Marble Drive

Like any products of self-publishing, webcomics' greater freedom and creativity has always come at the cost of overall quality and technical skill. Even some of the more successful Y2K-era examples like David Willis, Shaenon Garrity or Pete Abrams could barely draw straight lines or write curved plots (to start) and the less said about wannabes that just ramble aimlessly about their inane interests, the bett- ... errr, but we were logging about comics...

Comics!

- come in flavors both antic and dramatic, but for today I'd like to focus on two adventure stories of the past decade demonstrating how such storytelling has improved over the slapdash accounts of college students fighting vampires from twenty years ago.

Drive's author has actually been around for some time, formerly drawing Sheldon, a comic with a ten year old billionaire, but the dot-com nouveau-Richie Rich never grabbed me. Drive on the other hand is a space opera pitting alien species of various heights, builds, limb numbers and dispositions in a multi-sided galactic war(s) zone. With bubble tea and secret pocket chocolates!

 

Marble Gate Dungeon falls at the other end of pulp F/SF routine, delving the titular dungeon by most tropes (if not strictly the rules) of Dungeons and Dragons. A gifted young hayseed cleric takes her chances partnering with a drunken surly old dwarf fighter after getting ditched by her roguish friend. Undead are re-deaded, traps sprung, elf buttocks admired, toads put in the hole and much ale consumed. While their core worldbuilding and main plots may be just decent enough to pass muster, both authors have shown themselves far more adept than the rest of their ilk in handling the endless parade of bit players, set pieces and wacky wayside tribes incurred in the scribbling of years-long comedias.

 

In Marble Gate such chapters are mostly organized dungeon floor by floor, interspersed with protagonists' backstories or side quests. While the heroine's hard knock backstory as a deprived peasant might drag a bit (especially as her religious elements hint the whole comic might devolve into a proselytizing pamphlet eventually) in detailing her motivation and determination it dovetails nicely between the initial excitement of the adventure's start and her later display of determination in seeking treasure. It even balances bit players' panel time skillfully enough to let them make an impact without monopolozing the story, like, say, Sluggy stumbled into with the Oceans Unmoving chapters.

 

In Drive it's the planet-by-star trekking, narrowly hefting its various aliens above the usual one-dimensional "species" of space operas by consciously padding out their communal personalities with at least one additional dimension. One race is inventors/poets, another inventors with a monolithic scientological faith, another inventors planetbound by their biology, another cantankerous yokels descended from gifted engineers, another matriarchal warriors with a tendency to hold grudges, etc. And weirdly, though it self-consciously skirts the "planet of hats" pitfall (sometimes literally) it successfully builds nuance via the multispecies spacefarer crews' interactions on each (others') world, revisiting and recombining these interactions every few chapters.

Both authors have a knack for incorporating smaller details as well. For Drive these mostly consist of each alien species' or various organizations' quirks, even incorporating evolutionary history more coherently than you'd expect from a space opera. For Marble Gate they tend rather toward the visual, like a monster's appendages indenting cloth or other inspired little flourishes that (much like Quentyn Quinn's attention to its characters' sensory experience) render the otherwise trite "I cast fireball" RPG routine more tangible.

As I myself discovered both when I tried writing in my youth and later when I started blogging, it's surprisingly difficult to pace one's output in the absence of editorial, professorial or other restrictions, to avoid rambling tediously or skipping past unwarranted assumptions of your audience's shared experience. (Come to think of it, this may partly help explain fan fictions' massive popularity, as the original work's boundaries take the place of general knowledge or self-awareness/discipline.) Overindulgence or incoherent rambling served both as creative wellsprings and laughable foibles in early webcomics. Drive and Marble Gate show far better self-mastery in that regard... and maybe sacrifice not too much creativity in the process. Maybe. They are, after all, both working in nearly terminally re-trod subgenres.