But first we’ve got some walking to do. Nale reappears – yet another apparition. The cell phone has been a nightmare for modern writers: many perfectly good, dramatic plots are undone when a character can just call another character. On the flip side, slow communication is a real hassle for pre-cell phone stories. So Nale’s apparition solves the cell phone problem pretty easily. He tells Roy that he’s taken Julia – Roy’s sister – hostage. He wants to swap Julia for Elan.
The team zaps their way into a town, whose name I can’t remember even though they mentioned it last page. RPGs are usually fanatical about worldbuilding – to their detriment, because it’s the wrong kind, focused on census data rather than human experience – but so far OOTS is indifferent about worldbuilding – to its detriment. Adventure stories rotate backdrops quickly, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But every story should strive for a sense of place, no matter how briefly these places will be inhabited. Compare OOTS to Gunnerkrigg Court; Gunnerkrigg has structures, rituals, roles, context. The world of OOTS is a series of differently-colored rectangles placed behind the copious speech bubbles. So far, Azure City is the best developed setting, and that’s just samurai-era Kyoto with a bucket of blue paint dumped over it. I give some points to the militant shogunate.
So: Roy waltzes into a warehouse, where Julia and two friends are tied to chairs. But no, the two friends are in fact the winged succubus (?) Sabina and the bizarro Vaarsuvius. Sabina throws Roy through the wall like in Mortal Kombat. Julia punts (Burlew’s sound effect) Roy’s sword, and he growls to Sabine, “Hope you left room for dessert, bitch.” +1 to the men calling women a bitch count! (#340)
While the trees uproot and begin to attack Vaarsuvius and Haley, we cut to the local police precinct. A series of grisly murders, when plotted on a map, point towards the very same park our heroes are in. I’m curious as to what the purpose of this is. Presumably Nale wants to frame the gang for something, or whatever, but the murders better have some function. Because there are other ways to draw the attention of police – like melees involving oak trees – than elaborate murder maps whose solving you cannot time down to the minute.
Back into the warehouse! +1 to the “bitch” count! (#349). The cops show up, Elan gets brained by Thog and bundled up, Durkon destroys the rampaging trees with a thunderclap courtesy of Thor: I’m not Randall Munroe, but I can guess that the decibel level required to disintegrate wood would ruin everybody’s eardrums.
Now, I wanted to steer clear of most content commentary, but in #355 Sabine, vanquished, tries to flash her way out of defeat. Roy hurls the topless woman out of a plate glass window. As she hits the ground (“WHURNK!”) he remarks, “That DID feel better than before. Nice piercings, though.” To which I reply: woof.
The battle continues – Sabine gets away – and the cigar-chomping head of the police loses his cigar-chomping head when Nale chops it off. Nale then dashes inside, cuts his goatee, transplants it onto Elan, and lays down on a pentagram, ostensibly the sacrificial lamb in a satanic ritual (#361). So this was the purpose of the serial murders.
Julia gets shuffled off the stage, though Roy calls her a bitch beforehand (#364). A job well done as far as the gang is concerned. The gang teleports back to Azure City, while Elan pleads his innocence from behind bars. Final result: Nale has infiltrated the group, and Elan has been marooned. I’m hoping there will be further mileage wrung out of Julia and the bizarro V, Pompey; otherwise the setup time for those characters was wasted.
Miko reenters the narrative, knocking on the door of a watchtower moments before Xykon does. She fights his lieutenant, Redcloak, inconclusively, as the lich imprisons her before disabling the warning beacon. Miko is not killed immediately, however: Redcloak takes the opportunity to belittle the paladin’s creed of fearlessness, and Xykon pitches her on the dark side. So… fallen paladin? Is there a TVTropes page for that? Yes, here it is, and sure enough, Miko is listed on it: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KnightTemplar
The gang is back in Azure City, and so are Sabine and Nale. But when Sabine pops out for an interdimensional errand, Nale decides to take advantage of his likeness to Elan. He goes to Haley’s room for some more mistaken identity farce hijinks, though his purpose is rape by false pretense. Yech. Wait, in the next strip he states his plan while shaving. “You’ll wine her and dine her and then, right when she’s ready to let you have her way [sic] with her, you’ll kill her instead.” I guess the “first alone, first killed” policy mentioned in #365 can be suspended in cases of added drama. I am relieved that this will just be a foiled murder attempt – the alternative is too skeevy. Belkar busts in and immediately lunges at Nale because he smells different. Nale charms him with a spell, and then… does not kill him. I’m not clear why Nale wants to be here. He told Elan in Cliffport (#351) that he didn’t give a “wererat’s ass about [killing] your friends.” Hopefully Burlew will have Nale clearly recap his plan, as characters are wont to do every now and again. For the moment he is that bumbling Bond villain and nothing more, concocting overly elaborate homicidal schemes when a knife in the belly would do it all much more effectively. This is a downside of the plot-heavy style of Burlew; there is nothing interesting about Nale besides his plans, and so readers are forced to critique his decision-making, which is really tedious. At this point I’d say that Durkon, Haley, and Miko are the characters who are interesting in a vacuum. (Ignore the mental image.) The rest are only functionally interesting, which is to say they are only interesting when they are doing interesting things. Not a good spot to be for a story like this.
Nale and Haley go to dinner and the jilted lovers Sabine and Elan crash in on them just as they kiss. Turns out that Elan enlisted the dopey Thog into a prison break, and they promptly secured airship passage to Azure City. Stuff happens, yadda yadda, and Haley final breaks her aphasia in #393. That was 146 strips since she contracted it, if you’re wondering. She celebrates her recovery by calling Sabine a bitch (#396). And she repeats herself in #398. We’ll consider it 1.5 for the sake of the count.
#400 sees the consummation of the Elan/Haley romance, and concludes with a shot of the inn they are staying at; one of Burlew’s infuriatingly blobby moons hovers above the roof.
I planned on focusing on just the structure, but as you can see this turned into plot recap pretty quickly. 400 strips in, almost halfway through the run as it stands, I think this comic needs to seriously dig into its characters. The obvious solution is backstory, but that’s not a good impulse. Developing a character by revealing their biography is kind of like defining a city – say, Cliffport – by deciding it has 100,000 residents. It is partially descriptive, yes, but indirectly so. Characterization is almost entirely behavior. Burlew needs to put the characters in more situations and contexts which will reveal them, preferably the unguessable parts. Since the characters are intentionally stereotypical, he needs to work at their edges, where the novelty is. Belkar’s psychopathic jokes, Durkon’s staunch loyalty, Roy’s rolling eyes… we’ve had enough of these, and now he needs to move into the unknown, which includes things like Haley’s self-esteem issues.
