Re: Magick Chicks 29-07-14 Attack
Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2014 9:40 pm
Let's hope no one in the archery club has pointy ears.[/obscure French reference]Bambikles wrote:Bastoooooooon!!!!
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Let's hope no one in the archery club has pointy ears.[/obscure French reference]Bambikles wrote:Bastoooooooon!!!!
That part does seem odd, 'cuz after freeing the Asian looking student, she implied the wand wouldn't be enough and hightailed it. Which lead me to assume she was either going to try to come up with an alternate solution, or maybe she'd consult with Sandi to see if she could come up with anything.Varanus wrote:Personally I think things have flowed fairly well until this latest update where Melissa somehow has run back to Cerise for no apparent reason despite running away earlier and finding out nothing beyond what she had already guessed (that almost everyone is brainwashed).
You keep saying that, yet I've shown you several examples that prove otherwise.Cranium wrote:Battles are not Dave's strong point, comedy is.
I think this is completely right, and where things really went wrong was the scene-shift to "Hekate Academy". Here's the basic problem with the plot - since then, Cerise has become a joke, to be humiliated by Melissa, "Skye" or even Hekate at every opportunity, with the fluctuating power levels CFT mentioned. Even Tandy wasn't allowed to be properly taken out of the fight! [I still think that, rather than being dragged by the hair, when Cerise came in saying "I love an audience", Tandy should have been following her in the black Hekate uniform, having been turned/"infected" by Cerise with the stab. It would have allowed the stab to have immediate consequences since the writers are averse to killing anyone, it would have fit with everything else Cerise had been doing, and generated some angst in the ninja camp about going against their "sempai". Oh, and it would have added someone who's been built up recently as one of Cerise's slaves to up the stakes, since no characters we've actually been following were turned by her and her sidekick in the first place - the most prominent ones are Chastity and Ava, minor characters who hadn't appeared for literally hundreds of strips beforehand!]CFT wrote:I can't be exactly sure what the problem is but it seems to me as if MC has suddenly become aimless, lacking a direction and just flip-flopping between "cool" scenes without substance. As if the writers suddenly forgot both where they were going as well as how to properly present that "journey" and how to build up towards it (which frankly buffles me). Only in the last few updates we got: wildly fluctuating "powers" and abilities to cope with being physically hurt, totally arbitrary external interventions (that fail to at least contribute to character development), characters running away when they should fight and returning to fight when they should run (and changing between the two "stances" on a whim, as if they're Batman's Two-Face flipping a coin), out-of-character reactions (or non-reactions) and many more that I can't pinpoint now. All in all, a "mess" that threatens to ruin all the amazing buildup so far.
There's definitely something gone - have the writers lost interest in the scenario and want to get back to "normal" Artremis Academy and the "volcanoed" characters? The pacing has been upped, but not in a controlled way, in a "crap, we only have X pages left before cancellation, better wrap this up!" way, and Cerise-as-threat has suffered mightily for it. The moment Hekate started openly talking about Mel killing Cerise, she stopped being treated as someone who could end Melissa, and started being treated as someone who's only threat was the manner of her defeat.CFT wrote:But the most buffling thing for me is the "why?" question. Why did this suddenly happen? Why now? Nothing changed in the writing department (which continues to provide the same amazing quality in their other comics) and this chapter came right after two of the best ones so far (the camping trip and Mel's "origins" ones), so what's going on here? I frankly have no idea. Or I COULD BE TOTALLY WRONG, of course. Do other people feel the same or is this something that reflects more on me (did I change somehow?) than on the comic itself?
I think you're being a bit generous to Shouri there for three reasons - firstly, the "direction" of the scenes is absolutely the layout artist's job, and we've had it confirmed that Shouri does the layouts herself more than once. [Not that Cassandra was perfect in that respect, of course]. Secondly, the art shift itself has caused confusion about who "Skye" was or wasn't post-reveal - if it's Rain, he's almost unrecognisable, and if it isn't... well, that's a combined failure of art & writing (and tagging, I suppose. Even if the system was semi-borked, EC and Chloe were still having their tags updated, even if sometimes belatedly). And thirdly... this story has always seemed to be "writing for the trade" in comic book parlance. So if it's already very slow at two pages a week, the fact that we've been averaging less than a single page a week for the past month hasn't helped anything, and although that was partly down to Shouri being sick for a bit, on the rest it seems to be as much as anything else the result of her having over-committed herself (running the Ma3 kickstarter(?), inking/toning most of Giz's strips, writing & drawing Fragile, colouring for IDW and attending cons on top of pencilling/inking MC. It's not so bad with EC - even if there's still five blueline pages in the archive, at least we can read them, but it's killer for this)CFT wrote:[note: before anyone jumps into blaming the whole art-change issue, let me clarify that while it coincides with things going "downhill", in my opinion it's just this, a mere coincidence, and my issue is strictly with the writing, and maybe a bit with the "directing" of the last updates, which should still be more the responsibility of the writer than the artist.]