#sirksome

[sirksome]

Wrestling isn't a smart career choice in Invincible Fight Girl

Howdy folks it's your old pal Sirksome here. If you're for some reason following this blog you probably did so from that one post where I pointed out Samurai Jack once teased its audience with an enemies to lovers plot, only for them to actually followe through on that like ten years later.

Anyway, we're not talking about that. We're talking about Invincible Fight Girl!

First of all just watch the show if you haven't. This quietly feels like the kind of show that could easily disappear before it finishes it's story despite being excellent. *cough* THUNDERCATS 2011! *cough*

The animation is great, the character designs are great, it's funny, heartfelt, and references basically every anime or video game that ever existed.

That being said, despite the tag line that "In this world wrestling is everything." I don't think it is. I don't think it's actually even smart to practical to be a wrestler much like in our real world where you can't suppress entire crowds with your conqueror's haki or punch a guy into space.

I'm not actually articulate enough to explain these things. So I'm just gonna ask a bunch of questions I've had while watching.

Such as why Quesa Poblana supposedly the greatest wrestler in the world, assumedly a multiple time champion, in her retirement, has to sell jarred peppers to make a living?

The living in question, mind you, is living in a shitty barn outside town. And while we're on that why is her grandnephew, who should be a legacy that is set for life in the wrestling world, actually a con man obsessed with making money? Almost as if he witnessed firsthand that just being a good wrestler isn't enough to be financially secure.

But wait there's more!

Why is the Pantheon, supposed wrestling superstars' gym an abandoned and dilapidated shithole?

Why do these weirdly hot wrestling washouts have to foster a community and safe space for each other?

Why is Mikey's dad, who was likely a pro wrestler in his day, and walks with a cane (So does Quesa Poblana, almost as if a career in wrestling destroyed their bodies without providing proper post career medical support to help repair them.) so obsessed with training all his sons to be successful pros? Besides the reason he directly stated....or actually just because of that reason he directly stated. Why does he also have to run a butcher shop to support his family and his sons training?

Why does Aunt P even look this old to begin with?

She was still prime and active like 5-10 years ago depending on how old Andy is. I assume at max Andy is maybe 18 and she saw Poblana wrestling as a kid. Aunt P's physical fall off needs to be studied.

Mind you in this world where "Wrestling is everything." The GWC and their associated corporate partner Buffcorp can afford to fund and install a satellite network that not only globally broadcasts all their matches to a remote island of accountants but can also launch wrestling rings from space!

Suddenly it makes a little more sense why the Perm gang were such assholes

These lower mid card jobbers are probably living paycheck to paycheck and lording their physical and social superiority over a town of meek accountants is probably all they got.

Needless to say, as a filthy wrestling mark who occasionally tunes in week to week to watch attractive people pretend fight this reminds me of real world wrestling issues that still linger.

So, if I were to hazard a guess as to where this story is going if it gets more seasons to tell it. It's not just a story of Andy rising to the top of the wrestling world, but likely, potentially, hopefully, reforming the system that leaves even the best of these wrestlers broken and forced to wrestle into their twilight years or grift to support themselves. It might make some thematic sense that a girl from a line of accountants is responsible for restructuring the financial situations of these wrestlers despite rejecting her accountant background.

This all seems really obvious to me. Maybe it was for you too? Maybe this post wasn't worth making, cause it makes me look obnoxious for pointing it out? Maybe I'm actually wrong about all of this? Maybe I'll never do this again?

[thewebcomicsreview]

So I guess Mike's actually dead in Dumbing of Age? I suppose maybe there's still room for debate on that but it seems pretty big for the comic and I'd like to know your take on it.

I like how it’s casually mentioned in passing like this. It’s a good way to naturally fit in this exposition, and I think this reveal works a lot better than having everyone in Mike’s hospital room and the heart monitor goes beep beep beep beeeeeep, which is the kind of thing Roomies-era Dave Willis might’ve done. Compare to the reveal of Ruth’s death in Roomies

Which is way more drawn out and melodramatic while also kind of flippant about Ruth’s death in that in transitions immediately to how two male characters are sad about it. Fully seven percent of strips (6 out of 86) Tagged “Ruth Lesse”  in Roomies are flashbacks to her dying by someone who feels sad.

Indeed, Mike’s death in DoA is a pretty clear 2nd draft of Ruth’s death in Roomies!, as both involve a minor character mostly known for being an aggressive jerk heroically sacrifices themselves shortly after a vehicle at high speeds. 

It’s literally the same car!

