Do I detect a smidgen of hostility?

The best part of this post has nothing to do with the image; the author's username basically identifies him as a self-proclaimed prick:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth. ("Outsider" is probably a better definition, but I like to think that context is what really makes the world go around).

Other than that, his "analysis" is actually pretty entertaining, although I don't know where the boob-straps come in. Still, it raises a question in my mind: where did the whole Mary-Sue thing come from? I know I've heard it in reference to this comic before, but I could never figure out why. Who exactly is the Mary Sue?

Also, why are the boobs talking?

Shibboleth wrote:

Perhaps I should explain.

Yes, that would be best.

Before I begin, a special mention.

Jomon Dogu. Aside from your brave attempt at sarcasm. Calling into question the art. The relevance and form of design. I think you may have missed the point.

Let me spell it out for you, slowly. It is not a hat. Nor is it a cone. Cutting though both suggestions were. It is a pointless structure. One could describe it as “vestigial”.

Now look at Mr. Diaz’s comics. Look at his, shall we say, designs. Sometimes belabouring or exaggeration is necessary to make an implied point. It seems for you, even this was not enough.

If I were to do this again, I would label it “pointless thingy” or somesuch so that you may comprehend what it is.

You seem capable of only understanding expository things. I suppose it was my flaw, that I over-estimated you in this regard.

That’s a lead in I can work with.

I shall begin with what it means to tell a story.

I. Dresden Codak as a Story

A good story is about so much more than its language, its surface statements and all other immediately apparent virtues. These are a conduit more than a product.

The greatest stories have their power in what they do not tell us, what is difficult to convey and must be worked out for oneself.

Let us refer to a wiser man than myself. Blair, though you don’t know him by that name.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the most oft performed of Shakespeare’s plays, for it is easy to act and tell. Yet it is shallow and the tale is simple. Scratch the surface, and there is no great meaning or moral. It is a popular play, but not a great one.

Timon of Athens is rarely acted, it is difficult and there is so much to try to convey. There is much not in it apparently that an actor must find and leave to be inferred. It is not easy. Yet it is considered to be one of Shakespeare’s greatest works, his greatest stories.

Mr. Diaz has given you a Dream while purporting to peddle you a Timon.

That is the first problem. There is little left to the imagination, to be drawn out by the reader himself. Allow me to illustrate.

“Metropolis” is simply a wall of exposition. Mr. Diaz is essentially using an entire page of his work to explain the concept of transhumanism, and “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” to explain neoteny. “An Exotic Matter” does the same job for time-travel. Admittedly, all are necessary concepts for his story.

However, merely dumping this in isn’t story-telling. It’s at best verbose and clumsy foreshadowing. One doesn’t need to know about axolotls to grasp the concept of neotonal Earth. He’s simply banging in facts because he knows them. It ruins the world he is trying to create.

A story that tries to explain it’s own allusions and methods of allusion renders them moot. It ceases to be a clever part of the story and becomes a bore’s lecture. Swift never says of Lilliput, “This is England”.

It’s like putting a brief history of Stalinist Russia into the middle of “Animal Farm”, or more analogously, like opening “The Name of the Rose” and finding a printout of an encyclopaedia page on semiotics has been stapled into it.

So why exposition? Why not leave it implicit? Why the walls of text?

Two suggestions.

Either Mr. Diaz is incapable of conveying concepts in any form except through a wall of text. If this is the case, he needs help writing his comics.

Or, Mr. Diaz simply thinks his average reader is much less intelligent than him and he needs to convey his meaning this way lest people not understand.

Furthermore, one must note that merely referencing oneself does not constitute depth.

Take the bottom left panel of “Copán”. It foreshadows nothing. It merely establishes an irrelevant object that appears later in “Epilogue”. Is it red in colour as it is a “red herring”? Implied foreshadowing of an irrelevancy?

Implied foreshadowing that foreshadows nothing is clever. Explicit foreshadowing that foreshadows nothing is, given the lack of the former, pretentious at best and patronising at worst.

But is there is a story to be told in here at all? “Hob” has a problem. The characters are flat. Kimiko is defined by science, and the other characters, by her. Events are driven not by people, but by rigid, distant philosophies. This is something that will be returned to.

The story itself is minimal. So much is exposition, so little is exploration. Who is anyone? Why do we care about them? Inexorable events on rails occur and that is that. There is no feeling of a world. It’s a lesson with pretty pictures, a parable without analogy, Virgil without poetry.
Turgidity and meaninglessness kill the story by smothering it in the cradle.

There’s no characters or events, only philosophies and science expressed through paper mouthpieces. Mr. Diaz has, in his tale of the birth of the world, created a dead one.

In closing this section, as there are four more, one must note that there is problem with a story that has really only one strand having nothing to make it work beyond that strand itself. As everyone sits there and spouts with no control over events, everything stagnates.

When inexorability is your strand, you have to do something beyond the explaining of the mechanics of the inexorable to make the story work. Mr. Diaz is either unwilling to or incapable of doing this.

Shibboleth's a troll
His thoughts are poorly argued
Bring back powerist