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Rand Brittain posted:Y'all be acting like Dreen appearing in the past means that the thing that brought them there happened in the past, which is probably not actually the case. I mean, you are correct, but also we saw that the last Heterodyne to tinker with time saw "angels" who convinced him to stop, which might be the Dreen showing up back then. edit: implied, nothing, the comic flat-out shows them: https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20160406#.YHSzvOhKj4Y
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Apr 12, 2021 21:54
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I love GG, but it is best read once every two months in a giant binge.
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Apr 12, 2021 22:03
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Still can't handle the playdough faces. I don't know why they bother me so much 
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Apr 12, 2021 23:44
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I'm just impressed at Klaus' ability to recruit literally any monster available and get it to function as part of his bureaucracy, Time Horrors, Jaegers, or whatever else.
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Apr 13, 2021 02:04
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Klaus shoved a document under their noses and in their various states of frenzy, the blood splatters landed on the dotted line. A contract signed in blood is going to have some effect on even the most monstrous creature if it's crafted by a spark
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Apr 13, 2021 10:13
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Joe Slowboat posted:I'm just impressed at Klaus' ability to recruit literally any monster available and get it to function as part of his bureaucracy, Time Horrors, Jaegers, or whatever else. He offers excellent employment benefits. (He really does.)
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Apr 13, 2021 10:19
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Twibbit posted:I love GG, but it is best read FTFY.
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Apr 13, 2021 13:00
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Just to get a ballpark of how much I have to catch up if I decide to start reading Girl Genius again. The last thing I remember reading was Agatha going into Mechanicburg, and talking with Castle Heterodyne through the old man who put on the "mind blend with the castle" helmet. How many years ago was that?
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Apr 13, 2021 13:10
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Mikl posted:Just to get a ballpark of how much I have to catch up if I decide to start reading Girl Genius again. that was 3 presidents ago my dude
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Apr 13, 2021 13:14
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Yeah, I just checked. 2011. And I barely remember what happened before that, except in the most general terms. 
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Apr 13, 2021 13:23
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Does GG seem to be approaching any kind of end? It just goes on and at some point I must have said "I'll read it when it ends" and that was a decade ago.
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Apr 13, 2021 15:36
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No.
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Apr 13, 2021 15:41
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I mean, it is progressing in the direction of an ending, just at a glacially slow pace. Bits and pieces of the endgame have been set up and long running arcs get incremental payoff in the form of a plot drop here and there every couple of years. Honestly I have no idea how the Foglios have the patience for it, there is stuff that has been plotted out for two decades that they've just been sitting on and by all appearances they could keep it up for another 10 years before they get there. But it seems to be working for them 
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Apr 13, 2021 16:04
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Assuming the Time Travel arc is the final one, we're getting there. But hypothetically there's no reason they couldn't put more stories after that, so...
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Apr 13, 2021 17:29
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Pierson posted:Does GG seem to be approaching any kind of end? It just goes on and at some point I must have said "I'll read it when it ends" and that was a decade ago. I think there's a clear direction the story is intended to be going that could be a conclusion, but the story's also not in much of a hurry to get there. But even if it does reach that point, the whole thing has a real pulpy feeling like there's always going to be adventure in this world, and the out-of-main-timeline interludes imply that even after whatever end the story is headed towards, the adventures will continue ever onward. I feel pretty disappointed by the whole England arc because on top of being pretty slow, it seems to have been largely a repetition of the whole Paris arc. Agatha finds a safe haven to rest and find out her next move, meets the immortal god-dictator of that little state, there's a fancy dress party, a battle with the Other, and in the end, Agatha and company are forced to leave in dire circumstances that have left the status quo shaken. There's even some alien society beneath them that Agatha ends up brokering a peace with. I think Paris had more interesting characters while England was a more interesting setting, but they both have pretty similar structure with a lot of the same ideas revisited.
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Apr 13, 2021 18:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:I feel pretty disappointed by the whole England arc because on top of being pretty slow, it seems to have been largely a repetition of the whole Paris arc. Agatha finds a safe haven to rest and find out her next move, meets the immortal god-dictator of that little state, there's a fancy dress party, a battle with the Other, and in the end, Agatha and company are forced to leave in dire circumstances that have left the status quo shaken. There's even some alien society beneath them that Agatha ends up brokering a peace with. I think Paris had more interesting characters while England was a more interesting setting, but they both have pretty similar structure with a lot of the same ideas revisited. For that matter both of these are largely reprises of the Sturmhalten arc. GG reuses the skeleton of its episodic arcs very heavily, just steadily escalating each time.
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Apr 13, 2021 18:23
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At the very least the England arc has had a more forward movement on the core Lucrezia/Other/Time mystery than the others have.
