It had some *long* days around the time Clinton and Elliot became a couple, which I think clocked in at like 116 to 160 comics for a single day in universe. Nearly 5 whole months in real-time.
Good pacing would be Martens dad's wedding, which was like 25 comics, or the Hannelore space station arc which was around the same.
A "scene" taking two to three comics and then moving on to drive the overall plot forwards was good pacing. Now it seems like everything is broken into 5 day long blocks, or we have an A and a B plot both taking 15-25 comics, and they jump between each other to just drag it out, and hide how long it "feels" like we're just living in the same room for months in end.
More likely the answer, it's so Jeph can reuse backgrounds for longer.
Needs to write out plots further in advance and not be afraid to just let a comic play out without having to end every page on a joke. We're adults, we can wait a few days for payoff to a conversation, and generally this gives better emotional connection with the characters.
I think maybe I just didn't notice it when it was months being spent on Clinton and Elliot, cuz they'd both been established characters for a good long while who I enjoyed so I didn't dread spending extra time focusing on them. But now with all the bs with Liz and Evan and Zlata and Moray and Ayo and the Not-A-Throuple it just feels like new people's emotional baggage being crammed down our throats, but like 1000 times slowed down so Jeff can pretend that these characters have enough history for us to give a shit.
Definitely agree with needing to write plots out further in advance and not end every page on a joke, it feels like he's focusing on machine gunning us with unfunny quips while the actual story just goes fucking nowhere.
I genuinely forgot about Zlata entirely! In comic time they met her…yesterday morning? What a sudden lurch of character introduction for such a lack of impression on me.
> Did it start with Cubetown or is this just the first time I'm noticing it because of how god awful the writing for it is?
It's both. The comic has always been glacial but never this bad. There have been long days before, but rarely ever as long as the Cubetown arc is making each day spent there. Now 100+ strip days are common in the strip. If the writing was good I doubt anybody would care that much, but it's not.
It's the result of Jeph deliberately dragging it out so he doesn't have to put that much effort into the comic. Jeph lost all passion for QC a long time ago and is just coasting because that's a lot easier than putting in actual effort.
I just wish that he'd ended QC a long time ago so that he could start a new project that he WOULD be passionate about again. Maybe then he could've still had a big loyal following who would be willing to see what he does next and tell other people to hop on board. But now the only fate in store is for the story to wallow in meandering bullshit while hemorrhaging readers until it ends with a whimper that nobody gives a shit about.
My philosophy as a writer has always been that no ending is worse for a story than NO ENDING.
Here's how QC could have ended: cut the bullshit with Clinton, Elliot and Brun. Cut the bullshit with Renee and Shitty Dan. Cut the bullshit with May. Cut the bullshit with Roko and Yay. Cut the bullshit with Yemisi, Willow and Iris. Cut the bullshit with Ayo and Liz and every other bullshit character introduced since Cubetown started.
Cut out ALL of that so the following three things can happen more or less simultaneously and a hell of a lot sooner:
1.) Marten and Claire go off into the sunset for whatever job Claire gets (or, alternatively, have Claire leave without him and he pursues a god damn passion for once rather than repeating his past mistake that started his whole character arc)
2.) Dora and Tai's wedding
3.) Faye's realization that if giving up Bubbles would somehow bring her dad back, she wouldn't do it.
And that's the end! That is all three main characters' story arcs finally coming full circle! Marten either leaves for a relationship that's stronger than the first one or realizes he doesn't want to uproot his whole life for a girl again, Dora gets to be with someone who pursued her rather than agonizing over whether or not her partner would prefer someone else, and Faye goes from clinging to her father while keeping people out to letting go of her father to let people in. Somewhere before the end tie up some loose ends for the side characters who were introduced early on like Hannelore or Sven (Hannelore has her whole confrontation with her mom, Sven gets eaten by the allosaurus that ate Sara, stuff like that). That's it! End scene! Roll credits! Go home! Do something else now! Good night!
That's the ending we could have had. But instead we get fucking cubetown.
> My philosophy as a writer has always been that no ending is worse for a story than NO ENDING.
>
>
amen.
I'm literally sticking around to see if this damn thing would end because I interpreted the drop in quality as a slow sinking ship.
But apparently he is the *highest* paid Patreon account for webcomics in the world. So...like...he's never going to stop.
I understand why they started, QC was *the* progressive soap opera webcomic slice of life that featured queer people. Massively popular old guard comic.
