The GREAT NOUN ADVENTURE RETURNS!
A year ago we did a big, weird noun-voting experience over on Patreon with my $5+ patrons and this year it came back with much fanfare! And now you get to see the bizarre results! It’s a pile of weird nouns just thrown into a blender. What will result? Well…
VOTE TO EXPOUND WITH A GREAT DEAL OF NOUNS!!!
As for this comic…
The appearance of the Hotdog Guy indicates that the story arc has come to an official close. Puck’s debriefing with him seem to have evolved into a structural story arc closer. And that will inevitably cause some confusion with newer readers who are confused by the presence of a hot dog in the psychotherapist’s office. Suffice it to say there’s deep lore going on here.
I personally look forward to these psychotherapy comics because they’re relatively simple to draw. It’s just four images of Puck; the only complexity comes from whatever outfit I choose to put her in. And this is a simple outfit. My wife gave this dress the seal of approval, but that makes sense because she has a number of dresses with a very similar cut. Art vaguely imitates life, I suppose.
Just wait till the next cosplay trip.
There won’t BE a next time. I can’t deal with another.
Never say never…
I swear that looks like the curtain dress.
What? No! This is cute! You just have no appreciation for floral patterns.
Saw it hanging in a window and had to have it?
Playboy bunny Heather?!?!?
I think I need brain bleach…
I think they sell it on the Internet.
Hey, it’s Hot Dog Guy! My favorite character!
I was honestly curious if we were gonna see him again but given how the last arc was about them dressing up as the Scooby gang… yeah, I wasn’t sure how it was gonna make sense to have HDG appear in front of them. Glad to see he’s back, at least.
He shows up at the end of every story arc for a debriefing, like clockwork.
So Mrs. Gecko dresses similarly to Puck? Sounds like the cosplay adventure is still ongoing….
Sometimes. When I first met my wife, her style was quite Puck-like. As the years have progressed, her style has remained mostly similar, but there are many outfits that Puck sports which she would never wear. And my wife hates bows. Puck loves bows. That’s a difference.
Soooo … Does that mean that you are like Colin in some respects?, and do you own an ascot? (sry lol)
I do not own an ascot. And Colin is the stupid, immature man-child side of me, so yes, I’m a lot like Colin. But honestly, Puck is more of an accurate self-portrait for me than Colin is. So in short, Puck looks and dresses a bit like my wife but acts and thinks a lot like me.
If you take the selfishness and anger of Puck, and mash that up with the immaturity and foolishness of Colin, you get a pretty good approximation of my personality.
HDG is like Warner Brother’s “Th-th-th-that’s All Folks!” only with more dialog?
—
Perhaps that which canonical Puck discovered in herself comes from her distant Shakespearean past. There’s always a good time backstage!
Wot U sed! [personal anecdatum deleted]
HDG is more like the ‘moral of the day’ section of the old He-Man show, framing and explaining what you were supposed to learn from the last half hour. Beyond learning that you need to buy more toys.
THAT’s what we’re missing: Toys!
The mind boggles ….
The Phoebe actin figure comes with a play sewing machine and real knitting action!
Exciting!
Um . . . I guess this counts as a breakthrough . . . maybe?
Breakdown, more like it.
OhByTheWay, Puck has just taken 11th place in the TWC voting, passing Realm of Owls.
I always dreamed of one day passing them.
But really, it’s “Spying with Lana” that I have a friendly competition with. We dance around each other on that list every month, never far away from each other.
Well, when the music is throbbing in your blood and the lights are flashing like the stars in the sky and the bodies are swaying like a forest in a thunderstorm, then …
It takes two to tango.
Do the team over at Lana know about this?
The ‘team’ is Sean. And I don’t know whether I’ve directly verbalized it. But I’m sure he feels the spirit of competition through the ether.
I don’t *think* Lana has ever been in Hamilton.
Not asking for a crossover; not confident any of the characters could even understand the other universe
No, that would be nonsensical to the point of being broken. My friend Shan (from Exiern) did hire Sean (from Lana) to do some Puck fan art a while back, and while the results were beautiful, the stylistic dissonance kinda broke my brain. My characters just don’t work in that style. And I’m sure it would be truly disastrous if I tried to draw Lana.
1 can be a team. Don’t listen to can’t-do people who try to be reasonable with you! And don’t forget family. Friends. The people who run his local deli.
But yeah, you’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking.
The comic looks amazing, so assuming it’s a whole team would be reasonable.
You managed to make the pattern on the dress at least plausibly reflect Puck’s shape, which is no mean feat, and she does look especially cute in it.
I think this dress is super cute. And the pattern adhering (somewhat) to her shape is a result of a vector warp.
Leeeet’s do the vector warp agaaaaaaaain!
My friend Leah would never forgive me if she found out I hadn’t done that that. And now she won’t!
Now she will be so proud.
So if people who get emotional and sexual arousal by dressing as a forest dwelling mammal are called “furries.”
Then people who get aroused by demanding comics cosplayers must be “commies.”
COMMIES!!!!
This is as good a title as any.
As a clinical psychologist/clin psych professor, I alluded to offering hot dogs to clientele in one of my lectures to see if anyone got the reference. Not yet, just a couple of predictable Freud assumptions. I’ll keep trying.
You will never, ever get anyone who will understand the reference. And even if there were someone who understood the reference, they would never acknowledge such a thing in public.
Few are that cool.
And they all reside here.
Did HDG ever have his cart in Hess Village?
No, just on campus. Hess is a little too rowdy.
I like the Hot Dog Guy. Not just ’cause he heralds the end of an arc. Because honestly, I didn’t catch onto that. I wonder why.
She’s been around for a while, I catch her drift.
[No, I can’t post that. Never mind.]
I’m sad that you didn’t post that.
