The Legacy of Dominic Deegan II: Don't Be Clothed-Minded!

[elros]

I do not remember all of the original stories, but I thought the Storm of Souls had a good setup and decent pacing, especially for a new author writing his first webcomic. Since I am not creative, I like seeing imperfect work from beginners, and then watching how they develop and improve.
That enjoyment, however, ended with Maltak. It was a confusing mess that was too long and had characters and a premise that did not hold my attention. I actually never finished reading that arc because it was just not enjoyable!
After that, Mookie spent the next year writing about characters other than Dominic and Luna, and I admire that he challenged himself like that. I did not really like the characters or the stories, but I give Mookie credit for trying something different. I will admit, however, that I was getting tired at the flaws of the comic, especially since it seemed the problems were not getting better.
The story arc where the fighter died and then went to hell was insufferable, and it made me stop reading the comic.
I ended up reading the finale story arc, and that was a hot mess. First, Mookie created a new character to be the final boss, which was understandable but felt forced. Also, I was completely sick of Dominic, Luna, Miranda, and the rest of the crew, so I was reading for a sense of closure more than enjoyment.

That said, I admire that Mookie continues to stick to a regular update schedule, and that he is able to have a career creating something he enjoys. I think the new comic is worse than the original DD, but Mookie has a fan base that enjoys his work, so to each their own.

[Vinyadan]

About Snowsong, I have wondered how much she had to do with Mookie choosing a superhero comic as his next story. She's visually pretty close to Danica.

[Gez]

I've not been keeping up with the Legacy of DD (I might, not sure. The no-dialogue part of it kinda turns me off. But I did notice a lot of panels do have text?)

I have however been doing a full re-read of the comic, I've just finished A Storm of Souls. I might throw some thoughts in here as I go through this stuff, I've not seen some of it for well over 10 years honestly, but I am mildly curious.

Out of the classic DD arcs, how would everyone rank them from best to worst (and why?)

I'm not *entirely* sure what true actual arcs there are, the first 7 chapters prior to visions of doom are kinda just random introductory stuff for example;
But I guess top 5 and bottom 5 might work well enough.

I think the first couple of arcs (visions of doom, extacy and evil & storm of souls) hold up well enough and have a lot of mistakes that I'd consider 'forgiveable', iffy puns, cheesy writing, some tonal dissonance. But from what I remember it's snowsong, maltak and some of the final arcs that get particularly grating, no?

Man I had blissfully forgotten about all these things.

I'd say that Storm of Souls was the climactic end of the first part of Dominic Deegan: the part where it wasn't exactly good, but it showed promise. It roughly makes a story arc with a fight against evil cultists, and their defeat. Not great, not terrible.

Then there's the second story arc which is about Hell and Karnak and the character assassination of Siegfried. This is the part where all the potential it showed in first arc is tossed out the window and everything becomes horribly self-indulgent. DD gets to be a teacher adored by his students, Gregory's personality becomes completely insufferable, we get stupid chapters like a benefit concert or a vacation trip, and Mookie introduces his MMO characters in the story (Snowsong is from City of Heroes, Stonewater from WoW). Just awful.

Finally there's the third arc, the one against King Callan and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This one is beyond badness, it's just straight-up nonsense. It's kind of like an acid trip. There's stuff happening in the panels, but nobody can tell what exactly is happening, or why. There's a ton of exposition written in English because of course, but it could as well have been written by an AI. I have no idea what happens at all but at the end the Flying Spaghetti Monster is slain or banished or something. Who knows.

[Vinyadan]

To be honest, Siegfried started out a haughty, brutally violent man who would reduce a civilian to a pulp for bearing bad news at his own request, then evolved into a cold, remorseless killer, that insulted and disparaged people based on their looks, and was a raging racist. That he banged the girl of his friend was probably the smallest of his misdeeds (he also wasn't a man to resist his impulses), and partecipating in ethnic cleansing fit with the other parts of his character. He still managed to be a cool character (well, until the big reveal), but only because he was strong, prideful, and unapologetic (like Vegeta). Jayden betraying her boyfried was more surprising, however.

What I find odd is that TVtropes says that Mookie deliberately killed him when he found that some readers wanted Luna to die instead. I'd like to know where they would have found such information, because it sounds made up.

[Neoriceisgood]

Man I had blissfully forgotten about all these things.

I'd say that Storm of Souls was the climactic end of the first part of Dominic Deegan: the part where it wasn't exactly good, but it showed promise. It roughly makes a story arc with a fight against evil cultists, and their defeat. Not great, not terrible.

Then there's the second story arc which is about Hell and Karnak and the character assassination of Siegfried. This is the part where all the potential it showed in first arc is tossed out the window and everything becomes horribly self-indulgent. DD gets to be a teacher adored by his students, Gregory's personality becomes completely insufferable, we get stupid chapters like a benefit concert or a vacation trip, and Mookie introduces his MMO characters in the story (Snowsong is from City of Heroes, Stonewater from WoW). Just awful.

Finally there's the third arc, the one against King Callan and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This one is beyond badness, it's just straight-up nonsense. It's kind of like an acid trip. There's stuff happening in the panels, but nobody can tell what exactly is happening, or why. There's a ton of exposition written in English because of course, but it could as well have been written by an AI. I have no idea what happens at all but at the end the Flying Spaghetti Monster is slain or banished or something. Who knows.

Huh I had no idea those were the origins behind Snowsong & Stonewater, definitely explains why I remember Snowsong feeling so ridiculously out of place.

I'm thinking of doing a general write up on the arcs as I get further into my re-read (I finally reached the War in Hell which I just absolutely dread, cause I remember that being one of the big breaking points). I do feel I've gotten significantly less cynical over the years so I find myself giving certain story arcs/points in the comic more of a benefit of the doubt than I did back in the day on the daily grind of reading, though that might also be cause I can just read through an entire story arc in an hour or so rather than having to wait for it to slowly update a page a day.

To be honest, Siegfried started out a haughty, brutally violent man who would reduce a civilian to a pulp for bearing bad news at his own request, then evolved into a cold, remorseless killer, that insulted and disparaged people based on their looks, and was a raging racist. That he banged the girl of his friend was probably the smallest of his misdeeds (he also wasn't a man to resist his impulses), and partecipating in ethnic cleansing fit with the other parts of his character. He still managed to be a cool character (well, until the big reveal), but only because he was strong, prideful, and unapologetic (like Vegeta). Jayden betraying her boyfried was more surprising, however.

What I find odd is that TVtropes says that Mookie deliberately killed him when he found that some readers wanted Luna to die instead. I'd like to know where they would have found such information, because it sounds made up.

Yeah I don't know, I've watched 1 or 2 interviews with Mookie ahead of my reread and the one time he mentioned what happened with Siegfriend within the story, he mentioned that the thought of just fully redeeming him felt kinda boring to him as a writer & that it felt more fun to him to swing him back to what he's always been at the core, which is some level of scum.

I think the whole "he did it to punish Siggy's fans" narrative seems to come entirely from the somewhat nasty/habit of some hatereaders to seemingly make up very, very negative authorial-intent to make bad writing come across as not just sloppy but actively malicious on Mookie's part?
There's a lot of stuff in DD that hasn't aged well at all, like the excessive use of slurs

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I know that Mookie's general reasoning is that he wants it to feel unpleasant/gross when villains say hateful stuff and he thinks this works better when the actual language is used without censorship, but the open use of slurs frequently mixes with puns? Like dude, how did he not notice that'd be a really bad idea?

But there are a bunch of things I remember people saying in the vein of"oh Mookie did this cause he hates his readers" that just seem 100% sourceless?


One thing that surprises me on my re-read, as some other posters also mentioned is that ... the decline in quality is actually far less big than I remember? I always had this "it used to have promise/be decent then it got really weird and bad" memory of the comic, but when you read it with the knowledge of it never getting better, the big "issue" is mostly that as Mookie tries new and different things, some story arcs mostly reveal new flaws simply due to the fact that when Mookie attempts new and often heavier topics, his lack of finesse and habit for tonal dissonance makes the chances of massive misfires just sky high.


I'll throw in a write up of my thoughts of the chapters up to the War in Hell soon in a single post, I'm actually mildly surprised that so many people legitimately forgot many of the story arcs entirely. There's a couple where the title didn't ring any bells, but after reading 4-5 pages I did have major flashbacks to reading the arcs back when they were posted.

[Gez]

Siegfried was from the start a violent, judgemental thug, but the mere fact he was friends with apparently decent folk allowed readers to infer he must have had some good qualities. So that made him a shade-of-gray character and that was kinda interesting. Then Mookie decided he didn't like shade of gray and should only have stark black and white, so he made sure to show at length that Siegfried was absolutely devoid of any redeeming quality.

But then this guy opposed to shades of gray also had Stonewater and Snowsong, who both have skeletons in their closets so to speak. Whatever.

[Neoriceisgood]

Okay, here goes,
Thoughts upon re-reading the first 9 chapters. Sometimes I'll refer to vague recollections of stuff to come, e.g. Siegfried's downfall and the like, but I'll mostly try to judge the chapters on their own merit rather than purely in relation to vague memories of stuff to come.


Some thoughts before I start diving into individual story arcs:
1. I decided not to take a death of the author approach here, partly because I’ve heard so many rumors about how Mookie kept making decisions because he hated his readers, so before I got deep into the comic I watched a bunch of the interviews I could find to get a general sense of what Mookie, in his own eyes, was aiming for.
His personality in interviews honestly is pretty eye-opening as to why he makes certain writing decisions, he comes across as pretty impulsive and like he enjoys writing things that may be a bit edgy and emotionally confrontational, albeit in good spirit (how far he succeeds in this endeavor, we’ll get to). But in none of the interviews he seems particularly spiteful aside from openly stating that some of the weird behavior haters have shown at cons really, really got to him.

Which … yeah, I can get that.


Before I get started on any individual arc I’ll talk about the art separately.

[the art]
So as a creator I’ll try to give Mookie the benefit of the doubt where I can & I’ll not be overly cynical/negative in how I go over the comic (even an optimistic reading is going to be negative enough, honestly) so for the art … yeah, let’s start here.

