Was Dresden Codak any good?

Was Dresden Codak any good?

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Not really. It was pretty far up its own ass and far too impressed with itself, and any good ideas it had were never really fun to read.

It's a chore.

Not really. The panel layout was always dodgy as fuck and while the art was technically proficient and showed signs of improvement in both technique and execution, the schizophrenic plot – or, in all honesty, the lack thereof – and what can only charitable be described as an irregular update schedule undermined whatever charm it may have passed. Added bonus, the creator is an obnoxious asshole.

You can survive any combination of two of those, like a webcomic version of the iron triangle; but all three and the whole project is a lost cause.

Welcome to the New Lesbian: Super- Cyber- Futuristic... Space Hybrid!

>all this past-tense

Did he finally give up on this shit?

Has anyone actually done a summary of what the hell the plot is?

The entire fucking thing is only 80 pages, only a little bit longer than entire chapters of some other webcomics that I've read, but each page is fucking exhausting to get through;

>"brevity is the soul of wit"

Diaz's writing could benefit so much if just trimmed the fat a bit; of course he won't, gotta waste more time complaining about white people on twitter.

What's the point? It started off as Penny Arcade for philosophy majors and after a brief series of too-clever-by-half one shots in the vein of Dungeons and Discourse, it became some disjointed anthology if overeating bizarre science fantasies to justify the artist's burgeoning amputee fetish and Singularity worship.

What's that one joke webcomic image about webcomics where it's like, "Look at my totally empowered female protagonist! Now look at her getting totally naked in my comic, because she's totally empowered! Now look at her marrying my self-insert OC, but because she totally wants to!"

As I recall that comic was ABOUT Dresden Codak, which is a pretty damning statement to make about a webcomic that seems like it's being written for philosophy majors. But that itself is a problem too, the comic gets bogged down in a lot of dialogue that ultimately doesn't serve a purpose beyond philosophical wankery for it's own sake. It's a shame, because I actually like the raw aesthetic of the comic. It's well drawn.

I'm reading the oneshots right now and I refuse to believe this comic could possibly climb further up its own ass.

It was by the lady who does "Let's Speak English!"

>The entire fucking thing is only 80 pages
Are you fucking serious? i've seen this around for at least 4 years, there's no fucking way.

No. It's one artist with a robot amputee fetish making a bunch of pictures, randomly stringing them together with some text and calling it a comic.

The art is okay but the plot is impossible to follow because the guy has zero skill in setting up sequential art. You basically cannot tell which panel follows which, or which text bubble follows which.

So it's something unreadable with decent art.

I've always liked this one, but even this has some flow problems.

Jesus fuck that layout is an eyesore. How the fuck do the panels flow?

Dark Science started in 2007, I believe.
It's at page 81.

He has a Patreon. He's paid above min wage. He promised to update, what, twice a month I think? He does 4 pages a year on average since ~2012.

They doooooon't.

The man seriously doesn't understand conveyance, in word or visuals.

I recall seeing these characters before.
Can someone explain who they are/what this comic is actually about?

I've read this entire comic and I would also like to know this, user.

>what this comic is actually about?
Aaron Diaz, the author, faps to amputees and transhumanism and he fills this webcomic with his fetishes while pretending is something deep. In some way he's like a pseudo-intellectual Sup Forums.

This is actually a perfect example of how far up his own ass Diaz is.

hey cyber-lesbos are cool

How in the fuck do you spend this long making comics and still have no idea how to arrange panels in a way that doesn't make each and every page a migraine-inducing mess?

That is actually one of the things that made me drop the comic.
Once a creator stoops to the inevitable lesbians angle, they've given up actually trying to come up with ideas.

