Taking Initiative
Art – I really have no complaints about the strip save for my normal problem with the shadowing under Jade’s right eye in panel 1 and Brent’s in panel 2. Even that is small because they are light enough where you have to take a harder look then normal to see it.
Otherwise, there is no Jade with bug eyes (another normal complaint), and the shading of the hair, especially Jade’s, is done well. Also, Jade’s mischievous/sinister look in panel 3 is done very well.
Finally, I really like Jade’s arms throughout as the width has been variable at times with the characters and she could have look beefy (or Clarkson-esque, heeeeey-oh!). They stay thin, and very feminine throughout.
Story – I’ve never played D & D a day n my life but this is a good version of gaming nerd joke. Unlike other instances, this is no where near being too inside baseball and it is a joke that the average person can get. Plus, as I have seen with Morgan Webb and Olivia Munn girls into anything nerdy is sweet and adding –atrix to anything will give anyone (even D&D virgins) a good nerd-on.
Side note – Who’s pony tail is sweeter, Brent or Jade?
9 comments:
Ha, I read the blog that RW put up and who ever is the person behind Scott Kurtz (not scott kurtz) had a "simpsons did it" moment with the quote "I sleep on a huge pile of money"
Either if its a) the real Scott thats lame b) a bad impersonator, which is a shame because blogspot does initiatve some good impersonators
Sory about my Ding!-lite hiatus guys
For today's strip, I only have one quibble: The punchline at the end is really weak. The panel that precedes it is a good deal funnier, so I was hoping for some scathing sarcasm to follow up on the great eye-roll. Instead, we have an extremely diluted verbal version of the eye-roll. Too bad.
I like choosing good colours for my dice too. Surely that's why they make such a large variety of them.
I don't call them "cute," though. More phrases like that should have been used in the second last panel. It does seem a common habit amongst females to use the word "cute" for the most ridiculous things.
Looks like she just settled for an entire set of plain purple ones, though.
- Sage's title for this post is oddly appropriate as an alternate title for "Holy Roller".
- The bug-eyes are back. And, they brought friends.
- It's "That Guy(/Girl)".
It really is heartbreaking as a game master to have a game fall apart like that. You put so much effort into preparing everything and trying to present it properly, all the players have to do is show up. When they hate it or ruin it with pettiness your heart sinks into your belly and starts to slowly digest.
But on to our own pettiness: everybody is standing up! Ha!
Huh. I thought Miranda and Sam were the only two players (I was wondering why the other character the day before was there). Granted, two players would be a really weak gaming experience and it seems obvious that what's-her-name should have been included from the start.
Since Jade is sitting down with a mug or cup in the first panel but standing in the next ones, and Brent is not visible alongside the players, and since each of the players seemingly has no knowledge of A) Jade not being alone in the room with them, nor of B) what any of the previous girls said... I was sure that there was supposed to be some sort of sequence of flashbacks occuring. But the final panel definitely seems to disprove that possibility. Awkward.
Ignoring the obvious failure of the artwork to convey what's going on in that room, though, each separate panel is drawn very nicely. I think Jade's failure as DM may be due to her not being aware of how spontaneous and reactive a job DMing can need to be. Player creativity needs to be addressed and even rewarded, not dismissed and ruled out.
Not sure what Sam's problem was, though. The story is a bit too truncated, due (I'm sure) to Kurtz wanting to limit it to one week of strips (Why that would be neccessary is beyond me, though. This isn't a newspaper comic strip).
Sam's problem is similar to one of Jack Chick's, as demonstrated a couple of days prior. You have to pretend that your fictional character is worshipping a fictional deity in a fictional world, which somehow conflicts with her tendency to worship what she considers to be a real deity in the real world.
Oh, and I'd like to add that half way through the week I finally understood what was happening in last week's Ding: they all have their hands up in the second panel for the call for Darkmagic stories, in that panel the bard is asking who wants to hear stories WITHOUT Darkmagic, and in the next panel their hands go down in response. It took me a long time to realise that the hands-up in the previous panel wasn't in response to the text in that same panel, although I know other people understood it and tried to explain it.
The 'ding' strip suffers from a layout issues, with the typical left-to-right reading causing the meaning of that frame to be a touch murky, but since it was the same joke from the last 'ding' before this D&D fixation, it was fairly clear what he was trying to do.
Regarding Friday's strip, I had my suspicions from Thursday that there was another person playing with them but thought it would have been rather sloppy to have not mentioned them by then. So I figured it was a GM-run player, for scenery. Turns out, no, it was just sloppy after all.
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