Order of the Stick - Book 5 Discussion Thread

I’m pretty sure, somewhere down the line, Burlew will put out a book collecting all the kick starter strips. I’d buy one, and I’m getting all the PDFs already.

I think the extras kicked in at a tenner, so not that much at all.

Having checked the kickstarter page for it, I was in at the $35 level and I got the pdf.

I thinking of kicking $20 or so, but hesitated too long. I later bought Origin of PCs and Start of Darkness, and was really let down by the greyscale artwork. And in retrospect maybe I wouldn’t have like today’s pdf - is it also greyscale?

It is greyscale, but honestly I loved it anyway. Then again, I loved the prequel stories too, so YMMV.

Thanks, yellowjacketcoder. I guess I wouldn’t have liked today’s pdf in any case. Go me for not getting it! :smiley:

I don’t really hold the b&w art in the prequels against him. When I got the .pdf of D&D miniature cut-outs, I decided color them in (with PhotoShop) to kill time during lectures. It was fun, but Jesus, that was a lot of work. I’m not surprised Rich decided to skip that step when he was making those books on top of the regular strip and whatever it is he does (or used to do) to make a living outside of the comic.

I suspect that coloring doesn’t take Rich as long as it took you-- He’s probably using tools better suited for it, and he’s also very used to it. And it’s not like grayscale coloring is much quicker than true color. The main reason the prequels are (mostly) B&W is cost of printing. For the PDFs, I dunno.

And personally, I colored in my miniatures after I printed them, using good old fashioned Crayola markers. Or at least, the ones I use for my character and his animal companion. No way I’m going to color in the full zoo of things he summons.

I figure he will. He’ll certainly have enough material by the time he gets done all eight reward stories.

Just finished reading Haleo and Julelan, and it was fantastic. It’s also the only place you’re likely ever to see these fights:

Haley vs. Therkla; Thog vs. Crystal

I doubt it. I was using a professional graphics package and a Wacom tablet, and while Burlew certainly has more experience with both then I do, I have enough experience to recognize that there wasn’t much i could do to speed up the process beyond what I was already doing.

But good point about greyscale likely taking as long as color fills.

I have no doubt it would take Rich much less time than it was taking you to do the fills. And not because he’s more used to it, but because his process probably isn’t very similar to what you were doing – he works on the strip in Illustrator as vectors (cite). If you’re working from scanned OOTS artwork, you’d need to select and fill a zillion small areas of a comic. Rich would be working with the vectors and shapes themselves and applying fills to them, no pixel selection needed, which is a whole heck of a lot faster.

ETA: I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Berlew works on the grayscale artwork in mostly final color and then applies a grayscale palette to them before printing. This would make it quite fast to later turn around the same artwork for color printing if he wanted to publish higher-quality, colorized versions later.

All comics are created in the state that you see them. If they are printed in black-and-white, then I drew them in black-and-white. It would be an enormous amount of work to colorize them or decolorize them, so I am unlikely to ever bother.

I am TOTALLY first this time!!!

I like where this is going. I know Tarquin is TEH AYVIL and all, but I can’t help but like the guy.

He has a certain, as the French say, I don’t know what.

Hey, you don’t need a low Charisma to be evil. Nor do you need a low intelligence. And Tarquin is very polite.

Ooo, plot expositiony goodness! How much time will have passed since V was taken out of the action, I wonder? For that matter, how long has it been since Sabine was pulled out of this plane? Has a night passed yet?

And how often have I been in this state of mind? ‘Oo, a new OotS! Yay! Aw man, I can’t wait to see what happens next – when does the next one come out?’ I swear, it’s worse than eating potato chips; one just makes you hungrier for more.

I wonder if there’s any significance as to the psion turning up now…

You mean, since V fled in panic? Two hours, tops, IMO. Or since the TF hijacked her soul? Obviously still less than 20 minutes or whatever was their portion of her soul this time.

No. That ‘dusk’ Roy mutters about would be the beginning of that night, so there’s a long way to go before Sabine comes back if the strip stays in real time. If there’s a time-passing panel (“we’ll camp here for a day, good night everyone”), then she could be back just after.

Anybody know which flashback panels? The expository ones where Tarquin talks about conquering/losing/conquering kingdoms? And later disagreeing strenuously with Nale?

I think it’s probably connected to the significance of Tarquin separating the Order into two groups: those he might want to keep around and those he has no further use for…

duh duh dunnnn

Seriously, I’m guessing Tarquin is going to ask Elan to do something with the psion standing by to ensure he answers honestly. And the threat will be Roy, Belkar, and Durkon get killed if he gives the wrong answer.