I've got one here for you


>Kimiko is introduced, and her motivation established: Get a job
>Yvonne is introduced
>Kim’s bag is stolen by The Shadowy League of Evil, who are introduced
>Kim fails to get a job; some worldbuilding is done.
>Melchior is introduced
>Vonnie returns Kim’s bag
>Balthazar is introduced
>Alisa Caspar is introduced
>Thomas Caspar is introduced
>Vonnie is emotionally devestated that no one will be her friend
>Prince Robot From Saga But A Cat is introduced
>Leviathan is introduced
>Kim and Leviathan fight
>The giantslayer is introduced
>In a plot twist, Kimiko uses an amulet to shoot lasers out of her head
>In a plot twist, Leviathan is revealed to be Thomas Caspar
>Thomas Caspar explains that Dark Science is separate from real science, implying it’s some kind of magic.

>Kim and Vonnie go to jail, but are busted out on the same page they’re thrown in.
>Asmodea is introduced
>In a plot twist, Vonnie turns on Kim and rats her out
>Belphegor is introduced as an individual character (as opposed to part of the league of villains)
>In a plot twist, it’s revealed that the robots worship Kim as a goddess
>Vonnie becomes the new Leviathan
>Kim becomes an Exode
>In a plot twist, Asmodea is revealed to not actually be Asmodea
>In a plot twist, Kim’s memories are revealed to be fictional
>Nod and Enoch are introduced
>Melchior helps Thomas Caspar escape from the League of Evil’s prison
>In a plot twist, Kaito Kusanagi is revealed to be a dude name Kim Young-Soo who was assigned the name by accident, and Kusanagi is revealed to be a PR stunt.
>Thomas Caspar attacks Kim, but it’s a hallucination
>In a plot twist, Balthazar turns on Kim and Asmodea
>Dark Science is revealed to actually be regular science that the Aligeri keeps from normal people, contradicting what Thomas Caspar said earlier
>In a plot twist, in turns out that the Caspar attack actually did happen
>In a plot twist, Kim realizes that her memories are correct and everyone else is wrong.
>In a plot twist, the Aligeri save Kim from the city police, and it’s revealed that they’re opposed to the city
>In a plot twist, Kim is revealed to be a Dark Scientist that Kusanagi freed and programmed to think was his daughter.
>In a plot twist, the Aligeri are revealed to have a vampire-like inability to cross running water
>Kim and Melchior escape Nephilopolis.
>In a stinger end to the storyline, Kim realizes that her dad’s alive somewhere.

tl;dr, Aaron Diaz attempts to make up for shitty release dates with plot twists and ruins the pacing of his comic in the process. Also, the layouts are still shit.

...

It's pretty enough, but its writing sucks in addition to being blatantly derivative without any innovation.
The artist is insufferable; it never updates, so there's little reason to keep up.

There are better, prettier webcomics

>webcomics that I've read, but each
Not that bad, DS is from 2010

Don't forget his unhealthy obsession with Ashley Birch.

DS started in early June, 2010. So that works out to be about one page every five weeks, on average, for about 7.3 years.

To put that into perspective, on the opposite side of the spectrum is someone like Aaron Neathery, the writer and artist for Endtown, who started his comic in 2009 and did 5 comics a week every week for almost 300 weeks straight apart from the odd holiday or convention until his overworking finally led to a medical episode that put him in the hospital for a month and he had to cut back to 3 comics a week.

I'm not saying Diaz needs to work himself into an early grave, but one page every five weeks, for an artist who makes a full-time living doing this, is fucking inexcusable.

I exiled myself from Sup Forums for a couple of years but i remember that being proven unfounded? or did i get fooled by a Diaz shill?

he clearly modeled his waifu after her.

To be fair Lackadaisy's been going on for almost 11 years now and only has about 150-some odd pages to it.

Granted Lackadaisy also has decent layout and an artist who doesn't regularly make an ass of themself on social media but still.

was the cat okay

kinda obnoxious, hard to follow, up it's own ass, etc, etc, all complaints are generally true.

I still dig it tho, Diaz' vision is pretty neat when i look at it as a whole, I think the art is pretty decent and i don't mind tricky/poorly flowing page layouts. I actually dont understand what bugs people about working to understand a page, promotes active reading which fosters a critical eye.

>I actually dont understand what bugs people about working to understand a page
Complexity of format is not a substitute for complexity of substance. Just because a page has to be deciphered like a codebook in order to understand the flow of dialog, doesn't make the actual content any less shallow or boring.

is this ever going to end.

