I don't think I want to live in a world were a parody stick figure comic
beats one of the comic industry's top writers.
So...
I would like to call shenanigans on the owner of this site.
Why? 2 reasons
#1) I dont like the way Rich implies that the fact that this is a parody stick figure comic is a bad thing, deserves less credit because of that or anything like that. AND it has nothing to do with the:
#2) I consider, Rich is one hell of a writer. The way the plot has evolved and his character development amaze me. It often makes me forget this is a stick figure comic in the first place. So what I would like to say is that it is not a shame to lose to Alan Moore, he was a tough opponent. But I like Rich's work better.
that's all folks
just my 2 copper pices.
Last edited by Gorbash Kazdar : 05-15-2008 at 01:15 PM.
Eh, he kinda has a point but at the same time it's only a parody because that's what he feels like- If he put his mind to it, like we've seen in TNW, he could easily make something awesome.
\V/
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Alan Moore & Rich Burlew belong to different cattegories. They both do a great job, but comparing them is like judging which is better, a XII century Romanesque church or latest Calatravas' building. They are uncomparable.
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Alan Moore & Rich Burlew belong to different cattegories. They both do a great job, but comparing them is like judging which is better, a XII century Romanesque church or latest Calatravas' building. They are uncomparable.
I'd totally go with the Romanesque church. :P
But I agree about Alan Moore and Rich.
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Stoats legit King Arthur by The Succubus.
I check for an update to OOTS several times a day. I leaf thru something by Moore and drop it into the discard pile. That sort of vote is a pretty strong standard. Taken in mass, it determines whether the writer lives on Park Avenue or Skid Row.
Still, from my limited knowledge and indifferent view of Moore, it seems he is much the superior here. Our writer is unable to make Miko really work as a character. A difficult task to be sure, but Moore seems to have succeeded at far more difficult ones.
It may be disappointing from our view, but it may be the right decision.
I fail to see how Rich has failed to make Miko work as a character. He made as her an example of how not to play a paladin, and if the countless hate threads that have been spawned are any indication, he has succeeded in making her unlikeable. Yet, at the same time, there are many Miko defenders, showing she is a complex character and more than a cardboard cutout. So, though I don't really like Miko that much, I think she is a very good character. By 'good,' I mean 'interesting.'
No matter now much I hated Miko as a character, I still feel she worked as one. And I also disagree with Rich, I want to live in a world where the best comic as defined by the competition wins. In this case what had happened is that OotS has been declared not was good as the winner. If it had won it would have been declared better than the winner. But it isn't, it is worse.
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Originally Posted by Tirian
He may secretly be the World's Greatest Detective, but I think that the average person in the DC Universe thinks of Bruce Wayne as the World's Worst Skier.
Alan Moore & Rich Burlew belong to different cattegories. They both do a great job, but comparing them is like judging which is better, a XII century Romanesque church or latest Calatravas' building. They are uncomparable.
Oh I dunno, I can totally see Moore doing a D&D parody comic, actually there's very little I can't see Moore doing.
I would like to call shenanigans on the owner of this site.
Get out your broomsticks!
But seriously... I think that Rich might just be showing some modesty here. I know there have been times where I've won something or bested someone at something when I thought that they honestly did a better job then me. But awards are always based on opinion and everyone's opinion is different.
I fail to see how Rich has failed to make Miko work as a character. He made as her an example of how not to play a paladin, and if the countless hate threads that have been spawned are any indication, he has succeeded in making her unlikeable.
This is one of the aspects of his failure with her. She was supposed to be likably unlikable. The venom expressed shows he failed at that. People were supposed to cheer when she took a pratfall, but still not want anything serious to happen to her.
Then we have her romantic aspect. We already have his confession of his failure here. He just couldn't make Miko work. Which is too bad. Celia as Roy's lover is downright insipid compared to what Miko could have been. He was likely wise to give up and use other ideas, but we still have a failure that a superior artist would have avoided.
