Alice Grove: A new webcomic by Jeph Jacques of QC

Oh right

Too lazy to change it on my phone now though

Also that still was almost 3 years, even with the rush ending

edited 20th Jul '17 10:25:04 PM by Adannor

Three years but not a lot of actual pages and plot it feels like.

That ending felt like it was put on with a brad nailer.

Jeph: "I left lots of things unexplained or open to interpretation on purpose; I think stories are more fun if you don’t necessarily have all the answers."

Two words, good sir: MY ASS.

Jeph created an interesting world, and bailed when things were getting interesting. No idea what Sedna and Alice were, or how much of the war was Alice's fault.....1 or 2 holes at the end of a tale are OK, but this is I-80 in the summer.

I has a disappoint. Maybe Jeph will come back to the grove someday.

Aaaaand it ends with an unfortunate accidental Freudian image.

I'm with ya. Trying to cover up the loss of interest and rushing through with "ITS DEEP" is just undignified.

I'm happy with the goodbye, but I don't think the comic as a whole was "good". It was entertaining, but the last chapter was super-rushed and a ton of shit just sort of exists in the setting as what it is. A lot of stuff made me feel like this was "And Then: The Comic", because stuff just seemed to happen without a lot of the usual gravitas of a time-skip or settings change.

Like Gavia having her nanobots sucked out? interesting and freaky situation. Waking up on a wagon drawn by a giant Chocobo, that lays eggs for the party to eat at night? No explanation about the Chocobo, no meaningful worldbuilding - just Gavia coping with the loss of her nanobots. Which is fine, but at the same time maybe she should have been unconscious for longer, even for like three super-rushed comics where they get her to the carriage, start out across the fields of wheat and have some time to just talk about the weird sci-fi world with the giant bird. The bird is just there for exotic flavor, not for any real reason. And what's with the sentai suits?

That's one of my biggest problems, next to the plot-hijacking villains. A lot of the world feels like it rushes by for flavor. The post-apocalyptic setting didn't do much for me, so this town with a windmill or a settlement around a bunch of pre-apocalyptic bunkers felt kind of... there. I was there for the characters, which is why it's disappointing that Alice doesn't go into more detail about who she is, what she was made for and what she did. We get a few valuable snippets, but never the full story - and even some of the snippets are baffling and even kind of pretentious. Sedna is just kind of there as well, she's cool and her and Alice have a cool history, but aside from that she shines in like three major scenes, and her personality doesn't evolve past "snarky foil to Alice's Straight Man" until Cerebus Syndrome kicks in with Pate and she's mortally wounded.

The best aspects of the story were Gavia and Ardent. Alice and Sedna were a bummer, and I've talked about Pate and Church before. The world felt sort of flimsy and not fully realized, and while I enjoyed the comic for the most part, I've read better - as far as webcomics and sci-fi goes.

But Jeph did spend three years of his life making this comic for us, on top of a weekly comic. I respect the hell out of that, and I hate to trash his hard work. All I can say is that I hope any future projects have a little more meat to them. AG was entertaining, but it fell short of my expectations.

Hey, sometimes a spaceship is just a spaceship.

This pretty sums up my feelings too.

At best the comic felt kind of enjoyable, but a lot of time it felt rushed or lacking in logical cause-and-effect storytelling: things happened, but a lot of it wasn't very important nor did they really affect the characters in any meaningful way.

But that said, it kind of feels bad for thrashing Jeph's work, as this is something he used three years of his life, on top of his usual daily webcomic. I have nothing but respect for managing that kind of workload. Then again, I felt like dividing his attention between two projects was detrimental to both: to me, QC hit an all-time slump around the time AG came to be, and I believe time management problems were at least a partial reason for Jeph cutting AG short.

Yeah, I have to agree with what has been said so far: while I respect the fact that Jeph managed to run two comics at the same time, AG was ultimately kind of disappointing, though it had its moments.

One thing I have to ask is: did the main characters actually get to accomplish anything? I mean, yeah, Pate and Church got killed, but the main course of the plot kind of happened without much involvement from the protagonists. Oh, and did any of them have any arc? I guess Ardent got a bit more responsible and Gavia a bit softer, but that's about it.

Pretty much the only accomplishment is that they personally found out what's going on.

With the big storm hanging over the planet, one singular Pate and one singular pet supersoldier are a drop in a bucket.

There was that sweet new plant arm.

Continuing with the reread. I hadn't noticed, but here it looks like Sedna and Alice are just jumping straight down rather than taking the ladder.

We never even learned the significance of the strip's title. It might have been Alice's full name, or the name of the town she was guarding, but..

The site banner shows a Praeses with the title, so I'm inclined to think it's referring to them.