Lackadaisy Cats creator can be criticized just as much on that count yes. She makes some beautiful comics but if I was contributing to her patreon I'd be pretty pissed about the rate she works at.

I don't even know how to read this page

>Was
wait dresden codak ended?

Wonderful art. Pretentious prick writer who wasn't writing to entertain but to show how much smarter than everyone he is. Still, lovely art.

Yeah, but Tracy has an actual comic job that she works on most of the time. Lackadaisy cats is a side project unlike Diaz's only income

Does the creator have an actual job, though?

This is the worst sin you can commit as a comic artist.

literal Dresden resident here

is it even about my town?

By all that is holy I pray this is a joke, but while I've never read more than a page of this shit when posted here to prove Diaz is a pretentious shitlord, I hope this is not accurate

I would hope someone with two brain cells would be able to realize that the story was going nowhere and the writer was making shit up/adhocking random situations together without any forethought

I mean people pay him for this, stupid people sure, but this is an insult to writing

Naw, the name is gibberish.

i have now seen Dresden in a title several times and it never has to do with our town

drives me up the wall

The only info I want from Diaz is if he knows what happened to Ryan Armand (Kiwis by Beat). He did a guest comic a long ass time ago for him apparently.

It was nice before. But Dark Science threw away what made it good in exchange for drawing his dyke waifu change clothes every three strips.

>you were best girl all along

I like the character design, almost always stop reading the WORDS halfway through.

Is her cuck faggot brother in Diaz story?

The shallow plot is the only way Aaron can justify it as feminist empowerment literature. When he's just doing character design, it reads as the male gaze-y cheesecake it actually is.

I can't figure out if there's a story to this shit or if every page is a self contained "look how smart i am" wank

>When he's just doing character design, it reads as the male gaze-y cheesecake it actually is.
Not always. Sometimes, it just comes across as faddish and creatively bankrupt, like the time he redesigned Cyborg as Richard Ayoade if he were an Aperture Science employee, because the IT Crowd and Portal were hugely popular at the time.

Kek, that Cyborg would have to replace that gun for a regular hand and stick to working behind a desk. Twig body like that wouldn't last long.

funny thing is alma is straight

>every page is a self contained "look how smart i am" wank
You know it's this.

Doesn't Diaz also have a real job?
IIRC he teaches visual storytelling at some university (something like that, anyway; I don't remember the specific subject only that it's hilarious for Aaron "this page makes no sense" Diaz to be teaching it)

>Doesn't Diaz also have a real job?
>IIRC he teaches visual storytelling at some university (

That's a thing he did like once over 5 years ago. His comic is his job.

That tweet he made about how far mediocre white men can make it in society is getting ever more ironic.

You're stuck in the past, you Luddite. It's the current year, creatives don't have to actually produce anything to enjoy a comfortable middle class lifestyle. As long as there are idiots willing to subsidize his goldbricking via Patreon, Diaz never has to produce anything.

Nope.
Nice ass shots though.

Hey, listen.
It's lesbians with no buildup or chemistry that's the problem.
I'm a lesbo and I and every other one I know fucking despise Diaz's shitty romance subplot.

Yeah, the artwork itself is the best thing about the comic, if not the only good thing about it.

Diaz would probably have done better to have started doing amputee muscle girl illustration commissions. It'd be a lot more honest and a lot less pretentious.

Hob was good, the one-offs were sometimes great, and Dark Science was drawn well. I haven't actually read Dark Science for several months though.

I will not tolerate my cybernetic nerd musclefu being a lesbian... at least not before I get uploaded into a female body chassis.

...

The artwork isn't even that good, he horribly crushes his work down to look competent, if you look at any full res screenshots you'll see his sloppy brushwork in all its glory.

What about when one of the girls in a comic is gay but it doesn't really come up much if at all? I think the real problem is less the use of lesbians and more "protag and her girlfriend we had no prior investment in overtake the plot."

In the good ending she considering to give it a try tho, so maybe they will hook up eventually

You had to remind me that this motherfucker published just one big comic and it was a motherfucking hobby project.