I don’t think there’s any real point in rating the art separately from arc-to-arc because in the original run of DD the improvements are so marginal that it’s negligible. I’ll likely talk about character and outfit designs per-arc as those do see some … uh … changes, but the art itself is very “what you see is what you get”.
I will say, updating a comic literally daily with almost zero major interruptions over the years does take a certain toll, it sets a pretty hefty limit on what sort of quality and standards you can realistically strife for without inevitably eating into the ability to keep up the daily update rate.

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(I know technically speaking certain manga authors produce significantly more in a single week, though they tend to have assistants and their work schedules are generally kind of screwed up and in a few cases have clear negative effects on their health.)

As someone who had a comic in the past where I wasn’t satisfied with the base style & I frequently did try to give it a complete overhaul, I can also say that genuinely trying to fully reinvent your style *and* keeping the update rate DD had going at the same time is pretty brutal, for me any time I tried to reinvent or change my art significantly it resulted in pretty massive hiatuses. I totally understand how sometimes to keep an update rate you’re satisfied with, you have to set a limit/bar that you’re satisfied with, quality-wise. Changing it invariably can eat into something like pacing/update rate.

*that being said* Mookie’s bar is … low. And although I’ve not read the reboot yet, I will say that some part of it, aside from issues like sameface (which I’ll get into with character designs) a notable improvement in the stuff he’s uploaded recently is that he’s stopped constraining himself to the tiniest panels humanly possible. I’m not going to say bigger panels necessarily make his comic better looking (some of the worst panels in his comic are honestly the massive colored ones just cause … we get horrors like scarf-underwear Dom) but for certain parts of his comic like fight scenes and moments of action, the sheer lack of space Mookie gives himself to work with really makes it difficult to have particularly interesting action to start with.
It does feel a bit hard to suggest on the topic of art what he could’ve done to significantly improve it because with the strong size limit early DD had + the daily update rate, the constraints are pretty heavy.
Which is, I guess, where one compliment I can give fits … as much as the comic never looks good, I rarely found myself confused by action or what was happening in panels?
Considering readability of frames/poses/characters is something I’ve struggled with at times I’m honestly kinda shocked how, aside from some sameface-character-confusion I’ve rarely looked at a DD comic and not understood what was going on. I guess that kinda gives me some perspective on why Mookie might’ve been satisfied with the art, if it tells the story he wants to tell & is readable, maybe that’s all he wanted from it.

I do wonder (maybe someone knows); does Mookie ever post art/experimental style practices outside of his daily comic uploads? Even though I try to keep my general style consistent, I do often use art that’s not related to my own comic specifically to experiment and try new things. With Mookie I’m genuinely curious if he really does art outside of his comic at all, cause I don’t think I’ve ever seen just a regular art gallery for non-comic work from him.


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Anyway, those are my general thoughts about the art, it’s not good but I can sorta see how Mookie might be fine settling for functionality and speed.

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Okay let’s slay this beast.

-Chapters 1-7-
So the first 7 chapters I’ll just discuss as a set because they predate the format of real long-format ongoing story arcs.
They introduce Dom, Stunt, Bumper, Siegfried, Luna, the Infernomancer, Spark, Rachel and Greg.

This first part uhm … oof, does it not hold up. One thing I noticed in interviews with Mookie is that he seems to absolutely pride himself in telling grating, annoying jokes that make his friends want to beat him up and, although it’ll be a mainstay of the entire comic’s run, the first chapters have a more lighthearted gag-a-day structure to them compared to latter stories, which really, REALLY goes in weird directions when we get the “knot the answer” pun with Luna wanting to hang herself or Stunt and Bumper making some jokes/puns whilst slicing the infernomancer’s throat.
A weird habit that starts right from the start is for Mookie’s characters to make terrible puns, then look extremely annoyed at the camera like they had no agency in saying it … I guess you could read this as the author forcing his puppets to make jokes against their will but … man, weird way to have the annoying character also be their own straight man? To this day it’s wild to me that the relationship at the core of this entire comic started with Dom making a joke about Luna’s attempted suicide.
It's kinda interesting because a significant issue I’ve had in many of the story arcs is this weird tonal dissonance, e.g. jokes being told during really dark or ****ed up moments. I’d argue the “Knot the answer” joke is pretty high up there in terms of how bad it is, and it came right in the first few chapters.
The story in these first arcs is … okay? There’s definitely this tone of every single person on earth being awful, discriminatory and cruel except for Dominic and his close friends, though … Greg and Luna are just nasty to each other, both constantly sniping at each other’s disabilities when they meet. You’d think this would be set up for some Hurt people hurt people moral, or a set up for character growth or something but … it mostly just seems like an excuse for Mookie to make tooth and ‘lame’ jokes. I don’t know, the open uncensored use of slurs has aged badly in general but the jokes made on top reaaaally rub me the wrong way. I get the sense that whenever Mookie thinks of a joke or pun, he just throws it on the page without thinking about how it might be received.

The closest thing to a story arc in these first few chapters is the adventure in the woods with uh … Durk? The squinty short guy with the Sylvan oracle. She’s a weird character honestly, not much purpose beyond constantly making the same leaf-joke that doesn’t land. In hindsight it’s kind of weird that this arc set up long recurring villain the Infernomancer who … somehow saw the need to hire a buff dude with an axe? Knowing what’s coming I really get the sense the Infernomancer was a villain that was made up on the fly and was given a bigger role as the story progressed.
As much as people talk negatively about content in latter phases of the comic I must admit that the opening act might end up very low on my best to worst acts list in the end. The grating puns are the only part of most chapters worth noticing, most of the characters outside of the main characters are just 2D *******s and idiots & the only plot worthy of note is a very, very simple adventure.
Greg & Luna are also just kind of … weird and meanspirited to each other during the forest arc, the insulting puns they keep throwing at each other feel off.
Any positives? For as samefacey as the series is, I do think DD does a pretty decent job making characters stick. Most of the regular cast has pretty simple base features that are easy to understand. Considering the same-facey art style, small panels & lack of color, you’d think it would be hard to keep track of characters but most of them rely on relatively simple core concepts that would be pretty simple for new readers to get into.
Another praise I’d give is that Luna x Dominic quickly becomes an actual item? I know many people don’t like the relationship, and I’ll judge that arc-by-arc, but a pet peeve of mine is endless “will they? Won’t they” relationships, or fiction where romantic conquest is somehow the be-all-end-all of the story, Mookie isn’t afraid to change the status quo or pair off characters and put them in relationships which imho is far less annoying than 10 years of “omg will Dom and Luna date?!”

My favorite character at this point I guess is Dominic, not cause he’s particularly special, but mostly cause the others aren’t spectacular in comparison.

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Visions of Doom (chapter 8 and 9)

New characters of note: Uhh.. Jacob, Jayden, Milov … maybe Pam? & “the Chosen”
Here we go, the first proper arc. And y’know what? I actually do enjoy the set up for this one, the dark and seemingly personal visions work well to set up a somewhat mysterious and dark arc. For once the dark and extreme tone (a tree full of hanging people) fits well, it sets high stakes and does make it feel like something absolutely terrible might happen.
Siegfried beating the hell out of Gregory with his own stick & his absolute unwillingness to hear Dom’s side is an interesting ‘extreme low point’ for such an ******* of a character before he gets completely wrecked in the middle of the arc and then, at the end, is the one to spread the good word about Dom and his friends. I’ll get back to this.

Milov and Jayden’s introduction is fine, at this point they’re not characters of any particular depth, but they help ease the tension between Siggy & the main cast and helps create a truce for the arc to come. The vision including them right after they join the team is … interesting, I like the implication that the main cast showing up might somehow be part of the prophecy rather than something the Chosen don’t expect. It’s the type of situation you kind of imagine in a seer versus seer fight, messing with visions to make it harder to get a grasp of the truth of the future/past.

… hm, interesting concept for seer v.s. seer fights? I’ll probably return to that at some point.

The exact plot of what the chosen are up to is kind of confusing & most of them aside from Vilgrath or whatever his name is are non-entities at this point, the fight against them is …whatever.
On paper I like how dark their plan & method of fighting is, pushing people to hang themselves, sowing despair but … I don’t think the art really quite sells how messed up that is. The simple art and small panels will always make it hard to really sell potent imagery & action in a satisfying way, so once the fight starts I kinda just click through.

My favorite part of the comic so far has to be Jacob’s introduction! The way he infiltrated the chosen by wearing someone’s skin & apparently has some power leech abilities that make him effective at hiding seem believable as a skill set. The way he used his knowledge of Dom’s history against him also works quite well.
The one thing I’m not entirely sure about is … why is he so concerned with killing Greg/Making Greg stop believing his brother could potentially be redeemed? If he was just a plain cruel sadist I’d get it, but his personality seems to have a very strong “FOR SCIENCE!”-vibe to it as well. I don’t know, maybe when he shows up again in more recent arcs I’ll get a better sense of the angle here, but I just can’t quite fit he more sadistic “oh I want to make people who love me suffer” side of his would naturally fit with the “I want to build lego men of flesh in my isolated cave”-side.

Recluse who avoids people, sadist who intentionally torments his family. It feels a tad disjointed.

At the end of the arc, Greg being incredible at white magic due to having to suffer a blight for years? Yeah I buy it, seems like a fair explanation for the deux ex machina. Jacob seems cool at this point, hell of an introduction. One of the few things in DD I’d still say is legitimately well done.
Jayden and Milov? They’re fine, at this point harmless.

Siggy’s signs of redemption? Phew … so I know a lot of people LOOOVEEEE Siegfried and got mad at the hell stuff, maybe I’ll get there too when it happens but I gotta be honest, re-reading this story arc? The start of his redemptive arc kinda sucks …. Lol. It seemingly happened off-page, there’s zero dialogue, his underlying motivation is kinda just left in the air & we get two panels of him gently uwuu smiling at the main characters.
Yeah after Dom/Luna/Greg rescue his closest friends you’d imagine he’d not flip his **** and be an ass to them (we’ll have other villains to do that job later) but the first signs of his redemption are also very …bare minimum? Yeah what is he going to do? Beat up the people who rescued his friends from certain death some more?

In isolation this scene isn’t like …bad, but Siegfried up to this point was a very VERY flat bully-type character who suddenly got a very quick, reasonable but otherwise unimpressive redemption tossed on. I can totally understand, from a certain perspective, that this scene was never meant to be a full 180/redemption of such a fundamentally broken man. (I do have some questions about how relatively reasonable people like Milov and Jayden associate with this guy and haven’t noticed eons ago what type of person he is?)