So it’s kind of instructive to compare these two executions on the same concept by the same author, some 20ish years apart. It’s a good illustration of the “writing in the middle lane” concept I stole from Kazerad. So what are some key differences between the “No Regrets” storyline in Roomies and “To Remind You Of My Love”/”When it Crumbles”/”Is a Song Forever”. It’s too early to really to an “analysis”, since we need to see more of the fallout, but let’s just keep this comparison in the back of our mind and literally just make a list of all the differences for now, and once we have more DoA context to work with, we can do an analysis to indicate what Dave Willis has learned as a writer over his career and how he applies this knowledge to effectively re-telling a story, but for now, a simple list: 

1. “Ruth’s death is two storylines (”Beer Necessities” and “No Regrets”). Mike’s death is spread out over three, but they are also much longer storylines. The two storylines that comprise Ruth’s death are a mere 23 strips, while Mike’s covers ten times that much ground.

2. Mike is killed by the main villain of the book. Ruth is killed by “a truck”. Not even someone driving the truck, IIRC we never find out who was driving the truck that killed Ruth (maybe it comes up later and I forgot, but certainly not in the storyline).

3. Blaine was, in addition to being the main villain of the book, a recurring major villain who was teaming up with another major villain in a big season finale episode. The problem Ruth had to solve was Danny driving drunk after having beer for the very first time in that very same story.

(Actually, Danny driving drunk wasn’t even the problem, the truck was the one who randomly sped out of control the strip before Ruth dies!)

The three changes can be groups into Mike’s death was in the service of a big important storyline, whereas Ruth’s death in a comparatively random one.

4. 

Although both strips drag out the “Did they die?!” mystery a bit, Roomies provides an answer almost immediately. Mike’s fate is left up in the air for far longer, as Amber has to deal with Brain Ghost Mike helping her process Real Mike’s death, which may or may not be inspired by a famous episode of Scrubs.

5.

DoA spends much longer letting everyone begin to process Mike’s fate before skipping ahead four months so we can get to people finishing to process Mike’s death. In Roomies, Joyce literally gets abducted by aliens on her way out of the hospital. 

6.  Mike is a relatively minor character in Dumbing of Age, but Ruth is barely above an NPC in Roomies. She’s only in 86 strips, and most of them are flashbacks of “Isn’t it sad Ruth died” or strips added later and retroactively added into the archive.

It’s getting late (2:30am!) and this post is getting long, so I’ll come back and add some more stuff later, but we can summarize all these changes as “Bigger”. Mike’s a bigger character than Ruth in Roomies, the storyline leading up to his death is bigger, his actual death is longer, with dying words and stuff, the reactions to his death are bigger, much more time to breath, etc. This makes his death a lot more impactful than the Roomies melodrama. It also took much longer, but it was intertwined with other stories in a way Ruth’s death wasn’t, and that’s an essay for another day. To be continued! 

[sirksome]

I’m in the rare mood to post stuff I’ve actually drawn myself on here. 

[thewebcomicsreview]

Can you maybe contextualize the Homestuck epilogue for someone who has never read Homestuck but is curious what all the hullabaloo is about?

It’s 200,000 words following 8,000 pages of comic, so I’m not sure if I can really explain it “simply”, but I’ll do my best. *ahem*

Spoilers, obviously. 

tl;dr;, by the way, I actually really liked it. But I can see why a lot of people didn’t. 

So, I can, have, and will rant about the myriad of reasons everyone hated the ending, but for the sake of context let’s only focus on the main ones:

1. The climax of the story was meant to be “John masters his powers, goes back in time, and undoes a lot of the terrible things that happen”. This didn’t at all feel like a climax, so everyone expected a “real” climax and was confused when we didn’t get one. Worse, because the solution to, say, Rose’s alcoholism was that John changed things so that she never started drinking, it felt less like characters overcoming their struggles and more like the characters we loved being replaced with alternate, better versions, and we never saw how things went for the “real” characters (John’s main change, preventing Vriska’s death in Act 5, invalidates something like 15% of the entire comic!). 

2. Because the climax fell so flat and the big bad wasn’t defeated (and because [S] Collide ended with the music turning all sinister), everyone went in to Act 7 expecting one last huge twist. But while we were given enough information to figure out the basic gist of how Lord English was defeated, we don’t actually see it.The above screenshot, of Caliborn powering up into his Final Form, comes in the last fifty seconds of Homestuck.  

So, that’s kind of the context of the ending. Everyone went in expecting like a full act, was wildly confused that Act 7 was a victory lap, and then we all kind of figured out eventually what Hussie was going for and we were like “Oh. Okay” in a monotone. So, everyone hoped for the epilogue to “fix” the plot, but the plot wasn’t so much broken as it was badly told.

