Achievement Unlocked

[Nick]

This was quite an achievement, Jenny. Two successful webcomics you have under your proverbial belt now. Congratulations. Keeping a webcomic up isn't easy at all, and Pastel wasn't any little four-panel gag-a-day gamers-on-sofa deal either.

[Jennifer Diane Reitz]

This was quite an achievement, Jenny. Two successful webcomics you have under your proverbial belt now. Congratulations. Keeping a webcomic up isn't easy at all, and Pastel wasn't any little four-panel gag-a-day gamers-on-sofa deal either.

Thank you, Nick.

It was... a bit of work.

[Alikat]

Agreed, I think that in just a few years you've managed to create quite a legacy. I had always hoped that you would start seriously penning comics for public consumption, ever since I first saw your work, Jenny, and now that you have, I think that the results are fantastic. Screw all that video game nonsense, you've found a way to let people tap right into your amazing imagination with these comics, they are far more entertaining than some flash-in-the-pan, almost-immediately-obsolete game ever could be. I think that people will be reading these comics decades from now and enjoying them as much as we do now.

[Jennifer Diane Reitz]

Agreed, I think that in just a few years you've managed to create quite a legacy. I had always hoped that you would start seriously penning comics for public consumption, ever since I first saw your work, Jenny, and now that you have, I think that the results are fantastic. Screw all that video game nonsense, you've found a way to let people tap right into your amazing imagination with these comics, they are far more entertaining than some flash-in-the-pan, almost-immediately-obsolete game ever could. I think that people will be reading these comics decades from now and enjoying them as much as we do now.

Goddamn, that really hits the spot, Alikat. Just what I needed to hear right now. Thank you.

[Relee]

This was quite an achievement, Jenny. Two successful webcomics you have under your proverbial belt now. Congratulations. Keeping a webcomic up isn't easy at all, and Pastel wasn't any little four-panel gag-a-day gamers-on-sofa deal either.

Thank you, Nick.

It was... a bit of work.

Work nothing, it was your LIFE! And now your life is over! Mwe hee hee hee hee! XD


Okay okay maybe you had other things in your life.

[Monthenor]

Goddamn, that really hits the spot, Alikat. Just what I needed to hear right now. Thank you.

Not to derail the praise train so early, but with the fancy paper textures on that post I thought you said "peeded" and it was really funny.

Back on track! I liked the ending quite a bit. It was a little abrupt, but so was most of the last third of Heliotrope; great leaps in time that actually tied fairly closely with what had just happened.

[Alfador]

Goddamn, that really hits the spot, Alikat. Just what I needed to hear right now. Thank you.

Not to derail the praise train so early, but with the fancy paper textures on that post I thought you said "peeded" and it was really funny.

I peeded. But it's okay. It didn't leak, so my chair is fine.

[Volair]

Pastel Defender Heliotrope is a great comic. I freely admit, I like To Save Her and Unicorn Jelly better, but PDH has-- CRAFT. Loving detail in the illustrations and a beautiful, usually meaningful use of color really hit the spot. PDH also represents a fairly unusual expression of comics: using as much as a page of expository text underneath to flesh in any update's experience. In most comics, this would be laziness and nothing more, but as Jennifer has pointed out, Pastel Defender Heliotrope is about ideas. Big ideas, Astounding Tales-sized ideas. The stuff that old pulp science fiction mags that all us autism-spectrum types used to read, to the unending chagrin of our neurotypical English teachers. And there's just too damn many of them to put into a page.

So Jennifer compromises at a key pivot point, and in the end, I can call it nothing less than daring. There's no POSSIBLE way to get a character to explain what M-bag is. Everyone in this world knows what it is. And absent a classic "inquisitive fool" type character, the audience would never find out. So Jennifer puts on her wizard's hat and tells us what it is.