I know I’m absolutely dreading the war in Hell for various reasons, but I’ll judge what happens to Siegfried in the future as I get there.

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Final thoughts for this first part:
the good:

• - Excellent pacing.
• - The art isn’t good but readability is fine, I have no trouble understanding the story being told.
• - Jacob’s introduction still feels pretty cool, the skinsuit is gross and creepy but it feels appropriate for what type of villain he is.
• - I like the more narrative structure of the Visions of Doom arc, the use of Dom’s power and Jacob’s underlying plan feel solid.
• - I like that Spark got to kill the little demon. It kinda bugs me when comedic characters don’t have any real effect on the plot whatsoever, the villains failing to account for the cat still being there felt kinda … fun. I don’t know, it’s simple but I like it.

the bad:

• - The puns mixed with serious situations, really uncomfortable.
• - I genuinely don’t really understand the plan of the chosen. The way I read this chapter makes it seem their plan just …failed and the chosen are done with, but later they return. I don’t know, maybe I didn’t understand their specific plan cause it was too uninteresting for me to try and understand it xD.
• - I don’t hate any of the main cast yet but … I can’t say I actively like any? Dom’s fine, I know people dislike how much of an author insert he is but he gets the plot going, I kinda like that he’s grumpy but eh.

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Luna I don’t hate,
Greg I don’t hate either, but the way they kept insulting each other early on sticks in a bad way.
Jacob’s introduction was cool but no opinion on the character.
Siegfried having a bit more depth than just being a flat villain is … okay, could be done better but I like the potential it has.
Milov and Jayden exist … I don’t feel anything for them.
Stunt, Bumper, Infernomancer weren’t really part of a genuine arc yet at this point so I’m fairly neutral on them.

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Next in line I'll punch through both Ectacy & Evil and the Storm of Souls, which will be interesting.

[Gez]

The one thing I’m not entirely sure about is … why is he so concerned with killing Greg/Making Greg stop believing his brother could potentially be redeemed? If he was just a plain cruel sadist I’d get it, but his personality seems to have a very strong “FOR SCIENCE!”-vibe to it as well.

That part did kind of make sense to me but it was informed by something that is completely outside of DD and that I also have no idea if Mookie ever heard of it, so it's completely coincidental and not related.

There was a roleplaying game called Ars Magica, which is all about playing wizards. In some ways, it was a precursor to White Wolf's line of vampire/werewolf/etc. games (the Tremere clan from Vampire: the Masquerade even comes directly from a wizard house in Ars Magica) but very different on many other aspects. Anyway, this all doesn't matter here. The point was the rules for becoming a lich in that game.

In order to become a lich, you had to first break all your ties to the outside world, becoming entirely "self-contained". And this did involve gathering everything you've ever built and destroying it, killing all your relatives and close friends (even including your familiar, if you had one), and so on.

So with that Ars Mag lich idea in mind, the way Jacob wanted to either kill Greg or force him to break his familial tie to him, just kind of made sense. Again, I don't know if such a rational has crossed Mookie's mind at all when he wrote that so it can be just a happy coincidence, but here you go.

[Neoriceisgood]

That part did kind of make sense to me but it was informed by something that is completely outside of DD and that I also have no idea if Mookie ever heard of it, so it's completely coincidental and not related.

There was a roleplaying game called Ars Magica, which is all about playing wizards. In some ways, it was a precursor to White Wolf's line of vampire/werewolf/etc. games (the Tremere clan from Vampire: the Masquerade even comes directly from a wizard house in Ars Magica) but very different on many other aspects. Anyway, this all doesn't matter here. The point was the rules for becoming a lich in that game.

In order to become a lich, you had to first break all your ties to the outside world, becoming entirely "self-contained". And this did involve gathering everything you've ever built and destroying it, killing all your relatives and close friends (even including your familiar, if you had one), and so on.

So with that Ars Mag lich idea in mind, the way Jacob wanted to either kill Greg or force him to break his familial tie to him, just kind of made sense. Again, I don't know if such a rational has crossed Mookie's mind at all when he wrote that so it can be just a happy coincidence, but here you go.

Thanks! Yeah if that is the underlying reason, it totally makes sense! I do know Mookie is big into things like D&D and some other table tops, so perhaps he borrowed those "lich-rules" and assumed it'd be obvious/known to readers by default, but I'm not really super familiar with game rules like that (I am familiar with Vampire: THe Masquarade to some degree.)




I'm guessing this particular page is actually referring to the type of Lich rules you're describing, It just didn't mentally "click" with me that it was an actual "magic requirement" rather than just Jacob being a weirdo hermit.

[Vinyadan]

But then this guy opposed to shades of gray also had Stonewater and Snowsong, who both have skeletons in their closets so to speak. Whatever.

There's also DD's older necromantic brother. Personally, I felt that Mookie's best characters were the evil ones, Siegfried, Karnak, Jacob. His good guys are either too slow and candid, or too self-complacent, while these are self-assured bastards (all with long black hair, for some reason), but their morality matches their role.

Siegfried would have needed some massive disaster to redeem himself. He probably could have been Reinholdt or whatever the Callanian knight that went to Maltak was called. But I feel that the only thing that could have conceivably rattled Siegfried enough for that would have been the total disappearance of the kingdom of Callan, the origin of his nobility.

And nobility is how I understood Jayden and Milov's relationship with him. They all three are nobles, and probably being aristocrats, in opposition to the lowlier classes, informed their bond. That Lord Siegfried wants to rough up a peasant criminal now and then doesn't touch that. Notice his open disdain for Luna, fallen from nobility and also a bad noblewoman when she still was one. Also notice that Jayden only intervenes during the beatdown because she knows Luna, in spite of possessing a detect truth spell. It's all about personal relatioships and following the letter of the law or the nobility (and pack) code.

Also, possible start of Siegfried's relationship with Jayden: https://www.dominic-deegan.com/wp-co...4_20030902.gif (except Milov was in the same room )

[MetroAlien]

The issue with Mookie's hero/villain dynamics are that he's playing it too straight... I don't know how else to describe it...

I'd say that normally, when an author writes a character, they can go about it in two ways:
a) write a stereotypical character that the audience instantly recognises
b) write an original character (OC don't steal, lmao) and make the audience question the validity of stereotype templates, either by "deconstruction" (shudder) or some other technique

For example, Superman is played straight, while Dr Manhattan is his stereotype subversion.

Now, what Mookiedoes, is write original characters, but then pretend that they fit into a stereotype all along.
He also writes the story as if it contained stereotypical characters, never encouraging the audience to question the literary norms.

All the while, his characters act nothing like what their stereotype would suggest, but that discrepancy is never addressed by anyone, ever.
Or worse: if it is addressed, then the character who brought it up is presented as a "hater" or somehow otherwise unworthy of respect and is either passive-aggressively ignored, or outright "defeated"

Imagine a Superman story, but instead of Superman, there's Dr Manhattan, acting like Dr Manhattan does in Watchmen, while all other characters treat him as if he's straight Superman.
Except one random bystander, who points it out, but Dr Manhattan vaporises him for his sins, while the crowd cheers.

.... oh God... did I just describe Zack Snyder's Superman?

Anyway, that's a Mookie "hero" in a Mookie "story" (plus talking-heads, puns, retcons, etc...)

[Gez]

So, anybody understands what's happening?

https://www.dominic-deegan.com/comic/september-9-2022/
It seems it started in "real world" as far as the comic is concerned, but...
https://www.dominic-deegan.com/comic/september-19-2022/
... it pretty much instantly turned into more abstract wacky dreamworld stuff
https://www.dominic-deegan.com/comic/september-21-2022/
cubes everywhere
https://www.dominic-deegan.com/comic/september-23-2022/
whatever that means

[Kantaki]

No idea what's going on, but considering no one's naked it's probably not a dream.
Not one of Snout's at least.

[Celestia]

So, uh, is Vine Lady supposed to be black? With the hair and now clothes... This is looking suspect. :/

[Vinyadan]

So, uh, is Vine Lady supposed to be black? With the hair and now clothes... This is looking suspect. :/

I guess it's possible. Dominic Deegan had the Semashi, a dark-skinned people with Italian surnames and Japanese architecture (Bumper was the most prominent member). Their skin colour wasn't visible in black and white.

I assume that what they are seeing is the woman from which Vinegirl was cloned. The place instead looks like the Elemecca to me.

[Neoriceisgood]

Ecstasy & Evil

Fun fact: My dyslexic ass can’t spell ecstasy; I swear I thought it had an X in there.

Major characters: Dom, Luna, Stunt, Bumper, Szark, Infernomancer, Miranda, Celesto Morgan, Gregory “D”, Luna’s sister … uh Karnak I guess!

Huh this one’s … interesting. There’s a weeeird sex-negative vibe around Dom & Luna, using language around her sister about her being a four-letter woman of low virtue and the like.
I don’t know, isn’t one of Mookie’s side hobbies mild kink photography? Or at least, in the past.

I know Dom was his D&D character but I could never quite rhyme the “pure self-insert” theories entirely with the fact that Dom & Luna often come across like a bunch of prudes (then again … reader challenge: what percentage of visions that Dom’s had involve him looking at other people having sex?).
I don’t know, that’s one part of Dom & Luna I never felt quite fit the self-insert vibe of the character, their pretty reserved sexual views.

The arc is … fine? Szark is actually a character I like!! Might be the first one!
His inner conflict is interesting, in a way he’s a play on the vampire trope, right? But rather than drinking blood he needs to satiate his bloodlust to prevent that eternal aching wound of his from hurting, so he found a legal way of getting his high without being forced to kill innocent and unwilling bystanders or breaking the law.
Another character I find … interesting is Celesto! So here we get our first proper seer v.s. seer conflict that isn’t just Jacob wearing some dude’s flakey skin, I’ll also say this … something about Celesto’s design just feels right? I don’t think the character designs so far have been particularly impressive, most are serviceable but something about Celesto feels right. Maybe it’s the iconic hairstyle? I don’t know, he stuck by me. Stark looks cool too, I like his ghastly face. For as samefacey and simple as Mookie’s style is, he does manage to sell that there’s something gaunt and off about Stark.
Luna’s sister is another flat villain, we do hear she does “some” good through Celesto, but by the point we learn this she’s already done so much weird **** that it doesn’t take a genius to figure out she was probably lying about that too.
I uhm … so what I hate about this set up is … the skeleton for a decent conflict is there?
Szark isn’t exactly a good guy, he does kill many people to soothe his injury. On the flipside, I do find the contrast of Celesto’s morals to Dominic interesting at a base level … but literally everything about Celesto falls apart when we see how evil Luna’s sister is, like dear lord she’s bad.

