El Goonish Shive

Crashed trains of thought, and Luke!

Justin single-handedly justified Grace's continued presence in this plot. What a guy.

I very suddenly miss color. We haven't seen Luke since the comic reverted to grayscale, and he doesn't look nearly as distinctive without the green hair.

He also looks a lot paler in greyscale. Which like, yeah obviously, but he had notably brown skin before.

When I looked again and saw that his beard was different, for a sec I thought I was losing it. I wonder who these people with such strong opinions on facial hair are.

Oh good, he changed it back. Looks much more like Luke now, as much as possible without the green hair, anyway.

I was gonna comment the same thing, Luke looks paler in grayscale, and that kinda sucks.

I actually didn’t recognize him. Like. Not just the greyscale affecting his skin and hair, but the different beard, and I’m fairly certain his hair and glasses are different now too. He looked totally new to me.

I was sure his glasses used to be thicker-rimmed, but I checked and apparently I imagined this because they are in fact exactly the same.

Re. Luke’s skin tone, this is from the EGS Facebook page:

The differences between Luke then and now mostly can be hand-waved through grooming choices (comparing both his goatee and his hair then and now, he's distinctly more groomed now, which makes sense if you consider he's probably trying to impress Justin), and possibly different clothes (while that jacket looks pretty similar in style to his original one, it hangs on his body differently).

The skin tone does look off, as noted, but I'm hoping that Shive's note there is his realizing the goof and that he's going to tweak it in the future.

Sounds like if he fixes anything it'll be Justin.

The explanation I'm reading is "Luke looks lighter than he ought to because I accidentally made the entire rest of the comic darker than it ought to be".

Comic Tsos09

This has been a bad day for train crashes.

I'm completely lost at where Grace's train of thought is currently going.

I think she remembered that she is a really nosey person who got in on Sam's secret because of observation and not because they were friends or she gained his trust or anything. Therefore Sam wouldn't appreciate her butting into his relationship, good intentions or no.

It's like Shive knows that Grace shouldn't be involved in this storyline, tries to write her out, yet keeps writing her back in. Gyah.

Why shouldn't Grace be involved in this storyline, again? The fact that she and she alone knows Sam is transgender can't just be ignored.

Sure it can be ignored. All of this is none of her business. It's not her relationship; it's Sam and Sarah's. The right thing to do here is for her to shut up and not poke her face into it, and to be supportive of her friend as much as is reasonable. That's it. Grace's meddling into Sam and Sarah's relationship is a jerk move (also, I find it annoying on a narrative level, but that's its own issue only somewhat related).

I don't know about whether or not she should be in the storyline, but she has decidedly been the least interesting way to approach it thus far, that's for sure. Half these strips have just been "Grace's inner monologue being conflicted about approaching the situation well or not" without a lot of variation or comedy to it. Grace is at her best when she's being weird and cheerful and bouncing off of other people, not like this. This has been boring thus far.

All of the anticipation going into this was built by fans who wanted to see Sam and Sarah interact with one another. To see how they click and watch them interact with each other. Instead, they're being used as an excuse to give Grace wacky shenanigans to engage in.

It's pretty much the final nail in the coffin of hopes that Shive gave even a single solitary f*ck about this exciting and interesting scenario that he'd introduced years ago. That he already Yadda-Yadda'd over their date - explicitly because he considers it uninteresting, per his commentary - doesn't bode well for Justin and Luke either.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 30th 2018 at 11:45:18 AM

I don't know what possessed Shive to think that the thing he writes best (that being wacky hijinks with two or more awkward characters interacting with each other in dorky ways) would have been uninteresting to people. Has he not read his own comic? That's when he's at his best.

It might be a low-key version of Magnum Opus Dissonance - what Shive thinks is his strong suit in terms of writing and what we think is his strong suit in writing may not be aligned.

Eh, given we've had some evidence in the past that Shive has seen what we write about him (outside the running joke of "X on the forum is Shive!", someone sent him a link at one point when we were discussing what sort of a pervert he was), it could also be a reflexive "Oh, I'm approaching this sensitive topic where I want to do wacky hijinx, but people complain I'm handling it well, so let's explore how this character who has done wacky hijinx is coming at it with more compassion."

TL;DR: I'm waiting to see what happens before judging.

NP is enjoyable. Lizards are kinda nice and Dan really needs to play more elder scrolls and learn how to draw actually reptilian faces instead of horrifying freaks of half breed nature.