Comments on: Volume 06 Page 39

By: ~j~

~j~ — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 02:52:49 +0000

I do still think, upon some reflection, that “Gormenghast: The Musical (Based On The Comic)” would be awesome.

Unwatchable/unreadable, but awesome nonetheless.

By: Carcosa

Carcosa — Tue, 31 May 2011 13:41:31 +0000

And as a player in many of your games, let me take this moment to apologize for reducing your carefully constructed villains and settings to terms like “Crazy Cat-Man” and “That One City, You Know, With The Slavers, And That Lake.”

I’m bad with names.

By: ~j~

~j~ — Mon, 30 May 2011 18:02:57 +0000

Also, there’s a good reason why “Fictional Travelogue” is an even smaller section than “Travelogue” and the best selling travelogues are the ones which are for all intents & purposes nonfiction picaresque novels, where the narrators themselves are interesting enough characters that the reader cares about their adventures and even though there is no real plot besides their interactions with the random, yet interesting, other characters they meet.

The sort of travelogue popular in the 1800s featuring a disembodied impersonal narrator infodumping about places connected only by geographical coincidence and their inhabitants only in general terms is a chore to read even in small doses.

By: ~j~

~j~ — Mon, 30 May 2011 17:52:32 +0000

A counterpart to this theorem is the comic that has nothing BUT characters interacting without any context given to indicate who they are, where they are, or what is at stake–far beyond any acceptable level of mysteriousness.

I’ve given up on stacks of otherwise attractive comics because after 10, 20, or even more pages I still had NO idea who any of these people were, what the ground rules of their setting were, and thus what the risks or gains they were contesting for were either. “Is any of this ever going to make sense?” should probably not be the number one question in the readers’ minds for too long.

(One even had a footnote several pages into the prologue, explaining that the creator KNEW all this cryptic talk between unknowns in an undescribed place was incomprehensible and thus boring to the reader, but it would eventually be explained so just bear with it!)