I know this is going to be a recurring theme for DD, but so many of the villains are so mindbogglingly irredeemable, and not even in a fun campy way, they’re just **** people. And Celesto is basically morally married to this mess of a woman, making his houlier-than-thou where’s the justice for her!! Mentality fall flat. I think if her cruelty was toned down a lot, maybe make her only target men or something and still have a soft spot for women, I don’t know. Another alternative would be to have more focus on Celesto refusing to scry/spy on the woman he loves. It gets mentioned later in another story arc but having Celesto be adamantly against Szark’s killing and confronting Dom on the ethics of scrying to spy on loved ones to start with would be interesting, particularly as it’d actually raise good questions about how far someone like Dom can go in using his power for “The greater good”. A lot of lost potential.

I guess the ending of the story arc kinda relies on Luna’s sister being totally okay with releasing a raging sociopath onto a crowd just to help herself escape, I do wonder how I’d rewrite that if I had to make this arc good. It’s definitely a pretty intense ending, I Don’t mind Miranda at this point. I don’t think extremely powerful moms are that common in fiction, are they? I thought it was kinda rad to have this badass old lady show up, it also explains how the 3 brothers are all such gifted mages if they were raised by one. Does make me wonder about the politics of the world though, why can someone like Siggy freely beat the **** out of the son of the archmage? A bit confusing.

The first & final parts with Karnak felt like set up for a future villain, which is fine. Not sure how excited I am for some evil demon dude though; we’re already front loaded with a LOT of flat babby-bad-guy villains at this point. Like the least evil villains we have are the “sometimes friends/sometimes allies” guys like Stunt and Bumper/Siegfried and uhm … Celesto who’s a decent attempt at a more nuanced villain but who is emotionally glued to a total piece of scum. Celesto is meant to be a smart guy right? Cause he looks smart but acts like he’d look very small in a mindscape.

Let’s see am I missing anything important uhh … oh right the weird plot with Bumper and Luna that was … I don’t know actually, it bothered me less than the rampant use of legitimate slurs in certain parts of the comic. If Bumper actually went through with it that’d be pretty ****ed up. It’s another card in the “yeah Luna’s sister is a piece of ****” deck. I’ll say I totally understand why Bumper would want to kill her after it. It’s unpleasant but in a way it works as a set up to get a less violent character like Bumper to actually get pushed far enough to kill someone, what Luna’s sister did to him is a really ****ed up violation. I think the set up might work in a better comic where we don’t get Spark or Dom’s dad making weird jokes 2 pages later.

In conclusion, the good and bad:

Good:
- Szark’s inner conflict feels interesting and has enough shades of moral gray to be interesting.
- As much as I find Celesto a dumbass, I like his design and concept. I feel it’d not take super much tweaking to make him actually decent (so far!!)
- I sorta like Stunt and Dominic teaming up, I don’t really like stunt as a character but he’s just evil enough that it feels like a legitimate villain-hero team up of sorts.
- Also Dom looks kinda cool in his black burglar outfit, he should wear it more.
- I think I’ll put the ending with the Infernomancer and Miranda here? Not sure The Infernomancer feels way more threatening here than in the first arc. I guess it’s due to Karnak’s glove. I guess I liked that part, though I didn’t like it just making Luna’s sister even more evil. It gets boring.

Bad:
- There’s some weird sex negativity that, I don’t know. Luna there’s better reasons to hate your sister than her sexuality.
- I feel the number of simply evil and flat villains is so high cause Mookie genuinely has a lot of trouble writing morally complex characters whose downfall isn’t “REALLY, REALLY STUBBORN”. Celesto shows quite well how Mookie handles more ‘nuanced’ villains and it just makes a supposedly smart character look like a total fool.


Rating this arc is tricky because it’s the first arc with a couple of characters I legitimately like, but on the flipside the main villain is the first one I just find unengaging from a narrative point of view.

I want to say this is my current order from best to worst:

1. Visions of Doom
2. Ecstasy and Evil
3. Opening chapters

I found Visions of Doom a better arc in terms of what happened and how exciting it felt to read, but Ecstasy and Evil does finally introduce some characters I feel some level of investment in. That might be in part due to it introducing so many of them, though. It actually has a relatively large supporting cast.

Chapter 11: Hellooo Nurse!
Major characters: Greg, Pam, Rachel, Dex Garrit and Brett Taggerty

The first real arc stepping away from Dominic, honestly not a bad break of pace. I’ll likely keep complaining about flat/1 dimensional villains throughout large swats of DD but I’ll admit … Brett kinda works for me? Maybe it’s just the politics of recent years, or the fact that there have been so, so, so many reveals of powerful and famous guys being absolute monstrous scum protected by their class and status. It helps that the stakes are very low, Brett isn’t trying to destroy the world or torturing little children for fun, he’s just a very selfish narcissistic guy who has enough money to stay out of trouble when he abuses and violates those of lower status.

It’s not deep or particularly insightful, but I can totally imagine a guy like him existing & many of his friends being totally okay with his behavior.
What does weird me out is … how long has Dex Garrit been part of this team? He’s so morally at odds with the rest of the team that it does legitimately surprise me they’ve not gotten in a violent encounter before.
I half appreciate the notion that he’s there as a “not all jockz are evil monsters” example, but I don’t know.
That being said, I do like Dex. Complete resistance to magic is actually a cool power, I’ve always enjoyed characters who have abilities that sorta ‘change the rules’ and it actually gives Pam a good moment to shine despite Greg being around with his ridiculous healing magic. His personality also seems fine, kinda quiet and stoic. We haven’t had many of those.

I guess the biggest downside of this arc is … honestly Rachel’s sexy outfits. I’m not going to voice any strong opinions on having more sexy/fanervice-y art in comics, there’s tasteful ways to do it, there’s bad ways to do it but … what bugs me is that Mookie’s art style really *really* does not lend itself to looking sensual or attractive at all. Rachel is quickly becoming one of my least favorite characters just because her being present in a story arc tends to result in really, really uncomfortable attempts at ‘sexy’ art that just don’t … work. They feel unpleasant to look at.
I guess the one up side I’ll add is this: When Pam opens the door in a really, really minimal and sensual outfit to find an emergency, I do kinda like that she immediately switches to nurse mode and tries to help to the best of her ability, not showing concern over how exposed she looks.

There is something admirable about her immediately throwing any shame away to aid an injured stranger, feels properly heroic. This chapter definitely makes me appreciate Pam more as a character.


At the end of the day the conflict here is pretty minor but that's not a negative to me, Pam, Greg or Dex dying seems like a more plausible negative outcome than the entire world being destroyed, so I've generally been a fan of smaller stake conflicts where it is entirely possible for the conflict to end badly without it literally ending the story.

The Good:
- Dex is interesting, I like his "power".
- I completely forgot about Pam but she's definitely one of the good guys I'm appreciating most upon my re-read.
- Greg having to fight the powered up jocks using non-conventional methods cause his kit isn't built for true combat was kinda neat, nothing impressive but just neat. I like out of the box thinking.

The bad:
- I'm kind of starting to hate Rachel showing up because, damn, Mookie really really can't do sexy & any time he attempts it legitimately makes me uncomfortable.
- I don't 'hate' that the group of jocks is so gross but Dex being so ingrained in the group weirds me out in the same way that Milov and Jayden hanging out with Siegfried feels weird. The contrast in morals just seems too extreme?


The Storm of Souls
Important characters: Very many so let's see if I can remember all of them:
Dom, Luna, Miranda, Donovan, Jacob, Helixa, Celesto, Klo Tark, Acibek, Sylvan Oracle, Quilt and others.

Ah so here we go, the big one! The arc where Dominic ...saves ... the world? The Universe? Humanity?

So right off the bat I'll say, some of the vision shenanigans to start this arc are fun:



We've seen Dom get plenty of creepy or foreboding visions at this point, but never visions that are quite this visceral, where it feels like he's being ripped apart and hurt within the vision itself.
It immediately gives off this vibe that this arc he's dealing with something bigger and more imposing than just some evil plot.



So as we find out that the culprits here are, once again, the chosen I do sorta wonder ... what's up with the lack of build up or foreshadowing in Dominic Deegan? I know it's not the end of the world or one of the general complaints people seem to have, but when it comes to recurring villains, plot lines etc there's very rarely a stinger/hint that we're not done yet with a certain group or character. Looking back at the scenes within visions of doom, the chosen were just looking for, what? cool evil powers and magic upgrades? Nothing about that story line reads like "oh they were up to more, but we need to discover later what exactly it is..".
It's not a big thing but in a couple of future chapters I'll see "oh this person was behind x and y"-all along type writing for various villains, where it almost felt like they're retroactively pushed into the existing narrative to make them seem more important/established when there's very little to foreshadow that at all.

Anyway that tangent aside, storm of souls hm.... despite it being the first big major stakes arc I am actually shocked at how badly it ages for me? There is a lot of set up and build up, explaining the entire order/chaos division and who Acibek was, which is fine, some world building is appreciated. But it feels like world building that's mostly relevant to this arc and not so much outside of it? Maybe it'll become important again later, I'm not sure. Will find out as I continue my re-read.

What makes this arc age really poorly to me is uhm ... I really, REALLY dislike the villain line-up here? I really, REALLY want to appreciate what Mookie is trying to do with Celesto, making him ideologically similar to Dom, but being too extreme in how he wants to fix humanity's issues & having a personal emotional grudge against Dom that' just ... petty, but ...

uhh ...

Like ...

Celesto is still on team "just blow up the world" right? Maybe the mechanics of what the Storm of Souls actually does are going over my head but he's literally on team "blow up all of humanity" right?
The entire page of him sparing the sex worker, showing that he does have a moral backbone kinda falls flat when he's literally going to blow her and her child up the next day with the storm.


If I'm somehow missing nuance here please correct me, but his entire schtick of being good but too extreme/misguided kinda fall flat when that's the side he's on. At least with Celesto you can argue he's misguided and too emotional to understand this, I literally have zero grasp of what the hell makes Jacob think that joining team "literally blow up the world" is beneficial?
For as cool as Jacob's introduction in visions of Doom was, his return here feels like a wet fart, really unimpressive and his motivation seems really thin. I guess Mookie just wanted to raise the stakes by having a pretty potent line-up of adversaries to help Helixa?

