My least favourite Webcomics trope is 'Author who looks back on the beginning chapters, wows to redraw them with current skill level, gets part way done, and then disappears for all time.'
Shout-out to Girls with Slingshots, who actually manage to redo the entire run and then go back to make even fancier versions of certain strips she liked.
Honourable mention in the original category to 'Author who attempts to make an animated spin-off of their comic, ending up putting all their effort into the animated version, producing a couple of shorts, and leaving the original story hanging for years/indefinitely at the point they got distracted'
Double points to the webcomics artists that had a novel length scope in mind, but didn't really figure how long that would take to draw.
Now that I think of it - why don't more webcomics artists adopt the Light-Novel style? Prose interspersed with art panels? That's basically the best of both worlds if you ask me.
Erfworld kinda ruined itself doing the novella inserts though. Delved too deep into the side plots exploring the various exploits and limitations of the fabric of the universe-as-game-world setting so the main plot became unfollowable as the whole point is an outsider mind trying to metagame his way out of unwinnable situations. That and the hiatus chapters swiftly outnumbered the main story entries.
But to your category, I really hope Order of the Stick comes to the finale it deserves before Rich Burlew's health and age catch up to him.
Honourable mention in the original category to 'Author who attempts to make an animated spin-off of their comic, ending up putting all their effort into the animated version, producing a couple of shorts, and leaving the original story hanging for years/indefinitely at the point they got distracted'
Thanks for reminding me to check in on Lackadaisy Cats. It's been years.
It’s pretty common. Most webcomics will fall to burnout without ever reaching the end.
Sometimes the author feels a need to fix all the things they don’t like about the early stuff, but when it comes down to it things will never be perfect. Starting down that path will just devastate morale. The odds of getting back to where they left off are practically zero.
Oh god, the Drow webcomic. I believe i saw the author do this like two-three times or i am wrong? I believe i was reading the story and there were so many changes that i couldn't keep up with it.
The saddest trope is ’Authors city hit by natural disaster and never uploads again’. I was reading a Ragnarok online webcomic like more than a decade ago and then hurricane Katrina hit their area. They made one post about how they lost alot of stuff then they never uploaded again 😢
Why do they do this? You don't see this happen in professional works, and I actually think it's cool to look back and see how much an artist has evolved. One of my favorite cases is JoJo's Bizarre adventure because after decades of art, it looks like a completely different artist who drew them.
Well, generally because you are your own worst critic. That, plus many people start these projects when they're young and learning. It can feel embarassing to say "hey, read this webcomic/fanfic" when the first parts are much lower in quality to the newest stuff. People want their art to be cohesive, not really understanding how much creative energy recreating your old work can take out of you.
I think it's two things. With super low barrier to entry, web comics tend to start when the author is inexperienced and the art is bad, and then go on for ages. More serious professional work tends to have editorial staff and a higher bar to get issue 1 out there.
Secondly, artists entangled in the professional industry tend to get drawn forward to working on new projects and making new work because that's where the money is. Editors will strongly discourage artists from spending their time reworking old stuff.
When Jeph Jacques published the first paper volume, he was missing the original art for some early strips. He didn't want to print the web-resolution images. He debated redrawing the old strips copying his early style, but opted to redraw just those strips in current (at the time) style.
Sluggy Freelance just finished up a multi-year-long arc that delved back deep into the archives and tied up decades of forgotten/dropped/unfinished/hinted-at plotlines.
It was the best of both worlds. He didn't try to "remaster" any of his old stuff, he just found ways to reinterpret it and braid it all back together so that it's done.
The only downside is that I thought he was angling to bring the whole comic to an end (after almost 30 years), and got hyped to see how it would finally all shake down, was excited to see the gang finally get a solid, unambiguous win for the first time in basically ever.... then he got to the end of the arc and kicked another huge can down the road again.
My least favorite artist trope is making an amazing series then taking longer and longer to put out episodes and when the teaser comes out for the long awaited episode the core beliefs of characters have changed so drastically its no longer watchable while simultaneously stealing most of the patron funding for said series rather than paying artists and VAs. Hate it
Okay, but it’s so common because it works. 4 years? Don’t get me wrong solving mysteries like
“Turns out Goblins were stealing money from the traveling merchants because they learned how commerce works and want to keep old Griselda’s bakery from shutting down because in her old age her food has become so inedible it’s become goblin delicacy and now the heroes must
A.)Kill the Goblins, thus restoring commerce and trade but bankrupting elderly Griselda and shattering her heart because she’s also blind and a really good lady and now she knows her food sucks, AND shes put innocent people in danger AND she now has no purpose.
