Dominic Deegan: This comic should be renamed Cubes and Pubes.

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SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

"Runcible spoon" is a direct crib from Edward Lear. He uses "runcible" as a nonsense word in numerous contexts, but "runcible spoon" is straight from "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat":

quote:

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2020 11:59

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 19:10

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

FlocksOfMice posted:

I KNEW that sounded familiar. MOOKIE.

The only caveat I'd offer is that it's possible that Mookie got it from somewhere other than the original source, as there are a lot of runcible spoons (and other runcible things) out there because other people have borrowed it already. There's a fight on a Navy destroyer using runcible spoons in Gravity's Rainbow, "runcible" is the codename for the primer in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, there's a character named Runcible in the Ni no Kuni games, and so on.

But that all said I'm way more willing to believe Mookie read a page-long nonsense poem by Edward Lear than that he lifted something off page 600 of a Pynchon novel.

# ¿ Oct 13, 2020 22:25

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

The Little Death posted:

I guess they are a cover band, for lovely generic nerd metal music in a medieval fantasy setting, which you think would make a lot of this subject matter either inappropriate or eye-rolling to the audience.

I realize that anachronistic settings can't be fun and aren't the worst thing. But Mookie has used up all my goodwill. I don't even know what's supposed to have happened to Greg in that last panel.

I'm pretty sure we're supposed to think Greg got knocked over by Quilt throwing metal horns.

Quilt is throwing metal horns and making his angry face because he's performing the song. The song which he knows only by virtue of the enchantment placed on him by the magic scroll he just read. An enchantment which the last strip just told us is broken when the song is performed.

Which could've been a better gag than the Greg getting knocked over bit if Mookie had bothered to think it through.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2020 23:45

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

This is just... Nothing. It doesn't even feel worthy of mocking.

I'm reminded of someone, forget who, who wrote of the HBO series Carniv�le that it started out going nowhere fast and ended up going nowhere very, very slowly.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2021 01:42

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

It turns out the real legacy of Dominic Deegan was up its own rear end the whole time.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2021 22:33

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

TheHan posted:

gently caress, man...

Visit scenic Maltak, land of a thousand pubes.

# ¿ Feb 5, 2021 01:32

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

The comic doesn't update every couple days so much as it goes into screensaver mode and displays a random test pattern.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2021 10:12

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

TheHan posted:

Just to really hammer home that Monday's page was pointless wheel spinning Wednesday's page is just drops the topic entirely. They're all just loving around in Arudak's studio apartment.

Ink Witch's mysteriously shrinking dress be like:

code:

v_v
 V

Edit: It turns out that the real legacy of Dominic Deegan was the women who died along the way.

SubG fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Feb 16, 2021

# ¿ Feb 16, 2021 22:45

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

*does a gis for wizard lab*
*doesn't bother to trace any of the tricky parts*
*does this for a living*

# ¿ Feb 17, 2021 16:23

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Gentle necromancy.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2021 15:51

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Billy Gnosis posted:

Dialogue-free*

*free from trying hard. Rock on

There's no dialog, it's all flavour text in tooltips while we're waiting for the comic to load.

Been ~18 months so far.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2021 22:33

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

WELP

Also, aren't they in a foreign country with a different language now? Isn't that, like, the first thing we learned this chapter?

Ah, a sampling of the different cuisines of the deeganverse: several plates of featureless lumps.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2021 04:04

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

The little goblin waiter is also wearing skin tight superhero spandex, for some reason...?

Good lord, reading a sign is now something that takes multiple days. As if reading a sign wasn't already the quintessential Legacy of D experience, motherfucker had to figure out some way of slowing that poo poo down even more.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2021 23:49

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Mors Rattus posted:

why does arudak have a restaurant inside his house

Wizard guys are the only ones with enough invisible chairs.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2021 23:32

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Fister Roboto posted:

tag yourself, i'm DEVS

I'm the ophanim that got left out of the Pseudo-Dionysian angelic hierarchy.

Or maybe the Dominions that appear to have gotten a promotion, or the Thrones and Virtues that got demoted.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2021 01:22

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Twelve by Pies posted:

I'm AER GROSSUS

DOWN
TOWN
AER
GROSSUS

# ¿ Mar 25, 2021 10:31

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Chapter 50: The Language Barrier; or, Other Things With Which We Will Not Concern Ourselves

# ¿ Apr 9, 2021 00:50

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Clouds and random scorch marks on tortillas are better at visually conveying information than Dominic Deegan.

