#pintsize

Hey, it’s Raven again! Hi, Raven! And you thought I was kidding when I said the no-name character who showed up for all of one comic would come back as a regular character. This is part of the reason why I enjoy Jeph’s style – he can, and does, very easily take bit players he made for a single gag or to fulfill one role and flesh them out if he thinks they can serve a purpose or if they entertain him enough. The most famous example of this will be roughly 2900 comics from now so… holy shit, I just realized Bubbles is 1000 comics old! That’s crazy awesome!

Right. Sorry, some of you might not understand a word of what I just typed. Nevermind, moving right along.

Here we see the beginnings of Dora’s next character arc, if you’d like to call it that. I do have some questions about this as far as the in-universe time-scale goes, but I’ll touch on that later. Faye also invites Dora along to hang with her and Marten to indoctrinate her to the Hipster Lifestyle™ to serve two purposes: First, that their relationship as a boss and employee is relaxed enough that they’re comfortable doing this, telling us a lot about the way these two work together and the way this coffee shop is run without saying a lot. Second, this serves as the perfect in for Jeph to incorporate Dora into the main cast. From this point forward, Dora becomes a main secondary character, arguably a main character in her own right. The fact that she takes on a much more prominent role in this next batch of 50 comics and skyrockets to fourth-most frequent character is proof enough of that on its own, but we’ll touch on all that when we get to the data analysis at the end of this post.

Back with Marten, Steve is encouraging him to apologize to Faye. He offers a… novel solution to keep Marten from being the center of attention.

Seriously, the sheer, raw confidence on this guy alone is attractive as hell. And I’m only mildly ashamed to admit that to myself!

I hope you understand why I don’t need to explain why I should, nay, must provide this panel without any other context.

Same deal with this one.

And this comic puts me into hysterics every time I read it. I swear, this isn’t going to devolve into me just posting comics and saying “this is funny” or whatever. I just really, really like this progression of events right here. I wish we could see more of this Marten more often in modern QC – able to read a room quick enough to defuse the situation with absurdity or dry wit. It reminds us that, despite all evidence to the contrary, the boy does have a spine somewhere in that body.

And as immediate contrast, we jump here. This? This isn’t funny. This makes me not like Faye. This is actual abuse. And I know I talked about in the last post how including Faye retaliating against Marten physically and actually showing it happen in the comic rather than implying it with backfilling is the better method of storytelling but… Maybe it’s because she created a visible bruise, maybe it’s because of how candid she is about it, maybe it’s because of my own personal fucked-up past relationships (which admittedly never got physical but still), but this feels infinitely different than the Faye Jeph is trying to set up. He’ll have to do a damn good job in later comics to win me back to thinking Faye’s a likable character again.

Also Dora is definitely a woman of her word. I hope the coffee shop was empty right then. Actually, I hope it’s been a slow day from the point Faye started chasing her around with a dildo. Otherwise news might travel for all of the wrong reasons.

Faye tries to invite Dora over for festivities both as a friendly gesture because she expects her boss doesn’t get out much and because she wants to drag her from the dark abyss of Goth into the light of Hipster, only for her to turn the invitation down.

Not that it’s going to deter Faye, of course. Also, QC is in wide screen now. I have NO idea how that’s going to be represented on Tumblr considering how narrow my current theme at the time of writing is. Maybe I’ll change it, I dunno, I’m shit with this sort of thing. If you’re reading this and the page doesn’tlook like some faux notebook shit, I pulled myself together and fixed things. Go me.

Dora is being incredibly chill with this whole situation. Personally I’d be a hell of a lot more pissed. Although this does provide us with further insight to Faye’s character – someone who sees her next step, bulrushes her way towards it and has zero plans where to go after that until she arrives at her destination. She is aggressive and decisive, but to a fault as she doesn’t ever seem to really plan ahead. I’d say this makes her the perfect foil to Marten as someone who plans obsessively but never has the spine to go forward with anything but… Marten doesn’t really do much future-planning himself. He obsesses over little things and gets stuck in his own head, but he never really seems to look any further than maybe next week. Hm… I want all of us to keep this in mind for an offhand comment like, 500 or 600 comics from now. Trust me, it’ll make sense when we get to it.

