Webcomic Wonderland discussion

Discuss Order of the Stick here.

Order of the Stick is a parody comic set in a D&D style game world. What makes the humor unique is that the characters are self aware of the rules governing their existence and reference it frequently in forth wall breaking jokes and comments.

It evolves a lot over time and it's interesting for me to go back to the beginning where the parody aspect is stronger. I'm not a pen and paper rpg player, but I was able to pick up enough to enjoy the jokes. The humor does blend better and becomes less about straight D&D parody later as the strip goes. The story also gets a lot deeper and it becomes epic in scale and a real masterpiece in plotting and balance of the dramatic and comedic elements.

The art style is "fleshed out stick figures." It gets a lot more detailed later on, but even in the early strips I think it works surprisingly well.

More gushing praise can be found in my review of volume 1 here.

Here are a few discussion questions for everyone to think about (Please remember to use spoiler tags as appropriate to your answer, even if the question didn't contain spoilers. Thanks!):

1) What's your favorite part of the comic? Least favorite?

2) Do you prefer the comedy or more dramatic elements?

3) How do you like the art? Does it enhance the story being told? How effective is the artist in using the style?

4) Who is your favorite character? Least favorite?

We have an interesting batch of comics this month that are all comedic at the core with an underlying connecting story of various levels of seriousness and are all somewhat ensemble in nature,but have very different art styles and approaches. So I'm starting us with the same discussion questions in all three.

1) I love how intricately and carefully everything is plotted and planned. The story really builds over time and things that seem unimportant often pay off in a big way either dramatically or humorously (or both) later on. Part I like least is hard to identify since this is my overall favorite webcomic. I guess some of the side stories that have dragged on here and there and featured less interesting characters.

2) This is one of the rare comics where I think they work equally well and in great balance. Rich knows just how to intersperse his humor so it both gets a good laugh and doesn't ruin the dramatic tension he's been building. The fourth wall and character self awareness humor in this comic is second to none.

3) The "fleshed out stick figure" style used is very unique and much more detailed than it first appears (and also gets more so as the comic goes). Rich works really well within its potential and limitations and uses it to great effect to contribute to his story.

4) Must resist urge to list 99% of the cast. The Monster in the Darkness (see my avatar) tops my list. All of the Order are great. Roy has always been my favorite by a hair, although Belkar has been a lot of fun recently and has gained on the rest quite a bit. Least favorite is Roy's father. I know we're not really supposed to like him, but he sometimes annoys me to the point where I don't want to read about him, rather than wanting to see Roy put him in his place.

hmmm. . . even with the additional opening strips, there are still signs in this volume that this was originally intended to be a gag-a-day comic. Though he weaves it together nicely even at this stage.

Yeah, it's really interesting to look at the difference between the early strips and what the comic becomes. He settled into longer plot threads fairly quickly but I totally agree it really shows the gag-a-day style in the first book. As you say it still worked really well.

The end page with all the ironic cut aways showing what was false about Elan's enumeration of their triumphs lead them on gracefully.