Apparently, revising a plan or replacing it with one that you like better now counts as failure, I guess. Never mind that Rich has to write each page and publish it before he writes the next one, robbing him of the ability to actually revise earlier pages that any other author has. If, after writing the last page of Black Dossier, Alan Moore realized that he had changed the story from what it was going to be in the beginning, he can go back and rewrite those pages without anyone ever knowing about it. Rich can't, he's stuck with his first draft every time. He can only revise by adding additional material later that retcons the older stuff.
There's no way to know what another writer, even Alan Moore, would be capable of if the ability to revise was taken away.
----------------------
To the people actually discussing the topic: I don't think Rich is wrong, but not because Alan Moore is an inherently better writer per se. I think Rich should have lost because his nomination in that category was likely the result of people from this site going there and stuffing the ballot box in every category possible, and Original Graphic Novel was just the category that had few enough other nominees for his name to stick. Start of Darkness was an apple competing in the Favourite Orange category.
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Congratulations, you can link to TV Tropes. This does not mean you have special insight into the storytelling process, much less the author's mind. Stories don't need to fit into neat boxes, you know.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Giant
Spod has it right.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Grasilich
You not reading the comic isn't going to make this comic any less awesome for all the rest of us.
To the people actually discussing the topic: I don't think Rich is wrong, but not because Alan Moore is an inherently better writer per se. I think Rich should have lost because his nomination in that category was likely the result of people from this site going there and stuffing the ballot box in every category possible, and Original Graphic Novel was just the category that had few enough other nominees for his name to stick. Start of Darkness was an apple competing in the Favourite Orange category.
That's hardly unique to any particular case; it's endemic to any contest that takes nominations or votes from the Net. Except in particularly egregious cases, it more or less cancels out.
As for the merits of the vote, it's between two books (not two authors), and I haven't read one of them.
That's hardly unique to any particular case; it's endemic to any contest that takes nominations or votes from the Net.
Oh, I completely agree, I'm just saying why I believe Rich is correct in agreeing with the results. He didn't make the contest and he didn't solicit nominations (he only solicited votes), so he didn't have any control over the process. I got the impression from his statement that if he had been the person who needed to submit nominations (instead of fans), he would never have submitted to that category. Therefore, he made a statement that he was glad that it all worked out the way he thought it should, since he had no business being in that category to begin with.
Also, your point about the books being the actual competitors is well-taken; Miko doesn't appear in Start of Darkness at all!*
* Writing the preface doesn't count.
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Congratulations, you can link to TV Tropes. This does not mean you have special insight into the storytelling process, much less the author's mind. Stories don't need to fit into neat boxes, you know.
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Giant
Spod has it right.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Grasilich
You not reading the comic isn't going to make this comic any less awesome for all the rest of us.
This is one of the aspects of his failure with her. She was supposed to be likably unlikable. The venom expressed shows he failed at that. People were supposed to cheer when she took a pratfall, but still not want anything serious to happen to her.
Then we have her romantic aspect. We already have his confession of his failure here. He just couldn't make Miko work. Which is too bad. Celia as Roy's lover is downright insipid compared to what Miko could have been. He was likely wise to give up and use other ideas, but we still have a failure that a superior artist would have avoided.
Was she originally intended to actually be Roy's love interest? I always thought that he had intended their relationship to fail from the beginning, but i have not followed all the threads related to the subject.
What these issues seem to be are not necessarily a failure in character writing, but more a case of the character developing in unexpected directions. Characters taking on a life of their own is generally the mark of a good writer. Plus, as someone else pointed out, Rich is slightly limited by the webcomic medium. If he changes his mind, or sees something he doesn't like, it's already too late to change it.
Was she originally intended to actually be Roy's love interest? I always thought that he had intended their relationship to fail from the beginning, but i have not followed all the threads related to the subject.
According to the notes in No Cure For The Paladin Blues, Rich originally had a more "romantic comedy" tone in mind, but quickly realized that it wouldn't work with the overall story he had in mind.
Was she originally intended to actually be Roy's love interest? I always thought that he had intended their relationship to fail from the beginning, but i have not followed all the threads related to the subject.
