Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter > Arts, Crafts, Music & Drama - The Artisans' Guilds

Schlock Mercenary Plotting

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dubsartur:
So, since "Schlock Mercenary" ended ... does anyone often feel that there is something weird about the climax of that webcomic's stories?  Often the story builds to a peak of tension and that is suddenly erased by something in the background which is not fully explained and we move on to the denoument.

A lot of writing about plotting today is weirdly proscriptive on the basis of a very narrow selection of model stories and a very narrow selection of people's responses to those stories, but I often felt let down at the end of a book.

Jubal:
I didn't realise it had ended!

I know Schlock Mercenary only a little - I binged through a bunch of its archive once, after speculation that the Monster in the Darkness from Order of the Stick might in fact be of the same species as the eponymous Schlock. I was also reading it in sort of strip by strip form online so I suppose I wasn't thinking about arcs terribly separably: I wonder with webcomics whether this might be quite normal, because creators may not necessarily forward plan and produce things as a planned whole so much in the way book authors do due to the episodic format.

dubsartur:
I think Rich Burlew  said that the Monster in Darkness is something in the 3e Monster Manual.  It is too bad that he damaged his hand.

Howard Tayler planned Schlock Mercenary well in advance into books of a loosely fixed page count of already-published main story + bonus story + introduction.  Selling books was a big part of his business model for becoming a professional cartoonist (at one point he was negotiating to publish with Steve Jackson Games but he and Sandra did the math and self-publishing made more sense).

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