Girl Genius: Worth catching up on?

[Trixie_One]

Used to really like this webcomic. Was probably top three for me up there with Digger and OOTS.

Owned the first five or so trades, and even read the first two novels that were much improved ways of telling the story thanks to fleshing out and polishing stuff. So suffice to say I was decently invested back in the day.

Thing is it got to the timeskip (the first if there's been more than one of those since, it was after the Heterodyne castle stuff if that helps), and I was finding the going to be a real slog. There just wasn't enough going on per page posted given the update schedule. Tried doing a once per month check like I was doing with some other strips but even that wasn't a satisfying read. So I figured I'd park the webcomic with the theory I'd eventually come back to it which would hopefully circumvent the pacing problems.

Been waaaay more years passed than I'd planned, and now I've got to the point where I'm wondering if that full on level of archive delve is worth it.

So how are people feeling about Girl Genius these days? Some light spoilers are okay to discuss names of arcs in general, but hoping to avoid anything to specific which is why I'm not blindly diving into the main thread to ask this.

[BRC]

Comic is still going strong, but the pacing...


Well, it's not AS bad as it was during the Castle Arc, but it's certainly not great. They never really solved the core problem of juggling multiple side-plots while also making each page stand on it's own with a joke or cliffhanger, which makes the actual interesting plots move very slowly. They're still dealing with what I call the Triple-pacing problem. They've got a fascinating grand story, but that gets scraps compared to the arc stories, which while theoretically in SERVICE of the grand story, tend to feature a novels worth of plot in of themselves, and they do this in thrice weekly updates which all want to stand on their own in some way.

Their overall storytelling approach hasn't really changed. Each arc tends to start out great, but accumulates additional complications and distractions until it all explodes in a giant finale with a ton of different players and moving parts. Recent arcs have also moved away from the Gaslamp Fantasy/Steampunk Pulp roots for their big finales, pulp heroes and mad scientists still make up the majority of the action, but things have been increasingly ending with what feels more like a Wizard Duel than anything that happened in Sturmhalten or Mechanisburg.

They recently took a full year off to "Rethink their plans", during which they updated a quite fun standalone story about Franz Scorchmaw (The dragon of Mechanisburg). It's quite good, if only because they didn't have to deal with the Triple Pacing problem, since it wasn't expected to do anything with the grand story.




It's probably worth an archive binge? But from your description, you're probably not going to be satisfied following live, especially if what you're here for is the grand, overarching plot.

[Manga Shoggoth]

Horses for courses, I guess...

I'm enjoying it, but then again, the glacial pace of reading an online comic doesn't really bother me that much.

You might well be better reading it in larger chunks - a lot of the pacing issues disappear when you do that, but on the other hand spending more time with the pages does mean you tend to notice the background details more.

[Trixie_One]

Thanks for the really helpful comments.

Though this;


but things have been increasingly ending with what feels more like a Wizard Duel than anything that happened in Sturmhalten or Mechanisburg.

I'll admit is definitely concerning.

[Rodin]

Horses for courses, I guess...

I'm enjoying it, but then again, the glacial pace of reading an online comic doesn't really bother me that much.

You might well be better reading it in larger chunks - a lot of the pacing issues disappear when you do that, but on the other hand spending more time with the pages does mean you tend to notice the background details more.

*nods*

Everyone talks about how glacial the Castle arc was, but I started reading the comic somewhere close to the end of that (the arboretum I think?) and it flew by reading it that way.

What you probably need to do is treat it like a more regular novel and stop in once a year or so. Go through until you find a good stopping point and then give it another year to get ahead of you.

[Shining Wrath]

It's still good characters doing interesting things, but the number of subplots is getting hard to manage. It's as though the Foglios are Dungeon Masters and every PC has given them a 20 page back story that they are trying to respect.

They had to take a year off precisely because the complexity of the story is getting hard for them to manage.

[Southern Cross]

And worse yet- the comic seems to have stopped updating last Friday.

[geoduck]

And worse yet- the comic seems to have stopped updating last Friday.

Kaja had to have emergency gallbladder-removal surgery and is still in the hospital.

[Peelee]

The Mod on the Silver Mountain: This thread stopped updating 45 days after September 26, 2023.