Comic Discussion > ALICE GROVE

Alice Grove MCDT - January 2015

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Wildroses:
I think it is better if you eliminate all thoughts of QC from your mind as you read AG, although that might be harder for some people than it is for others. I imagine practically everyone who reads it (including me) started doing so because it is done by the same guy who did QC. So the danger of expecting something exactly like QC and being displeased because it is not is higher.

I consider QC and AG quite different because of the emphasis. In QC Jeph put a lot of work into the characters. The plot and the world his characters live in are of secondary importance as readers are invested in the characters, and they want to see what happens to the characters and how they react to certain things. So in QC the plot and the world's primary work is to give the characters a place to exist and react.

In AG, we have the reverse. What is important is the plot and the world. The primary work of the characters is not to make readers like them, it to show the readers what sort of world they live in and reveal the plot, and Jeph has chosen to do this by not quite revealing everything so his readers are full of questions. It was effective in my case. I'm not following AG because it was done by the same guy as QC anymore, I'm following it because I want my questions about both societies answered.

And just to be clear, I don't consider characters serving plot or plot serving characters any better than the other. Both are valid, and as all people are different it is possible to prefer one without having bad taste. However, if you are the sort of person who thinks character is more interesting than world building and plot (and there are probably a lot of you because of QC), be aware you will probably never like AG as much as QC. That doesn't make AG bad, just different. Lots of artists want to experiment with different things and don't want to make the same piece of work again and again.

ReindeerFlotilla:
I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm not comparing AG and QC. The relation I described above was just refulting Isyrion's suggestion that AG and QC started at a similar pace. They did not. There were several character hooks in QC by strip six.

Taking AG as it's own thing, I still find it wanting. Story is character. Character is story. Or more accurately, Plot = Character plus Conflict.

AG is nigh 40 strips in and we don't know much at all about the putative main characters, and have very little feel for why Vicissitude's conflict should matter to us. Not to mention it was just introduced.

I rather expect AG will do just fine, in the long run. Name recognition goes a long way, and there are plenty of other ways to drive new readers to strip (other artists). I'm not prognosticating, I'm not complaining. I'm offering a structural critique.

As a reader, offering no comparison to QC, I don't give a damn about AG's world or characters.

I've been somewhat over focused on the sympathy side. John Grisham knows you don't need sympathy to create an audience hook (I once tried to read everything he'd published, and found that I couldn't deal with any of it, because his characters were too unlikable to root for but not unlikable enough to root against. That said, Grisham was a best selling author and his book were being turned into movies in job lots. So he was doing something right). And, to be fair, AG started off raising decent hooks on the mechanical side.

The issue is what I call The X-Files problem. If you raise interesting questions that are not fundamentally unanswerable, the audience expects answers. In AG's case, the question raised for the starting block is "what is Alice?"

Now, the right thing to do is to string the audience along. Rather than giving them the answers, give them more questions. I call this The X-Files problem, because the was a certain point in the shows run where it became obvious that the writers were never going to answer any of the questions. Like, they didn't have answers. Right around the point, the show's rating declined.

The X-Files went for years, AG has had months. But I don't think I'm premature. X-Files got away with what they did by offering answers to the questions regularly. It just turned out every answer was another set of questions. AG has raised questions but barely touched on them.

I look at it this way: What if this was a comicbook? Given that one of Jeph's pages is about half a comic page, it turns out that the end of Chapter one lines up nicely with where a 22-24 page comic would end.

Would you buy issue two?

I don't know that I would. I don't know I wouldn't, but I do know that if I did, it would because of the author, not the story.

BenRG:
@Reindeer,

Your problem is the 'I am the world" fallacy. Just because you consider those things to be problems does not make that universally true. I, for one, will come back because, with these questions posed, I want to hear the answers and know that they may be many chapters away. To me, this is a feature, not a bug.

Neko_Ali:
I actually find these mysteries that have been put out to be the reason why I want to keep reading. This first chapter was just basic set up, presenting the reader with a world similar to one we are familiar with, then introducing things showing that it's a lot deeper and stranger than we know, starting from the first 'How did she survive that fall' and 'who is this blue monkey kid?' So far we have been introduced to several principle characters, a couple of conflicts and story hooks and a small bit of world building. That is really pretty standard for the first chapter of a story. It only seems long because of the slower update schedule of the comic. If this were a comic book, or a graphic novel or written book, we would be talking first issue or a few dozen pages here. You can't expect a huge amount of characterization and resolutions at the very beginning, though we did have a small three part arc with hook-conflict-resolution between Ardent, Alice and Gavia.

Or to put it shortly, this is just the introduction. I find there are plenty of hooks that have my attention that I want to know more about. It's way to early in the story for us to know everything, or even a lot of things about those characters. The story is being written along the lines of a longer, more episodic format than a web comic 'important stuff/punchline every day' format.

Method of Madness:
Yeah, I also have enjoyed it so far, quite a bit.

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