Talking about Helixa, D-tier villain, entirely unmemorable. Evil woman in a skimpy dominatrix outfit who wants to blow up the world because she was in love with some sort of mass murdering despot. Great, dictator's evil waif. I found Luna's exhibitionist sister a more compelling villain than Helixa.
I think the arc has plenty of stuff that's fine, the whole thing with order and chaos both having a dark side, some of the visuals surrounding the storm of souls etc are all fine and dandy, but I can't help but feel that Helixa and her evil blow up the world plot is literally dragging other established villains down with her due to their thin-as-hell motivation for joining her.

On the topic of new characters, here's a fun game: Describe Klo Tark's personality.

Anyway in conclusion:

The good:
- I still enjoy the mirroring of Celesto and Dominic as these major rival seers, although I feel Celesto is, again, damaged goods simply by being morally tied to total scum, I do just kinda think he's neat.
- Within the expectations of how good DD can possibly look, I think Mookie did a good job on how the storm of soul looks visually, I find it kinda interesting.
- It's not super deep or clever but I do kinda like the general notion that Order & light don't actively mean "good" & Destruction & Chaos don't actively mean "evil". The introduction of Rillian being a good way to play around with this. It's not anything amazing but, it's neat.
- I like the arc playing around with more intense and visceral visions, I like how they feel kinda creepy and surreal.

The bad:
- Helixa is a really, really bland villain, probably one of the worst ones so far. As a consequence I feel she's actively dragging other villains who are better down with her, just due to them joining in with her complete nonsense plan.
- Klo Tark is just so boring lmao, it's hard to care about his big heroic sacrifice at the end of the story when I just find him the dullest character so far.
- The lack of foreshadowing/build up in previous arcs kinda bothers me, it'd be neat if we had at least some indication earlier on that the chosen were up to more and weren't just 4 people. I don't know, I kinda like it when arcs/stories feel like there's a lot of thought that went into them in the past.

The hrm:
- The increased worldbuilding in this arc is sorta neat, but I'm getting the distinct impression a lot of it is just connected to this particular arc and nothing more, I'll keep tabs on how relevant it'll be as the story continues.
- Dom is now *THE* champion of order. W-what does that actually entail? How big is this world? Is there also a champion of destruction, or a champion of fire? It's a cool title but I have no idea what prestige it actually holds within the word we're in.


Anyway new rating:

1. Visions of Doom
2. Hello Nurse!
3. Storm of Souls
4. Ecstasy and Evil
5. Opening chapters

Maybe it's cause the stakes are low and the story is kinda simple, but Hello Nurse I actually enjoyed decently well, it left me with very, very few questions regarding overal world building and didn't ruin any characters.

Storm of Souls I still rate relatively high despite it having many, many flaws and issues, because to me, it was still largely an enjoyable arc with a lot of fun set dressing & some long awaited world building. I'd probably rate it #1 if Helixa wasn't just so ... bland. The overly high stakes also feel like a negative.

The next major arc I'll have to review is ... Battle for Barthis! Another arc with some weird WEIRD moments.

[Vinyadan]

Ecstasy & Evil

Fun fact: My dyslexic ass can’t spell ecstasy; I swear I thought it had an X in there.

Before I read your review, that's an interesting point... in English and other languages you find words with a prefix e-, ex-, and ec-. Those we care about here all mean more or less the same thing (out of, from). However, they can come from Greek (ec-, ex-) or Latin (e-, ex-). Which form is chosen depends on the presence of a vowel following the prefix: Greek ec-topic (no vowel), ex-arch (with vowel). Latin e-rupt (no vowel), ex-act (with vowel) (exceptions apply, depending on the way the word was formed: ex-culpate). Ec-stasis would be a Greek word meaning "standing/being out of it".

Late Latin did have an extasis form, however, and English has older spellings like exstacy and exstasy.

[MetroAlien]

I uhm … so what I hate about this set up is … the skeleton for a decent conflict is there?
Szark isn’t exactly a good guy, he does kill many people to soothe his injury. On the flipside, I do find the contrast of Celesto’s morals to Dominic interesting at a base level … but literally everything about Celesto falls apart when we see how evil Luna’s sister is, like dear lord she’s bad.

I think this part perfectly encapsulates what I was trying to say...
Mookie introduces characters who seem like they potentially could mesh well together to create a nuanced story of contrasts and opposites....
but the actual story he tells, just ends up being a run-of-the-mill hero saga played as straight as ... something(*)

(* the Euclidean distance between two points on a Cartesian plane)

As for the weird disconnect about sexuality (or lack thereof) with Dom and Luna...
I think you're right that Mookie isn't against sexuality per se... but that doesn't mean he has to always treat it as a good thing?
With Dom and Luna, Mookie is clearly trying to portray what he thinks is his most ideal, perfect romance.
And, how I read it, Mookie's ideal romance is not kinky.
He puts the contrast between the pure relationship, that's based on both partners actively wishing each other the best, and the "tainted" relationship, that's based on primal cravings.

Again, I'm taking a "death of the author" approach here... I won't claim this is the message Mookie intended here

[Neoriceisgood]

I think this part perfectly encapsulates what I was trying to say...
Mookie introduces characters who seem like they potentially could mesh well together to create a nuanced story of contrasts and opposites....
but the actual story he tells, just ends up being a run-of-the-mill hero saga played as straight as ... something(*)

(* the Euclidean distance between two points on a Cartesian plane)

Yeah it's like, there's this absolute foundation of actual differences in mindset below the base of Dominic and Celesto that could make for actually interesting and nuanced reasons why they could never get along, even Celesto's introduction is kinda interesting there.

But gluing any nuance that exists to the most banal and flat good v.s. evil plots just makes it feel all the more disappointing in the long run?

A villain like Helixa is trash and forgettable, but my feelings towards her are quite muted specifically because there's not much to work with. Celesto is definitely in the camp of characters that I enjoy *just* enough to find it genuinely sad when the potential is squandered.

I think this part perfectly encapsulates what I was trying to say...
Mookie introduces characters who seem like they potentially could mesh well together to create a nuanced story of contrasts and opposites....
but the actual story he tells, just ends up being a run-of-the-mill hero saga played as straight as ... something(*)

(* the Euclidean distance between two points on a Cartesian plane)

As for the weird disconnect about sexuality (or lack thereof) with Dom and Luna...
I think you're right that Mookie isn't against sexuality per se... but that doesn't mean he has to always treat it as a good thing?
With Dom and Luna, Mookie is clearly trying to portray what he thinks is his most ideal, perfect romance.
And, how I read it, Mookie's ideal romance is not kinky.
He puts the contrast between the pure relationship, that's based on both partners actively wishing each other the best, and the "tainted" relationship, that's based on primal cravings.

Again, I'm taking a "death of the author" approach here... I won't claim this is the message Mookie intended here

Yeah if you Death of the Author it, there's this very unfortunate implication that the sexy/lustful/ characters are evil, manipulative and have urges they can't control, which is contrasted super bad to Dom & Luna's explicitly low-on-sexuality relationship.

But based on what I know about Mookie that's gotta be unintentional right? With Dominic Deegan I often feel like one of the weirdest flaws is that I genuinely feel Mookie really, *really* is completely unable to see the greater implications of some of the stuff he writes.

Spoiler

Show

e.g. that one joke that heavily, HEAVILY implies that Rachel took Dom's virginity without his consent.

[Gez]

Fun fact: My dyslexic ass can’t spell ecstasy; I swear I thought it had an X in there.

It has in several languages! And yeah, as Vinyadan said, "extasy" is a valid though obsolete spelling.

On the topic of new characters, here's a fun game: Describe Klo Tark's personality.

"Generic benevolent NPC" is the best I can come up with.

And yes I know "NPC" doesn't make sense outside of a game context, but he really just feels like he's written as an NPC in some sort of The Legend of Dominic: Super Deegan Brothers RPG.

[MetroAlien]

And yes I know "NPC" doesn't make sense outside of a game context, but he really just feels like he's written as an NPC in some sort of The Legend of Dominic: Super Deegan Brothers RPG.

Iirc, at the very end of Dominic Deegan
when he found the gate to the source of magic, or whatever
many snarkers commented how the scene is structured exactly like a video-game cutscene.

Instead of being proactive, like a protagonist is supposed to be, Dom just passively accepted whatever the gate did to him, despite previously established motivations, until the video-game cutscene was over.
You know, like how a player character can't act while the cutscene explains the plot to him?

It doesn't help that the cutscene happened immediately after the "final boss fight".

[Neoriceisgood]

Okay, here I am again! I've read all the way up to the Shadow of Siegfried by now, but my stream of thoughts is finished up to the War in Hell.

I write these out a few days after finishing an arc after my thoughts have settled a bit, so if I don't mention certain aspects of a story it's likely
because they didn't leave me an impression that stuck after a few days.

Re-reading DD has been quite fascinating, I don't consider the comic good by any stretch of the imagination, but there's a part of me that finds it fascinating to think that
Mookie basically posted a new page for this story every single day for years.

From what I remember, Mookie made the pages the day before he posted them, right? He didn't work with a buffer but literally made his content "as he posted"?
With my own comic I actually used to do that in the past and it was a complete disaster, so I decided to reboot and make use of a sizeable buffer that'd always give me some
space to properly plot out, discuss and figure out story beats before I actually start producing pages.
Reading DD I can sorta sense that the style of writing almost feels a bit like a stream of consciousness, I think many ideas in the comic actually have potential, but the way they're introduced and used almost reads like a first draft, a rudimentary idea that isn't quite done baking, which is where world building issues show up.

I wonder, just from my own experience, if this particular issue with the writing is in part the result of his posting and creation style?

Anyway with those musings, let's get started:


The Battle for Barthis!

