El Goonish Shive/ The Shamalan of webocomics

I can't think of a worse writer than Dan, say what you will about Willis and his inability to understand even one iota of the issues he tries to cover but at least he can set up a plot and execute it.

Dan has spent years setting up Diane as being Susan's sister, but now in a few days he has decided there is actually no evidence and she probably isn't her sister.

The fact that this comic is 85% exposition was bad enough, but these "Twists" he keeps insisting upon are just stupid. Then you hop over to the strip comics were a person explains some complicated made up BS only so the character can then do exactly what was stated as impossible.

This shit is aggravating. Its like BVS there is a good story in there somewhere just need to get rid of all this useless fat.

I haven't read it in years but the author had a chronic problem of suddenly visualizing a "new direction" and story arc for the comic about 2/3rds of the way through the currant arc, so suddenly fucking his plot set up, lore, and characterization is totally consistent for him

It was only recently that i actually realized that this guy might have an unhealthy obsession with telling the audience EVERYTHING. More than half the comic is exposition, there are a bunch of Q&A's and every page commentary is him explainning something.

I think he might actually think his fans are idiots

I figured that out YEARS ago, I only read now for my fetish and best girl Tedd

Maybe I'm defending him because I do still enjoy his work. I want to say in one of his little blogs a few years back he said he's gotten to this point of dumping so much info because a good portion of his readers demand it. They demand to know the minutia of every thing, particularly how a spell works.

At least he's gotten around to doing lewds after all these years.

Imagine if it was Tedd who was femduplicated and not Eliot. That would be a really different Moperville.

I'm torn. I want to hate Dan for his writing (and unironically making a character "genderfluid") but I just can't and I don't know why.

Grace is best girl, fuck you.

>I want to hate it but I can't
this seems to be Dan's super power, he can create this mediocre product that's loaded with retarded fetish shit that should be painfully irritating but you just can't get worked up enough to really despise it, and this observation is fairly common among those who have dug through it going back like 10 years.

Dan is just a cool nigga that draws sexy fetish art.

Isn't this that shitty genderbending fetish comic? Why would you read this trash, let alone expect decent writing from it?

Wait... is this still ongoing? I remember reading it in my school's library during study hall... that had to have been more than a decade ago.

We read it for the waifus. We realize it's terrible and leave only to come back for the art style and waifus. So it's just a vicious circle of bs

i guess because it never became sinfest or dumbing of age or questionable content.
it always kept that naive, nerdy playfulness at its core.
el goonish shive feels too innocent, there isnt spite, or an axe to grind or chip on the author's shoulder, it just the guy telling whatever silly sci fi-fantasy story he wants to tell

Ashley or Rhoda; you may only choose one.

There used to be dozens of webcomics I used to read but now it's just this one. I should hate it, but I don't. I actually kinda love it
>not Susan

She is her sister, just not in the way Nanase and Ellen think she is.
The Dewitchery Diamond is involved.

I wonder if Dan Shive is that guy that complains about how every piece of media, every story doesn't explain it's world enough, down to a myriad of details that don't fucking matter.

i gather that if you ask he can probably come up with hundreds of plot holes on the spot but ultimatly doesnt let that get in the way of him enjoying something

That sounds like a symptom of writing your own long running work.

>Susan
I can tell you are a man of taste

...

The problem is a lot of them are. Haven't seen Dan's, but any other webcomic community I've been in has been FILLED with people who can't understand basic concepts like "she hates him because he killed her father" or something that was explained three pages ago. It's like those people who walk into a movie halfway through and ask a bunch of questions about the plot.

We'll he hated the midichlorian thing and explicitly mentioned how it ruined the mystery of the force. Personally I think it's him just being overeager with his story

I'm trying to work myself up to giving some of these webcomics a shot

It's hard not to do that when you're storylines last YEARS because you have to show every little detail.

Honestly I'm not sure if Dan has autism or he's just appeasing his audience who are all retarded because apparently they bother him with questions unless he explains every little thing in minute detail

I would still say that Willis is worse.
He's become a parody of himself.

Story-driven or gag-a-day.
I've got recommendations for both.

>Story-Driven
Sam and Fuzzy
It's Walky
Dead Winter
Broodhollow
>gag-a-day
Channelate
Chainsawsuit
Jerkcity
Bug Martini
Square Root of Minus Garfield

I like how his artstyle encorporates 3D imagery.

