Why do you read OotS?

[seans23]

Because Thog is so cute

 

[RichGreen]

All of the above, but mainly because it makes me laugh. A lot.


Richard

 

[molonel]

It's gaming humor. That's the primary reason I started reading it.

I stopped reading it when it became too much about story, and dragged on and on and on and on with page after slogging page of Haley's inner goth and her spouting that gibberish that you had to access Rich's forums to understand.

When it got funny again, I started reading again.

 

[jmucchiello]

I read it because it's hobbit forming. No wait, that's why I read Irregular Webcomic, also an amazing comic about RPGs.

But I prefer OOTS and that's because of the characters really.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Take a look at any long-running webcomic (Something Positive, MegaTokyo and Apple Geeks are a few good examples) and you'll see the same thing... The comic begins as a series of fairly unrelated jokes, slowly develops a story line, and occasionally pops back into the random jokes, just for fun.

It's hard to keep a three-days-per-week web comic going on jokes alone. You'd use up all your good jokes real fast.

Penny Arcade has survived for eight and a half years without becoming "storyfied".

I'm not saying that storyfication is a bad thing, or even that you're wrong in most cases - though I think the first two examples you cite have never been funny, and are in fact a bunch of crap - but your theory is certainly not universally applicable.

 

[coyote6]

All of the above (poll options).

 

[was]

it's hilarious...

 

[Pbartender]

Penny Arcade has survived for eight and a half years without becoming "storyfied".

I'm not saying that storyfication is a bad thing, or even that you're wrong in most cases - though I think the first two examples you cite have never been funny, and are in fact a bunch of crap - but your theory is certainly not universally applicable.

Yeah, I thought I'd included a "most" in there between between "at" and "any", but I must have brain-farted it. My bad.

As for the examples... I was using a few examples I was more familiar with. You'll notice that I did not actually call them funny, but only that they began as a string of topic-specific jokes (recognizing the fact that not everyone finds the same jokes funny).

Interestingly, you sometimes see the same phenominon in television series... Shows that begin as isolated plots in unrelated episodes that later develop in a long-term over-reaching plotline (X-Files is a perfect example).

 

[WayneLigon]

I said 'character' but really, it's 'all of the above'. Each one has a healthy component of why I love the strip so much.

 

[Gez]

Choice 6: All of the above.