The whole bit with the inn was supposed to be "light romantic comedy" in which Roy puts on the gender bending belt in order to get in "girl talk" with Miko which fails. But it's not stated that he was to wind up falling out of love with Miko so dramatically as he did, so the romance plot might have been intended to go on for a while. Couldn't say for sure.
To me it looked like they were all wrong for one another right from the start. His attraction to her was shallow and sexist and had nothing to do with her personality. YMMV, I suppose.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Calinero
What these issues seem to be are not necessarily a failure in character writing, but more a case of the character developing in unexpected directions. Characters taking on a life of their own is generally the mark of a good writer.
Hear, hear.
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I got the impression from his statement that if he had been the person who needed to submit nominations (instead of fans), he would never have submitted to that category. Therefore, he made a statement that he was glad that it all worked out the way he thought it should, since he had no business being in that category to begin with.
Spod has it right. My point in that News post was relief that the system had worked. Start of Darkness is not really a graphic novel, it is a collection of comic strips, the same as the OOTS compilations. The only difference is that no one had ever seen these ones before. I would have been mildly embarrassed if I had won a contest for which I was uncertain of my qualifications by virtue of the power of the internet. If I had written something I truly considered to be a graphic novel, I would have been happy to kick Alan Moore's ass. I still wouldn't have expected to win, but I wouldn't have been so relieved to not win.
As to the other discussion, I will only say that if the end result of my creative process ends up being something of which I am far prouder than I would have been of the rehashed trivialities that I first set out to write, then I consider that a success in every way. I should feel eminently blessed if I manage to have more such "failures" as Miko in the future.
According to the notes in No Cure For The Paladin Blues, Rich originally had a more "romantic comedy" tone in mind, but quickly realized that it wouldn't work with the overall story he had in mind.
True, but he never says that they were intended to actually ever BE in a relationship...merely that Roy was going to try to get secrets out of her in the hope of getting into one. I would expect that such an attempt would fail, spectacularly, in the manner that such things usually do in comedy stories. Therefore, the existence of Roy's relationship with Celia was not necessarily mutually exclusive with his original intent for Miko.
Also, I would argue (not so much to you, personally) that the ability to recognize what can and cannot work in a story is a mark of a good author, not a flawed one. David Argall's unspoken supposition is that a sufficiently skilled author can make ANY situation work, and I think that's deeply flawed. A skilled writer identifies what won't work and removes it in favor of something that does, he doesn't try to hamfistedly jam a square peg into a round hole and make the audience swallow it.
EDIT for being ninja'd by the Giant:
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Giant
Spod has it right.
OK, this is going into my signature.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by The Giant
Spod has it right.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Grasilich
You not reading the comic isn't going to make this comic any less awesome for all the rest of us.
This is one of the aspects of his failure with her. She was supposed to be likably unlikable. The venom expressed shows he failed at that. People were supposed to cheer when she took a pratfall, but still not want anything serious to happen to her.
Then we have her romantic aspect. We already have his confession of his failure here. He just couldn't make Miko work. Which is too bad. Celia as Roy's lover is downright insipid compared to what Miko could have been. He was likely wise to give up and use other ideas, but we still have a failure that a superior artist would have avoided.
For starters, Miko is not universally hated. Many people LIKED the character and her path to destruction.
Second, most real writers consider it a measure of how deep a character is by how polarized people's views are on them. A poorly written character will be looked over, but a well written one will invoke a passionate reaction, good or bad.
real writers consider it a measure of how deep a character is by how polarized people's views are on them. A poorly written character will be looked over, but a well written one will invoke a passionate reaction, good or bad.
I would like to just put this out there: This is the internet. We get passionate over which cereal-mascot would win in a fight, whether Hinata's a better match for Naruto than Sakura, and just how many ways a wizard can win any given fight. Just thought it was worth mentioning.
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anyway...
I get Rich's point now but... I still wanna see aquaman! maybe he could appear now that our heroes are in dire need or something I dont know...
and about Miko: That is precisely one of the character developments I had in mind in the OP. Miko is one of my favorite characters because... you know: god I hate that bitch!!
