Although Pete Abrams is stretching out the knife fight between Oasis and Bun Bun. That starts here. (The plot starts moving a good bit before that.)
Actually, it was kind of spooky for me. A bunch of web comics that I follow started posting regular updates after months of big gaps. Then the plot in Sluggy started moving. I was waiting for the world to end for a few days, there. Then Order of the Stick and Goblins went back to big gaps and I could relax.
Anyway, if you stopped checking on Sluggy because it was spinning its wheels, you might want to hit the archive and catch up. Or you could drop in to watch the knife fight.
Oh, man. I haven’t read that thing in a good half-dozen years, after following it regularly for several years. I finally dropped it because it just got so damned weighed down with self-references and interwoven plot threads that I just couldn’t bring myself to figure out why I was supposed to care that this guy is talking to that girl who we last saw fourteen months ago. I like my entertainment entertaining.
If I have the willpower, I like to save up comics for awhile and then read a bunch of them at a time. You can tell how much I’m enjoying a particular comic by looking at the bookmark and seeing how caught up I am.
For instance, Order of the Stick is always bookmarked to the latest one – I have no willpower against its awesomeness.
XKCD is bookmarked to comic #591 – about a week ago.
PvP is bookmarked to the May 21st comic.
And Sluggy Freelance is bookmarked to the week of August 3, 2008. Now, Sluggy used to be in the same league as OotS, but man, has it fallen. I found myself waiting longer and longer between reads, and finding them less and less funny. Don’t get me wrong – Pete could still make me bust a gut now and then, but it’s nowhere what it used to be.
And it’s no coincidence that the date of that bookmark just happens to be the beginning of Torg Potter and the Giblets with Fiber. I just don’t know if I’m ready for another bad Harry Potter parody – each of the last three have set a new low point for the comic. Maybe I’ll just jump ahead a bit and catch up.
Wait…Oasis is back? Hmmm…
I was a regular Sluggy reader for years, but threw in the towel when the second “Torg Potter” storyline began. The main storyline was moving slowly enough as it was, and I felt suffering through one of those lame parodies was enough.
Really, of all the weak Harry Potter parodies I’ve encountered, I’d have to put “Torg Potter” at or near the bottom. It’s funny because everyone’s name is a stupid pun? I think not.
Megatokyo may take the prize for being the slowest-moving Web comic, though. It’s not just that updates were often late, it’s that strip after strip went by with NOTHING HAPPENING. I was never a particular fan but did read it semi-regularly, until I eventually realized that not only was the story moving at a sub-galacial pace but that the long-promised updates to the website were probably never going to happen. If you’re going to go years between references to supporting characters, you could at least have a functioning “Characters” section on your site!
I quit reading Megatokyo sometime in 2004. Then one day in 2006 or 2007 I was bored and thought “I wonder if anything ever happened with Megatokyo.” This was a good two and a half years since I’d last read the comic, and as far as I could tell it was only a little later that same day in the story. (Wouldn’t surprise me if it were still the same day even now in mid 2009.) I read a few recent strips and nothing had been resolved since I’d last read it. And of course the site hadn’t been updated either, aside from the blog.
Sadly, I agree. I quit somewhere around 2005 (I think Torg Potter played a part for me, as well). Which was sad, because it was the first webcomic I ever really got into.
Then, last year, I had some spare time and rediscovered it, but I had to start reading almost from the beginning to make sure I remembered things properly (plus, I’m a little obsessive like that and I was really bored). “That Which Redeems” actually made me cry; it is a really striking story that shows how good Abrams is when he’s not just trying to make pun after pun. Hopefully this next arc that’s starting will go in a similar direction (I also think “Roken” is one of the best arcs he’s done).
I guess it’s just a problem with serial comics; they’re hard to walk away from if you’re the author. Especially if you’re like Abrams and make your living from your comic; it’s not like you’re getting syndication money should you decide to end it. So, you stretch and stretch and stretch the story, with some pockets of brilliance just kind of floating in a sea of filler. (At least the filler is mostly funny with “Sluggy,” though.)
Edited to add: I also somehow, masochistically, manage to keep checking Megatoyo every week. I don’t think it’s made me laugh in over two years, but it’s so ingrained at this point that it’s practically a compulsion.
In comparison Schlock Mercenary has been running only two years less than Sluggy Freelance and if anything I think it keeps improving. There were a couple of extended storylines that I thought were missteps but that last one (starts roughly Feb-08 and runs a year) was the best that Howard Taylor has done. I think part of that is his move to think of roughly a year worth of strips as a “book” so he writes a mostly self-contained storyline for that period. It keeps the pace moving where other strips just keep padding it on thicker and thicker.
Taylor also manages to make each individual comic funny. There’re damn few, if any, that serve just to advance the plot without some payoff for coming by that day.
This. Also the first webcomic I started reading, so it’s a little sad. I checked back a few months ago, read a few strips, and had no idea what was going on or if it was supposed to be funny anymore.