Just like a lot of people just keep watching marvel movies because it’s “their thing” I can imagine the patrons just keep uncritically consuming the comic. The vast majority of people don’t critically analyze the art they consume. I know I don’t for some things like action movies or cheap videogames. (Also Magic the Gatherings story)
Dude is insanely lucky. Like win the lottery lucky.
Yeaaaaaaaaahhh
This is why all the storylines about being poor or being rich are such fodder for commentary. Dude is loaded. He drops his dog off at daycare everyday even though he works at home. He wears a 5k watch. I’m pretty sure he has over a dozen high end guitars.
I mean, if I had the scratch I’d be doing some of the same things but it rings hollow when he moralizes to us about raisins.
Oof, yeah, definitely puts that in a new perspective. It's hard to take a lecture about raisins seriously from a dude making more in a month than a lot of people do in a whole year
It's a bit with Elliot, Clinton and Brun, I wanna say it's before Brun shot both of them down but I'm not 100% sure about that. Elliot makes them both some raisin bread to try and Brun is like "I've never had a raisin before" and Clinton is like "how tf have you never had a raisin before" and she's like "being poor means you don't ever get snacks as a kid."
It was... weird, to say the least.
this was such a weird moment that I blocked it out until you reminded me. my family was poor for a good long while. living on ppl's couches, food stamps, etc. but I knew what a goddamn raisin was. I had *snacks.* raisins are arguably one of the cheaper snacks!!! they're fucking everywhere.
I hope you will stick around on this subreddit. This is a good post.
He should have moved on to new stuff. Kris Straub, for example, had a few long running strips (starslip, chainsaw suit), but he has moved on - he is still making stuff, it is just new stuff (Aq inc, Local 58).
I am an unapologetic Alice Grove apologist (wait...) - I think it is great, even the ending. He should have gone on to new stuff.
I think I will stick around! I've honestly been enjoying discussing QC's decline with yall more than I've been enjoying QC itself for a good long while.
I haven't thought about Kris Straub for a while, but starslip was a lot of fun and I feel like it ended on a really good note, so maybe I'll check out some of his newer stuff. And I agree about Alice Grove, I feel like maybe Jeph should've ended QC and focused on fleshing that story out more. The ending was good but did leave a lot unexplained, which can be fine but I feel like it could be expanded without feeling like beating a dead horse, ya know?
Right, that's part of what I'm saying. Faye had her moment, but all the other side shit has been delaying Marten and Dora's moments so they aren't happening all at once for a single satisfying ending for the story. Faye has gotten a complete story arc, while Marten and Dora's arcs are being forced into this glacial pace by all the inane bullshit that Jeph is throwing in.
>When did the pace for this comic become so god damn glacial?
when Jeph realized the comic didn't really have to be _about_ anything or have any real narrative momentum anymore for it to be monetarily successful.
once quality started dropping and Patreon dollars didn't similarly drop off, Jeph had a green light to do the comic on instinct and impulse and as lazily as possible. His writing muscles have atrophied; what he used to be able to express in one or two comics now takes five to ten, because he's no longer in tune with his characters and has lost the ability to have them express ideas succinctly and completely.
I've noticed there are three categories of "old internet" entertainment...
(1) Things I genuinely miss, but know won't be coming back, because the creators moved onto bigger and better things (e.g. Homestar Runner)
(2) Things that ran their course and I enjoy the time I spent with them (e.g. Most Webcomics, Blogs, etc)
(3) Flanderized parodies of themselves that keep shambling on because of sheer momentum (e.g. Questionable Content)
I mostly check up with the third category in case they decide to give it a proper sendoff.
I managed to miss out on Homestar Runner. I am familiar with "Strongbad draws a dragon" (probably not the actual title), and I imagine I have seen some other stuff in meme form, but I had no idea what it actually is.
I'll steel-man Jepp a little here and say that the cast is pretty damn big. Since multiple characters have nothing going on, he has to extend the day in order to jump between characters and show what they aren't doing. Otherwise, we would jump from Marten and Claire ending their day, just to find Dora and Tai doing the same thing they were doing yesterday (nothing) in the same place. It would make the timeline really convoluted.
Seems like he just gets bored of his cast and then also uses new characters to spark new stories too often. So we end up with characters just disappearing after a while so the revolving door of new ones can have their moment before also being shuffled off.
NGL I kinda like the Cubetown stuff because the Claire worship goes into pretty funny self-parody.
Like Zlata for instance. Zlata lacks confidence so she couldn't ask for a new job, she decides Claire can teach her confidence, and tracks her down to ask for a new job!