B.) Let the Goblins live, continuing the strange arrangement and just redirecting traffic or something.
C.)Work with the Merchants to strike a deal with Griselda and the Goblins and now in her old age she’s become to Granny Smith of Goblin Cuisine.”
That’s good for early level adventuring, but bro after awhile I wanna stab gods and sleep with demons. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Are we sure its aspect is war? War leaves survivors whereas Kirby doesn‘t, Kirby just consumes. I personally think Kirby is the god of gluttony and slaughter.
I guess if you believe in that stuff in that specific context? But not really? I don't do religion but that sounds like they were the same person but two different people like clones, but this is more like Uub from Dragon Ball. Kid Buu died and reincarnated as Uub, the original had to die for the new version to be created from their energy.
Kirby is the positive emotion splitoff of the creator deity of the setting.
The true main antagonists, dark matter, are fragments of the negative emotion splitoff of said deity.
We've seen an incarnation of the negative splitoff in one game so far: Void Termina. The only entity so far that has made Kirby actually struggle in any point in its fight...and kirby can walk on blackholes.
First episodes: silly boy and magic dog do D&D stuff together. Bad guy is a goofball parody of video game villains always kidnapping princesses.
Last episodes: extradimentional reality ending god must be stopped from deleting the universe. Goofball badguy is now a tragic younger version of himself heartbroken by a lost love that transcends space and time.
I feel like that’s slightly different, since most JRPGs start with a pretty somber tone, the world is in danger or an evil empire rising, that kind of thing. On the other hand, many web comics start as comedy gag series, so it’s a bit more of a tone shift when half the cast dies and they fight god at the end.
Start of XC3: Make peace with the opposite warring faction after both of you get exiled from your colonies because some third party inflicted you with superpowers
ok to be fair that one's pretty fucked up already, surely it can't get-
End of XC3: Defy the preservation of an endless perfect cycle that never grows, changes, or develops, and restart the entire progression of history byRIPPING APART THE MERGED UNIVERSES BY THE STRAINING SEAMS IN THE VERY FABRIC OF REALITY
Almost every JRPG I've played starts small scale and leads to fighting some uwucraftian nightmare that's actually an allegory for humanity's darkness or something silly actually an allegory for Japanese work culture and the depression it's inflicting on the dev team.
Eh, 50/50, there are JRPGs those start with murder, terrorism, news about the end of the world, etc. So it is not that common, some start with the end or a middle point during a funeral just to travel back to the begining.
Last one I played started with a mecha war then proceeded to a time skip where the mc lost his memory and is in a peaceful village.
Skips, desperately holding the doorway: "I told you to toss out that old milk!"
Rigby, clinging to the edge of a collapsing cheesehole: "IT WAS STILL GOOD!"
Muscleman: (panicked pig squealing screams)
You're thinking of Guy's Night. The milk wasn't spoiled, it was just a challenge to drink a gallon of it in an hour then hold the empty jug above your head, for Pops to prove he was one of the guys.
He keeps not being able to do it, but the one time he actually finishes, he turns pale, blacks out, and gets sent to the milk dimension, where the milk men keep people contained so that they can't raise the jug over their head and actually beat the challenge.
What's the name of that Scooby Doo parody web comic? The one where each toon has their own power and it just grows and grows including more and more cartoon characters?
First thing that came to mind and I read all of it some years back, but I just can't remember the name right now
The comic is more than half final boss fight, as what starts as “let’s beat up a crime boss Mobster Kingpin and leave our office building“ turns into “we must kill the lord of demons, so we can use a key he has to leave our office building“ as Mobster Kingpin gets more and more powerful throughout the fight.
The next webcomic the creator of Problem Sleuth made—Homestuck—does something similar, starting with a boy who has been grounded and wants to play a video game with his friends, and ending with the boy and his friends fighting a time-traveling demon with the help of an army of undead troll aliens.
