The Answer Post (May/Jun/Jul 2020)

This is the third Answer post for my Patreon patrons, covering questions asked in the months of May and June (and July, it turns out). I don’t have much to say for this little introductory blurb this time, so how about I just get right to the answers?

Oh, except I should again mention that previous answer posts can be found here and here.

1.) Kevin Bumgarner: Was the dream V had in #623 an actual event that happened, or was V just having a bad dream based on their decision to run from battle?

Yes, it’s intended to be a memory. In the D&D rules that OOTS is loosely based on, elves don’t actually sleep—ever—and therefore do not dream. They simply enter a trance and meditate to review old memories, deciding what to keep and what to allow to fade. That’s what V is doing in that part, except they’re getting stuck on one particular memory. I used that as a riff on the classic technique of opening a scene with a dream sequence, to go back and show something that we didn’t get to see the first time.

2.) Michael Curley: Has Elan told his mother about Nale's death? Or is he waiting to see her in person?

I don’t think he would have had the opportunity to do so yet. He can’t cast sending the way Durkon and Vaarsuvius can. I suppose he could have asked one of them to send it for him, but his mother doesn’t know either one. So that would result in a strange elf or dwarf contacting her telepathically out of nowhere to tell her that her son is dead, which seems like the sort of thing Elan would be emotionally sensitive enough to avoid doing.

3.) River Psmythe: For the MitD I’ve seen a lot of speculation out there on what it is, and my two questions tie into that. I’m hoping these can be answered without spoiling anything. I realize saying who would be, so I’m hoping only for yes/no here. First, has anyone out there that you’ve seen guessed right? Second, has anyone out there made a guess or come to the wrong conclusion but made you think ‘that’s better than what it really is, even for a second?’

Obviously I cannot answer the first question. If I say yes, then everyone will go scouring through the internet to get a fixed list of what he could or could not be, and if I say no, then they will throw out all the existing guesswork and start over. Either way, I’ll be spoiling something. And besides which, I don’t really read what people are speculating in the first place and I’m not about to start, so I have no actual way of knowing.

For the second question: No, because if he was something else then it wouldn’t fit everything that is going to happen and has already happened. It’s not a guessing game I added to the strip just for extracurricular fun and games, it’s part of the story. There’s no answer that’s better than what he is because everything written for the last 15 years has been written with that answer in mind.

4.) [bɜnd͡ʒəmɪn t͡ʃəɹkaskʰi]: what made you decide to add a new character to the main cast so late in the story?

I presume you’re referring to Minrah, in which case the answer is clearly, “I didn’t, really.” Minrah is traveling with the team and helping them out, but she is not a member of the main cast, which is and has always been numbered at six. She’s closer to Blackwing or Bandana—an important ally, but not a main protagonist. The difference is, I’m not going to be delving deeply into Minrah’s backstory and she’s not going to get a huge amount of solo spotlight time to work through whatever personal issues she needs to sort out in her life. To be honest, there’s not going to be enough room for that from here on out. She has an important role to play, certainly, both in terms of her working relationship with Durkon and some specific events that will be happening, but the story is not really going to focus on her development. 

So the answer to the qustion of why I decided to add her, regardless of her character status, is that bringing her in gave me a unique opportunity to look at my main characters from the outside and see how they’ve changed since the beginning of the comic. And to tell new jokes—it’s always good to have a fresh face with a new point of view so I’m not rehashing the same gags over and over.

5.) joel kramer: The artwork upgrade for the Julio Scoundrél story in SSaDT bears a striking similarity to that in Utterly Dwarfed. Did you use that short story as a test for the art upgrade in the main strip or did the main strip upgrade idea come first?

I suppose more the former, but I wasn’t actually thinking of it that way. I was casting about looking for a way to make the art more special for the Julio story and came up with that solution. Some of the techniques I used in that story I really liked, so when I was getting frustrated by the limits of my regular style toward the end of Blood Runs in the Family, I started thinking about porting the more helpful parts over to the main strip. But not all of it; the shadows in the Julio story would’ve been a nightmare to start using on every panel of the color comic, and I didn’t really like how the speech balloons came out. So yeah, I guess it was a test bed, but it wasn’t an intentional one at the time.