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Apr 13, 2021 18:30
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Mikl posted:Just to get a ballpark of how much I have to catch up if I decide to start reading Girl Genius again. Twelve volumes plus whatever hasn't been collected in print yet.
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Apr 13, 2021 19:13
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GG gets away with reusing the previous stories because it takes so long to tell it, you've forgotten you've already read it before.
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Apr 13, 2021 19:15
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The weird thing about the England arc (at least, so far) is all the hints dropped that the Queen is kind of a worse authoritarian than Klaus and would try to keep Agatha and all the others in England, not by physical might but by guile and sheer force of personality, but that isn't really paying off at the moment, since a bunch of them are leaving, ordered out by the Queen herself.
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Apr 13, 2021 20:00
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Bobulus posted:The weird thing about the England arc (at least, so far) is all the hints dropped that the Queen is kind of a worse authoritarian than Klaus and would try to keep Agatha and all the others in England, not by physical might but by guile and sheer force of personality, but that isn't really paying off at the moment, since a bunch of them are leaving, ordered out by the Queen herself. I assumed she wanted to split Team Agatha up because she realized all of them together are too much chaos to wrangle at once. Mikl posted:Yeah, I just checked. 2011. Almost a year ago now, the comic suddenly called back to one of Agatha's early beaus, who died in 2006, which she refers to as, "last month!" I wouldn't even have remembered him if I hadn't just re-read that part of the comic.
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Apr 13, 2021 21:10
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Bobulus posted:The weird thing about the England arc (at least, so far) is all the hints dropped that the Queen is kind of a worse authoritarian than Klaus and would try to keep Agatha and all the others in England, not by physical might but by guile and sheer force of personality, but that isn't really paying off at the moment, since a bunch of them are leaving, ordered out by the Queen herself. i think that plan kind of got shelved when she came to fully understand the airfleet of trouble that agatha et al towed in their er wake
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Apr 13, 2021 21:29
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Possibly the Queen will try to bait Agatha and Gil back in, but definitely the Other and the Frostlords take precedence for now. I think there's might be a whole thing going on where they plan out future plotlines way beforehand, but then their plot ideas bleed over into the earlier story beats and they don't have an editor cutting out redundancies. I remember when Mechanicsburg was happening, I got the feeling like so much of the story had been leading to Mechanicsburg that they had planned too many things to be doing at once. FronzelNeekburm posted:Almost a year ago now, the comic suddenly called back to one of Agatha's early beaus, who died in 2006, which she refers to as, "last month!" To be fair, a lot more time has passed for everybody else than it has for Agatha. She skipped some time into the future and the only quiet moment she's had between Sturmhalten and now has been waiting for the train. I will say that the pacing of the comic isn't great. I love a lot of the moments when everything's fallen apart and all the subplots crash together, but there's often just too many subplots at once. Although it feels very differently paced when you're not reading weekly and you can go through a year's worth of stuff in an hour. It's extremely common for ambitious creators to plan out adventure stories that are way more ambitious than anything they'll ever be able to finish and just keep it going until it collapses, so I guess what's remarkable about Girl Genius is that it's just kept going for so long. I think Fullmetal Alchemist is the only big adventure story I've read that just kept on steadily moving forward without losing its way until it was over.
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Apr 13, 2021 22:12
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GG is a weird case where things are resolved or altered pretty often, but often in a less bombastic way than people anticipated. Lucrezia is out of Agatha's brain now! But so much happened around it I nearly forgot it occurred for a while. One of the most impressive examples of the Foglio's planning is probably The Works, a card game they originally released back in 2001- it had character designs for characters from the Paris and England arcs over a decade before they appeared in the comic, designs that were left mostly unchanged when the characters did appear. That page lists a few characters who still haven't appeared too. For all the changes the Foglios made (ie. Tarvek and his family were originally not meant to be important), they appear to have remained largely on track for twenty-plus years.
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Apr 13, 2021 22:37
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I have to assume that, rather than need to build a new audience with a new IP after they wrap up, the Foglios intend to only actually finish GG when they're ready to retire.