And yet despite Faye’s self-assurance and aggressive nature, here she shows an outright refusal to accept or face the reality of the developing relationship between herself and Marten. Not just being coy, not just dancing around the issue, but straight-up not allowing herself to even consider what’s going down. Maybe I’m reading too much into this little exchange due to what I already know about her character, but this is an extremely unhealthy trait that speaks a lot to Faye’s character that she doesn’t want the world to see. We’ll be touching on this later.

I mostly like this comic for Marten and Pintsize’s reactions on the last panel. Marten makes a good straight man, and it’s not often we see Pintsize share that role either.

Faye you’re really not helping your case right now. Although it is interesting how hard Faye is showcases how into him Dora is, considering she has her own feelings for him and I highly doubt she’d be 100% cool with the two of them going off to make out.

So here we establish Anthro PCs relationships with humans – namely, they’re basically glorified pets. Pets that have human-level sapience. Don’t worry, Jeph comes to understand the unfortunate implications of this as well, and he goes on to change this in future comics. And by “change this” I mean “completely re-incorporate how AI works in this universe and establish QC as a near-future sci-fi setting.” But that’s not going to be for quite some time. For now, despite my poking fun at the horrific implications here, Jeph’s doing a good job taking the “funny robot sidekick” that’s supposed to be in every webcomic and creating proper lore behind it, making it feel like it belongs in this world rather than be used as a comic relief character and only a comic relief character.

Granted the Anthro PCs as a collective are going to be used as just comic relief right now but, y’know. Baby steps.

As said before, the fact that these guys are all fully sapient creatures makes the implications of this downright horrific. Also, that’s Ell. I have no idea if he ever comes back – I don’t remember him coming back at all – but I’m marking him down in the character statistics because he’s named.

This… actually has some interesting implications. Marten mentions needing Steve’s help with a date “the other day.” Does that mean he and Faye have known each other for an extremely short period of time? I highly doubt it, we’ve seen a number of times the time has moved from day to night, and the comic itself certainly implies at least a few weeks have passed. So unless by “the other day” Marten means “a month ago” then Marten has been dating women on the side while Faye’s been staying with him. That… seems extremely out of character for him considering the circumstances we’ve seen established in the comic thus far. Considering nothing else really comes from it and the fact if Marten was dating anyone on the side it would definitely be Dora, I’m going to go on the assumption Jeph simply made a mistake here and meant to say Marten was seeing someone a month or a few months back.

She’s cut off by Pintsize’s destructive laser that he’s using to assert himself as King among the Anthro PCs, don’t worry about it. What we should focus on instead is… well, this second panel here. On paper, this is really good. We’re getting some insight to Faye’s character here, the cracks in her mask are showing. We’re addressing the issue of her assaulting her friend and roommate, what she thinks about it, her current mindset and addressing that this is an actual problem. She’s openly apologizing, sincere in her conviction and clearly wants to fix things.

The problem with this is of course the fact that this is rushed as fuck.

Part of this, of course, has to be the fact that Jeph’s comic by nature is married to the structure of a four-panel comic. We have to set up Faye’s conversation, allow her to continue, but due to narrative convenience she needs to be cut off before she can finish what she’s saying. So the laser cuts her off and after the panel of action, we follow-up and end with the punchline of Pintsize having been made King among the Anthro PCs. And I get it – interrupt Faye before she can finish so you can keep the romantic ambiguity of “boys whom I…” Classic RomCom stuff. Problem is, this isn’t the time or place to do it. Keeping to the structure traps them into a situation where unfortunately Faye doesn’t have the breathing room to stretch this out and make it feel natural. This feels contrived from every angle and every sense of the word.

Easy way to fix this: Have this conversation take place while they’re walking home. Establish she feels bad, have her bounce off Marten and have this conversation naturally. Then either you can have Pintsize cut her off at the end there or maybe even she stops herself when she realizes she’s saying too much. There are ways to make this feel natural. This isn’t natural. Still, credit where it’s due, they’re at least touching on this topic here. Part of me wonders if Jeph had, like, a mental map of where he wanted Faye’s character to go but because he writes these page-by-page it ended up stumbling along and falling flat. A written outline of events can, and does, REALLY help in situations like this.

