Is he? Most everything we’ve seen in the comic has corresponded to their official alignment. We haven’t met any good aligned goblins, or good aligned black dragons, or good aligned undead. Burlew seems to be more about making evil characters who have understandable motives, or charming personalities, but who still act in ways that are clearly malevolent.
IIRC, there were some teenage rebellious goblins who acted good out of, well, teenage rebelliousness. Much to the dismay of their parents; "You’ll drink the blood of the innocent and like it!"
Personal power is what makes him who he is today. Without it, he’s just some schlub. In the cinematic words of Henry Hill:
Anything I wanted was a phone call away. Free cars. The keys to a dozen hideout flats all over the city. I bet twenty, thirty grand over a weekend and then I’d either blow the winnings in a week or go to the sharks to pay back the bookies. Didn’t matter. It didn’t mean anything. When I was broke, I’d go out and rob some more. We ran everything. We paid off cops. We paid off lawyers. We paid off judges. Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now it’s all over. And that’s the hardest part. Today everything is different; there’s no action… have to wait around like everyone else. Can’t even get decent food - right after I got here, I ordered some spaghetti with marinara sauce, and I got egg noodles and ketchup. I’m an average nobody… get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.
I remember them, but within five strips, they’d “grown up” and sold out the OotS to the other goblins in the dungeon.
I don’t know about that. If he came back to life with exactly the same personality he has as a vampire, he’d still be friends with Tarquin, who seems to hold some genuine affection for the lizard. And I don’t see why being a non-vampire would necessarily threaten his position as head of his church, which presumably mostly derives from his cleric levels and organizational abilities. Being high level isn’t a necessary prerequisite for being a national leader, as we saw in Azure City, where Lord Shojo just had levels in an NPC class, and not all that many of them.
I think Der Trihs has it right - Malack sees being resurrected as a reversion to a personality he has long since shed. He views it as being turned into a different person entirely, and is not merely concerned with being depowered in some meta-gaming sense.
Nitpick: Shojo did have a lot of Aristocrat levels (16, IIRC).
The primary significance of Malack’s 200 years dead is that it means that he couldn’t be resurrected at all, at least by any caster short of epic. Resurrection has a time limit of 10 years per caster level, meaning Durkon would have been limited to 150-ish.
We (at least, those of us who have bought the print books) have seen at least one goblin who seems to be good, and we’ve all seen a good kobold. But those don’t matter much, since goblins and kobolds are both just “usually evil”. That just means more than 50% likelihood for any given member, but even going by the strictest rules, still leaves plenty of room for exceptions. Of species that are listed as always a particular alignment, we’ve only seen one or possibly two exceptions: Enor the neutral half-blue-dragon, and possibly Sabine who seems to behave as lawful evil rather than the chaotic evil that’s normal for a succubus (though her alignment hasn’t been confirmed).
Which ones?
Right-Eye is probably the aforementioned Good-aligned goblin.
The good-aligned kobold mentioned is probably The Oracle, but that’s rather dubious in my view. He seems pretty neutral to me.
In addition to the reasons Roy actually mentioned, there are a couple more reasons why I think he was in such denial about Durkon. Belkar really did not help himself with that “turning undead” pun. And Roy and Durkon knew each other for a couple years prior to forming the Order; Roy, in fact, was the first human ever to treat Durkon with any kind of respect.
Anyway… the Order may be up shit creek anyway, but they absolutely need to find V (and V needs to get over her Heroic Blue Screen of Death) or they’re really in trouble.
Not that the information would have been current anyway, but I got curious about this and looked it up and I was misremembering. No information in Deities & Demigods about flipping deities. Rather, the Krynn sourcebook said that clerics who change alignment immediately lose two levels. They also lose all spells until they find a new deity. I have no idea if those guidelines were ever used outside the Krynn setting though.
The good-aligned kobold is most likely Yokyok the son of Yikyik.
Yeah, that’s got to be it. The Oracle serves an evil god, and he is on the “bad guys” side of the big Order of the Stick poster.
YokYok doesn’t seem terribly good-aligned to me.
But you know what they say about the only good kobold.
And we’ve seen plenty of those.
Oh, yes, forgot about Yokyok. D’oh!
That’s where the thought comes from that Yokyok [del]is[/del] was good.
And from the commentary in War and XPs: “… I did try to hint that Belkar’s opposite was also the odd-man-out, alignment-wise, on his team… only Yokyok was noble in the company of villains…”
I really need to buy some of those books …
You really need to buy ALL of the books.
Ouch. Not at $30 a pop, I don’t.
It looks like most of the strips are available online anyway and I’ve already read them. Just the old Dragon Magazine strips and the prequel book have material I haven’t seen (unless I’m judging wrong).
Not completely. Burlew usually adds extra strips to the main story when he publishes the books.
Well, I like Burlew’s stuff and all but I doubt I like it to the tune of $5 a strip for new work 
I’m not saying that you have to buy them all at once. However, Burlew does put more content into each books, and sometimes re-orders the strips within the books.
Personally, I find it much easier to read the strips when they’re in a book, and I WILL buy the new book when it comes out.