# ¿ Apr 10, 2021 01:23

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

RoboChrist 9000 posted:

What's the opposite of storytelling? Is there a word for it?

"Dominic Deegan".

# ¿ Apr 12, 2021 22:44

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Dear diary, today I met a couple of people I already described to you literally a page ago which I will describe to you again as if this is new information. I also opened my diary and wrote "Dear diary, today I met a couple of people I already described to you literally a page ago which I will describe to you again as if this is new information. I also opened my diary and wrote 'Dear diary, today I met a couple of people I already described to you....

# ¿ Apr 28, 2021 15:10

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Tesseraction posted:

Speaking of boobs,

So much of this comic is Mookie patting himself on the back.

What's the name of that science fiction puppet show where one of the puppets is like this little guy who's supposed to be a prince from a planet that exploded or something, and his gimmick is that he farts a lot and whenever he farts it makes everyone's voice squeaky because he farts helium? The series' main antagonist is Skeletor in a gimp suit, at one point the heroes' space ship gets pregnant, and I'm pretty sure Claudia Black is in it. Anyway, one of the members of the crew is a plant woman. Who is just a woman with a bunch of coloured body paint.

The whole alien-is-just-a-human-with-a-coat-of-paint makes a certain amount of practical sense in something like a low-budget tv show because, you know, the people making the show have access to a lot of humans and no aliens and so they end up having to cut corners and make due. The reason I take the time to talk this through is because holy hell is plant dude's design lazy and it looks exactly like something that was designed to be on a low-budget tv show. It's just a dude in an outfit that looks like it could've come from a seasonal popup store selling Halloween costumes. Like it's a comic. Plant dude could look like literally anything. And here we have a splash page in which I assume we're supposed to be witnessing some awe-inspiring...something-or-other. And it actually looks like a bad special effect from a low-budget tv show where they're trying and failing to conceal the fact that their magical plant dude is a guy in a bad costume with a flower on his head.

# ¿ May 5, 2021 20:30

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Beelzebufo posted:

The show is Farscape and you will not badmouth it.

It's easily my third or fourth favourite science fiction puppet show.

# ¿ May 5, 2021 20:54

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Since this is a story without dialog we have to rely on reading body language. In this case, flower guy's body language here is either a) a mystic pose reminiscent of a Buddha doing a mudrā, or b) he's making the same gesture Homer uses when he says "that's a spicy meatball".

Now we just have to figure out what the spicy meatball mudrā represents.

# ¿ May 6, 2021 16:52

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Fister Roboto posted:

The flower guy stepped over the diary and it started auto-playing, like in video games.

Yeah. I think that's probably also why all the characters seem to share a single hivemind as well--that's the way it works in SNES-era JRPGs. Characters other than the player are mostly just dialogue-dispensing kiosks that sit around waiting for the player to interact with them. If the player hasn't obtained the crystal widget yet, then all anybody wants to talk about is the local legend about a strange crystal hidden somewhere in the caves north of town. Once the player obtains the crystal widget, everybody instantly knows about it, and will now helpfully mention that the witch who lives in the swamp east of town is an expert on crystal widgets. And so on. They're not so much characters as post-it notes that get updated periodically.

# ¿ May 11, 2021 09:14

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

TFW you return home unexpectedly and discover your roommate jacking off to a photo of himself.

# ¿ May 12, 2021 18:47

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

It's the "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" sequence except instead of touching the monolith and going through the Star Gate the comic is just disappearing up its own rear end at relativistic speeds.

# ¿ May 12, 2021 21:21

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Whatever the storytelling equivalent of a cat always landing on its feet is, this is the opposite of that.

# ¿ May 14, 2021 09:57

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

The story so far...

# ¿ May 26, 2021 22:05

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Mx. posted:

Twitter Deegan fans:
https://twitter.com/DharricRolyat/status/1397616404250177545?s=19

Thread Deegan connoisseurs: lol he poop on hill

# ¿ May 27, 2021 00:07

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Caphi posted:

https://twitter.com/BradStone/status/1397551413471760389

See? Mookie does have "diverse worldbuilding"!

Let me demonstrate my ability to shift disciplines and reduce building a rocket ship down to its most essential essence:

they're kinda long and thin
they're usually pointy at one end
there's fire at the other end
they have like fins and stuff
there's a place for people to sit
they're usually painted white or sometimes silver but I think other colours are also okay
oh! they're not supposed to blow up

After you guys are done building your rocket ship come back here and I can tell you how to cure cancer.