Then again I’m giving writing advice to a version of someone who existed fifteen years ago. I’m sure he’s got this all down himself nowadays, right?

Payoff to the previous comic.

Not only does this crack me up every time I read it, it also shows that Faye and Marten have gotten onto the same wavelength of humor. They’re also comfortable enough with each other that they can imply for a moment sexual favors before completely derailing the implication with the absurd. This is a far-cry from when Faye was trying to burn Marten with her mind back when Pintsize merely implied the two of them share a bed with each other.

Granted, it does kind of fly in the face of Faye’s reaction back at the LANPark. Still, good moment.

Speaking of Faye’s character…

Here we have Faye’s explanation for why she hides her southern accent. Makes sense.

And here, her explanation as to why she doesn’t use contractions… I’ve already said my piece on why I feel this makes zero sense, let’s move on.

And here we properly draw attention to Faye’s scar and establish the fact that her scar is a sore spot for her… was that a pun? It felt like a pun. Anyway, more and more it’s becoming clear that despite her outgoing nature, Faye has a LOT she keeps close to her chest.

Okay now I know that one was a pun, I’m sorry.

Point being, there’s a lot to Faye’s character we haven’t found out yet, plenty yet to explore in future comics. And I’d also like to point out, this? This is an extremely natural way to establish things about Faye, right here. This feels like something that would actually come up in a conversation rather than planted there for the sake of the audience, and I appreciate that. That said, this in conjunction with the last few moments makes this feel more like it’s time for Jeph to introduce and explain aspects of Faye’s character all at once, which deters a little bit from the natural feeling of this moment in particular. Or maybe I’m just being pedantic, I dunno. In a bubble, this comic works.

And here we get a flash of the personality we’ll see in Raven in the future. Just a spark though, the flame hasn’t risen up quite yet. Also a little detail about Dora that… again, doesn’t quite make sense given the timescale Jeph has established. I’ll touch on it later in this post when we find out exactly how old Dora is.

This… is an aspect of Marten’s personality that we never really touch on. Actually, this kind of goes toe-in-toe with his interest in Final Fantasy. Is Marten a fantasy buff? Does he enjoy escapist literature and media? Would he be super into Game of Thrones when it comes out as a series? These are questions that… unfortunately, don’t really get answered. I don’t know, I feel like these aspects of who Marten is ends up getting forgotten on the cutting room floor later on in the comic. Maybe they were only included as an off-handed joke, maybe Marten just developed as a character differently than what Jeph originally envisioned him as. Either way, these are parts of him that I think would be wonderful to bring back, especially with his current job and relationship in present-day coics.

Again, like a LOT of things I’m bringing up, we’ll get to that later.

In case you forgot that Faye is genuinely interested in Marten, a reminder and an assertion: She isn’t just interested in the skinny boy. She’s got it bad for him.

But, like a lot of things involving her personal life and feelings, she openly refutes them – not just to Dora but to herself.

Having gone out to give Dora a new look and indoctrinate her into the Cult of Hipster, Dora McPalerThanWhiteBread ends up sunburnt. Marten’s home, he has the lotion, we all know where this is going.

Heaven holds a place for those who pray… I wanted to follow this up with a clip of Sonic from Tails’ story in Sonic Adventure saying “hey hey hey” but surprisingly enough, that particular soundbite isn’t available anywhere. There are plenty of Let’s Plays that poke fun at it, but nothing with that line in particular.

Anyway, let’s talk about time frames. Dora said she got into the whole goth and coven stuff in High School and only now gotten bored of it. She’s 26. Let’s be EXTRA generous and assume she got into it in Senior Year, and she graduated at 18. That’s eight years this has been her life style, almost a third of her life. This wasn’t a phase, this was a genuine life style choice. Either Jeph got the timing wrong, or this is genuinely an identity crisis on Dora’s part because seriously, when something’s been a part of your life for so long I don’t blame you for not knowing where to go from there. I’m just surprised it took 8+ years for her to get sick of it. Then again, maybe that’s normal. I dunno, you can tell me if that’s a normal human thing. I’m literally autistic so I genuinely don’t know.