6.) Leo Barlach: How often do you go back to old comics when writing new ones? For example, to connect Hylda and Durkon's plot last book, how much did you need to check comics from the first book?

Less often than I should, because I keep making mistakes where I think my memory is better than it is. But certainly yes, for something like Hilgya’s reappearance, I thought it was important to go back and look at exactly what was said and done in that original scene. I don’t know how to really quantify that, other than to say I try to do it more often than I think I should and end up doing it less than I actually need to.

7.) K G: How much thought do you put into your characters’ names? I was wondering at what stage in the creative process you assign a name to a new character, and the extent that the name is influenced by that character’s prospective personality. In particular, I was thinking of Vaarsuvius’s similarity to Vesuvius, but I’d also be interested to know if there’s any significance in the more common names.

I am much more influenced by how names sound than by any meaning for them. The important thing is for names to sound different from one another so it’s hard for readers to confuse characters. After all, people butcher the name Xykon constantly (Zykon, Xyklon, Xkon) but everyone still knows who they’re talking about because no other character in the strip has a name even close to his. My big mistake in this category came early, when I named the starting dungeon the Dungeon of Dorukan even though I had Durkon in my main cast. 

For the name Vaarsuvius, no, I wasn’t specifically trying to reference Mt. Vesuvius. I was trying to come up with something that sounded elaborate and vaguelly formal, in order to differentiate V from the other one-word name character, Elan. I wanted V to have a unique first syllable and a name that didn’t look the same as anyone else’s in print. Any connection to anything in the real world most noted for exploding in a overwhelming display of fiery obliteration is a pleasant coincidence, though I suppose it’s possible that as V progressed, that aspect of their character may have been influenced by their name rather than vice versa. 

8.) Erin S.: Something that's been nagging me for a while; did you intend to make V "genderqueer" (quote marks because of the explanation from the first round of questions) from the start, or was it just a happy accident?

It was more or less a happy accident. I’ve told this story before, but it basically came about because early readers of the first few strips disagreed on V’s gender, and rather than correct anyone, I latched onto and ran with that. So if you define “the start” as the literal very beginning, then no, but if you definie it as “the first 5 or 6 strips” then yes. And no, it doesn’t matter what I thought V’s gender was before those readers said anything, because it turns out I was wrong.

Even though I played it for laughs at times during the early days, I always tried to make it so that V themselves was never the butt of the joke; it was always Belkar looking like a fool for caring so much, or Roy getting frustrated because he’s uncomfortable with ambiguity. I don’t know if I succeeded at that, but that was my intent. Generally, readers’ feedback on V has always been very positive, though I do think some of the jokes from those early days probably wouldn’t stand scrutiny today. At this point, though, it’s just become something that’s a fact about the character, who I think is far more defined by their actions during the story than their gender presentation.

9.) Abraham Kotev emet: Would you consider publishing new comics on a constant pace? Once a week, for example? I would love it if I could expect when the next comic strip will be released. Sometimes it's couple of days and sometimes it can arrive to two weeks.

This is a question that I have addressed many times in the past, but I realize that not everyone sees everything I’ve written, and also some readers are relatively new to the comic and may not have been around years ago when I used to talk about it more frequently, so I think it’s important that I give a definitive answer: What you’re suggesting is not something I can actually do.

I can’t flip a switch and speed up the pace of creating comics. I publish them as soon as each one is finished, give or take some time differences (I don’t generally update in the middle of the night). So if a strip takes two weeks to show up, that’s because it took two weeks to make. That might be because the art was particularly complex, especially for new scenes with splash panels or the like. It might also mean the script was unusually difficult, which can itself take several forms. The current strip as of this writing, #1208, is a good example of a situation where the entire conversation occurring needed to be continually finessed to make sure it was saying exactly what I wanted it to say. Sometimes I will complete an entire comic and then realize that something else needs to happen before those particular events to give them context, so I put that aside and start a new page—which often leads to that second page coming out faster, unless I see yet more problems in the interim and need to rework it. The fact that there is no opportunity for editing the story after each installment is released means that I must make sure all of the work of fitting it into my overarching tale needs to happen during the creation of that individual strip, rather than during a traditional “editing pass,” and there’s no way to put a fixed limit on how long that process takes. It varies wildly.

