This makes a heck of a lot of sense. I've been a reader of EGS for a long time, and unwilling to recommend it to anyone else for a while, but I hadn't put it together to realize why I continued reading a comic that I didn't think was particularly good.
Seconding the reboot dear god please.
Read my stories!
At least let the story wrap up first. However long that'll take.
Come sail your ships around me, and burn your bridges down.
I agree that the comic suffers seriously from pacing issues, and Dan Shive dipping into genres and then springing back out again, but I don't think the school uniform arc is an example of this at all. I'm pretty sure that one was a deliberate anticlimax.
I'm not in favor of a reboot though. David Willis started Dumbing of Age after bringing multiple comics to completion and wanting to be able to continue to work with those characters. Nothing was lost in its creation. If Dan rebooted EGS, it would mean a whole lot of ground to re-cover. Willis has deliberately avoided setting up retreads of previously covered character development arcs. It would be much harder for Dan to arrange that with EGS, because the progression of the story (such as it is) relies on certain developments taking place.
I'm pretty sure Dan does have some idea where he's going with the comic, the whole Lord Ted plot has been hinted at and alluded to plenty of times since Dan originally backed away from it, so he's probably going to come back to it at some point. I suspect he doesn't have the exact path to get there worked out, or know exactly how long it's going to take. I'd rather see him improve his skills while working on this comic, and give it an ending that picks up the slack for the earlier parts of the story. That's what Willis did with It's Walky, way before Dumbing of Age was ever a thing.
...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.Leave a Comment:
A published brainstorming session
Dan Shive has some really fascinating ideas for an urban fantasy webcomic. Deep characters, a twisting plot about magic and government conspiracies, plenty of personal drama, and just enough of the everyday to keep things fresh.
The problem is that none of this is in a particularly coherent order, and this is ultimately the comic's downfall. There's little sense in what the comic is trying to accomplish, as it veers back and forth between arcs with no meaningful end goal. From fantasy to romance, and from romance to humor, and from humor back to fantasy, the comic staggers back and forth between genres, instead of weaving them smoothly together.
Given the nature of the topics that pop in The Rant, coupled with the obvious lack of buffer strips, my conclusion is that Shive himself has no overarching goal for the story. He just throws out whatever he currently thinks is cool/awesome/funny/heartwarming, and only stays with that until the next cool/awesome/funny/heartwarming thing comes to mind. A good example of this would be the "school uniform" arc, which had several strips of build-up, only to be abruptly ended in a single strip. Clearly Shive had moved on, and was just getting the ending done so he could move on.
In conclusion, the whole strip is a giant chain of ideas of varying quality. While it can be fascinating to get some insight into the evolving mindset of Dan Shive (which is probably why the comic remains fairly popular), the question remains: when is he going to actually take these ideas and weave them into a genuine story? Sadly, the answer will likely be never. It's the sort of comic that begs for a Dumbing Of Age style reboot...a reboot that certainly won't happen any time soon.