Miko was a brilliant character! I really and truly hated her. And I swear I went chaotic evil for a minute cackling at her death. LOL. It takes skill to write someone like that. Hats off to The Giant.
I am not so sure of that. Miss Young Paladin at the goblin village has a distinctly Miko air to her, and may have been intended to be a young Miko until somebody did the math and found it would have made Miko about 50. Of course, as I have mentioned a few times, there are a lot of characters and a limited number of ways to express any differences, so a lot of characters are going to resemble a lot of characters.
Still, there would be a definite appeal of having her there and the flaw in timing might not have been noticed before it was easier to just remove any references to any name than to delete the character or make other changes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NerfTW
most real writers consider it a measure of how deep a character is by how polarized people's views are on them. A poorly written character will be looked over, but a well written one will invoke a passionate reaction, good or bad.
But relatively rarely both, which is what we have here. And even more rarely unintentionally.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SPoD
but he never says that they were intended to actually ever BE in a relationship... I would expect that such an attempt would fail, spectacularly, in the manner that such things usually do in comedy stories.
He doesn't categorically say there was intended to be a relationship that would last for the rest of the comic, but that is the easy way to read it. That there would be disastrous "dates" during that is almost a given. They would merely not end the relationship.
But if we assume only a short romance, followed by a long association, we have a rather rare situation. Ex-girlfriends and boyfriends normally drop out of the story, generally quite rapidly. So Miko staying in the plot after all relations with Roy are over is unusual. [Now granted, a 200 strip exit is long, but it does not involve her jumping back into the plot.]
Quote:
Originally Posted by SPoD
David Argall's unspoken supposition is that a sufficiently skilled author can make ANY situation work,
No, I have said this is a situation I have seen other authors make work. It is by no means easy, and it is very easy to end with a character like Miko that is too hated, but it has been done.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SPoD
A skilled writer identifies what won't work and removes it in favor of something that does, he doesn't try to hamfistedly jam a square peg into a round hole and make the audience swallow it.
More precisely here, a wise writer identifies what he can't make work and tries to work within his talents. The writer who works with the square peg and round hole may be foolish, or have greater talents.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SPoD
Rich has to write each page and publish it before he writes the next one, robbing him of the ability to actually revise earlier pages that any other author has. If, after writing the last page of Black Dossier, Alan Moore realized that he had changed the story from what it was going to be in the beginning, he can go back and rewrite those pages without anyone ever knowing about it.
Now the main problem here is the nomination was book [Start of Darkness]vs book, not web comic vs book. I can say with confidence that, without seeing BD, I prefer SoD, but I have been told often enough that mine is the minority taste.
But as to the point itself, I am reminded of another of my favorite comics, Pawn. The artist gave us every one of his efforts on one picture. The last of his 8? 10? efforts was the best, but it was barely better [or different] from his 2nd effort. [Since the result of such perfectionism is that the comic posts on the slow side of a page a month, I am willing to settle for 2nd best.] There is certainly a gain from being able to revise, but it is easy to overstate. Most of the errors discovered and corrected are rather trivial.
See what you did?
You turned a thread about beating up Alan Moore into a thread about Miko.
If you can look me in the eye and tell me that is not a successful character, your standards are too damn high. What is your successful character? Jesus?*
*Note: That is a literary allusion and not a religious one so don't take it as such people. Please.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by The Extinguisher
So the moral of this story is that you should never listen to me ever.
Are we talking about Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, The Watchmen) or are we talking about new-school Alan Moore, who writes squicky porn in the form of graphic novels (Lost Girls)? 'Cause while I don't think Start of Darkness should have beat old-school Alan Moore, I wouldn't have a problem with it laying a lickin' on the new school version.
OK, I'm joking here, but in all seriousness, what if the category had been for "Comic That You Just Recently Read And Really Enjoyed?" I wouldn't have had a problem with SoD winning then. Moore was nominated for The Black Dossier, not his entire career. Yeah, he did FANTASTIC work in comics, but that doesn't mean we throw trophies at the guy every time he puts pen to paper. I haven't read the Black Dossier, but I did read SoD, and I thought it was great stuff.
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