Comic for Monday, July 24th
Jul24
Well, first the exciting news – we hit the next goal on Patreon ($90), so a new bonus series will start there again. Same as last time, eventually it will make it’s way to the main comic or otherwise be posted once it’s done, that said, voting will be up to the Patreons on what it’ll be.
We are out of buffer once more, but hopefully this week will be less silly than last week. I don’t have great confidence in that, as that’d take require intelligence decisions to made higher up the corporate ladder than intelligent decisions are usually made.
Maybe I will reduce panel count for a few pages, this one sort of got away from me as they tend to do 😛
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Ahh Tom…..as of panel 6, you’re now officially awesome.
And Kally in panel 9 is doing a poor job of throwing up an unnecessary defense, eh?
(I’m not sure if 12 is more of a glare or “are you kidding me”, though. Which, depending on how offended she was, could go either way….)
Or she could just ask Mium. He seems to have a bit of a soft spot where she is concerned. Nothing like his relationship with Naomi, or Miko, for that matter, but certainly better than his view of Tyler. Besides, she might ask better questions. 🙂
Do these characters have names, or are they just generic IDS people?
Also, although I do appreciate the “IDS” t-shirt [presumably to indicate where we are, in IDS headquarters], I can’t help but think that IDS is hardly the sort of organization that would hand out t-shirts telling everyone who worked there…
They are sort of background characters at this point, but they do have names. We’ve seen them a few times, but to honest rarely enough that I’m not entirely confident their appearance doesn’t fluctuate somewhat.
I try to not go super crazy with the character count, but it depends. I could, technically, have recycled the IDS Analyst pair people are more used to, but it upsets my internal verisimilitude (if likely no one else’s) that they’d be here currently.
Realistically what I should do is update all these people onto the character page, even if we technically don’t know their names yet, just put them there. The reason I don’t is mostly because I’m lazy (or busy, depending on how you believe), as in this case it wouldn’t really be a spoiler.
It might help if they were on the character page. But it is still hard to keep track of the cast size. Peter’s been on ~2-3 pages out of the last 30, and Naomi hasn’t even shown up lately. It is just sort of odd given they are the main characters. I think a lot of it is narrative focus, something they teach in creative writing courses.
It might help to divide up the character page instead of trying to list everyone together. Something like “major characters”, “incidental characters”, “supporting characters”, or the like. Otherwise the “characters” page will end up with nearly a hundred people when only a dozen are important to keep direct track of and only a dozen more are important but not in such a supporting role that they are “introduced” by their position each time they appear.
To give an example, everyone but Tyler in the MSB is a “supporting character” at this point. Whenever they show up in their capacity as an agent it is clear by context that they are part of Tyler’s group (under him) and other times their position is clearly and directly spelled out. This is also true for most of the IDS individuals. Rovak, on the other hand, is an “Incidental Character” shown by the fact that he isn’t one of the people central to the story as someone who directs things forward nor is he a supporting character; instead he is a mostly independent entity that shakes things up whenever he shows. Other examples include Nathan, most of the IDS people who aren’t supporting characters, and (to date) Ryn Tomorrow.
The major advantage is that this allows people to get a much quicker understanding of who is important and helps people memorize the major characters without nearly as much confusion. The major downside, especially in such a long running story, is that it can become spoilerific if someone notices that So-and-So is incidental or a main character rather than a supporting character or that this mook looking guy has a name and will be reaccouring despite them looking like a nobody at their first appearance.
I like this idea/approach, I don’t know when a reasonable ETA for me to go through it would be though. It’s going to be a reasonably big undertaking make to up the list, as I don’t even know off the top of my head which characters need to go on it. We’ll see.
Unfortunately cast pages are sort of useless without a picture attached, so there are three steps – find the characters that need to be on there, draw or snip a picture, and put a name and brief bio. I’m never quite sure how much to put in the bios anyway, but I suppose at least a name and who they are would probably help people.
One of the advantages of dividing up the cast page is that it divides up the work as well. The only part that would /need/ to be filled out is the “major characters” portion, and that includes less than a dozen characters, all of whom are already included (Peter’s entire group, Aaron Kepler, Tyler Webber, Dr Mir, Illa F10, Kalisto Summers) And none of them need to be organized by group (preserving such reveals as the Illa side switch) and just saying that they will become more important later on isn’t much of a spoiler either.
Most of the Incidental Characters are also already present (Rovak, Ryn Tomorrow, Tom, Nathan, Jayce Meyer, I think “Gate” turned out to be the F5 which would make him qualify) though there might be a few that are missing as well (the teleporter mage, etc.). The nice thing is that if you miss filling in one of these characters it isn’t as much of a big deal and adding in new characters to this group is a one-at-a-time thing, as opposed to the dozen-at-a-time thing that filling in all the supporting characters would be. As for the supporting characters, you already have a good amount of filler from the main three groups (Aaron’s, Tyler’s, and Avon’s) so anyone missing could be saved as a donation goal or just ignored completely for now.
