“Let’s start at movie-making 101, shall we? Y’see, in most movies, the audience needs a character to connect with. Typically this is something called a prota-gone-ist. When you’re in a weird movie with like aliens and monsters and weirdos, the audience really needs someone who’s like a normal person like them to guide them through the story. Now this of course doesn’t apply to every movie, but it works best in the sci-fi, superhero, action, and fantasy genres”

If you haven’t watched the Mr. Plinkett Star Wars reviews, go watch them now, by the way. At some point I’m going to make a required materials list, and those will be on it.

We are 34 pages into Alice Grove, and I understand nothing.

I don’t know who the protagonist is. I’m presuming it’s Alice because her name is in the title, but most of the characterization has gone to Ardent.

If Alice is our protagonist, she’s going out of her way to keep me from relating to her.

Neither she nor the comic are explaining her abilities.

She’s apparently some kind of Dragon Ball Z character who’s from space and talks a lot about keeping the planet untainted by space people while using space magic to help them with their problems, a contradiction not explained to us. We are really late into this story to not understand who the protagonist is, what her motivations are, or what the fuck is going on.

The only reason I have any inkling as to who “Cupressacaea” is is because I’m presuming it’s basically Heimdall. This is a lot of technobabble here, and yes I can get the gist of it through context/assumption based on other popular movies.

All this comic is is a bunch of people talking about things I don’t understand because no one is explaining them to the audience. Freeevvveeeerrrr.

By the way, people have been saying there’s nothing happening in comic. Let’s put things in perspective. This is page 34 of Alice Grove.

34 pages was more than enough time to, for example, establish who Peter Parker was, establish how be got incredible powers, and then tell a story with a complete character arc about how he used those powers for selfish reasons and realized that with great power yadda yadda yadda. For a more modern comparison, Alice Grove is longer than the first two chapters of Gunnerkrigg Court. Alice Grove has kind of sort of established who the main characters are, the setting, and the premise of the first storyline. How long did that take Gunnerkrigg Court?

Not very fucking long, did it? I can get a pretty good sense of Antimony’s character just from her slightly-fancy word choices. I know the plot, and I get a hell of a lot of a better sense of the tone of the comic because there’s some style done. (99% of Jeph Jacques panels at the same camera angle, to the point where I was legit intrigued at AG at first solely because it opens with a bird’s-eye view)

Fuck, here’s page 3. We know so much about the Court itself just from seeing the dude in panel 5 here. Look how fucking snooty this NPC is. And he’s representative of “adults”, so now we know how the adults at GK seem to be. DONE!

Oh wait, hold on, Alice Grove also established the problem (the weird people are trying to get somewhere). How long did GK take to establish that?

Oh, four pages?



Okay.

"Essay Mod, you’re being unfair. Gunnerkrigg Court has a lot of panels, and Alice Grove only has four a page. You can’t compare like that”

Page four of GK is 600x841px. The latest page of AG is 800x1120. Alice Grove pages are significantly bigger than GK pages, and yet contain so much less. Not my fault if he’s using them ineffectively.