a lot more screen time than the rest, but that means he’s funny more often than they are, if only because he shows up more. I don’t know... I just feel like they were added in the beginning because it seemed like a cool set of characters and they just... stuck around, without changing, developing or noticeably contributing to the comic in any way outside of strips that are for all intents and purposes cannon filler.
Barring my little complaints though, Questionable Content really is an enjoyable (if long) read and if you like slice of life at all, you should go check it out, links at the top. It’s got drama, great characterisation and it’s... well, believable (a far higher complement than the word alone implies). Thanks for reading everyone.
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