I’m skipping “it’s my first day” for major analysis cause the chapter’s relatively short & many of the new characters introduced I feel I can talk about more in-depth when we get to class-action. There’s something kinda weirdly quirky about these characters in a fantasy adventure story having these somewhat mundane jobs like “magic researcher doing lab work”.
It’s not necessarily a negative, but it’s kinda quirky how Mookie keeps mixing this fantasy world with relatively mundane/” earthly” views on things like professions. It almost reads like satire, though it isn’t.

anyway, Battle for Barthis. Some scummy affluent merchant named Serk Brakkis is out to turn all of Barthis into a massive stadium to celebrate the late Brett Taggerty, may the elements rest his homophobic little soul.
The set up for this arc is … fine? There is something about the writing that’s making me feel like one of Dom’s biggest enemies is just Murphy’s law, trouble always seems to find its way to where he is. I personally enjoy playing around with the notion of proactive and reactive protagonists and I’ve noticed that the majority of DD’s story arcs are actually quite reactive in nature? Dom and friends are just living their good life, then some vision or newspaper article or EvilMcBadguy shows up to ruin everything.
I’ve been trying to figure out why the story arcs feel almost sort of … random? Like they’re just picked out of a hat, and I feel that might be the actual underlying reason. Conflict doesn’t really arise during most arcs from our main cast’s goals and ambitions, but rather from the villain of the week popping up and needing to be stopped.
I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing or that writing a story arc this way can’t be done well but it does give many of the story arcs a similar and somewhat disjointed tone. What would the story actually be if no bad guys showed up to add tension? Dom teaching & Luna doing lab work?
Anyway like almost every DD story arc, I don’t actually dislike the base concept behind this story arc at all, I find the way DD kinda switches from BIG EPIC ARCS to more down to earth ones like “Hello Nurse” & “The Battle for Barthis” kinda refreshing, it kinda gives us a bit of down time and makes it feel like Dom’s life isn’t just an endless parade of quests where he’s protecting all of humanity.

Serk Brakkis is a decent villain, having to deal with a smug snake who knows and exploits the law & his resources is a different threat from what we’ve seen so far and I welcome the change. I do think that Mookie’s slightly flat writing here can get somewhat in the way. Smart and savvy villains can be neat but Serk’s posturing, and bullying doesn’t really feel that threatening when all the power and magic appears to be on the hero’s side. Every time Dominic spies on Serk he finds more and more evidence of just how vile this man is, especially due to his past with Luna (I’ll get to that). On paper this is fine but … we know it’s possible to block off seers by hiring your own seer & that there’s anti scrying-glyphs, I guess Serk was just an idiot who decided to go against the son of the archmage without understanding who he was up against?
Spending literally an entire arc taking down a smug and incompetent buffoon might be satisfying to some, but I don’t know … Perhaps if Serk was introduced earlier on and had a longer time to be set up like the heel he’s meant to be & it was harder to take him down I’d enjoy this more. But it kinda feels like this guy was literally just designed as a ragdoll for Dom to sink his teeth in.

Perhaps making him more competent might have killed the lighter tone of this arc though … except UHHH, this is the story arc with Luna’s weird ass very personal sexual backstory with Serk, which Dom accidentally saw IN FULL (???) and this arc ends with THAT MELNA SCENE.

Can Dom actually -turn off- visions, honestly? I can’t fully parse if he watched his girlfriend boink this ****heel cause he had to or he actively decided to. Wild stuff.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, tonal whiplash will remain this comic’s absolute bane. I think if I try to ignore the weird sexual stuff I do … like this story arc? The concert is kind of a fun little idea, even though the arrival of the 3 orcs … gosh that brings up a lot of bad memories, not looking forward to the baggage that comes with them, NOT AT ALL.

I’ll also admit I actually kinda like the band name “Oblivion Folder”, the origins of the name due to Szark’s dad & it actually sounding like a band name are kinda quirky and fun. I honestly feel a lot of character names and names of locations, objects just … *feel* right in this comic. I often have trouble keeping track of names and characters with stories, I don’t really experience that much with DD.

Anyway closing thoughts:

The Good:
- I like how DD kinda switches between heavier arcs and lighter arcs, I know some people don’t enjoy these more low-stake stories compared to something like Storm of Souls but I enjoy some respite after heavier story arcs.
- The introduction of a villain who uses money and the law to fight his fights is actually fun and a nice departure from guys shooting beams. I wouldn’t say the execution is amazing, but I do enjoy the change from previous villains. The guy’s still a pretty flat strawman regardless, but still.
- I’ll 100% defend the concert. I love a story arc that ends in a good old party or celebration, but tonally that didn’t quite fit Storm of Souls. Having a lower stake story end in a big ol’ banging concert made up for that.
- I like Scarlatti, I hadn’t mentioned him yet but he’s like one of the only morally ambiguous characters in the comic that doesn’t feel completely self-contradicting or ass. Both him and Szark are characters I’d actually firmly put in the category of chars I legitimately just enjoy thus far.
- Szark desiring to murder Luna to get with Dom is absolutely brutal and I am here for it lmao.

The bad:
- the entire scrying scene involving Luna losing his virginity to Brakkis is just WHY MATE, WHY. I also find the notion of him losing interest in her & immediately switching to being okay with killing her over her wanting to use a freaking contraceptive scroll so incredibly far-fetched that it goes against believability. So if she had not put up some scroll he’d have married her or something? I feel this actually hits the nail on the head why Mookie’s evil villains often feel so strawmanny and … bland.
It’s not unrealistic for someone to be sadistic, or greedy, or cruel but Mookie always manages to take that one exra step that just makes it completely impossible to believe someone could be that bad.
Like if Luna refused to have sex completely without protection and that made him angry … sure, makes sense.
If he never cared for her, but decided to have sex with her before killing her? Yeah, completely sociopathic, but makes sense.
Not wanting protection, sleeping with her with protection & then killing this woman he loved and just slept with over her wanting protection afterwards? It just sounds too ridiculous. I don’t buy it.
- the weird sexual stuff combined with Dom’s scrying also makes me feel that Mookie legitimately has no idea of the implications of stuff he writes. Dom did ask for permission … after already doing it? What was that? Did Mookie suddenly realize -after- he already made the pages how it came across? Really confusing.
- Honestly? That’s kinda all the stuff that really bothered me, if the weird sex stuff was cut out most of this arc was passable or even enjoyable for me.
- Did … Rachel rape Dominic … ???



The War in Hell

I was not looking forward to this one, but after re-reading it I kinda feel that I’m mixing a lot of the latter arcs up in my head, I don’t remember when the stuff that really annoyed me back in the day came, maybe it wasn’t this arc yet?

Anyway, the souls of the chosen all make it into hell simultaneously and the demon lords are all apparently fighting over who gets dibs on these new souls, with the potential risk of Helixa herself becoming a new demon lord if she manages to survive long enough.
This war is having a massive effect on the real world due to the infernomancers of hurt/killed demon lords dying together with them, which means Bulgak is negatively affected & because Szark’s injury results in him getting hurt/potentially dying if Karnak doesn’t make it through, effectively making it feel like Karnak was actually soul-bound to Szark. Karnak dies? Szark dies.

My big initial issue with this entire premise is … Dominic Deegan as a comic often dabbles into pretty hard metaphysical concepts just actually factually existing for a fact, Evil and Good are tangible concepts & Hell is a definite place you can literally just look at with a vision or scrying … this uh … this is pretty wild from a storytelling perspective, right? Like maybe this is just me but the entire notion that hell, and presumably heaven, are just places you can casually look into and are effectively just scientific facts isn’t something to just gloss over when it comes to moral choices characters would make & the exact question of what makes a person good or evil. Who draws that line in the sand? This world clearly has some set of objective morals that determine where you go after dying, but … if you actually go to hell or heaven you can also be … killed again? See just at the base level this is something that just absolutely drives me up the wall with this comic!
Mookie clearly LOVES world building, inventing lore, having his own little magic system, races, cultures etc. But he keeps introducing these high concepts to his world without really thinking through the implications at all?

I think at a base level that having places like heaven and hell be real existing locations isn’t an impossible concept to work with, but I kinda put It in the same camp as time travel where, just introducing it inherently opens a massive can of worms in terms of logistics and rules that you kinda need to deal with to avoid completely ruining immersion.
One choice is to have a story so silly, lighthearted and inconsequential that it’s clear world building only exists for the entertainment value it brings, another is to really, REALLY flesh out your magic system and world in such detail that high concepts feel at place.
DD falls in that weird camp where it clearly cares about character’s emotions enough that it wants us to take its story and world seriously, but where it doesn’t really seem to flesh out & think through concepts quite enough to not feel like a very childish and basic interpretation of “yeah hell is for bad people and Siegfried was a bad person”-type logic.
I don’t know, I don’t hate that hell exists in this world, but I find the execution to be roughly as deep and convincing as the existence of hell in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
The arc itself is … okay? The world building feels like it is cracking at the seams, but we’ve known hell was a place from like … what? Ecstasy & evil? I’ve just not sat down and really thought about what that means until this arc where it’s front and center. Siegfried being a complete racist monster … meh, y’know what? I know this was unpopular at the time cause people really liked him, but I don’t think it’s an entirely unreasonable direction for the character to go in. The dude was a ****ed up guy raised in a ****ed up culture by an even more ****ed up father. A thing with “twists” in DD is that I often wonder when exactly Mookie planned on things like Siegfried being hella racist and a child-murderer in his youth, I don’t think it’s completely out of character for mr. “beat a cripple with his own stick” but often these things are just thrown at us like … oh yeah surprise he committed a mini-genocide when he was a teenager. It does make me wonder if there’s any super-well received instances of characters people really enjoy/like being revealed to be complete monsters? I know in the case if Siggy a lot of people genuinely hated the choice, but I wonder if that is due to this just being a bad twist, people preferring him slowly redeeming himself or that Mookie handled an okay twist badly due to clumsy writing? I’d be curious to hear other people’s views here especially.
The set up of castle Callan having a whole bunch of infernomancers inside of it, including the royal seer & lady Loxo was … cool? Honestly the most disappointing part about Siegfried’s reveal is that this arc initially sets him up in a promising way, his path to redemption and wanting to flush out corruption made him more observant to fishy stuff going on & willing to rely on outside help to find the truth. Even the idea of Siegfried dying due to him discovering this massive conspiracy of infernomancy and corruption within his own castle works well, the implication that a Knight of Callan who isn’t corrupt wouldn’t survive long could technically work.

