El Goonish Shive

"The trauma in store

Breathes all hot on your heels

 

You've got a little spell

Memorize the lines"

 

I:Scintilla - Sequins and Pills

 

 

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Spoilers for the webcomic El Goonish Shive follow, though it's hardly a mystery novel.

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This comic repeats itself.

I've been reluctant to talk about El Goonish Shive first of all because I've been expecting these past couple of decades for it to gain some clearer definition, some dimensions amenable to measure... but as that doesn't seem to be happening, I might as well start referencing what there is to reference, especially the ways in which this comic repeats itself.

Second, having met the author long ago knocks a sizeable dent in my objectivity as I resent the crap out of him for proving able to create something at least borderline enjoyable, unlike myself. Make no mistake: though I'll be bitching him out, I've been leafing through his drawings now and then for 19 years while he's never heard of my little blog, so Shive wins this little ersatz reunion by default.

This comic repeats itself perhaps inevitably for its age, being among the few still running from around Y2K, with the rarer distinction of having recovered from a major tonal shift. At its start it largely riffed on anime clichés: teenagers endowed with superpowers via nonsensical phlebotina battle monsters, authority and each other, with the ensuing slapstick providing most of the humor. After only a couple of years the various slapfights escalated into a goth-tinged Dragonball climactic battle called Painted Black which obviously comprised the author's proverbial "wad" for the time being.

Then most of those characters were never heard from again.

So what do teenagers do after your squirrel-alien-girlfriend-chi-fireball-throwing-ingenue's abusive adoptive nuclear father blows up leaving your half-animal shapeshifting brothers to ride off into the sunset as humans?

Throw a karaoke party of course.

That ate up about two more years.

 

After falling back on the lowest common denominator of relationship dramedy for a while, EGS eased into a pattern of superpowered mentors showing up to let each of the cast discover their AMAZING UNTAPPED POTENTIAL. In due course, this comic repeats itself from one of the original protagonists discovering he has superpowers and creating a superpowered female duplicate of himself who gets a soul implanted by an alternate-universe furry, thereby discovering more superpowers, the tech-head discovering he might give himself superpowers and rule the multiverse (... or something, that part's no longer canonical apparently) the squirrel girl discovers she has even super-er superpowers from her extraterrestrial heritage, an elf and some fairies and a medieval magician and an extraplanar magician and mysterious force of chaos show up, with the end result of a couple of other teenagers discovering they have superpowers, a fairy reveals secrets of creation resulting in another character remembering she has superpowers, the force of chaos (being female) turns out to be well-intentioned, resulting in a few more teenagers getting superpowers, the first guy gets even more superpowers courtesy of the all-pervading force of magic, which then gives even more superpowers to even more random schmoes, the last nonmagical member of the core cast gets her own superpower by befriending the nice chaos girl, the first guy's new girlfriend discovers she has dragon superpowers, the tech genius rediscovers he had even super-er-er superer powers than all the other superpowers all along, which, incidentally involve discovering superpowers in others...

...

For a fun exercise, try counting the times any of these kids have actually utilized their newfound abilities, in any context other than revealing their existence or testing them gratuitously. What have all these devices plotted?

This comic repeats itself also by falling into the modern fad of introducing an endlessly redundant, all homo-/bisexual cast to toe the politically correct line, and worse, putting its older characters through unofficial gay conversion therapy to bring them in line with our modern presumption of the moral superiority of homosexuality. Weirdly enough, though my one previous mention of EGS here criticized one of its more heavy-handed politically correct moments, the gender politics angle rankles less than in contemporaries which have undergone a similar forced queering like Something Positive or Questionable Content. From its start, EGS had a long history of playing gender-bending for a quick chuckle here and there, and its more recent self-righteous tinge remains muted compared to that of newer comics.

Then they had another year-long pizza party.

No, its main problem is that this comic repeats itself, both in larger trends and day-by-day reiteration. Skim through the past decade and count the repetitions of "magic could change at any moment" coming out of various mouths, even as this comic repeats itself by filling page after page with verbal recapitulation of past or current events between characters just now finding out that "magic could change at any moment" even as this comic repeats itself by soulful declarations of every new character's true fee-fees and admiration for one another and yet another fairy godmother shows up to demonstrate how this comic repeats itself by bestowing new superpowers on yet another this comic repeats itself.

Then they had another year-long pizza party.

There you have EGS' appeal: rewording and re-casting, endlessly, the moment where a young adult fiction protagonist discovers "the power was inside you all along" and gradually conflating that notion over the years with eschewing muggle sexual identity.

So what makes it worth reading? Why haven't I abandoned it like I have endless others? Well... he's good at it. Conceptually, in its slapdash excuse for world-building, EGS is a pile of crap, never having outgrown a sophomore's disjointed ramblings. Still, Shive manages to wed every new redundancy to revelations about characters' own internal conflicts and constantly re-evaluates their characterization in a surprisingly self-conscious manner, including a particularly inspired recent moment where two of the protagonists force each other to confront their exaggerated martyrdom and self-flagellation. The nonstop navel-gazing, in its better moments, amounts to an ongoing, two decade long writers' workshop in comic form. With bonus boobies.