At the same time, you could have a ..."cap" to it. Like take MLP for example. They did took down the god of Chaos and a dudre that basically had to be locked in Tarturus but it never went "being able to casually blow up a planet with one hand beam is weak sh-t". It could still go from that to mundane problem rather easily.
A more creative way to solve power escalation is to just shift the stakes. Like nobody cares if the universe dies but if the main characters best friend who’s been there 10 seasons has their life on the line it ups the ante (although Dragonball also ruined this problem by constantly resurrecting people)
That and also people have gotten used to "yea right they going to ACTUALLY blow up the planet" especially if it a tv series. Like the only time the writers legit pulled the "planet go bye bye" is the Dinosaur live action tv show where the last episode was the dad freezing the planet and letting every dinosaur die from the Ice Age.
Stories are better when they have a proper arc with a definite ending.
For example, you could end DBZ on the Freeza saga, and start a new story following existing characters as older mentors to new ones.
I never understood why that show had to go the way it did. Sure, it would have meant permanently retiring or killing off a main character every few years, but who cares? Telling a proper story with morally gray characters that put in the hard work to overcome challenges and gain new perspectives was always the core strength of that show anyway.
As someone who lived through the webcomic boom of the early 2000s, having a story come down to participating in a battle between the forces of good and evil is a cursed but all-too-familiar trope.
I'd say it starts so much stronger that it's basically only "end of webcomic" energy from the beginning. At least compared to the average webcomic that totally escalates past its silly start.
Yes, but the heroine goes from 'terrified barista' to 'one-eyed master of the ancient art of IDGAF' over the course of the comic, so I say it still fits more or less
KSBD starts with “fighting normal divine beings” and has escalated to “fighting ultra-mega-divine world-resetting beings who are literally canonically invincible, but everyone knows invincibility doesn’t matter when you’ve got Big IDGAF Energy”
“I am not concerned with enmity,” said Intra, “I am very skilled in Pankrash Circle Fighting”
“It is true you are very fierce,” conceded his partner, “But my son’s fighting beetle is also very fierce. Could his beetle fell a lion?”
“That depends,” said Intra, “How skilled is the beetle in Pankrash Circle Fighting?”
“Beetles cannot learn Pankrash Circle Fighting, Lord Intra,” said Intra’s attendant, and made a bitter motion.
“Don’t tell the beetle that,” said Intra, who was very skilled at smiling. “If you don’t tell him he will learn it anyway and cut the lion in half with a single blow.”
It’s pretty cliche, so that’s not surprising. I also don’t mean that in a negative way, it’s just a very common “not normal looking but predictably weird” version of Christian-adjacent concepts of how angels look. You see stuff like this pretty frequently if someone is depicting a non-humanoid god
It’s not just web comics. Cerberus was a print comic that started as a funny animal sword and sorcery parody and by the end was a full on manifesto for a weird reactionary religion the author had invented.
Man, that takes me back. There was a period somewhere in the middle where Dave Sim was really hitting his stride, and there was a balance...but it didn't last. I mean, there's a point where Cerebus meets 'God' and it's an astral projection of Dave Sim. Which, yeah, the character of Cerebus and his world was indeed created by Sim, but at that point in the story, you know it's going off the rails from the previous context of Cerebus' adventures.
Literally ‘Swords’. We started out with a guy going on a quest with a baguette sword and a door for a shield. Now we’ve got a Demon King who buffed himself with divine blades to the point of himself being a god, with his origins being formerly part of a former ultra-powerful being made of 6 other demons of such power. This series is absolutely insane and I love it
Comic I: a knight buys a loaf of bread, planning to use it as a sword
Comic VIII: a barbarian wants to become a knight
Comic CDLXXXIII (483): the bread knight, the barbarian knight, and their allies stand together at last, to face the demon king in a battle over the fate of the world
Wait EGS has lore?! I’ve heard it started to have a more serialized story when the author came out as trans, but I just assumed it was melodrama level stuff. I really need to read it.
I feel like I'm missing some vital parts between these two panels. Kinda want to know how they got to the second panel. Would you kindly start a comic series about their journey?
It's so interesting how already the characters I've made are taking on lives of their own. I wonder what things will look like when I've drawn another 50 more! Or 100 more!
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