Considering who I know the final villain of the comic is, I’d consider this arc one of the biggest examples of wasted potential as well … like, I wonder if Mookie already knew what villain he was working towards at this point? If I had to throw a rewrite at this arc, I’d find it much more narratively satisfying if Siegfried’s eventual death wasn’t just because he went absolutely ape**** out of nowhere, but rather that his investigation put him a bit too close to the truth (one even Dominic couldn’t see because of anti-scrying measures, v.s. Siegfried’s non-magic form of investigation).
I guess I’ll give my grander thoughts on potential rewrites I’d do to fix story beats after I finish the entire story, but gosh this chapter has so much potential for intrigue.
Which kinda bugs me with how Mookie portrays stuff in general, Dom’s visions are a great vehicle to set up mystery plots when he works with flawed or incomplete information, e.g., due to a scrying block imposed by another seer. But there’s no grand conspiracy that we slowly get to piece together ourselves, the “shocking” visions tend to be things like: “oh Siegfried was actually really super racist, hot damn”. I don’t know, Castle Callan being an absolute den of snakes and political intrigue that goes hand in hand with it seems like such a perfect template for a nice who dun it or a more mystery-oriented arc, it bugs me.

The villains for this arc are … whatever, the demon lords are all incredibly evil and vile but they’re literally demon lords, I don’t think you can claim that title by being a pleasant person.
Due to that, for demon lords and their infernomancers I give a bit of a pass on how deep and complex I wish for them to be, though Bulgak … yeah I don’t know about him.

The entire start of this chapter with Bulgak, Stonewater, Melna and uhh… I forgot her name, pink haired orc, feels … uncomfortable. The entire rape sub-story is awkward and feels really forced as all hell, but having characters react overly emotional to it due to some demon clouding their judgement uhh… WOOF. I really, really want to retrace the day-by-day discussion thread for this part of the story, because I can imagine it being a wild time for readers who had to read all those heavy emotional outbursts followed by it being revealed 5 days later “A demon made the lady angry!”.
I’ve actually found emotional manipulation magic to be a plot point that’s very tricky to wield for this reason, it can add some strange baggage to scenes but man, mixing it with a “rapist savior” subplot is just a recipe for me wanting to plant my face into my desk.

One positive I’ll give the arc is that the underlying theme of Legacy is kinda …neat-ish? It’s not the best executed theme and I honestly feel like piling up so many bad acts onto Siegfried at the end was … ugh, really not the way to go to make it stick the landing, but having the parallels drawn between Karnak and Siegfried and how they were twisted individuals with some good in them … sure it works.
I do feel it would’ve worked significantly better if Siegfried’s death was way more uhh …”Boromir.”
Have him do a lot of bad ****ty stuff but go out in an actual decent/good blaze of glory at the end of it all that genuinely feels heroic and like he’s at his best, just before he dies. Right as it stands his final moments are him being racist towards the orc seer who is uh …well at least he’s a bad guy. Hurrah for racism aimed at deserving targets, I guess?

I guess I’ve not mentioned much about the fight between Stonewater and Bulgak, uhm … yeah I really don’t care. I can’t quite put my finger on it but I legitimately do not care about the orc subplot at all, maybe it’s the stupid rape subplot or the unflattering ‘noble savages’ writing of the characters, but “good rapist orc” v.s. “evil poison infernomancer orc” does nothing for me. I’ll give some credit that having a few of these fights happen simultaneously and affecting the war in hell is a somewhat neat touch. It’s not particularly deep or clever, but it adds more dimensions to these fights than the usual DD end-of-arc battles.

The final big thing I want to mention: I don’t understand how Dominic’s dolls work?! Or his powers?!
How can a seer protect people from hellblasts by pinning little dolls onto them? A thing that seriously, genuinely annoys me at this point in the comic is that I literally have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what Dom’s actual skillset is! So I understand at some base level that some sort of totem/token can make it easier for him to focus on a target … okay, it feels a bit weird that these dolls were something the orcs were just sorta making & Dom then was like “OH DAMN THIS WILL HELP PROTECT PEOPLE” … like? The fact that he got the idea from seeing the orcs make dolls makes it seem this was a new idea Dom suddenly had, not a standard tool in the seer-toolkit. The idea is, what? That these dolls he’s put his heart and soul into make it easier for him to focus on multiple people? I can sorta accept that on paper but:
A. I don’t think we see this method again in future arcs, right? I’ll pay attention to that
B. It still doesn’t explain what powers a seer has that allows him to stop HELLBLASTS by being able to focus on people with his scrying. Wouldn’t stopping hellblasts be something more suited for Jayden or Gregory? I know Dom is the protagonist, so he gets to do the cool stuff, but I legitimately don’t understand the mechanics of how he’s protecting people using this method. Someone honeypot this for me please, I beg you.

My personal theory regarding the dolls is that Mookie -wanted- Luna in particular to get hurt badly due to the war & needed a way to have her and only her be severely hurt by it & Mookie invented the dolls in a “oh man what if she had to take it off when it would be required?!”-type of scenario.
I … I get that, I sometimes invent magic items or objects that would help make a story arc happen the way it should, that’s the benefit of having a magic system and magic objects, they can be made to fit whatever rules you want.

BUT.

The way Dom comes up with the idea, the incredible power the idea seemingly gives him in the process … it feels off, I get the sense Mookie had this idea and just threw it into the comic without even second guessing for a moment if the logistics and the powers involved made a lick of sense.

All in All I didn’t hate this arc as much as I thought I would, but it’s another arc where the world building and power system are unraveling at the seams left and right to me, a lot of ideas feel like a first draft just thrown right in there without any thing about what they imply. I honestly even sorta like the dolls as a concept! Like, it’s kinda neat, it’s an idea I could imagine using myself. But that first draft feeling, the lack of setting up boundaries, rules, restrictions, internal logic. It gnaws at my very soul.

Anyway

The Good:
- the arc has some central themes which I’ve not seen much of in DD, that’s nice.
- I kinda like the vibe of there being a big conspiracy within castle Callan, with better writing that could’ve easily set up one of my favorite arcs in the comic … can I give points for squandered potential? Ah well.

The Bad:
- I don’t think redemption was the only viable path for Siegfried but this felt like too much of a negative, I think making it more bittersweet than it would’ve help a lot.
- The magic system is more broken and confusing than it’s ever been.
- Hell is a really, really badly thought-out concept and it makes me scratch my head too much.

The lord why:
- The entire orc subplot with Melna, Stonewater & Bulgak is genuinely uncomfortable to read. Bulgak at this point in the story is too flat and boring a villain, Stonewater’s backstory is like … NOBODY FORCED YOU TO WRITE THIS MOOKIE, NOBODY.
Like, yeah good job you managed to find some weird ass loophole to come up with a scenario where someone can rape another person and not technically be scum of the earth. This feels like a scenario you’d see in some unpleasant edgelord’s twitter polls. “WOULD YOU RAPE SOMEONE TO SAVE THEM FROM DYING?!”

I’m just endlessly fascinated by whatever life choices put Mookie in a mindset where he decided this needed to be the moral dilemma he decided to throw into his comic. I honestly find it hard to even engage with the actual text here, because I genuinely feel that Mookie, as an author, just never should’ve touched this entire topic to start with. Was Stonewater justified, should Melna forgive him? Who cares, don’t write this sort of nonsense.

To close off I do want to mention that interestingly enough, this means we’ve got two canonical rapists in the comic and they’re both on the side of good.
Anway arc ranking:

1. Visions of Doom
2. Battle for Barthis
3. Hello Nurse!
4. Storm of Souls
5. Ecstasy and Evil
6. War in Hell
7. Opening chapters

I’d personally rank Battle for Barthis pretty high because the different type of villain, relatively low stakes & fact that it didn’t split my brain open in power and world building confusion actually make it an arc with relatively few major downsides that affect the rest of the comic.

It definitely has some uncomfortable stuff with the Luna sex scenes but honestly, aside from Visions of Doom maybe I can’t think of a single arc that doesn’t have an uncomfortable as all hell “Why Mookie?” moment.
If it wasn’t for the weird sex voyeurism stuff it might have had a shot at the #1 spot for me.

War in Hell is less bad than I expected but when trying to list the positives and negatives I did notice that I was struggling far more than usual on the good stuff, so it’s quite low in my ranking. I still prefer it over the opening chapters just cause there’s at least story happening, the opening chapters commit a greater sin by just being so boring to me.

[Kornaki]

I think we get more plot where demons are fighting in hell later in the story, which is probably what you're thinking of.

It's been a while though, I might not remember it right.

[Neoriceisgood]

I think we get more plot where demons are fighting in hell later in the story, which is probably what you're thinking of.

It's been a while though, I might not remember it right.

There's a bunch of stuff with Siegfried haunting his old friends & also a whole part with Siegfried and his dad in hell, if I remember correctly

Spoiler

Show

Siegfried eats his own dad, no?

I'll have to continue reading to properly give my thoughts on those parts, but it's kinda interesting to me how early DD stuck with me far more than late DD. For many of the early story lines I still remember certain details quite well, e.g. visions of doom I seem to recall almost entirely.

A lot of these latter arcs feel more like one big mush in my brain that I am now unweaving during my re-read.

[Vinyadan]

Some of the things you write resonate a lot with how I perceived the comic, back when I read it (most of it in one time, I was a late comer). In particular, I agree that, because of the missing preparation, some huge reveals create a disconnect from the previous story. Dominic's mom was an unwelcome surprise for me: I liked the story of this scrappy seer who kept being dragged into dangerous matters without anyone to protect him. But it also was nonsensical that this guy who lived in an hamlet as an outcast was the son of a woman of immense power, the head of a top R&D institution that doubles as an air force (and hospital, school, and who knows what else). In a normal story, Dominic would have deliberately gotten away from Miranda, or there would have been some serious reason to stay away from her.
And, as you said, King Dave showing up so late (even just in name) in spite of the castle having served for some important scenes is another cause of disconnect.

Concerning Dom and Luna's relationship, I think Mookie had something of a dual attitude. They are represented as young people who are still "living it", so to say. They only want each other. That's all they need. That is a very pure feeling that, when idealised, can be translated into putting them on a tower looking down on the rest. The other side is that manga opponents often are or feel oddly lascivous, possibly as a secondary manifestation of their ultimate inability to govern themselves or accept social mores.

