OotS #1077: All Clear

It's been 6 in-universe days but 3 and a half years since Roy was stabbed in the desert by Tarquin.

I've never read Order of the Stick, but for the longest time, whenever I see it posted on Veeky Forums, they're still on that airship. Is this comic even good or do people still read it because you're 1000+ pages in and you might as well keep going?

Comic's alright.

It just moves at a snail's pace because the creator hurt his hand, and uses that as an excuse to not be able to draw more than one stick figure a month. That, coupled with his need to over explain even the smallest detail, and his forum's need to overexamine the story and take every single thing that's said in the comic as literally as possible, to the point where they once thought a character was half angel because somebody said "She's in heaven now" in relation to that kid's parent being dead. leads to the comic taking fucking years to do even the most trivial tasks.

It's legitimately a fun fantasy adventure story. Recent arcs have been overly decompressed when compared to the earlier parts of the comic, though, which seems to be a common affliction for webcomics.

It's pretty good, but suffers from a few issues.

It works better when you binge read it, and actually turns out to be a fair bit of fun. But it updates at a snail's pace and most of those updates are pretty pointless and have too much text.

You could probably read it from the start and enjoy it fine.

>still on the boat
We should just call this rhe curse of the Black Swordsman.

When you binge it (not too fast tho or you miss a ton of jokes and details), it's excellent. Incredibly funny, with good worldbuilding and a story planned hundreds of issues in advance.

Fucking 10/10 post user.

All the more reason you never get on the fucking boat, no matter how much the DM tries to railroad you there.

The hand thing was years ago. The creator has an unknown illness that can't be cured, is nonfatal, and renders him sick and unable to work periodically. Likely some kind of autoimmune disease.

That, and he spent a while working on Kickstarted rewards a little while ago.

I'm surprised Rich hasn't enlisted some help if he's got an illness that prevents him from drawing on a fairly constant basis

bout damn time

No, because Roy is barely swordsman at this point

>The creator has an unknown illness that can't be cured, is nonfatal, and renders him sick and unable to work periodically.

He apparently shares this disease with George R. R. Martin. I forget what it's called but the abbreviation is NFL.

Yes, it's called being a lazy piece of shit. Unless it's some crippling disease that makes him unable to hold a pen, he can probably still draw.

It was funny at first but I have since stopped caring since the whole god thing with Roy's speech. I recoiled at the end of this strip when he lampshaded the "Roy lost his sword again as a B-plot" thing, because it's almost a legitimate criticism at this point. And LAMPSHADING DOESN'T WORK WHEN YOU LITERALLY JUST DO THE THING. "Haha, looks like this is going to turn into another B-plot for the next few pages, xD" is not okay, when it is literally all you are going to do.

I don't think even Burlew could stretch finding that sword for more than a single additional page, unless it for some reason contained legitimately important plot stuff.

Thogging Thog's call and duty.

I tried to reread it the other day and honestly I just didn't care for it all. Guess I was really different person 10+ years ago. Still check in every now and again because shit I've been reading it long enough.

Damn, that's cold Burlew. Has it really only been a couple weeks in the story? Christ. What year was that comic printed in where this happened?

V's quips are still my favorite ones.

Probably AIDS considering his obsession with shoving faggotry in of late.

Way back when, OotS updated between 4 and 8 times a month with an occasional month long hiatus. Now, we're lucky if we see one update a month. As others have mentioned this is because the author has a chronic condition that he refuses to name which has steadily grown worse over the years. There was also an incident where the author accidentally smashed his hand through a window, suffered minor nerve damage, and had to take about a full year off of drawing or risk losing the ability altogether.

Some speculate that the authors chronic condition is something embarrassing, like Crohn's or another GI issue, which is why he refuses talk about it.

The story is actually very good when read as intended, which is like a comic book, and when the comic is completely finished it'll be worth the read.

Getting a little lazy there at the end, buddy.

>the gay boogeyman

As far as I know, Rich has been married to a woman for quite a while. When was the last time you spoke to one, or fucked something that wasn't your hand?

The court rules in favor of dubs.

The burn is legally applied.

Too bad he's like anti-Thog.

Actually how come we aren't calling them Zz'dtri edits?

Soon those will be called Roy edits.

I liked that scene where V killed a shitton of dragons. That was cool. The later ramifications for it were even better.

>I forget what it's called but the abbreviation is NFL.
Not Fit to Live.

>Recent arcs have been overly decompressed when compared to the earlier parts of the comic, though, which seems to be a common affliction for webcomics.
It's this. There's something about webcomics which causes even seasoned creators to utterly lose their capacity for pacing -- I'd guess that it's never having to finish discrete 20-(or whatever-)page issues that have to work as a unit, but that's speculation.

Even thoroughly good shit like Girl Genius has this problem. Foglio had a ton of experience when he started the comic, but once he moved it to webcomic format it slowed down to a snail's pace and spent something close to a decade fucking around in the castle.

Extreme decompression is terrible and often kills a comic, but it's also super fucking common online.

It's called riding a gravy train. People often start out writing with a story to tell. If the story becomes popular and changes their lifestyle they then have an incentive to keep that story going as long as possible.