Order of the Stick - Book 6 Discussion Thread

Cue the panel with “The Little Psion That Could”… (“I think I can. I think I can. I think I can!”) 494 DMILF - Giant in the Playground Games

Shamelessly stolen from their forums.

Drunk Roy is hilarious Roy. Watch there be a random encounter now…

I think there was something about anachronistic magic trains in Cliffport, too.

Excelsior!

I’ve written before that I feel Bandana is supposed to serve as a counterpoint to Roy in the story. So her continuing to work with Andi is the equivalent of how Roy continues to work with Belkar.

1187: Somewhere Between Super and Mega

Well no splash page, no diabolical twist; Book 5 just keeps on running. I’ve thought it for at least the last 5 strips but surely next one is the last.

I do like the punch line. Hayley remains my favorite character.

Elan has come a long freaking way as a person over the course of this. And of COURSE he’d be the one to understand the plot consequences of allowing Roy his drunken sleep. Nice save, Bard-boy.

Talk about character growth! Who knew Elan was so perceptive?

I love the expression on Minrah’s face: ‘Just what group of lunatics have I agreed to go fighting with?’

Still no end banner, and I guess the next strip is when we’re going to see what cliffhanger Team Evil, the Directors, or someone else entire, has in store for us.

I just got a notice from Ookoodook that the 6th book is off the presses and will be shipping the first week of December. If that’s true then there will be no end-of-book banner and dramatic reveal. Very much different than previous books.

Or … He’s been dragging out the last few pages because he was busy with something and doesn’t have anything past that book to publish.

I just assumed he’d finished all the strips ages ago and was just dripfeeding them to us to reduce the hiatus between books.

But this **has **been a rather protracted denouement.

Obviously he can change his mind but I think he once stated he had a police of never having buffer strips. Once it’s finished, it’s posted.

However it does seem clear there is at least one strip to go, if it was the last one of the book he’d have announced it as such surely, even leaving out the near-obligatory twist/cliffhanger that everyone expects for the last strip.

As long as the thread’s revived anyway.

It occurred to me that Burlew appears to have successfully misdirected us. When this strip ran, there was a lot of speculation (some of it mine) about how this was foreshadowing and what role Bloodfeast would play in the upcoming confrontation.

And now we know. None. He apparently just took a nap during the whole time.

I thought for sure that the Chaos Giraffes’ purpose was to foreshadow that the room would be high enough to allow Bloodfeast to rage.

Mildly disappointed there don’t appear to be Chaos Giraffe plushies available.

“Off the presses”. Huh, that is different than I remember him handling prior books. Glad he got it out on time.

My guess is that 1181 is the last strip of book 6. There was a three week break between that and 1182 and that’s when he got the book off to the printer. There was no black-panel notice because he wasn’t expecting to have a two or three months-long break while he got the entire book ready for printing. He’d done a lot of that beforehand, so just needed to fix up the last few strips. Or something like that.

1188: Perpendicular to the Sunlight

Huh… Now I’m wondering what’s with Roy.

Massively hungover is my guess. Drunkenly snuggling up to the animals in the Bag of Tricks made me go, “Dawwwww!”

Felt like a closing out strip, but nope. Maybe next one will show us what Team Evil is up to?

EDIT, I also like how casually Burlew disposed of the Sphinx Pox issue, that was clearly just a joke, but that people kept going on about like it was going to be a significant plot point later on.