No, but the bombing was an attempt to stop it from being published. Fucking time travelers.

Are you saying Masamune Shirow is shit these days?

Because he is.

Some of the earlier comics were pretty good, and it didn't get bad enough for me to quit until Dark Science.

That's just how faux-intellectuals write comics, man. They have so many great ideas and EPIC twists that they don't take structure into consideration or plan things in advance. Take former /hyw/ comic Chaos in the Tropics for example.

>Introduces setting and main character
>She finds an old book and cloth in a sea cove
>Goes home, introduces her pets
>She has super powers now!
>Super powers are explained
>Introduces tech savvy friend
>Mysterious event happens in distance
>Introduces a swordfighting mermaid
>Introduces three evil sharks
>Heroes retreat after a drawn out action sequence while protag mopes
>MYSTERIOUS guy watches
>Plot twist, two of the sharks aren't evil!
>Introduces a nudist because...
>Introduces an old man because...
>Introduces a girl with ice powers because...
>Introduces the threat of a tank rolling into town.
>FIGHT SCENE
>Flashback infodump introducing a bigger badguy
>More fight
>Badguy trashes an incidental robot, leading to a flashback about why the protag cared about it

And then they never updated again.
People tolerate writing like this because it's the norm in webcomics. Actual structure and climaxes are a rarity.

shawnstruck.blogspot.com/2014/08/open-letter-to-aaron-diaz-stop-hiding.html

SO GOOD AT MATH

I can't figure out the order to read the panels. And what's with the gratuitous panty shot?

It's a shame the art didn't look like this more often.
This page is actually pretty competently laid out and that first, flowing panel is really quite nice.

It's been half a decade or more, but I remember something to do with time travelers and a God AI. The Time Travelers come from a future where the God AI tried assimilating everything, and the humans understandably weren't terribly happy with that. Said AI followed them back. Uninspired SCIFI plot, but whatever I've seen way worse.

Then they encounter Ashley Burk, who actually sides with the machines for some reason. It ends with the robot assimilating the humans against their will, and the twins Ashley hinted at having a three way (or something) mourn their deaths. I think.

two assholes

Hob was alright, and then completely shit the bed with a complete asspull ending

Thank you, i thought i was insane with all this people clamoring it so much.

Years ago you could say that it was upper tier when you could isolate it on the still limited world of webcomics, but nowadays staying on webcomicland even it's nothing special, the fact that the guy stopped improving years ago only makes it worse.

There was a brief moment when it looked like a remnant population of human-Eloi time travelers on the brink of species extinction after being told to fuck off and die by their God-AI had then managed to after grueling effort, a suddenly discovered penchant for ruthlessness, and some treachery take the Galactic Singularity head-on and beat it, but there was more to the story.

What's worse is the "medicore white man" he was referring to was Will Eisner, who was neither mediocre nor technically "white."

i can't believe this is still going on.

Certainly not at the time. Antisemitism was much more prevalent in the early half of the twentieth century.

i remember the highlight of the whole thing being the philosphy take on Dungeons and Dragons, just because I could actually see that being a semi-fun game for tabel top but really it wasnt that great

...Cave man comics were alright too i guess

rest of it was so far up its own ass it could taste the back of his own throat

The one off gag comics were ok.

When it added story was when it went to shit.

>Penny Arcade for philosophy majors
Apt.

That sounds retarded, but awesome.

It had its moments.

Moment, singular. Your pic is the only good DC page.

i think it has potential.

the problem is that diaz has a planet sized ego, unable to meet deadlines and overall a pretty bad writer.

he really needs a editor or a co-writer to keep him on track but i think he all but blackballed himself from working with anyone.

Good thing he has a planet size forehead to store his planet size ego.

His hairline is about the only Cuban thing about him.

that was the one, thought there was more than one caveman strip but turns out it was all on one page

i thought the philosphy dungeons and dragons had a little potential to be interesting but it went no where in the end

Speakin of Lackadaisy, in about two hours there's gonna be a live strim on twitch, for those of you who know where to go.