Is EGS:NP becoming too important?

[Arakus 0]

With Question Mark (which is practically mandatory reading since I can't imagine Dan being able to recap everything about how Sarah's powers work), and now the hopefully untrue speculation about the Susan and Diane arc being moved forward in NP, I feel like we're getting to the point where some of the canon NP arcs have to be read to understand the main comic. This kind of worries me because it seems like in the future, if a new reader was trying to get into the comic, they would probably assume NP was all unnessacery side stuff without anything important, which would end up with them getting really confused if they were just reading the story stuff. (I'm probably worrying too much, he'll probably find some way to make it clear which NP arcs need to be read when.)

TL;DR I worry Dan might be making EGS less accessible to new readers

[Sjmcc13 42]

In the past Dan referenced the NP story line that was relevant in the main comic so you would know what to go read. 

[Pharaoh RutinTutin 1,586]

Comic books frequently have crossover stories that span multiple titles.  TV shows likewise have crossovers that include several series.

If Dan has more than one story to tell that take place at about the same time, and he has established multiple platforms from which to tell those stories, why wouldn't he use them?

[Scotty 1,061]

Yeah, Dan has stated that he considers the NP to be multipurpose and that it allows him to do Canon storylines alongside the main comic so that he doesn't have to try to fit all the main characters into a story, especially if the stories aren't related to each other. Playing with Dolls ran alongside Squirrel Prophet (the card tournament portion of it) even though it technically occurred the next day, but imagine if Dan ran Playing with Dolls in the main comic after Squirrel Prophet? It would have been a few months before we got into So a Date (and that's assuming Dan did 6-8 panel pages instead of spreading it out on 3-4 panel strips), and then how would he have fit Question Mark in since it takes place alongside both Playing with Dolls and So a Date in terms of being on the same day, (Sarah would have been messing around trying to figure out what the spell was while Susan and Nanase were at Tedd's and then Sarah would have discovered the spell and then later got visited by Pandora while Elliot and gang were dealing with the griffins) so yeah I think the way Dan's done it works best for trying to cover what everyone's up to. It still remains to be seen if the next NP is about Diane and Susan finally meeting, we only know that it does involve Susan and it does seem like too much of a coincidence that Dan was in the process of doing the comic where Nanase makes the decision to tell Diane about Susan when he came up with the NP story idea and basically had to stop the main comic to write the NP stuff. Guess we'll see in a few weeks.

[InfiniteRemnant 141]

I kinda wish NP would use the AF04 crew more often.

[Matoyak 51]

53 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Yeah, Dan has stated that he considers the NP to be multipurpose and that it allows him to do Canon storylines alongside the main comic so that he doesn't have to try to fit all the main characters into a story, especially if the stories aren't related to each other. Playing with Dolls ran alongside Squirrel Prophet (the card tournament portion of it) even though it technically occurred the next day, but imagine if Dan ran Playing with Dolls in the main comic after Squirrel Prophet? It would have been a few months before we got into So a Date (and that's assuming Dan did 6-8 panel pages instead of spreading it out on 3-4 panel strips), and then how would he have fit Question Mark in since it takes place alongside both Playing with Dolls and So a Date in terms of being on the same day, (Sarah would have been messing around trying to figure out what the spell was while Susan and Nanase were at Tedd's and then Sarah would have discovered the spell and then later got visited by Pandora while Elliot and gang were dealing with the griffins) so yeah I think the way Dan's done it works best for trying to cover what everyone's up to. It still remains to be seen if the next NP is about Diane and Susan finally meeting, we only know that it does involve Susan and it does seem like too much of a coincidence that Dan was in the process of doing the comic where Nanase makes the decision to tell Diane about Susan when he came up with the NP story idea and basically had to stop the main comic to write the NP stuff. Guess we'll see in a few weeks.

I mean, the solution to the timing issues is to not have them take place at the same time. There's law stating he had to condense it down into such a short period. Many of these story lines (The exceptions being the ones dealing with parental control [ie: Tedd and his Dad]) could take place when the group is in college, for instance. It'd be a different story and different flavor, but that's an extreme case. Most of these could be spread out across weeks or months and it not really change too much.

That said, I agree with your general gist, I just don't think the time frame issue is all that important a factor. I mean, there are (hopefully) reasons why he's compressed so much into so little time, but the way the comic has run thus far strongly implies the timing isn't completely rigid or necessary to be so compressed.

[InfiniteRemnant 141]

wait, i thought scotty's post was about how long it would take to get through the storylines IRL,  not IC.

[Scotty 1,061]

I think it'd be kinda both, Dan could have done "Squirrel Prophet">"Playing with Dolls">"So a date"> then have "Question Mark" after that either making it clear that it happened during the "Playing with Dolls" and "So a Date" arcs, or state that it happened later in the timeline. Either way we wouldn't likely have seen "Question Mark" until at least the end of 2016.

