Dear Girl Genius - I Quit

[jeriendhal]

Seriously, I'm giving up now. The downhill slide that I noted with the never ending medical arc has just gotten worse with the Battle of Mechanicsburg. It's been going on for roughly two years now real time, all of a day (maybe) in Comic Time. I could deal with that, if I could be assured that there was... I don't know... some kind of end in sight. But there isn't.

Phil Foglio made his reputation in Dragon with "What's New With Phil & Dixie", happily poking fun at the conventions of RPG's in 1 to 3 page bursts. Then he moved on to full sized comics like Buck Godot and the infamous Xxxenophile and proved he could do long format too. Girl Genius was his and Kaga Foglio's masterpiece though, an epic storyline through a fantastic alternate steampunk gas lamp Europe, simultaneously taking apart and embracing the cliches of MAD SCIENCE! with the same skill Phil did with RPG's.

And at first it was good. Agatha was an engaging heroine, Baron Wulfenbach an intriguing and sympathetic villain, and the initial stories, with the Airship City and the Circus of Dreams, were entertaining.

Then we got to Mechanicsburg and it all went to Hell.

The current story, to put it in the gentlest possible terms, is a damned mess right now. I cannot for the life of me describe it beyond "There's a lot of fighting going on" because it's been going on so flaming long that keeping up with the multiple plot lines and the now enormous character zoo is just too damned exhausting. Who the @#$% cares about a weaponized tunnel boring machine fighting a mechanical squid in front of a cathedral run by an intriguingly clad nun? IT DOESN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE MAIN STORY, which is the conflict between Agatha and the Baron.

Note, I said "conflict" not "battle". The heart of the story, at least in the beginning, was the Baron having to deal with the return of the Heterodynes, which he feared (and rightly so as it turned out) would break the Pax Europa he'd established. This was a fight between Agatha's beliefs and the Baron's, between the right to be a Spark of Conscience and the iron, lobotomized control the Baron wants to impose.

But instead of that we have the Battle of Mechanicsburg, which is a bloody mess and which seems to have gone completely beyond the control of the Foglios to impose any sort of coherency on. Freefall has some horribly long plotlines as well, but at least it can provide a punchline at the end of every three panels.

Girl Genius only provides punches now.

Comments

[avanti-90.livejournal.com]

I quit a while ago for pretty much the same reason. At some point I just couldn't keep track of what was going on in Mechanicsburg, and I found I didn't care enough to work it all out. Pity; it was so good for a while.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

I'm still reading because I like the characters. The plot . . . yeah. The lost-and-sick-in-the-castle arc got tedious as hell. The current insanity is also unfocused.

I suspect Phil needed the discipline of stand-alone pages or comic books to wrap things up. The webcomic has no end, so he can keep adding stuff indefinitely. The "books" are roughly arbitrary chunks of the webcomic rather than intended to stand alone.

Maybe doing the prose versions will teach him some discipline.

[allah-sulu.livejournal.com]

Walk away for a while, let it go for a while, then come back and get caught up. (I've done this more than once with more than one strip.) Comics move a lot faster when you read through an archive than when you're waiting days in between each update, making the pacing entirely different (same principle applies to watching marathons of TV shows vs. waiting weeks and months between episodes).

[seawasp]

This. Though I'm not having any trouble tracking what's going on in the important areas and I actually see it ALL as connected to the conflict with the Baron.

[natf.livejournal.com]

See my comment below about Sluggy Freelance and GG.

[lennan.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think I quit a few years back because of that. All I really remember when I walked from that story was that I couldn't see the point of it and there were a lot of weird side stories going on that killed what little plot progression it had. I can't invest myself in a story where I can't see that it has an end point in mind.

[natf.livejournal.com]

I too skip past it (both GG and Sluggy Freelance, if I am honest) in my RSS reader but so far I have resisted unsubscribing. I probably should. I have played poker with Phil and Kaja and do not want to seem unsupportive to them, even to myself, I suppose. Hubby still reads it, apparently.