{"id":46839,"date":"2019-07-28T06:00:32","date_gmt":"2019-07-28T10:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=46839"},"modified":"2019-07-28T04:24:19","modified_gmt":"2019-07-28T08:24:19","slug":"44-return-of-the-kinged","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=46839","title":{"rendered":"#44 Return of the Kinged"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And here we deliver a pure, almost leathal dose of fanservice. Most of this is an in-joke for fans of DMotR. Who Steve is and what role he played is left as an exercise to the reader.<\/div>\n



\nShamus Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yeah. A \u201cleathal\u201d dose! Nice spellcheck, Shamus-from-2008.<\/p>\n

Anyway, quite a lot good in this comic. Shawn did a great job of capturing the Lord of the Rings Viggo Mortensen and turning that into our gaming stoner.<\/p>\n

Also great is the shirt. I had the idea for a 4:20 shirt that used dice, but I didn\u2019t have any idea how to depict the dice and keep them readable. Shawn is the one that came up with the stylized design that made it work.<\/p>\n

As for humor: The \u201cpunchline\u201d is actually the weakest panel in the whole comic. The Steve \/ Ivy panel is lots funnier and more interesting. I can see now how this one strip could be cut up into a few traditional three-panel comics.<\/p>\n

If I had it to do over again:<\/p>\n

Strip 1 would be Steve\u2019s intro, with the \u201cI\u2019m the guy who won the last campaign\u201d in the punchline panel.<\/p>\n

Strip 2 would be his comment on the other characters, ending with the the \u201csexay\u201d dialog with Ivy.<\/p>\n

Strip 3 would have established the conflict between Steve and Josh.<\/p>\n

Here I went nuts and crammed all three concepts into a single page. It\u2019s funny and fun, but it just wasn\u2019t sustainable. I\u2019ve finally gotten the feel for this sort of humor. Only two years too late.<\/p>\n

Ah well. It turned out nice anyway.<\/p>\n

Shawn Says:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Steve\u2019s appearance was kind of amazing. He showed up, became an instant fan favorite, and then stuck around for two weeks or so, and totally wore out his welcome to the point where the fans were clamoring for him to go away. I\u2019d seen that sort of thing happen on many a tv show or what have you, but I\u2019d never witnessed it first hand, and so quickly.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I still really enjoy this strip. Mainly for that first shot of Steve, throwing horns and saying \u201cSup hoes?\u201d<\/p>\n

EDIT 2019: Looking back, I think I oversold the connection between DMotR and CB. Certainly the new characters borrow the same archetypes we see in the original webcomic. Chuck is the old-school Grognard like Gimli and Josh is the power-obsessed munchkin like Legolas, but the characters don’t really map directly. Chuck and Gimli have similar backgrounds, but Chuck has a mean streak that Gimli never exhibited. Legolas had a certain creative exuberance<\/a> that’s missing in Josh. But Steve really does seem to be Aragorn, son of Anduril<\/a>. <\/p>\n

On one hand, it was probably bad form to imply direct continuity between the two works. I didn’t really feel any allegiance to the original group and I was happy to have the new characters break from the old in the name of a joke. On the other hand, it was nice to be able to use the old characters as a launching point for the new run.<\/p>\n

I was able to skip a lot of character building at the start thanks to the established characters, but then it kinda annoyed people when the CB crew diverged from expected behavior. It was a tradeoff. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46839"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47603,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46839\/revisions\/47603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}