This would be infuriating from most authors. But Jennifer has also established a graphic pulse to these text updates-- they are part of the comic structure. Sometimes, a comic will use this often-long block of text as a quick dramatic flourish-- "Give Azure Shiro dark brunette hair, and you've just met my mother." As this usage (page 40) also establishes, Jennifer is using this textual "last panel" as a kind of personal aside-chat with the reader: part of the power of webcomics comes from the fact that readers interact with the creator in a far more personal way than with other media-- Jennifer capitalizes on this by stepping up and, Stan Lee-like, acting as a sort of cane-twirling entertainer, showing us the astounding tale's underside at each page, and sharing the place in her heart from where it comes.

Indeed, PDH often indulges in catharsis via disdainful caricature (sometimes consisting of just telling what happened), and although I argue this is mostly to its detriment, Heliotrope escapes becoming about the author's personal axes to grind because the ideas are so very very big and so very very shiny. On balance, PDH is not Jennifer's best character writing. But it is a showcase of some of the most ungodly beautiful artwork in comics, and a goodly dose of heady, Dr. Who-esque pulp sci fi.

Congatualtions, Jennifer, Pastel Defender Heliotrope is another great comic in the can.

[Alfador]

The stuff that old pulp science fiction mags that all us autism-spectrum types used to read, to the unending chagrin of our neurotypical English teachers.

I stumbled across a gem of a literature class in my last year at UW; I forget what the title was, but it was completely innocuous, just a generic literature class...

Until I saw the syllabus on the first day. It was all about "the monstrous form in literature" and covered everything from Beowulf to Frankenstein to Bisclavret. Seriously, has anybody else found a college-level literature course featuring an old French poem about a werewolf who's the HERO?! Who doesn't end up in tragedy? I forget what grade I got in that class but it was way better than it would've been otherwise, because I was INTERESTED in it!

*back on topic* Oh and... um... yes. Jenny! Congrats! PDH is awesome!!

[SvZurich]

Jennifer, the ending blew me away. I loved it. A perfect happy ending, selflessness on both of the ladies' parts, and showing hope exists when one picks a third option out of the 2 given. Kudos darling.

BTW, nifty board layout! I am digging it.

K, 34 today and taking a week off from work.

[Iustinus]

a third option out of the 2 given.

Aha! The tertium quid!

[Tychomonger]

a third option out of the 2 given.

Aha! The tertium quid!

And its champion, TQ! (use the bottom set of navigation buttons)

[Jennifer Diane Reitz]

K, 34 today and taking a week off from work.

Happy Birthday!

[SvZurich]

Thank you Jenny.

[Nick]

Happy Birthday!


It's good to have you back on the forum.

[Alfador]

Happy Birthday!


It's good to have you back on the forum.

Agreed! Welcome back!

[Alikat]

One of the things I love about the ending of PDH is that Fuschia/Cursor made an extravagant and unnecessary self-sacrifice for love's sake, and was at the brink of giving herself up entirely, and was perfectly willing to go all the way. The happy ending WITHOUT that attempted sacrifice would have been cheap and a bit Mary-Sue, but WITH that attempted sacrifice we witnessed the power of love transforming entire cosmoses and uplifting Destiny itself.

[Mesocyclone Goddess]

Cursor-Fuchsia makes a better ascended being than the Ascended itself, because unlike OoO, she still places value on an individual life, a single person's identity. OoO is a purely big-picture sort of entity, who will sacrifice people without a thought to serve some "higher" goal. Rather like Chou....

Ironic how an artificial intelligence did a better job of becoming (part of) an ascended being than the people who created it.

[Tychomonger]

Well, the thing is, when you are ascended, a generic individual life truly isn't important. You existing in eternity, see the blip of their life in totality, laid clearly out before you. To you, they are microbes. Do you worry about the bacteria you kill when you brush your teeth?

To the ascended being, the ontology of whole universes is much more real than the brief meat lives of the meat people they descended from. They have much more interesting things to attend to.

[Mitsukara]

Whereas the ascended ancients in Stargate are just dicks. And always were. LOL Wraith.

At one point Jennifer mentioned worrying about an association between the two... I wouldn't though. Trust me.