That said, there really is nothing /wrong/ with the page as it is now, except that updating it in any way seems to be such a big job that you (quite understandably) don’t want to touch it. Keeping it as is or changing it mainly comes down do a cost/benefit analysis: will changing the page make incremental updates easier on you or make the overall comic more accessible to new people enough to justify the work of changing it in the first place? Either way, I think you are doing a great job, so don’t think you have to change anything if you don’t want to.
PS: as an aside I find it hilarious the president Kokato, despite all his bluster, has not risen above the level of a supporting character. At this point he is little more than a humanoid mcguffin, barely even a character in and of himself. All of his maneuvering was before he became a real character and all he has done so far is bluster, get knocked unconscious, and annoy Illa by refusing to eat his ice-cream (and the ice cream thing really is the most he has personally contributed to the story). It is ironic how often those with the biggest heads have the smallest part in what is actually going on.
I like this idea; I’ve seen others do cast pages this way, and it does make it easier to start, in my experience.
An alternative that I’ve seen for other comics with this level of narrative depth (main case being Erfworld) is the fan wiki. I don’t know whether this comic has the level of popularity required to maintain such an endeavor, but it certainly has the level of complexity that it would be useful if it could be maintained (especially with all the additional information present in the comment sections and so forth).
I just found where I remember Ervon coming from (from two pages when Nathan says “I, Fifth of Ervon, seat of Summers…”
It is from the Lore pages, specifically the only mention I can find is:
“And one, perhaps one of the greatest of them, the Ervon Magical Society, a global presence that had played a vast role in containing the continued secrecy of magic, they could simply not remain spectators to this level of devastation. While the others waged war against the invaders on their own, the Ervon Magical Society stepped forward and turned over their magical knowledge and resources to the desperate collation forces.”
Ervon Magical Society was the one that seems to have broken the masquerade (though I suppose it was already broken by that point) and thrown their lot in with the IDS (or its incursion era predecessor).
This means that Summers are probably an old school magic line, which may explain why they seem to be natural mages in the autocaster heavy IDS.
An interesting question is whether Nathan’s remark refers to that society or to some thing (artifact/entity/whatever) that the society is named after… I could see it going either way.
It is really is not much to go on yet, but it is something. I think it is a good a clue to why Kally is a natural mage of her caliber when we do not really see that from the IDS for the most part (and it looks like Nathan might be too).
@Amaranth: Have I ever mentioned how impressed I am with your diligence? It is the level to which I would aspire if I had the ambition. ^^
I have a lot of time between updates to circle back on things. Not a complaint, but at two pages a week it gives me a lot of time to investigate. And there is a lot to investigate. The comic setting is more unique and detailed than anything I have seen outside of novels fantasy novels, and those are less easy to read while procrastinating on the internet than just clicking my bookmark for the comic again.
I suppose I really like the magical science fiction aspect, which is usually done not so well. Usually if there is magic in a science fiction setting, it is compartmentalized from the science (like the Force in Star Wars). It is unusual for a setting to dive into “uploading spell books onto computers” fiction. I do not even know what the proper genre for that would be.
You know what they say about sufficiently advanced technology, right?
Magic here is almost just another science. But it messes with physics in a way that’s incompatible with, well, physics.
Uploading spellbooks onto computers is a pretty standard urban fantasy trope, but it’s a matter of convenience; the interactions between computers and magic are not well explored.
Do you read Erfworld? It’s similarly unique and detailed – just as much to speculate on.
It’s not (usually) sci-fi per se, but it does have a comparable level of technicality behind its magic. If you don’t read it, I’d suggest it, although it’s currently on hiatus until the end of August.
I read the first “book” quite awhile ago. Had a compelling enough story, but I could not really get behind the characters or world.
@Amaranth, If you do not limit yourself to magic I recommend you look at Datachasers. It is a story-based science fiction webcomic heavy on sentient androids that is built upon a detailed, complex and well-thought-out world with a wide spectrum of interesting, believable characters. It also has a very active forum speculating and analyzing the frequent twists that the creatrixes throw at us. Xpacetrue has as much fun there as he does here (and is just as insightful).
Like here, the authors have created a very detailed, self-consistent world with a cast of personalities so believable that it leads to extensive character analysis, speculation and discussion on their behavior and motivation. And, again like here, there is an entire universe of implied off-camera backstory that adds to the forum fodder.
Warning, there are over 1500 pages so far (not even half-way done!), and lots of you-really-should-read comments. (It won’t be my fault if you ignore the warning!)
Sounds like she is trying to track MIUM, but he is through enough that the information she is looking for is at the very least tagged so that he will know if someone is looking at it. It might be interesting to see where this develops.
Ahh, the reminder that Kalli isn’t really a spy. She’s the person who makes problems go away, with explosions. That said, she isn’t stupid either. I imagine spending some time with Peter taught her at least basic skills.