Roleplaying games are a rich forum for comic material, whether you’re riffing on the setting or the game system itself. Typically, this involves have “players” and the characters they play, and either cutting between them or having the players semi-narrate the action.

Rich Burlew presents the Order of the Stick, a group of PCs whose players remain unseen, but retain full knowledge of the game system that defines their world.

The aforementioned Order is an archetypal adventuring party, including Roy, the noble (and put-upon) leader; Durkon, the Scottish-accent sporting dwarven cleric; Haley, the leather-wearing kleptomaniac thief; Vaarsuvius, the haughty and verbose elven wizard; Belkar, the bloodthirsty halfling ranger/barbarian; and Elan, the clueless, excitable bard. Their overarching quest pits them against the lich-sorcerer Xykon, but along the way they fight dragons, giants, goblin ninjas, their evil opposites (the Linear Guild) and the legal system of Azure City.

Currently, there are three books collecting the online material, two with entirely-original flashback stories (the origins of the heroes and the villains, respectively), and a board game available at the Giant in the Playground Shop. (Plus t-shirts, buttons and the like, of course.) The Giant in the Playground forums also deserve a special mention as the most impressive collection of D&D geeks outside of the Wizards of the Coast forums—there is no D&D question they can’t answer and then debate for 30 pages.

Notable moments:

The relative intelligence of the party members.
The introduction of the Linear Guild
Who remembers the old Hostess Twinkie ads in comics?
The Order’s first battle with Xykon begins!
Dramatic confrontation with the shadowy pursuer!
The harsh light of dawn.
The prophecies that will drive the next 200+ strips.
 
Drama: Moderate. While there’s definitely some angst and some agonizing moments, Burlew also likes to skewer various tropes of adventure games and action movies. A pair of red-shirt characters manage to survive mortal wounds by revealing that they have names and possibly backstories.

Humor: A solid half of the jokes rely on basic knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons, particularly 3.5 and 4th Edition. There are also plenty of random pop culture references and obvious anachronisms in the fantasy world (like in any good rpg campaign), but this comic probably isn’t for you if you don’t recognize the phrase “Attack of Opportunity”.

Continuity: High. Start from the beginning. The first dozen strips are loosely-connected D&D gags, but the plot picks up early on and gets into full-on continuity lockout by the later strips.

Art: Burlew draws the strip using vector-based illustration software, in an enhanced stick-figure style. The art has improved over the years, and though the changes are nice, they’re nowhere near the radical changes many hand-drawn comics see. Flashback comics are done in a crayon-like scribble style.

Archive: Five years of page-sized strips (including some double-pagers and infinite-canvas strips), about 600 strips.

Updates: Erratically. It averages three strips a week, but they might be spread out M-W-F, or you might get two on Sunday and one on Monday.

Risk/Reward: There’s a full-blown epic story and Burlew has noted that he knows how it ends; hopefully he won’t disappoint the fans by not getting there. The storyline has yet to hit a comfortable “stopping point” of any kind, which means getting into this strip may get you hooked for several years.
 

With the release of the first chapter of Watchmen in July, things have quieted down for Warner Premiere and Warner Bros. Digital Distribution. With an initial promise of bi-weekly episodes of Watchmen and Batman: Mad Love back in the summer, that was inevitably altered due to the ongoing legal battle revolving around the film, and the insurmountable success of Dark Knight. Finally, after four months of waiting, a second chapter for Watchmen has been released on such platforms as iTunes, Amazon Video On Demand, Xbox 360, and Playstation 3 for a small price. Warner Premiere also recently announced additions to their Motion Comic projects. Premiere has now stated that Mad Love will be attached as a DVD extra for the Dark Knight DVD later this year and that the Watchmen motion comic will be released every two weeks, continuing with chapter 3 on October 20.

Sadly, the hiatus didn’t effect the production of the comics, and all characters will still be voiced by narrator Tom Stechschulte, and this includes even the female roles. Those who haven’t caught the first chapter, the illustrations are taken directly from the book, with the characters’ joints and movements animated slightly to act as a hybrid of Audio Book and Flash Animation. It’s worth a watch for anybody who was a fan of the book and needs something to hold them over until the film gets released next May (or not).

You can purchase Chapter 2 from the iTunes Store here.

Jamilti & Other Stories
By Rutu Modan
Drawn & Quarterly, August 2008, $19.95

Rutu Modan came to the attention of most American comics readers last year, when her graphic novel [[[Exit Wounds]]] was published to great acclaim. Exit Wounds went on to hit a number of top ten lists, and won the Eisner for Best New Graphic Novel. But no cartoonist comes out of nowhere – Modan had been writing and drawing shorter comics stories for a decade. Those would be these stories, which have now been corralled between two covers.

[[[Jamilti]]] collects seven stories, all of them but the title piece originally published in anthologies from the comics collective Actus (of which Modan was one of the two founders). (“Jamilti” itself was originally published in [[[Drawn & Quarterly]]], Vol. 5, for those seeking closure.) Modan’s style has changed slightly over the years, but her artistic progression isn’t obvious. Her most recent work – Exit Wounds, “Your Number One Fan” from [[[How To Love]]], the currently running serial [[[The Murder of the Terminal Patient]]] – have a tighter, cleaner line and solid blocks of brighter, purer colors than her earlier stories, but that’s more of a tightening of what she was already doing than anything else. The stories before that bounce back and forth from color to black and white, with the drawing similarly getting looser and tighter as Modan worked out what she wanted to do.

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