#51 Some Friendly Advice

By Shamus Posted Friday Aug 23, 2019

Filed under: DM of the Rings 16 comments


Shawn Sez:

And here’s where it ended, more or less. This wasn’t the original plan to end the series. I had become horribly burnt out on doing the comic, and we posted this comic to lead in to a hiatus. Said hiatus ended up becoming permanent. We will not be reposting the “Hey, the hiatus is finally going to end! Oh no it totally won’t, the comic is ending forever” strips that followed this one a month or two later. The basic story is after some time away, I decided I was ready to get back in to the groove. And then as we were plotting and drawing what would have been comic #52, I realized that no I really was not. I probably should have realized that before telling the world we were coming back, but live and learn.

A few random art notes: I love how Ivy has a Fitzpatrick backpack. I like to imagine she bought it at Hot Topic, that in the CB universe, not only is D&D&D available in gaming stores, but Fitzpatrick is some kind of cute goth icon. Also, this is probably the worst I ever drew Ivy. Man, she looks horrible in this comic, especially the panel where she’s looking away. She looks like some sort of horrible, horrible Ctrl+Alt+Delete character. Ugh.

Anyway, I think the new final comic we’re going to leave you guys with next week will be a much better cap to the series. Which reminds me, I need to finish drawing it so Shamus can make it funny…

Shamus Says:

That frame of Ivy? That Shawn hates so much and says it looks like a CAD hackjob? That’s my favorite pic of her in the entire series. This is why Shawn and I never had a falling out: The ways in which we misunderstand each other are far too comical for anyone to get upset over.

Over the next couple of days I’ll be posting the ending to this thing. That is, I’ll be posting all of my notes on where the story was intended to go and how it all turned out. I’d had the final battle sketched out before we even made the first comic, and hopefully you’ll find it a satisfying way to bring the tale to a close. It should be better than leaving the story hanging, anyway.

EDIT 2019: So there it is. That’s probably not the most satisfying webcomic you’ve ever read, but at least it has a home now and isn’t going to vanish into the bit bucket.

Coming up, I’m going to publish the rest of the story – as much as I had planned anyway – as text. The first half will appear this Sunday, and the final part next Friday. Then there will be one final Epilogue comic.

 


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16 thoughts on “#51 Some Friendly Advice

  1. BlueHorus says:

    It’s a shame. This comic was fun.

    Also, I love the character details. It feels exactly right that:
    a) Ivy would just let Marcus go to voicemail because she wants to avoid talking to him
    b) Ivy would be the kind of person to give unsolicited heath advice, and
    c) said health advice would involve herbal tea and [a variation on] multivitamin tablets

    Though…I remember my first read-through of this left me with the impression she was going out with Chuck. Did I make that up, or was it actually revealed at some point?

    1. krellen says:

      You made it up. The potential romance was Josh+Ivy, but Shamus hates writing romance. He’s like Chris Avellone that way.

      1. Mr. Wolf says:

        Shamus hates writing romance, Avellone hates writing happy romance. If Avellone wrote it, best case scenario, one of them would be dead, worst case scenario one of them is eternally tormented by their own unremembered mistakes and the other carrying a torch beyond the grave for somebody who never did, and never will, love them the way they wanted.

        I personally think Avellone can write great romances. It’s just not the kind they you’ll read in Mills & Bioware.

        1. Mattias42 says:

          Agreed.

          Avellone is a great writer even in his romance stuff, but his tastes definitively lean more towards the twisted if not outright macabre end of romance. I get why it rubs the ‘happy ever after with my OC~!’ club the wrong way.

          Although, come to think about it, I’d freakin’ adore to experience what he’d do with a take on Romeo & Juliet—or even better, Tis’ A Pity She’s A Whore. That sounds like it would be just oodles of pitch-black gallows humor with a romance bend, and you don’t see that combo very often.

          1. krellen says:

            Romance requires the happily ever after. Romance without it is tragedy.

            1. Mattias42 says:

              Gonna have to disagree with you on that one.

              Romance isn’t how it ends. Two—or more even, people developing feelings for another, and acting on them. Even failing on acting on them, in some stories.

              Could end well. Can end in heartbreak. No matter which, it was still… well, a romance, and that’s the bit that matters. That that brilliant spark was lit in the first place and watching what becomes of it, if you will. Not the ash or blaze that actually follows.

              1. Asdasd says:

                I can think of at least one time Bioware have written a tragic romance before. It was a real ‘and they lived happily ever after, until years later, character X was murdered horribly’ fuck-you expectation-subversion. That’s sort of destination that can definitely sour the journey that came before it.

  2. Daniil says:

    Kind of an ironic note to end it on, don’t you think?

  3. Heh, that Ivy panel is also my favorite Ivy panel of the whole comic. I guess because it’s the one in which she least reminded me of that NWN players I mentioned I related her to and made me dislike the character.
    Now that I read Shawn thought, he’s right, there’s a touch of CAD like drawing. A webcomic I found somewhat funny and followed, until I saw it starting to go “I have many fans, time to try force feeding my ideology to the readers” and immediately dropped it. I don’t know if it continued that way, if it got over the cult syndrome (TV tropes has a name for that, but I don’t remember) of if it ended going under (I’d bet -if- that was the case it did because of it not getting off the preaching).
    I’ve looked for it. It seems it still is going on. Looking at the last three comics, none is preachy. None is very fun either, but feel there’s chances of having fun strips with a decent frequency. And yes, I know the last three strips aren’t necessarily a valid sample, but point to the chance it may have got off the preaching at some point. Hopefully those three correspond to the truth and it abandoned trying to preach long ago and recovered some decent level of fun (I don’t remember it being very high, but enough to get a chuckle with enough frequency to be worth checking), as that means someone being successful in what they do and that’s always nice.

    1. Profugo Barbatus says:

      Yea, a lot of the preachy nature died off when he hard killed the universe and started fresh, the stuff you’ve read is essentially the original crew transplanted into a new superhero comic thing. Its not half bad, doesn’t get preachy. His one off gaming jokes are sorta standalone now, and his industry commentary got swapped out with a seperate comic series for the ‘console wars’ which takes itself literally.

      I still don’t think I like it as much as back before it got preachy in the old days, but its at least good enough that I come back for the new issues now. Helps that the art got better too, he was pretty stagnant for a while.

      1. Sleeping Dragon says:

        Yeah, I actually kinda like some of the jokes and I treat it as a secondary source for industry news (well, industry gossip at least), I just can’t make myself care for the superhero narrative for some reason, though the tabletop comics did raise a few chuckles out of me.

  4. Scampi says:

    I wonder if there’s a market for Fitzpatrick merch, now that I think of it.
    T-Shirts, Backpacks (not just logo-packs: the pack IS Fitzpatrick, with “wings” attached to the sides and a zipper as its mouth), teapots etc. Have you ever tried to market it at all?

  5. Joshua says:

    Referring to “CAD” drawing confused me until I remembered the earlier reference to CTRL-ALT-DEL. You know, there’s a more popular reference to CAD when it comes to drawing….

    1. Nimrandir says:

      I’m with you. I was thinking, “She doesn’t look like a blueprint . . .”

  6. Ira says:

    I would note here the strong similarity between this strip and the original planned ending of DMotR: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1327

    The game is cancelled, players weren’t having fun, there’s some joke about a massively disproportionate illness.

    1. Nimrandir says:

      I’ve always wondered if Casey is genuinely so sick he can’t keep his diagnosis straight, or if he’s faking to get out of the campaign.

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