Home on the Strange: Guest Strip (Candi)

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Roni Says:

Today's guest strip is brought to you by Candi Comics, courtesy of the always-entertaining Starline X Hodge (who has a middle name I deeply, deeply covet). Candi is a really well-drawn comic with an adorable ferret and a solidly fleshed-out cast; if you like us, I'm pretty sure you'll like her, so go check it out.

(And I look nothing like this, by the way.)

While Roni's gone (and I hope she rests well in the asylum she's no doubt checked into after the art she churned out in the final days), I figure I'll start going over behind-the-scenes details and dirt. So let's start with a poll question: What was the best Year One HotS Storyline? And what was the worst?

For me, it's no contest: Gotterdammerung was the best thing we did all year. Yeah, it's arguably around the time of Princess Fluttershine when we finally hit a rhythm that I was comfortable with, but Gotterdammerung is the sort of storyline that just satisfies me: it involved the whole cast in a life-changing event (and there will be more Gotterdammerung ramifications for our little social group, oh yes), it finally nailed down the characterization of a lot of the main cast for me, and it had a lot of really funny punchlines. There may be better written storylines in the HotS archives, but I think for me Gotterdammerung was the Snickers that satisifies.

Plus, it actually ended. As we move towards more emotionally-complex plot, we have to sometimes stop after a solid month of concentrating on Character X to move over to Character Y for some light entertainment (as anyone who's wondering what's going on with Branch right now understands). It was twelve strips, in and out, good stuff. I'm happy with it.

The worst storyline? No question: Maid, to Order. Roni and I hate that one with a passion. Truth is, Roni and I are usually hammering out the scripts, altering them by the day as we see your reactions to them ("Oh, jeez, we didn't think they'd see it that way") and as we constantly think of funnier punchlines or better plot twists. But I was on vacation in Europe, and Roni was just drawing dead scripts without my input (or her much-needed new input), and it fell flat. Given our druthers, we would have rewritten it on the fly to make it shorter or punchier, but... It was done.

The good news is that after Maid, To Order showed us that preachiness does not work. After that, we vowed if we couldn't write a comic without exposition, we wouldn't. It has to be as dense as possible. So, like the Star Wars Holiday Special, we learned.

But how about you? What's your take?

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