Phew. Okay, now lets talk about the epilogue. 

So, John is given the choice of whether to actually go back into the comic and kill the bad guy or not, represented as a choice of eating meat or candy for lunch. The canon, alpha timeline choice is to kill Lord English (”meat”), and the choice to stay behind and leave a time loop/plot thread unclosed (”Candy”) creates a doomed timeline. Doomed timelines in Homestuck exist as physical bubbles you can fly to, so the two “timelines” are really physical places in Paradox Space. There are three such location in the epilogue 

1. The “meat” timeline, which is the actual “canon” alpha timeline with no unbroken time loops, where most of the Meat Epilogue takes place. It takes place in the normal universe 

2. The furthest ring, a void above and around all timeline bubbles where John fights Lord English. This is normally where all the doomed timelines are, but they are getting sucked into a black hole that’s sweeping out all the “irrelevant” stuff

Nepetaquest 2019 was never meant to be

3. The “candy” timeline, which is doomed, irrelevant, and thus sucked into the black hole. The whole thing looks like this

The reason I’m explaining all this is because the two epilogues are actually one epilogue, and one affects the other such that you need to read them both. 

In the Candy timeline, Dirk immediately realizes that he’s no longer canon/alpha, and immediately kills himself. Rose and Kanaya are happily married and adopt a troll. Roxy goes all stepford wife and decides all she really wants is to crank out babies with John. John is all “you seem to be wildly out of character for reasons that won’t be explained but okay”. Jade, Dave, and Karkat have a miserable polyamorous relationship where the boys don’t admit they want to each other’s dicks but are willing to settle on Jade’s furry knotted dog penis, which she apparently grew after becoming a dog girl in [S] Cascade

Pictured: The exact moment in Homestuck that Jade Harley grew canine genitalia. I had a print of this artwork and I’ll never look at it quite the same again

There’s relationship drama, but the most important part is Jane, who is now TrumpHitler for basically no reason,. She marries Jake but Gamzee cucks him and, well

There’s a scene of Jake talking to Jade and thinking about maybe murdering a baby while his wife has rape-play sex with a clown in the next room. We don’t have time to unpack all that, because Jane is also TrumpHitler now, and sets out to commit a literal holocaust on all the Trolls for….um…..well for no reason. She’s just evil now. Jade’s corpse crashes from the sky, which is a shock to everyone, most of all Jade. Then Aradia and Sollux show up and Jane’s corpse comes to life as a god and everyone kind of just….nods…..and ignores it. The JadeCorpse is possessed by a version of Calliope who’s basically God, whom Aradia serves. Calliope explains that nothing in this timeline matters and it would normally just dissolve but she’s keeping it around because letting everyone dissolve into nothing when you can stop it seems like kind of a bitch thing to do and also she needs somewhere for Lord English’s body to land. Everything in Candyland gets as comically terrible as possible, full-on civil war. John has an existential crises about being irrelevent but gets over it, and Calliope finally finds Lord English and eats him, gaining the power to escape the black hole. Somewhere all this Dave meets up with Barack Obama (??!!?!?!) who is a god (!!!!!!!!!!!) that fucked Dave’s bro (!efefiebnfuewf) and merges all Daves together into one Ultimate Dave that he puts in a robot. Davebot, Aradia, and Calliope all leave the black hole and close the door behind them such that nothing inside (which includes the “canon” Vriska and every single alternate Timeline that existed or will ever exist) can ever get out to interfere with the canon timeline ever again. 

Also 16-year-old Vriska fucks 40-year-old Gamzee and is so embarrassed about it that she kills him. 

Feel free to take a break here

==>

In the Meat timeline, Dirk has ascended and god from God-Like-Thor to God-Like-God, and can now manipulate the story in a fourth-wall breaking way that’s effectively nigh-omniscience and mind control. He’s also evil now, but that makes more sense then Jane being Hitler. 

John recruits the pre-retcon versions of Dave, Rose, and Jade, who with John are the closest thing to the “original” versions of the main four that Homestuck is gonna give us at this point. They fight Lord English and successfully boot him into the black hole, but all die in the process. John is mortally wounded but survives long enough to bang Terezi in the back of his dad’s car and get them both home (said car ends up in Candyland, where Candy John finds it and recognizes Terezi’s cum because thanks Hussie). Jade lives long enough that she could get to Earth C herself, but this version of Jade doesn’t even know about Earth C and decides to die via black hole. Dirk tries to stop this, but Calliope, who is more powerful than Dirk, pulls her in

It is indeed to late, and OG! Jade gets sucked into the black hole, crashes into Candyland, and leaves behind a fresh corpse for Calliope to control and all the people in Candyland to be weirdly blase over because deep down they know their world doesn’t matter. Having control over this Jade lets her possess the alpha Jade in Meatworld, which in turn lets her influence things there. She and Dirk fight about who gets to be president of earth (which doesn’t seem important unless you read Candy and know what president Jane will do), and Dirk manages to tranquilize Jade and keep Calliope from affecting anything else. 