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Apr 15, 2021 02:48
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I feel like a lot of creators have set up projects like that to go until they retire, but I don't think I've ever seen them manage a satisfying ending. Still, I think Girl Genius has still been pretty good while the plates have kept spinning. There's also often a thing where prolific creators trying to retire just can't keep new stuff from leaking out, which I think Girl Genius's occasional ADD is evidence of. There might be some kind of intent to make Girl Genius into some kind of a magnum opus. There's a lot in the comic. They started with the theme at the beginning of framing the story in the context of a swarm of messy stories that don't quite fit together, there's a whole series of messy romantic comedies of people pursuing prospective mates that keeps dipping in and out, there's a whole thing in the background where there's a lot of musing and philosophizing on the nature of monarchy and the aristocracy (which seems like it may actually loop in to the the stuff about the nature of stories in the beginning), and in the center of it all, there's Agatha having a running theme of just trying to treat people and monsters respectfully and trying to get along, and she's been constantly rewarded for it. It's also interesting how diverse the cast of the comic has been despite so much of it being in the heart of whitest Europe. It's even done in a way that seems to really celebrate internationalism and how some places just have different demographics than others. The Sturmvorus/Blitzengard family is all red-haired, Paris is largely black, some groups are conspicuously mixed and diverse like the castle prisoners or the Queen's daughters. I dunno, I think it's something. Although skintone of individual characters can sometimes be as inconsistent as their other features in the very fluid artsyle.
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Apr 15, 2021 06:02
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Personally I think it's entirely possible they finish the main plot of Girl Genius and then go on to write entire further books of Agatha Heterodyne Adventures, since the short stories set nebulously post-plot are honestly all pretty great. Ivo Sharktooth, Private Jaeger is great, as is the recent one about Solstice traditions in Mechanicsburg. Also, don't forget that they had a giant many-plotted space opera that they wrote, drew, and finished before Girl Genius, so I have faith that they will conclude the thing, even if they don't stop writing in the setting.
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Apr 15, 2021 06:26
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PMush Perfect posted:I have to assume that, rather than need to build a new audience with a new IP after they wrap up, the Foglios intend to only actually finish GG when they're ready to retire. Phil Foglio turns 65 at the end of this month, and with volume 13 known to be the mid-point of the full arc there's another five years left in the story. So this is almost certainly Phil's plan; there just isn't any need to pad it out once the arc is done.
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Apr 15, 2021 11:09
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do you ever actually retire from making a webcomic, I can't imagine the pension plan is that great even if you started in the 90s or whatever
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Apr 15, 2021 15:27
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you don't really retire from cartooning across any medium unless you're one of the lucky ones lol
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Apr 15, 2021 16:25
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I can only hope for their sakes that after a lifetime of working in comics and being almost entirely self-employed for the last decade or so, they've figured out their own finances. I'd say Girl Genius has a much better chance of wrapping up well than One Piece, but it's nowhere near Order of the Stick, which seems to be in spitting distance of an ending (but will probably spin up for at least one more arc when the current situation goes awry). Right now there's sort of a skeleton of a possible way that everything could begin to come together for an ending, but there's too many loose threads hanging that need to be picked up for that to work and the narrative is explicitly splitting focus again.
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Apr 15, 2021 16:33
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:do you ever actually retire from making a webcomic, I can't imagine the pension plan is that great even if you started in the 90s or whatever I don't really think there's a "retirement" plan for webcomics. You either just quit, or move on to a more "professional" gig like print comics or cartoons.
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Apr 15, 2021 17:18
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SlothfulCobra posted:I can only hope for their sakes that after a lifetime of working in comics and being almost entirely self-employed for the last decade or so, they've figured out their own finances. Considering they've been making Girl Genius work as their full-time job for at least a decade, I suspect they have a good financial plan. They're one of the rare success stories.
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Apr 15, 2021 17:20
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Foglios came up through the fan press/freelance/custom work path, I'm pretty sure they've got their eyes on the till. At least I hope so, and I think GG is garbage. Always have a soft spot for those Myth Inc book covers though.
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Apr 15, 2021 17:45
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fun hater posted:you don't really retire from cartooning across any medium unless you're one of the lucky ones lol Hell, Al Jaffee only retired last year and he is literally one hundred years old.
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Apr 15, 2021 18:01
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Hell, Al Jaffee only retired last year and he is literally one hundred years old. hot drat, he looks spry for his age
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Apr 15, 2021 18:17
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fun hater posted:you don't really retire from cartooning across any medium unless you're one of the lucky ones lol
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Apr 15, 2021 19:40
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https://twitter.com/ComfyBasilisk/status/1383365687704317965 Hold on a second, what? You mean CAD is not terrible anymore? What is happening 
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Apr 17, 2021 14:11
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Also (sorry the double-post) this sent me down a rabbit-hole of looking at old and terrible webcomics and apparently A.Diaz (of Dresden Codak) is trans?? poo poo, I've been out of the loop for a while it seems.
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Apr 17, 2021 16:51
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Mikl posted:Also (sorry the double-post) this sent me down a rabbit-hole of looking at old and terrible webcomics and apparently A.Diaz (of Dresden Codak) is trans?? Whaa? Didn't hear about this. Good for (I assume) her. I suppose over time one realizes cis people are considerably less common than we thought.
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Apr 17, 2021 17:14
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