My point mainly was that the NP allowed Dan to show us how characters not in the main story are developing, and also lets him create canon stories that fit in any time jumps in the main story, like the MV5 story.

[Maplestrip 20]

I was worried about this when "Question Mark" was coming out. To compare: I recently read multiple Pixie Trix comics, and the cross-over between Eerie Cuties and the spin-off comic Magic Chicks was very confusing. I just read through it anyway, of course, as that is what one does with a webcomic they generally enjoy, but it was a bit unpleasant as it felt both as spoilers for the other webcomic I hadn't read yet, and I wasn't seeing the full picture.

But you definitely can read one webcomic and not the other, and the same goes for El Goonish Shive. It's too bad that new readers in the future probably won't be able to discover Sarah's abilities with the same pace as we could, but I don't think it will ruin later story arcs. I hope not, anyway...

Regarding the in-universe time - I'm sure it could have been possible for Dan to tell a similar story while spreading out the events some more. Few of these arcs needed to take place in the same two days, but I understand why he made that choice and I respect that  But yeah, I hope Dan can keep the most important canon events in the main webcomic for ease of archive binges...

[Don Edwards 548]

15 hours ago, Scotty said:

I think it'd be kinda both, Dan could have done "Squirrel Prophet">"Playing with Dolls">"So a date"> then have "Question Mark" after that either making it clear that it happened during the "Playing with Dolls" and "So a Date" arcs, or state that it happened later in the timeline. Either way we wouldn't likely have seen "Question Mark" until at least the end of 2016.

My point mainly was that the NP allowed Dan to show us how characters not in the main story are developing, and also lets him create canon stories that fit in any time jumps in the main story, like the MV5 story.

It is possible for a single story to have multiple loosely-related strands going simultaneously, spending a bit of time with one then switching to the other then ....

And other than at the climax of the story, there's no need to tie a bunch of strands up at the same time. You can have strand B start in the middle of strand A, continue in parallel to strands C and D, and tie back in 2/3 of the way through strand E.

However, that's easier to do effectively - i.e. you can get away with more of it - when a single instance of publication has rather more content than a webcomic page, such as in a short story, a comic-book, or even when publishing a novel by chapters. Heck, even TV - I remember the 1960s-era Batman TV shows occasionally would have a narrator voice say "Meanwhile..." and the show would switch to showing what a different group of characters were doing in a different location at the same time that the stuff we just saw was happening.

Also it helps to be better at editing out the fluff than Dan is (or I am).

[Maplestrip 20]

I think the way Dan is handling this is especially useful for webcomics. It can be difficult to follow multiple storylines simultaneously if you only get a short update on one each two days and there are multiple of them. Running them simultaneously yet separate, using an entirely different style, allows a reader to keep better track of what is happening. Though Rain LGBT is getting away with the former most of the time in my opinion, so I suppose it really depends on how interested the reader is in the story? Dan does "meanwhile" style things plenty anyway.

The more important reason Dan may be doing this, however, is because the webcomic form allows him to. As an independent comics creator, it would be difficult to run two different comics simultaneously in one book without going back and forth temporally. On his website, Dan can run three series simultaneously and is only limited by his own ability to finish the pages.

Or something like that, I haven't exactly thought this post through

[Don Edwards 548]

Sabrina Online this month (April 2016, the first part of this archive page, for anyone coming in late) is a particularly good example of how bigger (but less frequent) releases help with multi-threading. The comic does four newspaper-comic-style strips a month... all released at the same time. This month the first two strips are one scene, the third is in an entirely different thread, and the fourth is a some-hours-later aftermath of the first two. I don't think it would have worked nearly as well if there were one strip a week.

This isn't saying that I think EGS or NP should be published in a similar fashion. Doing so would have consequences, and they may not be to Dan's liking (or, less importantly, ours). Just that different manners of publication, even seemingly-mild differences, change constraints on what works and what doesn't.

[Drachefly 30]

I would do it where, in the point of time in the main comic that an NP arc occurs, put right into the comic stream, a comic which says, "There is a canonical arc of NP which occurs now. Click this image to go read that next, or click 'next' to skip it". Naturally enough, it links to the beginning of that NP arc.

At the end of each NP arc that the main comic points to in this fashion, there is a page that says, 'this is the end of an NP canon arc. Click this image to go to the first main comic after this arc, or click 'next' to keep reading NP'.

So, Question Mark wouldn't get that treatment yet since there isn't a comic right before it or right after it. But once there's a comic that happens after it, then it'll be slipped in and everyone will get a chance to see it.

[Maplestrip 20]

49 minutes ago, Drachefly said:

I would do it where, in the point of time in the main comic that an NP arc occurs, put right into the comic stream, a comic which says, "There is a canonical arc of NP which occurs now. Click this image to go read that next, or click 'next' to skip it". Naturally enough, it links to the beginning of that NP arc.