Now, you might think to yourself, “But such-and-such comic produces pages at a higher pace!” Well, I’m not the author of such-and-such comic, I’m the author of this one. I fully concede that other creators are far more efficient at producing finished artwork than I am, even artwork that is significantly more detailed than mine, and further I am willing to stipulate that I would probably be more successful and happier and just generally better off if I could match their creative output pace. I can’t. I wish I could. After literally every comic, I say to myself that I’m going to post the next one in two or three days, and it only rarely works out that way. There are a lot of reasons why, ranging from physical limitations related to my health to economic circumstances such as the need to simultaneously be working on paid products in order to pay my bills. Maybe, if I was perfectly healthy and independently wealthy, I would produce faster. But maybe not; it is not unheard of for me to spend a whole day staring at my script looking for a punchline. And maybe I could build up a buffer of completed strips if I didn’t post any for a few months, but I try to do that every time I take a hiatus and what usually happens is that I obsess over the art and words too much and take a month to finish each one. Sometimes, the only thing that forces me to stop fiddling with a comic and push it out the door is the pressure of knowing how many days it’s been since I updated.

So there’s no way for me to speed the process up other than being a different person with different issues, at which point this would probably be a different story. If you want this exact story, I’m sorry to say that you’re stuck with this particular messed-up brain attached to this specific beat-up thumb, and they’re both already working at their maximum sustainable pace.

10.) Gregory Pratt: Any thoughts on trying to get OOTS back into a magazine again?

No, I don’t think so. I’ve tried it twice, first with Dragon Magazine and then with Gygax Magazine, and I think I don’t really enjoy the format. I can’t tell much of a story with a comic that only comes out one page per month where not every reader will necessarily have bought the previous issue, and I certainly can’t write one as complex as the online comic without the ability for readers to reference an archive. It was fun when I did it, but I’m really a lot more interested in the story than thinking up one-off gags over and over, especially when I can’t hang them on the ongoing plot.

11.) Tomer Mlynarsky: Why did Nale hate Malack so much as opposed to the rest of Tarquin's gang?

This question is sort of a category error, in that it presumes that the variable between how much Nale plotted the murder of Malack versus how much he plotted the murder of everyone else was the strength of his feelings about Malack, rather than the difficulty of the murder itself. In other words, Nale likely hated them all equally but spent more effort planning Malack’s death because Malack was harder to kill. Given his well-documented love of intricate plans, it’s reasonable to assume that he viewed it as a puzzle that was enjoyable to solve in its own right.

12.) Brian Leybourne: Will there ever be another not-in-the-main-storyline book (such as 0, -1, 1/2 and D) or will OOTS as a whole be wrapping up at the end of this book?

Both things can be true. OOTS as a whole will be wrapping up at the end of this book, but that’s still a while off and there are a few more events that need to be recounted before that happens. I suppose I also can’t rule out some stories that don’t get released until after the main series ends, but there are no plans for a full-on spin-off or sequel or what have you.

13.) Andrea: We love the Order of the Stick coloring book from the Kickstarter campaign. Would you ever be willing to create more coloring pages for your youngest fans, even just as PDFs on Gumroad?

That’s a great idea. I feel like I should also point out in the meantime that all five existing sets of the A Monster for Every Season line of print-out game miniatures include a black-and-white line art version that can be used for coloring. Each set has 300-400 different monsters you can print out and color. And then you can cut them out and fold them up into little figures you can play with. I mean, your kids. Your kids can play with them. Wink.

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That’s it for another Answer thread. The new Question thread will be up in a week or two. Thanks to everyone who asked a question, even if I didn’t answer it this time, and thanks to everyone taking the time to read them. Stay safe, everyone.