Jane becomes president of Earth and starts off and the path of becoming God Empress of Mankind. John dies, and we get more than a hint that Dirk killed him for being insufficiently grateful of their paradise planet

With things on Earth taken care of, Dirk mind controls Rose into become his (sex?) slave, and mind controls Kanaya into thinking that’s cool. He tells Terezi (who he can’t control, since Mind is her power) that if she comes with they can maybe revive John, and they all home into a spaceship and fuck off to a new planet. Dirk is the new Lord English, Jane is the new Condesce, and Rose -now a dreambot - is the new Handmaid. And Terezi is….also there. They find a new M-Class planet and set up to evolve some life there for a Sburb game. On earth, now of of range of Dirk’s mind control, everyone realizes that him kidnapping Rose was actually kind of fucked up, and they hop a spaceship to chase after them, with Jade-possessed Calliope giving them advice.  

And that’s the epilogue! Dirk has kidnapped Rose and become unto god, and is setting up a nefarious plan we don’t know the details of, and a the heroes are racing to stop him. Good night everybody!

I’m assuming there’s going to be an Epilogue Epilogue, because this was just a straight-up cliffhanger, and I’ll guess I’ll see when I think when that happens or when it becomes clear that won’t happen.

Hopefully that was easy enough to follow, I did my best. 

[thewebcomicsreview]

I'd be interested in continuing to hear your opinions on this latest DoA season finale storyline if your willing to give them? Personally I think some questionable logic decisions are being made for the sake of drama that's almost ruining it for me, but if you have any insights on where this is going I'd appreciate it.

I think it was very smart of Willis to frame this as a silly super-hero story first and foremost, as opposed to the last Becky’s Dad storyline which started out super-serious and then got progressively more wacky. 

I got this ask before this strip happened

And at this point logic is completely out the window, but honestly I think the story is actually better for it. If your story is going to be silly cape nonsense, it’s generally best to establish that right away rather than kind of drift into it from serious high-stakes drama.

Of course, the sillier this storyline gets, the greater the risk of tonal disaster the other way, where normal-for-DoA dramatic happenings jar with this story in a way Willis has a self-admitted habit of doing, but Dave Willis is aware of his past tendency to do that, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s also possible that - if done correctly - the inherent silliness of this storyline will actually make it easier to do things he wouldn’t normally do (i.e., kill Becky and/or Amber’s dad) by blunting the dramatic impact of it and making it easier to move on from Ross tackling Blaine and them both falling into a firey pit. 

So we’ll have to kind of see how the story goes before we can judge it. Dina getting herself kidnapped because everyone else was doing it is absurd even for DoA, and Willis is strongly hinting that some serious shit is going down, and those things usually don’t work together, but it’s not impossible and I could see Blaine or Ross dying a Disney Death here and the tonal dissonance making it work instead of ruining it.

tl;dr: I think I have an idea of where this is going and I could see how it might work, so I don’t want to criticize yet

[thewebcomicsreview]

I have a question as kind of a follow up to your last one, but mine more has to do with language. I'm worried that my use of certain words might be a turn off for people. Specifically because I'm black and you can probably guess the word I'm talking about. I literally hear it everyday and it means something completely different to me, I want my comic to appeal to my race and that word and other themes are a part of it. but I wonder if I should just avoid any potential blowback all together?

I’m a white dude, so I’m not sure if I’m qualified to give you your N-Word license here. I feel like it might be wise to casually throw in the fact that you’re black on your website somewhere,and to try to use the word in an authentic way (something I suspect you know way more than I do) and not worry too much about Tumblr discourse. A lot of The Discourse is white liberals anyway so you can be all “You really wanna police a black person on the use of the N-word?”, which ought to shut a lot of it down. Don’t let woke teenagers on Tumblr shut down marginalized voices trying to tell authentic stories.

[sirksome]

Ugh! I couldn’t figure out a way to color this page and make it even look passable. Still looks better than the original though! That’s not saying much.......Uh. You can read my comic on my deviantart: https://www.deviantart.com/mrsirk

According to them it’s been over a month since I uploaded a page. I gots to step it up! 