# ¿ May 27, 2021 20:46

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

skeleton warrior posted:

3rd edition D&D with half-orcs as a playable race had been out since 2000, so I think �female orcs are just more muscly humans� was a common idea by the time Dominic Deegan was written.

Half-orcs were in the original AD&D Players Handbook in 1978; they were re-introduced in the 3rd Edition after having been taken out of the 2nd (first published in 1989).

As a playable race they percolated from the original AD&D into a lot of the unofficial D&D-based CRPGs in the '80s--like Rogue (first released in 1980) and its descendants--but they didn't make it into the official stuff at the time--like the SSI Gold Box games (the first being Pool of Radiance from 1988).

As for their general depiction in these works...well, I'll just quote the manual from the first The Bard's Tale game (from 1985), which knows how to put things in terms the audience will understand:

The pattern there is the common one: the two "half-" races are orcs and elves, which are almost always at least implicitly mirror images of each other (the elves aloof, cerebral, magical, and usually attractive, and the orcs brutish, stupid, physical, and ugly). Dwarves are almost always present and gnomes almost as commonly, but half-dwarves and half-gnomes are definitely only present as afterthought-in-a-supplement added later if at all.

Anyway, if Mookie is lifting anything from these pre-WoW depictions of half-orcs, it's probably the implied omnipresent sexual violence kinda buried in the background of the fantasy setting (because if nobody would willingly date a half-orc and half-orcs are "not quite as dispicable" as their parents, then...), more than it is in the Luna conventionally-attractive-person-with-tusks thing.

# ¿ May 31, 2021 10:53

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

oriongates posted:

Dear loving god...is this going to be a chapter all about getting a new library card for the Maltek library?

It's like it's a series composed entirely of the scenes that got deleted to improve the pacing of a different series.

Like I've never watched the deleted scenes from Lord of the Rings films, but if there was one where like, I dunno, after everyone meets at Rivendell and they decide to destroy the Ring in Mount Doom, and then Boromir is like hang on, I gotta take a leak before we leave, and then there's five minutes of Viggo Mortensen tapping his foot impatiently and then Boromir comes back and says thanks, let's go...and then you made a webcomic that was just that poo poo.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2021 02:00

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Howard Beale posted:

Chapter 51?
He's at chapter loving FIFTY-ONE!?!

It's numbered contiguously with Deegan classic. Legacy started at Chapter 46.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2021 02:19

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Beelzebufo posted:

Again, it's almost impossible to believe he didn't trace this.

I don't know what you're talking about. I'm pretty sure his brush technique makes it impossible for him to trace.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2021 16:38

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Twelve by Pies posted:

But only kingdoms where the king is democratically elected. Shut up that totally does make sense.

Elective monarchy is a real thing; almost all modern hereditary monarchies were once elective monarchies (or evolved out of earlier elective monarchies). The explosively churning chaos that inevitably arises from the friction between the two systems is something which will be intimately familiar to anyone who has played any Crusader Kings or who has studied the Thirty Years War, and it doesn't make sense in the Deeganverse entirely because it is too interesting.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2021 12:30

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

YF-23 posted:

Elective monarchies are not democratic, though. It was typically just the most important members of the nobility getting together and deciding which one of them should be the next one to become king (also resulting in a very weak crown, as the monarch's position was largely dependent on said nobility's disposition). This is something that almost no fiction depicts properly, so no points deducted from Deegan for failing that - instead points are deducted for making zero attempt to actually depict any part of Callan's political system, outside of the royal knights acting as some sort of royal law enforcement body. Everywhere else we've seen, no government outside from the immediate local municipal authority has been depicted, except whenever Siegfried happened to be passing by for plot.

Eh, there's enough diversity in existing elective monarchies--from e.g. Venice ca the 17th Century versus the HRE versus Irish tanistry versus Spain in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution--that a "truly" democratic elective monarchy doesn't seem that violently nonsensical. And a system in which the gentry selects the king is probably as deserving to be called a democratic system as e.g. the system described in the original US Constitution.