At the end of each NP arc that the main comic points to in this fashion, there is a page that says, 'this is the end of an NP canon arc. Click this image to go to the first main comic after this arc, or click 'next' to keep reading NP'.

So, Question Mark wouldn't get that treatment yet since there isn't a comic right before it or right after it. But once there's a comic that happens after it, then it'll be slipped in and everyone will get a chance to see it.

This is an almost Homestuck-y way of dealing with archive readers and I really love it. This would require some change in site layout, perhaps, as some "in-between" page may not be pleasant, but if Dan could direct new readers to the right pages at the right time, this whole issue becomes a lot less big.

[Arakus 0]

3 hours ago, Drachefly said:

I would do it where, in the point of time in the main comic that an NP arc occurs, put right into the comic stream, a comic which says, "There is a canonical arc of NP which occurs now. Click this image to go read that next, or click 'next' to skip it". Naturally enough, it links to the beginning of that NP arc.

At the end of each NP arc that the main comic points to in this fashion, there is a page that says, 'this is the end of an NP canon arc. Click this image to go to the first main comic after this arc, or click 'next' to keep reading NP'.

So, Question Mark wouldn't get that treatment yet since there isn't a comic right before it or right after it. But once there's a comic that happens after it, then it'll be slipped in and everyone will get a chance to see it.

Actually, it is stated at the beginning of Question Mark that it takes place immediately after Squirrel Prophet (specifically, here:  http://www.egscomics.com/egsnp.php?id=268), so Dan should have put that in there if he was going to do that.

[Drachefly 30]

Wait, this last storyline is concurrent with Squirrel Prophet? I forgot. Got all turned around because the NP arc is in the past. Well, Question Mark is still the most-forward-in-time thing we have. I think it'd be reasonable to jump to it after the end of the current main comic arc.

[HarJIT 97]

I believe So A Date is concurrent with the latter part of Question Mark and follows immediately from Playing With Dolls (hence Nanase being rushed off).

[Scotty 1,061]

Yeah, Squirrel Prophet (Grace's dream, the bit at school with Grace, Ellen, and Diane talking about Elliot having a date, and the card tournament) all happen on Friday, Playing with Dolls, Question Mark and So a Date at the Mall, all happens the following Saturday, and looks like So a Date will run into Sunday if Dan shows us Nanase and Elliot's conversation with Edward.

[The Old Hack 2,448]

On 4/9/2016 at 6:39 PM, Don Edwards said:

Just that different manners of publication, even seemingly-mild differences, change constraints on what works and what doesn't.

Oh Lord yes. I still remember the idiotic flap when someone was screaming about an entire storyline being "trapped in the basement." I later counted the length of the so-called 'trapped in the basement' incident and found that it was a total of thirteen pages long, of which two pages took place in a different place with different characters. The problem was that in real time this took more than a month, in part because of Dan not releasing as regularly as usual at the time. I guess that made it seem like eternity to some. *sighs*

[InfiniteRemnant 141]

Meh...

I've read askblogs that make 3-5 posts a day run into the same pacing-slowdown problems as a weekly comic. It happens to pretymuch all image-based media to one degree or another. you just get used to seeing it after a while and stop noticing.

[Maplestrip 20]

This is not entirely on topic, but based on the order in which all these events take place, I'd love to see somekind of graph for these two days of what happens when. It is confusing enough that Dan makes use of both the main comic and NP to tell the story, but I honestly don't even know anymore when any arc is taking place comparatively to the other arcs. It's been a while since I've done a re-read, after all...

[Sjmcc13 42]

1 hour ago, Maplestrip said:

This is not entirely on topic, but based on the order in which all these events take place, I'd love to see somekind of graph for these two days of what happens when. It is confusing enough that Dan makes use of both the main comic and NP to tell the story, but I honestly don't even know anymore when any arc is taking place comparatively to the other arcs. It's been a while since I've done a re-read, after all...

MV5 if pre-squirrle prophet, Squirrel prohpet runs through all of Friday till the start of Question Mark Saturday morning, Question mark spans the entirety of Saturday but I think the part with carol is before the date or at least pre Griffin "fight" as I would expect her to be in a worse mood otherwise (and Sarah would have to have been trying to 5-6 hours min with out eating). Playing with dolls is probably most of Saturday afternoon up until  just before the start of the date, Nanase said she had to be back by 5 at the start, and I assume that was to get ready for going to Charlotte's, and tat bring us to the mall date storyline. 

[HarJIT 97]

I think this is accurate?

[Sjmcc13 42]

7 minutes ago, HarJIT said:

I think this is accurate?

Ellen is in Elliot's first scene of the mall Date, so she should probably start with Elliot.

[HarJIT 97]

So like this?