Setup… and also begging the question why you would give a libido to an AI, or how one would develop it naturally seeing as robots are incapable of sexual reproduction.

I haven’t really mentioned it until now, but Dora’s like aggressively bi. I can dig it. Guys and gals are both pretty in their own ways.

Ignore the lack of color for a second, Jeph wrote up this comic when he had like zero time and couldn’t color it in before he uploaded. Again, we have the HINT of something that Faye’s on the cusp of admitting that says more about her character only to be cut off once again. This feels a bit more natural than the situation at the LANPark. Still contrived by nature of Jeph introducing a conflict to purposefully cut her off, but an understandable narrative contrivance.

Also, remember when I mentioned the joke about the government level laser would come back as an actual plot point? Did you think I was joking? No, here we have Agent Turing (I can’t tell if that’s clever or if I should roll my eyes at this) here to take Pintsize in, dismantle him and take the dangerous laser back.

Faye takes it well.

Can you guess what consequences she suffers from assaulting a government agent? I’ll give you a hint – it’s about the same as the consequences she suffered from burning down an apartment.

Payoff.

And finally, we round off this batch of comics with Faye’s expert lying skills to fool Agent Turing…

Ah yes. The ever-deadly Space Owls. Not nearly as scary as Space Bears, though! They’re horrifying!

…not buying it? Yeah neither did my professors back in college.

As per usual, let’s compare a panel from the first and last comics in the batch to see how Jeph’s art style has improved.

It looks like he’s trying to get the proportions more… realistic? They’ve moved from “cartoons” to “cartoon versions of actual people” and it’s… eh, alright I guess? Personally I’m more of a fan of the more cartoon-ish style in the beginning of this batch, but beauty and eyes of beholders and all.

So overall, what did I think of this batch of comics? Personally, I think the humor is improving dramatically, this batch had the most comics that had me laughing aloud so far. And bringing Dora further into the limelight was a smart move on Jeph’s part – she’s just so likable, I want to see more of her. But as for the inter-personal conflicts… eh? It feels weaker than last batch. More is happening, progress is being made, but it feels… contrived. Artificial. It was the worst in the LANPark, but because that drew my eye I kept seeing every other piece of exposition as just that – exposition. Maybe I’m biased, I’ll fully admit that. I’ll also admit that the bit about Faye’s chest-scar was a well done piece of exposition without feeling like exposition.

I’ve said exposition way too much now, let’s move onto the stats (and for the record, Scarlet Manuka on the QC forums was kind enough to remind me that the name of Dora’s cat is Miéville, so while we haven’t been introduced to that name yet I’ll be using that in my stats from this point forward because it’s better than “Dora’s Cat”).

Faye: 47/50 – 94%

Marten: 41/50 – 82%

Dora: 31/50 – 62%

Pintsize: 18/50 – 36%

Turing: 3/50 – 6%

Steve: 2/50 – 4%

Raven: 2/50 – 4%

Ell: 1/50 – 2%

Grand Total:

Marten: 132/150 – 88%

Faye: 130/150 – 86.7%

Pintsize: 45/150 – 30%

Dora: 39/150 – 26%

Steve: 16/150 – 10.7%

Sara: 7/150 – 4.7%

Raven: 3/150 – 2%

Turing: 3/150 – 2%

Jim: 2/150 – 1.3%

Scott: 2/150 – 1.3%

Miéville: 1/150 – 0.7%

Ell: 1/150 – 0.7%

Faye is climbing up the ranks and getting closer to perfectly equal screentime with Marten across the whole series. Speaking of Faye, in this batch she pulled into first as the character in the most comics, the first time she’s been in more than Marten since the beginning. And Dora’s been in so many this last batch, she jumped up to fourth-most reoccurring character juuust behind Pintsize.