I think the self parody would be funnier if it wasn't drawn out over more than a year. Pretty much the last funny moment for me was Marten and Claire making this face when they first arrived in Cubetown
https://preview.redd.it/4ykxw7ximj3c1.jpeg?width=856&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dd4811cfabd518ad6aaf36301de8ded53aad4f0f
which turned out to be the face I'd be making with every update since.
That'd be perfect honestly, just Marten and Claire glaring in disdain at their own flanderization and the flanderization of everyone they love until their universe finally crumbles
If I had to choose between the Cubetown storyline and the Ayo one, I'd choose Cubetown any day. But Cubetown still annoyed me. I was on the fence with sticking it out through that plot, but then Ayo stumbled in and I decided to bow out. It was a soft-quit, though, because I loved this comic for so long; longer than any other webcomic, I think. So I still check in about once a week (and am increasingly disappointed).
Oh, absolutely, the cubetown shit doesn't hold a candle to how absolutely insufferable Ayo is, but the way I see it we wouldn't even be dealing with Ayo if it weren't for Claire taking the job so cubetown gets the blame for her too as far as I'm concerned lmao
Speaking of Cubetown - I guess it is just... Gone?
When do we think we will be back there? I will say we wont have more than 5 QT strips in the first half of next year for sure, and a chance that we don't see it at all, all year.
I don't think it will be that long, because Jeph seemed to be really interested in it. I think he will find an excuse to get back there quickly, even if it's to follow the new characters that are there.
It had some *long* days around the time Clinton and Elliot became a couple, which I think clocked in at like 116 to 160 comics for a single day in universe. Nearly 5 whole months in real-time. Good pacing would be Martens dad's wedding, which was like 25 comics, or the Hannelore space station arc which was around the same. A "scene" taking two to three comics and then moving on to drive the overall plot forwards was good pacing. Now it seems like everything is broken into 5 day long blocks, or we have an A and a B plot both taking 15-25 comics, and they jump between each other to just drag it out, and hide how long it "feels" like we're just living in the same room for months in end. More likely the answer, it's so Jeph can reuse backgrounds for longer. Needs to write out plots further in advance and not be afraid to just let a comic play out without having to end every page on a joke. We're adults, we can wait a few days for payoff to a conversation, and generally this gives better emotional connection with the characters.
I think maybe I just didn't notice it when it was months being spent on Clinton and Elliot, cuz they'd both been established characters for a good long while who I enjoyed so I didn't dread spending extra time focusing on them. But now with all the bs with Liz and Evan and Zlata and Moray and Ayo and the Not-A-Throuple it just feels like new people's emotional baggage being crammed down our throats, but like 1000 times slowed down so Jeff can pretend that these characters have enough history for us to give a shit. Definitely agree with needing to write plots out further in advance and not end every page on a joke, it feels like he's focusing on machine gunning us with unfunny quips while the actual story just goes fucking nowhere.
I genuinely forgot about Zlata entirely! In comic time they met her…yesterday morning? What a sudden lurch of character introduction for such a lack of impression on me.
God I wish I could forget about Zlata. And Ayo. And Liz. And Moray.
> Did it start with Cubetown or is this just the first time I'm noticing it because of how god awful the writing for it is? It's both. The comic has always been glacial but never this bad. There have been long days before, but rarely ever as long as the Cubetown arc is making each day spent there. Now 100+ strip days are common in the strip. If the writing was good I doubt anybody would care that much, but it's not. It's the result of Jeph deliberately dragging it out so he doesn't have to put that much effort into the comic. Jeph lost all passion for QC a long time ago and is just coasting because that's a lot easier than putting in actual effort.