So that doesn't particularly bother me. And, as you observe, virtually no fiction (high fantasy or otherwise) gets the nuts and bolts of medieaval political systems "right" (that is, assuming that depicting things in a way that closely mirrors history as "right"). So having a fantasy medieaval society described as a democratic elective monarchy doesn't strike me as particularly implausible compared to...well, literally everything else in the setting: the stereotypical fantasy "lonely city" we get in the establishing shot; the fact that everybody in the city is apparently just milling about and purchasing things (that they then carry in loving shopping bags) like they're in an indoor mall from the '80s; the interior and exterior of the library don't make sense in relation to each other; Mookie's people are like 50% torso and 25% junk; and so on.

Like one of the main characters wears a big floppy witch hat and I'm about 90% certain that Mookie has no idea how hats work. Because of the myriad ways in which Ink Witch's long-suffering chapeaux wobbles about her head like a poorly-rendered spacetime anomaly. Like for awhile I thought the gimmick was supposed to be that it (and the rest of her outfit) was a magical construct of ink and therefore in constant flux--which could be a cool gimmick...Mookie could have a character emoting with their outfit, kinda like Roberta Gregory's Midge emoting with her boobs--instead of just a physical article whose exact dimensions and properties remain a mystery to the artist:

A series of portraits of the Ink Witch siblings and their various hats.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2021 21:49

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

It WAS - the early concept sketches of her (which were all VERY horny) showed her as essentially an ink Bayonetta with, and I quote Mookie, "an aversion to clothes". Clearly he changed his mind, probably midway through the first arc, before Snout finally met her in person.

I think now they're just clothes, unless he's saving that up for some big reveal... But knowing Mookie, he can't help revealing a plot element the very week he thinks it up, so I doubt it.

Yeah, early on there's a sequence in which the Ink Ship beams her up after blowing up Snout's house and it clearly hints at the idea, but then subsequently her outfit always behaves exactly like normal clothing (drawn by somebody who needs to do more life drawing). Like we see her dressing and undressing several times during the naked cuddling phase of the comic, and there's never any indication that the hat and clothes are anything other than normal, everyday objects. And she casually does ink magic all through that arc, so it isn't as if her powers were sealed or something like that.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2021 22:16

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Comedy option: the legacy of Dominic Deegan is a book which literally contains his soul, like a lich's soul in a phylactery, awaiting a sensitive soul like Snout to liberate him.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2021 23:55

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Veth apparently got a haircut on the way to the library. Wait, no. He apparently got a haircut in the middle of the vegan exorcism of corpsewife:

He goes from a below-the-shoulders David-St-Hubbins feathered mullet kind of thing to a shorter Live-From-Las-Vegas-it's-Rod-Stewart kind of thing. Which appears to be generic orc haircut #7. The transformation apparently occurs in the middle of jotting down a note.

I think the above is literally every panel he appears in before the most recent comic. Maybe he's a hair warlock (capillomancer)?

# ¿ Jul 1, 2021 19:43

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 19:10

SubG: Aug 19, 2004; It's a hard world for little things.

Rotten Red Rod posted:

That untelegraphed enjambment on the last line is a perfect summary of all the weird fumbles of Mookie's work.

The whole thing is bad, but then there's a little detail that goes beyond basic incompetence. Like there's nothing inherently wrong with enjambment. If he'd just indented that last line it would have been fine. Or if there was any rhythm/structure/anything that would coach the reader on how to read each line (instead of very nearly the opposite). And it's not as if it's an insurmountable puzzle or whatever. It's just a little thing that makes the whole thing work just a little worse than it would've otherwise.

That's kinda how I feel about the Veth thing. It wasn't impossible to figure out. I think I had basically the same experience that Twelve by Pies described: basically thinking he was a different person at first because the only way we have to identify most characters is their clothes and hairstyle and both of those had changed, but then figuring it out from context. And, you know, fine. Whatever. It's just that extra bit of unnecessarily work (or whatever you want to call it) that goes beyond the basic incompetence the permeates everything. And produces the equivalent of that sensation where you're going up stairs and try to put your foot down on a step that isn't there.

Beelzebufo posted:

Mookie, when he presented Veth, was communicating a power differential between them and Daxethar, quite obviously. Now, I interpreted it as a more of a Professor/Grad Student thing[...]

That's was my impression as well, and it's emphasized by the fact that Veth is initially drawn with wide-open round eyes and Daxethar has smaller, squinty eyes...which is cartoon shorthand for youth and age, respectively:

The fact that Daxethar has facial hair emphasises this difference.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2021 22:04

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > BSS: Bisexual Super Son > Dominic Deegan: This comic should be renamed Cubes and Pubes.

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