>Its like BVS
BvS was bad for different reasons, one of which was the director's style.
Zack Snyder is good at creating moments, but not complete stories.
Hence why BvS looks better than Civil War, but is a worse film overall.

dan doesnt try to push an agenda and he doesn't use strawmen to be a douchebag.

he just draws lighthearted fetish fuel and has fun with it.

actually, this big 'twist' I'm pretty sure is dan just pointing out holes in the 'impeccable' logic of the main heroes.

now, the whole magic changing thing being a big TWEEST caused by the other immortal dude, I thought that was dumb.

HNNNGH. Why doesn't Dan just do stuff with this?

He's pretty prudish and uncomfortable about sex for a fetish artist. Gotta play the long game and slowly push him towards lewder and lewder stuff

His brain can't handle awkwardness, that's why he goes to pains to make sure nothing is misunderstood.

I like it.

One day we'll get him to do Cheerleadra smut. one day.

his fans are the same way. he goes into so much detail because the fans demand it. look at how many Q+A segments he has to do, and how many of them just go into the minutae of his world.

But the thing is this page is entirely unnecessary in context. The previous page ends with them saying "We think Jerry think's you're sisters." We know how the characters came to that conclusion, there's no reason why we shouldn't just infer they gave all the details and skip to the next thing. Why does this recap of logic the audience already knows need to be explicitly shown? It wastes a whole page, delays the next thing happening by 2-3 days, and the comic is FULL of useless pages like this. Probably why it takes like a year for one week of in-comic time to pass

Yeah. Do you know Kill Six Billion Demons? In a recent page there was a character talking about how she was an asshole in the past, and that meant that the loyalty of those that served her was easier to buy than dirt, while showing in the panel a hand offering money to a slave.

In the thread we had people asking if that hand was the hand of that character. They thought that was her for some reason paying her own slaves, instead of a slave being bribed in the panel talking about how easy was to bribe her slaves.

People are retarded.

I'm still thinking she's not her sister just because she's her from another dimension or some shit like that.

>she's her from another dimension
In that case, we may finally see another appearance from Lord Tedd.

Whenever he does something slightly ambiguous, he'll wind up with a note in the commentary on his next comic about how he had a lot of people who didn't t understand the previous comic.

He's trapped in a living hell of terrible fans.

>He's trapped in a living hell of terrible fans.
Such is the fate of most webcomic creators.

When is Elliot just going to realize he likes life better as a woman? It's been going that way for YEARS now.

Yeah, Dan's primary problem is being unable to ignore the dumbasses. He's become more and more overexplaining, because no matter how obvious an inference you write, there will ALWAYS be someone who gets it in a completely stupid way, and Dan is not able to just go "fuck these people".

Every single time he's tried to do anything by inference or insinuation or just leave things in the air, the very next comic he's like "okay, so I thought this was clear, but apparently not because so many people just mailed me to ask WTF, so here's this extra this extra comic I added in the middle in order to explain everything in detail for them".

Maybe he'll come to the conclusion that he's Gender-fluid like Tedd.

>I think he might actually think his fans are idiots
Nah, he just really like his worldbuilding, and isn't able to deliver it very smoothly.

visit the webcomic form, observe the autistic retards frothing over every little thing Dan does.

>observe the autistic retards frothing over every little thing

Dan is just so eager about it. He's not really pandering to anyone but himself. Basically, for a creator, he's kind of adorable, so he's hard to hate.

He also has a relatively consistent update schedual (Main comic + side comic 3 times a week).

well with Dan it won't ever happen but one can dream

I mean, Tedd being kind of genderfluid had been obvious for a while. Dude actively became a woman or a man during different tasks because he felt more comfortable in one or the other depending.

Well, there was the card game arc.

Still, Dan's never an asshole by intent and he's astoundingly lacking in egomania for a guy who's been doing webcomics for more than a decade.

To be fair, if anyone in this cast was going to be revealed to be "genderfluid" it'd be the character that has a long history of genderbending.

i had to drop it with the birthday arc. that's when i realized it would never go back to being just whacky fetish antics

I don't think Dan is a good writer, but OP also doesn't seem to be a very bright reader. One of the things that make webcomic readerships so utterly dumb is that some people insist on reading webcomics as if the latest page is the final development. If they don't yet have all the information on how magic works -> iiiit makes no seeense! If a reveal is hinted and then the slightest amount of doubt is introduced -> whaaat now they aren't sisters after all!

Nah, it's just trying to (clumsily, but like I said, not a good writer) introduce some last-minute suspense so they can be revealed to be sisters after all: note that the page isn't saying they're not sisters, only that nobody knows for real. That or maybe the above anons are right and they're more Elliot and Ellen type siblings (with dimension hoppery or magical duplication).