I got my wife to give her opinion, which I've added verbatim:

"I think part of it for me was that I originally DID come for the giggles - I don't have the background in RPGs that a lot of everybody else seems to. I mostly came along because [my husband was] coming along, and because it introduced me to the facets of RPGs that [my husband] took for granted and amused me at the same time, without confusing me. I tried to play RPGs before and the rules just ended up leaving me cross-eyed.

In some ways I really like the way Rich has developed the story, in other ways I do feel the story has become WAY more massive than it used to be, and I kind of miss the early lightheartedness, but I don't say that to diss what's going on now.

As for Start of Darkness, I think maybe it just went a lot more into the real 'nature of evil' than I was expecting from what until now had been a COMIC story. I believe Start of Darkness came out somewhere in the general vicinity of the real introduction to the meat of the story - just where it was becoming a much bigger thing, and so, it just wasn't what I was expecting and as my husband said to you earlier, it left me in doubt that the good guys were really doing the right thing. Everybody knows Paladins are lawful stupid, though they don't have to be (see Hinjo), but wholesale slaughter of apparently innocent women and children was a brain- and story-breaker for me."

So apparently I was wrong about why she read the strip...ahem...but, er, I remembered her birthday...