[sirksome]

I don’t know why people follow me on this account but once upon a time I imagined it would be for my drawings. Today I take another step toward that dream by posting cringe quality art of an original character! 

[sirksome]

I was working on some quick action  poses and decided to turn them into something so heres Helen Alvarez and Jill Leverett from potentially discontinued webcomic Legend of the Hare. If you don’t know what Legend of the Hare is It’s a pretty decent webcomic with amazing art by that guy who reviews webcomics. I’d give it a solid B. 

Anyway I really like Helen in the comic even though she’s done nothing but get her ass kicked. In my mind she’s Jill’s greatest rival. The Shadow to her Sonic the Hedgehog if you will. I don’t know where I saw Jill in a sleeveless version of her outfit but I saw it somewhere. I imagine maybe she wears it down the line when her magical girl skills level up and she gets some decent arm definition. See ya’s again whenever I feel like drawing something badly!

[sirksome]

Hey i drew something. This is a refinement of a character I uploaded eons ago. Maybe I’ll upload more sketches. Let’s be honest though probably not. I have a crippling fear of showcasing my own art. 

[sirksome]

A drawing I did, because I CAN DRAW GOODS I SWEAR!!!! I might make this my new icon because the other one has soured on me for reasons....Her names Izzellah! 

[thewebcomicsreview]

Was there no Saff and Sage this week?

There was not. We’re switching to a new script format that will allow Sabu to more easily thumbnail a bunch of pages at once, but there’s a one-week hiccup. Pages should return next Tuesday. That Comicide launches the week this happened is not a coincidence, actually. 

Once LotH resumes, the idea will be that there’ll be constant content, even if any one comic needs to tweak week.

[thewebcomicsreview]

HOLY SHIT THE INTERNET ARCHIVE HAS THE OLD LEGEND OF THE HARE SITE

Not only is this all the pages and comments, it’s all the shitty terrible lore posts oh my god my author commentaries are going to be novels now there’s so much shit to unpack here

[thewebcomicsreview]

sirksome said: Hey you’re legit good enough to do a gag comic about to guys on couch talking about video games and shallow social commentary! 

You said that as a joke, but I’m starting to think about how there are some really good comics out there that started out...like....I don’t wanna name names but some comics that are really good started out with art not that much better than what I can do. I’m not looking to take over from Carlos anytime soon but the idea that I could do something entirely on my own on the side is starting to enter my head.

I have no idea what that thing would be, though. There’s a vague Star Trek-y idea I’ve had forever but never developed, and the idea of doing a “One panel, then a bunch of text, and then a panel” comic like Prequel (or Homestuck, but really Prequel) feels like something I could potentially do, and that plays to how I am (I think this is fair to say) a better writer than I am an artist. 

Maybe I should start thinking about it now and try to do it over the weekend or during my furlough in two weeks...Nanowrimo for comics and a week. NaCoWriWeek

[thewebcomicsreview]

sirksome replied to your ask post

I honestly don't know if not reading Homestuck was missing out or dodging a bullet.

True fact 1: The reason I signed up for Tumblr, the first step in a long chain that ends with me making webcomics today, was to follow Homestuck fanart blogs

True fact 2: The thing that pushed me from comics fan to comics obsessive was the Aggy: Extrapolate update of Prequel, a comic that originated on the Homestuck forums and has obvious inspiration from it.

This update came out mere minutes after Unemployed Daniel got back to back rejection calls from job interviews, and snapped me out of my depressive funk that I’d been in for a few weeks and got me to apply for jobs all day instead of wallowing in pity. One of those jobs hired me. I still work there.

It’s not just that Homestuck is a comic that I liked. It’s not even that it’s a comic that I loved. There’s no other piece of media that has affected my life in such a tangible way, even indirectly. If it didn’t exist, I wouldn’t have the same career I do now, I wouldn’t be making comics, and I wouldn’t have moved out of my lonely Cambridge apartment so I could afford to keep making comics. It sounds complete insane to say that Homestuck made me a better, more complete person, but it’s kind of true.

But that Homestuck doesn’t exist anymore. It hasn’t existed since 2012. Even if there’s stuff in Zombie Homestuck I like sometimes, like how modern Simpsons has a good gag now and then. It’s just....it’s not the same. There’ll never be anything like it again

Unless one of you makes it.

[sirksome]

I’m working on stuff now I guess? So here’s a little preview. 

Preview of what exactly? Art so bad it makes both the viewer and the artist want to cry?! And what are those dumb blank panels at the bottom? Sirksome were you too lazy to crop those out? 

Uhhhhh?......This went south quick. Best not to post anything else about this until it’s actually done. *if* it ever gets done cause this took me hours.