I see that Questionable Content is touching on the sexy librarian thing today. Having said that, today might not be the greatest Questionable Content for the first-time reader. As the drama has ramped up lately, the funny has gotten a tad stale. The artwork has gotten pretty amazing lately, though, and I quite enjoy the strip now, just in a somewhat different way than I did before. I think Jeph Jacques's doing a good job of keeping QC a gag-a-day strip, even as he moves it in a more serious direction and develops the characters. Things are sort of in transition now for the characters, and once things get settled again I'm confident the funniness will return to prior levels. In the meantime, I recommend going through the archives.
Though, having said that, my heart belongs to R.K. Milholland. If you only read one webcomic on my recommendation, read Something Positive. That is all.
Son of a bitch!
I mean, not you personally, but as a general statement of aggravation. I went to read one Questionable Content comic and then I had to go back a few strips to try to pick up the storyline and before I knew it I was backtracking all the way to see what was going on between Marten and Faye. I wound up all the way back at Faye's big exposition. Do you know how many comic strips that is? Or how much I'm supposed to be writing reading responses for LGBT Studies right now instead of reading?
*sigh*
Also, it always astonishes me when cartoonists manage to make their cartoon characters hot. It shouldn't be possible; they're just drawings. But QC is so full of hotness that it's leaking out between panels. It's amazing.
Oh. And, because something's gone horribly wrong with Cementhorizon and your comment form won't let me enter a URL that isn't currently working, and I didn't think to enter some other URL to stop it from showing my email address, it's showing my email address. Can you do something about that (gibberishify the address, put in something innocuous for the URL, anything)? Thanks.
Done.
I actually have a nice sketch of Faye from QC that I got from Jeph Jacques hanging over my bed; it's one of the few things adorning my largely-barren walls. I met him at the San Diego Comic Convention this last summer. He seemed quite nice, though I didn't really say much because I got intensely shy as soon as I realized who he was. I had to pace in the near vicinity for about five minutes before working up the courage to go up and buy the TEH shirt that I now hate. He offered to do a sketch and I stuttered out a sure. He asked who I wanted sketched and I utterly forgot the names of all the characters in the strip. Eventually I remembered Faye, and so there you are.
Still, though, he seems nice. And he also seems to have put more effort than any comic artist I know of into improving his artwork.
Thank you greatly.
Oooh. I was intrigued enough by that last statement to go on a first-and-last-strip archive trawl of QC and my two standards for radical improvement, Penny Arcade and Goats. I tend to think that the latter two both started out worse than QC started out, and now they're all pretty much comparable. Mind you, QC is the only one I'd actually call hot.
So if you'd been able to marshal your full mental faculties (granted that this never happens to real people in the presence of anyone they admire, but just assume), who would you have asked for? Still Faye, or someone else?
Hmmm, I'm going to have to disagree on early strip quality. The early Penny Arcade strips demonstrate at least some attention to detail and hard work, if not much development of talent. Early Goats is well-staged and is put together reasonably well for dashed-off sketches. Early QC, on the other hand, has the painful look of something done entirely in MS Paint. Look at Marten's goofy rectangular eyes and elongated torso. And my God! Pintsize!
I'm less sure about current artistic quality. It's fairly easy to note and compare flaws in the early strips when the artists are just struggling to convey a scene and haven't really developed a personal style yet. But how do you compare modern PA, Goats, and QC? QC's pseudo-realistic sexy, PA is classic comic strip/cartoon characters (mixed with Gabe's other styles like Cardboard Tube Samurai and Twisp and Catsby, of course), and Goats is outlandish charicatures. I agree that none of them as presently constituted is notably better than the others, but I disagree insofar as I think QC started from a lower baseline.
As for who I'd pick? Hum. Probably still Faye. She's overall the character I find most fun and interesting (though she has the advantage of having gotten more lines than any other character save Marten, and of having more character development than any other character, period).
Marten would be a close second, and I nearly got a sketch of him when I almost returned to buy another shirt. But, alas, I was tempted by the siren's song of the Scoop-of-Dice and spent the last of my convention budget on role-playing supplements and dice of many sides.
Related sidenote: I have to say that I don't think anything good will come of this Marten-Dora relationship. That is, I feel like Marten's involved out of a combination of rebounding from rejection by Faye and sexual frustration, while Dora's scavenging opportunistically. Of course, it's hard to even envision the relationship, given that the entire strip so far has been a Moonlighting/X-Files/Rachel-and-Ross/Niles-and-Daphne style "when will they finally start their inevitable relationship?" thing between Faye and Marten. I'd be very interested to see if Jeph Jacques takes it in an unexpected direction by actually having a meaningful Dora-Marten relationship develop, rather than using it as a speedbump on the road to the eventual Faye-Marten hook-up. But we'll just have to see.