Personally, I find Michael's hell oddly fascinating. True, it is weird that people can just peek inside. However, on one hand, I like that this isn't D&D hell, but, more importantly, I think Mookie hit the nail on the head by turning this barren wasteland into the representation of Karnak's inner state. Karnak was one of the strongest men and is one of the strongest demons, but he is a failure as both. He doesn't talk much, he makes no one-liners, he is full of grudges and methodically slaughtering his way while being constantly reminded of his failures. The loss of his goofy, Power-Ranger-villain costume is also a great decision.
I also like the physicality of this hell, and I can't help but wonder how much Dante might have influenced it. His Inferno for example has a huge throng of the damned circling to meet a devil that will slice them up with a sword, and then there is the famous Count Ugolino gnawing on the head of his hated enemy, affixed in the ice close to him. Much of Dante's Inferno is a ruined stony landscape, full of grudges and lamentations, and mercilessly physical, although Mookie takes this aspect very, very far with mortality in hell.

About Melna and Stonewater, I was thinking about real-world situations where this sort of things happened, and there is one big difference: Mookie contrived a strictly legalistic way to get there. It's a cascade of Orc customs: the "test of taking" (a duel for property of women that is allowed to be fought disloyally) is followed by Melna's mom being put to death for murder and Melna being put to death for being an orphan and therefore worthless in Orc culture, which is stopped by Stonewater marrying her, which however needs strict verification. In the real world, similar things (where one victim is forced to do something cruel on the other) instead happen simply by abusing a position of strength (for example, soldiers or militias against civilians), without the need of laws or customs, either as torture, or as a way to make the perpetrator (actually a victim himself) unacceptable in his own people and force him to follow the gang instead.
I think this is what is so enraging about this whole episode, you can see the author smirking at having created this whole situation, while it wasn't necessary and it's ultimately just an overcomplicated cover for an episode fit for a video nasty.
But this I think is where Mookie starts enacting what he sees as his mission as an artist: to break boundaries. Like he's doing with the Legacy -- sex, nudity, and no speech balloons.

[Neoriceisgood]

Some of the things you write resonate a lot with how I perceived the comic, back when I read it (most of it in one time, I was a late comer). In particular, I agree that, because of the missing preparation, some huge reveals create a disconnect from the previous story. Dominic's mom was an unwelcome surprise for me: I liked the story of this scrappy seer who kept being dragged into dangerous matters without anyone to protect him. But it also was nonsensical that this guy who lived in an hamlet as an outcast was the son of a woman of immense power, the head of a top R&D institution that doubles as an air force (and hospital, school, and who knows what else). In a normal story, Dominic would have deliberately gotten away from Miranda, or there would have been some serious reason to stay away from her.
And, as you said, King Dave showing up so late (even just in name) in spite of the castle having served for some important scenes is another cause of disconnect.

Regarding Miranda: Yeah, exactly. I've been listening to a couple of supplemental materials to try and understand the underlying mindset for the comic (an interview with Mookie on YT & his "Writing interesting heroes & memorable villains" panel); and I sort of get why he makes some choices, Miranda and Donovan being alive & having no real conflict with the protagonist of the story is strangely ...wholesome and unconventional, it's very common for parents in fantasy settings to be dead, evil or somehow just ... lost.
I feel this is often an issue with Mookie's writing, he's a sucker for kicking against narrative conventions & his heroes/villains panel makes it obvious he lives and breathes for "The unexpected", things that catch him off guard in a text, things that don't feel like they'd be expected. But it often feels that his "writing by the edge of his seat" style of writing results in him trying to kick against existing frameworks without fully thinking through the larger implications.

"Why doesn't Dom just call his mom?" becomes a strangely plot-breaking question when she has that much power, influence & her relationship with Dom seems perfectly fine?

I do think there's a universe where Miranda could work as a character, even as a character that has a great relationship with Dom, but I question if that's a universe where Dom would be living in Lynn's brook. It just feels disconnected and strange.

Concerning Dom and Luna's relationship, I think Mookie had something of a dual attitude. They are represented as young people who are still "living it", so to say. They only want each other. That's all they need. That is a very pure feeling that, when idealised, can be translated into putting them on a tower looking down on the rest. The other side is that manga opponents often are or feel oddly lascivous, possibly as a secondary manifestation of their ultimate inability to govern themselves or accept social mores.

I guess what doesn't quite help here is that I find it pretty difficult to properly age-gauge Dom and Luna, do we have any real confirmation of how old they're supposed to be? They've always sorta read to me as this slightly snobby upper class couple over 30, but for all I know they're significantly younger.
Currently I'm up to the Oracle Hunter in terms of my archive binge, so I'll have some more thoughts on the portrayal of lust and love in this comic as we go further, but it's kind of funny to me how Mookie seems to love going against narrative conventions yet he seems to make a little bit of a habit of using either sensual outfits or openly sexual coding for a lot of his villains (at least, several female ones so far.)

I know that if we look at all the characters in the comic, particularly those that are good-coded, it's not like all the heroes are as 'puritan' in nature, Rachel, Greg/Pam etc are all in camp 'good' and shown to be far more sexually uhh... experimental than Dom/Luna, but then again Rache seems to have raped Dom so all I can really say here is that any time this comic touches sexuality at all it makes me scratch my head like, so much.

I think back in the 00s it was far, far more common to portray male sexual assault as a joke/not something to take seriously, so I don't want to pretend Mookie is exceptionally bad in this area, but there's a lot of drops in that proverbial bucket. It adds up.

Personally, I find Michael's hell oddly fascinating. True, it is weird that people can just peek inside. However, on one hand, I like that this isn't D&D hell, but, more importantly, I think Mookie hit the nail on the head by turning this barren wasteland into the representation of Karnak's inner state. Karnak was one of the strongest men and is one of the strongest demons, but he is a failure as both. He doesn't talk much, he makes no one-liners, he is full of grudges and methodically slaughtering his way while being constantly reminded of his failures. The loss of his goofy, Power-Ranger-villain costume is also a great decision.
I also like the physicality of this hell, and I can't help but wonder how much Dante might have influenced it. His Inferno for example has a huge throng of the damned circling to meet a devil that will slice them up with a sword, and then there is the famous Count Ugolino gnawing on the head of his hated enemy, affixed in the ice close to him. Much of Dante's Inferno is a ruined stony landscape, full of grudges and lamentations, and mercilessly physical, although Mookie takes this aspect very, very far with mortality in hell.

100% agreed! Honestly there's very few things in Dominic Deegan where I feel on a proper rewrite I'd argue it should be removed entirely, and I think the entire influence of Hell on the real world & vice verca is ... interesting, honestly the notion that hell itself isn't this stable unchanging place, but one that can also see wars, radical changes in landscape, the rise and fall of new demon lords who might completely alter the state of it & the world with it ... if you were to tell me some of these things in isolation as a rough draft/idea I'd actually like it!

In terms of actual execution though? I don't know. Hell works perfectly as a representation for Karnak as a character, but I've always found DD's worldbuilding around it to be so weak that the metaphysics and mechanics of that entire part of the plot just confuse the hell out of me.

I'll go more into this when I review Shadow of Siegfried, but DD exists in this weird place where it simultaneously has quite a lot of time and energy put into world building and fleshing out mechanics, as it tends to just make stuff (especially powers) up as the plot demands.

About Melna and Stonewater, I was thinking about real-world situations where this sort of things happened, and there is one big difference: Mookie contrived a strictly legalistic way to get there. It's a cascade of Orc customs: the "test of taking" (a duel for property of women that is allowed to be fought disloyally) is followed by Melna's mom being put to death for murder and Melna being put to death for being an orphan and therefore worthless in Orc culture, which is stopped by Stonewater marrying her, which however needs strict verification. In the real world, similar things (where one victim is forced to do something cruel on the other) instead happen simply by abusing a position of strength (for example, soldiers or militias against civilians), without the need of laws or customs, either as torture, or as a way to make the perpetrator (actually a victim himself) unacceptable in his own people and force him to follow the gang instead.
I think this is what is so enraging about this whole episode, you can see the author smirking at having created this whole situation, while it wasn't necessary and it's ultimately just an overcomplicated cover for an episode fit for a video nasty.
But this I think is where Mookie starts enacting what he sees as his mission as an artist: to break boundaries. Like he's doing with the Legacy -- sex, nudity, and no speech balloons.

Honestly, I don't think a comic should entirely avoid controversial topics, but ... with Mookie I find the ways he decides to kick against expectations to simply be ... strange.
On one hand it's pretty obvious he's got relatively progressive politics underlying his worldview, but it's always wrapped in this strange almost ... edgelordy desire to kick against expectations in a way that often feels just ... uncomfortable and counter to the more progressive message.

Like, maybe this is just cynicism setting in, but the entire Orc subplot is fundamentally about racial equality and how racism is bad, no?
But from the parts I've re-read so far there's this weird message that reads a bit like hm...

"It's not that orcs are inferior, it's just that a lot of their culture is" ?

When characters in Callan are portrayed as bad guys or evil, in many cases it's treated sorta as just corruption or personal vice, a person who decides to do bad things out of greed/vengence/anger/hatred.

But when we get to various orcs & at a latter point the ...spellwolves? Werewolves? We suddenly get all these weird racially-coded cultural practices that kinda have "HOW BACKWARDS!!" written all over them in big glowing neon letters.
Highly unpleasant.

The worst part here is that the orcs have this weird PoC/Native coding that really ads some massively unpleasant air to the racial and cultural coding added to things like their test of the taking and all that.


I definitely don't think Dominic Deegan is exceptionally bad in this specific case honestly, the whole idea behind "symbolic race/group to represent gay/racial minority/trans people" has often resulted in massive backfiring stuff in all fiction. (see vampires = gay people tropes)

But ... the way DD draws attention to it, highlights it, really rubs these topics in & actively decides to go for "hey the rapist is the hero here"-type narrative choices ... it just becomes uncomfortable in a way I only remember seeing in intentionally edgy nonsense.

[Pax1138]

Sooo... I see that guy in today's comic, and my brain instantly identified him as Jacob (that was Dom's necromancer brother, right?). Am I crazy to think that?

[Vinyadan]

I thought the same, that's Jacob hair, and he is a necromancer, or something similar. However, Jacob looked transformed at the end of DD. But it would be very early Jacob to create evil vines that duplicate people as a clone with magic-destabilising effects.

Maybe he's someone following this legacy, like Kylo Ren with Darth Vader?

[Kantaki]

Isn't this the guy who died after Snout ripped him out of the vines?
At least I'm pretty sure the face is familiar.

[Celestia]

At least I'm pretty sure the face is familiar.

Do you have any idea how little that means in a Mookie comic?