The Answers Post (#11)

Welcome back to another Q&A, where the questions are submitted by my Patreon supporters and the answers are submitted by me. And then submitted by your eyeballs to you!

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1.) J-Rad: On the GitP Boards, your handle indicates that you're from Philadelphia, PA (Go Birds!). What's your third favorite place to get a cheesesteak? Side quest[ion], do you have preferred toppings or are you straight steak and cheese?

I am not actually native to Philadelphia. I grew up in New Jersey, and even then, on the north end of the state that was more influenced by New York, where I went to college and lived after graduating. My wife is from Philadelphia; I moved here so she could be close to her family since once I was doing the comic full-time rather than working in NYC, it didn’t matter where I lived.

I also unfortunately have very little opinion on cheesesteaks anymore, since I’ve been a vegan for about 12 years at this point. The only place I knew that served a reasonable vegan cheesesteak closed a few years ago (Blackbird Pizza on South Street). I would welcome recommendations! Peppers, onions, and mushrooms.

2.) Pieter Simoons: Can you share something about how high level Tarquin, or Serini, or Xykon are? Not necessarily exact numbers, but I'm curious if they're all pretty close to each other (and to The Order) or if some of them are way higher or way lower level than the rest.

I couldn’t share numbers even if I wanted to, since I’ve never bothered to decide them, but the order of comparison would be the Order lowest, then Tarquin, then Serini (and the rest of her team), then Xykon.

3.) Zhon Lord: Let's talk about Quarr. While he has very little direct power, his hand as a minion and agent has been deeply influential throughout the entire comic. What led to the idea of having him as a recurring minion serving various people and then finally the IFCC?

When I was planning the battle with the Linear Guild in the Empire of Blood—the one in and around the gladiatorial games—I was looking for ways to differentiate it from the two previous times I’d done a full LG vs. OOTS battle. One of the things I landed on was that I had two entire new members of the Order who’d never had an “evil opposite” before: Mr. Scruffy and Blackwing. Since imps are often familiars for evil spellcasters, I could make Qarr into Blackwing’s counterpart and have them fight each other. Then that led to me using him as a foil for Vaarsuvius in the temple, since he was the only one other than Blackwing who knew what V had done. He basically kept being useful to have as someone that could represent the IFCC’s hand in the mortal world, so he’s stuck around.

4.) Charley S: I was discussing webcomics in a Discord group recently and when OOTS came up, several of them were surprised to learn it was still coming out as they'd stopped reading it years ago.  This made me wonder what you'd consider to be a good OOTS jumping on point for someone who didn't want to go all the way back to the beginning?

This is hard for me to answer because my instinct is to say that it’s all interconnected, you can’t just start in the middle! But if I have to force myself to pick a spot, I’d say the beginning of what became Blood Runs in the Family, when the Order arrives on the Western Continent (#673). I feel like the writing is about the same level from that point on, and that’s the start of a new adventure after a long period of the Order being separated. Anything related to what V did will be a little opaque, but I think the characters explain everything else they’re trying to accomplish in the desert pretty clearly.

5.) Gordon Alexander Fallon: When is the next trade back coming out with bonus comics?  By my count, we are missing one collection.  I really enjoy the bonus strip in the books because they feel like watching a director's cut of a movie

Thank you, but your count is off, I’m sorry to say. The last book, Utterly Dwarfed, ended on strip #1189. Everything after that is part of the current (and final) book, which is looking to be enormous but there’s really no good place to put a pause between now and the end.

6.) Androclese: How is Sabine's name pronounced?  My buddy married a German woman with the same name, but how she pronounces her name is quite different than the typical American pronunciation. Is it "suh-BEAN" or "suh-BEE-neigh"?

The first one. The e is silent.

7.) dan: Last Q&A you remarked that it is now hard to write strips (a) with jokes and (b) without plot reveals. My question is, are those bad things at this point? In character it doesn’t seem likely to be much of a time for joking around, even for Xykon. As a reader, I stopped reading it for the jokes about 1,000 strips ago. As far as plot reveals, it seems like a good thing that the story is driving itself towards completion at this point (as opposed to the problem many fantasy storytellers have where they cannot bring the threads together into a coherent ending).

I think you sort of misunderstood what I meant. Regardless of whether it’s funny or dramatic, each individual strip needs to have a “punch” at the end, or else it just trails off and feels incomplete and unsatisfying. If I try to put a dramatic reveal at the end of every page, it will feel like a melodramatic soap opera where everyone is gasping in shock every 2 minutes. Or it will force me to make 4-page strips every single time, which will only further delay how long it takes to make them. Either way, it will undercut any actual impact that those reveals have. The jokes enable the structure of it as a serially published comic strip by giving me something to put in the last panel that definitively ends the page. When I’m writing a whole story at once, I feel more freedom to let things flow from one page to the next, because I know the next page will already be in the reader’s hand.

But also, this is a comedy and I’m not going to abandon one of the main aspects of the comic just because it’s hard sometimes. I mean, I’ve already dropped the D&D jokes and the original art. I’ve got to maintain something to keep its identity coherent.

8.) Josh Sandomirsky: I’m always impressed by your (what seems to a lay-person) ability to plan things years in advance. When the PC’s visited the oracle all those years ago, did you have every character’s prophecy planned out? Belkar’s 2nd one for example was 17 years ago! Did you have its result planned out way back then?