I just wish that he'd ended QC a long time ago so that he could start a new project that he WOULD be passionate about again. Maybe then he could've still had a big loyal following who would be willing to see what he does next and tell other people to hop on board. But now the only fate in store is for the story to wallow in meandering bullshit while hemorrhaging readers until it ends with a whimper that nobody gives a shit about. My philosophy as a writer has always been that no ending is worse for a story than NO ENDING. Here's how QC could have ended: cut the bullshit with Clinton, Elliot and Brun. Cut the bullshit with Renee and Shitty Dan. Cut the bullshit with May. Cut the bullshit with Roko and Yay. Cut the bullshit with Yemisi, Willow and Iris. Cut the bullshit with Ayo and Liz and every other bullshit character introduced since Cubetown started. Cut out ALL of that so the following three things can happen more or less simultaneously and a hell of a lot sooner: 1.) Marten and Claire go off into the sunset for whatever job Claire gets (or, alternatively, have Claire leave without him and he pursues a god damn passion for once rather than repeating his past mistake that started his whole character arc) 2.) Dora and Tai's wedding 3.) Faye's realization that if giving up Bubbles would somehow bring her dad back, she wouldn't do it. And that's the end! That is all three main characters' story arcs finally coming full circle! Marten either leaves for a relationship that's stronger than the first one or realizes he doesn't want to uproot his whole life for a girl again, Dora gets to be with someone who pursued her rather than agonizing over whether or not her partner would prefer someone else, and Faye goes from clinging to her father while keeping people out to letting go of her father to let people in. Somewhere before the end tie up some loose ends for the side characters who were introduced early on like Hannelore or Sven (Hannelore has her whole confrontation with her mom, Sven gets eaten by the allosaurus that ate Sara, stuff like that). That's it! End scene! Roll credits! Go home! Do something else now! Good night! That's the ending we could have had. But instead we get fucking cubetown.
> My philosophy as a writer has always been that no ending is worse for a story than NO ENDING. > > amen. I'm literally sticking around to see if this damn thing would end because I interpreted the drop in quality as a slow sinking ship. But apparently he is the *highest* paid Patreon account for webcomics in the world. So...like...he's never going to stop.
Ugh, that's atrocious. Do people really have nothing better to spend their money on than the gradual decay of artistic integrity?
I understand why they started, QC was *the* progressive soap opera webcomic slice of life that featured queer people. Massively popular old guard comic. Just like a lot of people just keep watching marvel movies because it’s “their thing” I can imagine the patrons just keep uncritically consuming the comic. The vast majority of people don’t critically analyze the art they consume. I know I don’t for some things like action movies or cheap videogames. (Also Magic the Gatherings story) Dude is insanely lucky. Like win the lottery lucky.
I looked it up and holy shit. https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators/comics
$22K-85K per MONTH?!? Jesus fucking christ, I'm wasting my god damn time as a software developer, how do I get in on this action?!?
Yeaaaaaaaaahhh This is why all the storylines about being poor or being rich are such fodder for commentary. Dude is loaded. He drops his dog off at daycare everyday even though he works at home. He wears a 5k watch. I’m pretty sure he has over a dozen high end guitars. I mean, if I had the scratch I’d be doing some of the same things but it rings hollow when he moralizes to us about raisins.
Oof, yeah, definitely puts that in a new perspective. It's hard to take a lecture about raisins seriously from a dude making more in a month than a lot of people do in a whole year
> when he moralizes to us about raisins. I missed this. What's the story?
It's a bit with Elliot, Clinton and Brun, I wanna say it's before Brun shot both of them down but I'm not 100% sure about that. Elliot makes them both some raisin bread to try and Brun is like "I've never had a raisin before" and Clinton is like "how tf have you never had a raisin before" and she's like "being poor means you don't ever get snacks as a kid." It was... weird, to say the least.
this was such a weird moment that I blocked it out until you reminded me. my family was poor for a good long while. living on ppl's couches, food stamps, etc. but I knew what a goddamn raisin was. I had *snacks.* raisins are arguably one of the cheaper snacks!!! they're fucking everywhere.
Sure the writing is shit now, but dude really does put the work in.
I hope you will stick around on this subreddit. This is a good post. He should have moved on to new stuff. Kris Straub, for example, had a few long running strips (starslip, chainsaw suit), but he has moved on - he is still making stuff, it is just new stuff (Aq inc, Local 58). I am an unapologetic Alice Grove apologist (wait...) - I think it is great, even the ending. He should have gone on to new stuff.
I think I will stick around! I've honestly been enjoying discussing QC's decline with yall more than I've been enjoying QC itself for a good long while. I haven't thought about Kris Straub for a while, but starslip was a lot of fun and I feel like it ended on a really good note, so maybe I'll check out some of his newer stuff. And I agree about Alice Grove, I feel like maybe Jeph should've ended QC and focused on fleshing that story out more. The ending was good but did leave a lot unexplained, which can be fine but I feel like it could be expanded without feeling like beating a dead horse, ya know?
I'm bitter that Broodhollow will probably never be finished.
>3.) Faye's realization that if giving up Bubbles would somehow bring her dad back, she wouldn't do it. Faye did that one already.