It wasn’t classy. Puck would’ve given me the side-eye. And the side ear. Maybe even the side-nose! If I’m really unlucky, I might get some satire, mockery (not the fun one), parody. Eeek!
Life is absurd, sometimes you just gotta get down with it.
Also, yes the costume can be iconic.. when you wear it beating your way through all of the 90’s sci-fi and fantasy. (If you’re like me, you already hear “Twilight” playing)
I thought it was all of 70’s and early 80’s sci-fi/fantasy. If it’s Daicon IV we’re talking about.
Good point.
As always when we get more Emily, thank you 🙂
And in the comic, realizing that she was too mean to Phoebe and Colin was willing to call her out on it wasn’t self discovery?
Yes, the elements you speak of are FAR more significant examples of character development. But they’re not as funny.
I’m wondering, did she also learn those other things, or is she only mentioning the roleplaying to Hot Dog Guy because that was the only part she found memorable?
Well, I think she learned those things. I think the Hotdog Guy found that part the most interesting, though.
Hahaha
Of course 😉
Totally understandable.
Okay, super curious. You’ve said a version of “I don’t want to go through that again” to a couple of questions (ex. “Will Puck have another kid?” “I don’t want to do another pregnancy arc.”)
So let’s say some big studio bought the strip from you for a million dollars to make a TV show or something out of it. Are there any ideas that *you* would never do that you think it would be hilarious to watch ANOTHER writer try? Or, any plot developments (like more kids) that would have you (sipping your caviar-infused champaign in a diamond goblet) laugh and say “Oh, those hacks will NEVER be able to do this series justice!”?
(Respect to Sam Logan)
No one would ever make a show out of Puck. I’m not sure even I could make a show out of Puck. The premise is just too weird and too big a hurdle for your regular person to buy into.
My hesitation with certain story arcs has more to do with the medium. The fact that an arc can take a few years to run through means that new readers will often assume the comic is ‘about that’. Case in point: I recently heard from a former student who checked out the comic a year ago and dismissed it as a Scooby-Doo parody. He only discovered otherwise when going back to read from the beginning.
If someone were adapting the comic to a new format, I’m guessing the restrictions of said format would be different. I don’t really consider any story concepts verboten … as long as the characters remain intact. If the characters start to act in ways that don’t make sense for who they are, that’s when I’m upset.
And that’s a likely outcome of other people adapting your stuff, I guess.
I felt the same problem when I started reading “Giant Girl Adventures” partway through a story arc set in a DND universe (basically rerunning TSR’s “Against The Giants”.) Recently that arc wrapped and it’s on to something new but in my heart I can’t help thinking of the protagonist as a fantasy character now visiting our reality.
It’s not the fault of the author or artist, I guess it’s just the peril of having story arcs, and still worth it to the reader, I believe.
I wonder if this is a particular risk for webcomics; I can’t think of many or any example in prose literature, movie series, etc.
Yeah, I think webcomics are particularly susceptible to this sort of thing, because they update continuously but (for the most part) slowly due to the fact that most of them are labors of love by single artists. It’s easy to get the wrong idea when a comic spends two years of its run time on a goofy Scooby-Doo side story. Like this comic.
I only read webcomics starting from their beginning. I can’t fathom how anyone could expect to understand and enjoy a story if not reading it from where it begins. But maybe I’m the odd one out, that tends to happen 😀
I think that (from what I’ve seen) it’s a 50/50 breakdown. Some people just go from where they picked up. Others read from the beginning. If I’m going to participate in some wild stereotyping, I’ll say that I’ve seen older readers tend to be the ‘from the beginning’ types whereas any younger readers I’ve picked up tend to never go back and read the archive.
Perhaps my experience with “Giant Girl Adventures” may be instructive. I landed in the middle of her “Against The Giants” arc, found it interesting, and started over from the beginning of the arc. To get caught up was an investment of an hour or two.
However, the comic itself has a lot of volumes, and I was not willing to invest the time to start from the beginning. Maybe someday.
It seems to me that many of the Puck arcs are similar. We can figure out the relationships and basic characteristics pretty quickly from their appearance and dialogue (Puck being 600+ y.o. and Phoebe being a literal child of Satan is rarely important to understanding the plot and the humor.)
For example, if we’d started with Prom arc it might have been a surprise to discover Phoebe’s daddy lives in town, but not totally surprising considering the horns+tail.
That’s my goal. If you can get a sense of the characters from a single arc, then I think I’ve done my job. Some people may be thrown by the fairy and devil stuff, but if they’re looking for answers, they won’t find them in the archive. There are no answers to be had.
Maybe as an animated cartoon . . . I don’t say live-action couidn’t work, I do say even then there’d have to be much use made of CGI.
Wacko and Jacko and Dot singing the Puck theme!!!
There’s a Puck theme?
There’s already a chorus.
“Puck, ancient fairy of lore”
It’s been there from the beginning.
Just need a muso to score that and go from there.
Not me unfortunately, tin ear, cant carry a tune in a bucket, tone deaf, abysmally arrhythmical.
One day, maybe a song will conjure into existence.
So, Puck reveals that she likes it when Hubby asserts himself, eh?
Only when he ascots himself. She’s not there yet otherwise.
Only when dressing as another man. Which is … telling.
For Puck and Colin, the cosplay outing turned into a kind of foreplay. 😉
The best kind of cosplay often does.
Hmm… So, Puck finds it arousing when a man wearing a tie chastises her. Part of me wonders if Colin will get into the habit of wearing ties. Another part wonders if you’ll introduce her father as a tie wearing guy with a strict frame. If he’s not the mythical Oberon, then perhaps Puck’s dad is a military officer?
Puck’s father is the cold north wind. He doesn’t wear a tie.