The real secret to long-term planning is to be hideously bad at getting things done. Anyone can plan years in advance if it takes you years to finish it!

As far as the Oracle specifically, the prophecies were all written in such a way as to refer to things I already had planned, with the exception of Belkar’s original question. I wrote that as a “free space” to use later when I wanted. I knew Roy was already slated to die in the upcoming war, so if nothing else came up, I would have made Belkar more involved in that (somehow). But I thought of an idea on how to undo Belkar’s curse before we reached that point, so I let it ride until then.

9.) 3mix2yoo: After so long with the Order, I imagine that you have a very good idea of how they will respond to events in the plot. Has there ever been a time where you've been surprised/thrown off course by what a character's response was?

I get this question (or versions of it) a lot, and I never know how to answer it because it doesn’t really match how my writing process works. But I’ll try to tackle it this time, since I feel like the fact that it gets asked so often means readers really want to know.

The truth is, the characters can’t surprise me with their actions in any meaningful way. I decide everything they do and say and think, and they don’t even really “do” anything until I write it, draw it, and commit to it by publishing. I have to first imagine each character’s possible reactions to each situation, but I don’t decide what their actual response is until I land on one that fits both my characterization of them and the needs of the story. I have, on occasion, brainstormed possible responses that would totally derail the plot in ways that would indeed be quite surprising—but crucially, I do not write those ones down! Because I don’t want to derail the plot, and I’m not beholden to transcribe the first idea I have for any scenario.

The far more common place in which I find myself is that I write something for a character, then get halfway through drawing it and decide no, that isn’t what they’d do or say. And then I have to scrap what I’ve done so far and start over on that page. Much of the process of writing, therefore, is rejecting things I think up that would be too surprising or out of character if actually done. I’m sure there are writers who work differently, who write without a plan and just let their characters shoot from the hip with the first idea that pops into their head, but I’m not one of them.

I guess that's the real non-joke answer to how I am able to plan things out years in advance, to loop back to the previous question.

10.) Adventuress: I’m curious which story beats have brought you the greatest sense of fulfillment - when a quiet or climactic panel made you feel like you had really said what you wanted to say.

Probably Durkon’s invocation of his mother’s decision at the climax of Utterly Dwarfed. I think that was the first time when I managed to make the entire story revolve around something I actually wanted to say about how I see the world, rather than just exploring how the different characters see it. I’m not a paladin, or even especially Lawful Good, so when O-Chul or Roy talk about how they choose to behave, I am not (necessarily) putting forth how I personally try to live. They are, for example, a lot more selfless than I am. But Durkon’s discussion about choosing whether or not you want to try to be better—about accepting that yes, you are the person you are on your worst day but you don’t need to keep being that person, you can change—that’s something I try to embody (with mixed results).

11.) Anonymous: You’ve made a lot of references to Star Wars in your comic over the years, and in a previous Q&A you mentioned it as your biggest influence. Any thoughts on the current state of the franchise?

First, I need to acknowledge the courage necessary to ask a middle-aged man an open-ended question about Star Wars. That can go wrong in a few different ways, so I salute your bravery, Anonymous Patron.

I think the most telling fact I can say is that I am not caught up on the majority of things that have been produced over the last few years, a state of affairs that would have been unthinkable to me during most of my young adult life. I was thoroughly obsessed with the original trilogy during the long years when there were no new movies (much less TV shows), and now that there are dozens of hours of material being released every year, I find that I don’t care very much. It’s not even anything specific about what’s being made, I just don’t enjoy the modern corporate franchise model of storytelling, where existing settings need to be exploited endlessly for stories that don’t mean a whole lot.

Much like OOTS, the world of Star Wars was created to tell one story, and that story wrapped up with the prequels—which I found extremely disappointing from a storytelling perspective, but at least they never felt superfluous. The only pieces of Star Wars that I’ve truly enjoyed since then are all tightly tied to the time period of the original movies (Andor, Rogue One), with every attempt to go forward or back being progressively less interesting to me until I stopped feeling like I needed to watch it all. In some ways, I wonder if I was spoiled by playing a lot of the old West End Games RPG back in the day, because I look at a lot of the stories being produced and feel they pale in comparison to campaigns run by a bunch of art school students 32 years ago. (My Mon Calamari engineer killed Dengar, you know. Shot him with our freighter’s cannons.)

This isn’t the only franchise I feel this way about, either. I generally think that when a story starts going back and trying to fill in every last moment of the timeline rather than advancing the story forward, it’s a sign that no one involved has anything left to say. Except when I do it, my prequel books are gleaming beacons of necessity and you should read all of them.

12.) Emanuele Vaccari: Will you write new spin offs after the conclusion?  Do you have something along the line in store?

I would be a hypocrite of the highest order if I announced a spin-off immediately after lamenting the continuous stream of new Star Wars content. So let’s say: No, no spin-off plans. I mean, I guess I can’t rule out an individual one-off story if one occurs to me after I’ve wrapped things up, but not a whole new series. I have enough other ideas that I’d like to explore that I don’t see myself going back to that well.

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Thanks for reading! And thanks for asking, too. Just general thanks all around. I’ll see you next time.