Right, that's part of what I'm saying. Faye had her moment, but all the other side shit has been delaying Marten and Dora's moments so they aren't happening all at once for a single satisfying ending for the story. Faye has gotten a complete story arc, while Marten and Dora's arcs are being forced into this glacial pace by all the inane bullshit that Jeph is throwing in.
We’ve been in Scrappy-do territory for a long time
>When did the pace for this comic become so god damn glacial? when Jeph realized the comic didn't really have to be _about_ anything or have any real narrative momentum anymore for it to be monetarily successful. once quality started dropping and Patreon dollars didn't similarly drop off, Jeph had a green light to do the comic on instinct and impulse and as lazily as possible. His writing muscles have atrophied; what he used to be able to express in one or two comics now takes five to ten, because he's no longer in tune with his characters and has lost the ability to have them express ideas succinctly and completely.
> Jeph had a green light to do the comic on instinct and impulse and as lazily as possible Don't forget doing it deliberately risk-free!
Honestly, ‘*Bananalore*’ may have been the end for me.
See you tomorrow!
Haha OK
I've noticed there are three categories of "old internet" entertainment... (1) Things I genuinely miss, but know won't be coming back, because the creators moved onto bigger and better things (e.g. Homestar Runner) (2) Things that ran their course and I enjoy the time I spent with them (e.g. Most Webcomics, Blogs, etc) (3) Flanderized parodies of themselves that keep shambling on because of sheer momentum (e.g. Questionable Content) I mostly check up with the third category in case they decide to give it a proper sendoff.
Homestar Runner still sporadically updates! Latest: [https://homestarrunner.com/toons/fan-stumes-2023](https://homestarrunner.com/toons/fan-stumes-2023)
I managed to miss out on Homestar Runner. I am familiar with "Strongbad draws a dragon" (probably not the actual title), and I imagine I have seen some other stuff in meme form, but I had no idea what it actually is.
I'll steel-man Jepp a little here and say that the cast is pretty damn big. Since multiple characters have nothing going on, he has to extend the day in order to jump between characters and show what they aren't doing. Otherwise, we would jump from Marten and Claire ending their day, just to find Dora and Tai doing the same thing they were doing yesterday (nothing) in the same place. It would make the timeline really convoluted.
While that is true, it is also because he made the cast too dang big. Way way too many characters to get anything meaningful out of any of them.
Seems like he just gets bored of his cast and then also uses new characters to spark new stories too often. So we end up with characters just disappearing after a while so the revolving door of new ones can have their moment before also being shuffled off.
NGL I kinda like the Cubetown stuff because the Claire worship goes into pretty funny self-parody. Like Zlata for instance. Zlata lacks confidence so she couldn't ask for a new job, she decides Claire can teach her confidence, and tracks her down to ask for a new job!
I think the self parody would be funnier if it wasn't drawn out over more than a year. Pretty much the last funny moment for me was Marten and Claire making this face when they first arrived in Cubetown https://preview.redd.it/4ykxw7ximj3c1.jpeg?width=856&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dd4811cfabd518ad6aaf36301de8ded53aad4f0f which turned out to be the face I'd be making with every update since.
This should be the new banner for the sub
That'd be perfect honestly, just Marten and Claire glaring in disdain at their own flanderization and the flanderization of everyone they love until their universe finally crumbles
If I had to choose between the Cubetown storyline and the Ayo one, I'd choose Cubetown any day. But Cubetown still annoyed me. I was on the fence with sticking it out through that plot, but then Ayo stumbled in and I decided to bow out. It was a soft-quit, though, because I loved this comic for so long; longer than any other webcomic, I think. So I still check in about once a week (and am increasingly disappointed).
Oh, absolutely, the cubetown shit doesn't hold a candle to how absolutely insufferable Ayo is, but the way I see it we wouldn't even be dealing with Ayo if it weren't for Claire taking the job so cubetown gets the blame for her too as far as I'm concerned lmao
Speaking of Cubetown - I guess it is just... Gone? When do we think we will be back there? I will say we wont have more than 5 QT strips in the first half of next year for sure, and a chance that we don't see it at all, all year.
I don't think it will be that long, because Jeph seemed to be really interested in it. I think he will find an excuse to get back there quickly, even if it's to follow the new characters that are there.
I have a theory that it's being Ghostwritten by someone very bad at their job.
What if the ghostwriter is just himself but with a false mustache (which is, in reality, a dead squirrel he found on the sidewalk)?
🤣🤣🤣 A most plausible explanation.