When I borrow a sugar rush from Robin
on November 17, 2021 at 1:01 amTwo chunks of exposition are in panel one, each for a different purpose. The first one, obviously, is to remind even regular readers how Leslie’s Robin-Smooch works, just to make sure we’re all still on the same page. Often folks would just pop in for the one-off gags and leave for the storylines! And I was expecting a few folks who’d never read Shortpacked! but were here for the It’s Walky! content to show up, and thus this’d help them out as well.
Now, Ultra Car’s first-panel exposition is the wild bit. Like, she’s describing an event that happened behind a subscription paywall. There were probably maybe two hundred people in the world who read that story. This whole idea of doing a sequel to a subscription-only Joyce and Walky! storyline was friggin’ nuts, and I knew it was nuts, and I was gonna do it anyway. But I still needed to give people some basic info, just to make it slightly less nuts. Like, take maybe 10% off the top of the quantity of nuts.
The rest of the strip is even more exposition, but it’s of the This Is What We’re About To Do variety. Just scooch all this obligatory text outta the way all at once.
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I loved “any portal in a storm” so much that, years later, I stole it for the title of a session in a Masks game about our characters stealing a portal.
ya know, I didn’t even think about that until I read your comment? like, somehow I thought that was the actual phrase even though I know better =|
Ah, makes sense.
Into the Rachelverse
Ultra Car is desperate enough to go along with this harebrained scheme to steal an alt-Rachel in part because she feels safer coming out as a girl to her Mom than she would coming out to her totally-incapable-of-percieving-women-in-non-sexual-terms Dad, and you can’t convince me otherwise.
Or she wants her mom back?
I mean I did say “in part” for a reason.
There are many reasons to miss her mom, but I definitely accept ‘the slow realization that she has a gender and that gender is girl and she wants to talk about this with her mom, some version of her mom, any version of her mom’ as part of the rationale.
Also potentially some Kid Not Ready For Widowed Parent To Seriously Date Again awkwardness, made all the worse because Robin is UC’s coworker who she gets along with about as much as she gets along with most humans but who is nonetheless her coworker. Robin’s not stepmom material. UC rejects this premise.
That’s definitely more exposition on one page than I remember. It works, though.
As someone who read the Joyce & Walky free strips, but never even went back to check out It’s Walky, I was used to the arrival of SEMME characters heralding sequels to events I knew nothing about, so this was fine.
I was also used to reading whatever random DC and Marvel comics Diamond UK had decided to ship to my newsagent in a given month, and extrapolating as best I could, so that helped too.
This whole story line reminds me of Walky contemplating the wrinkled tshirt he’s wearing, picking up the iron, and fixing to iron it while his invincible self is still wearing it: “THIS WILL NOT END WELL”
When I first read this strip in Shortpacked, I definitely hadn’t read the subscription strips at the time, so the exposition from Ultra Car in the first panel helped me for sure.
I think any non subscription readers glazed over the first part as part of her sugar induced rush…. Yeah, I read it as that during that time.
As a non-subscription Shortpacked! reader at the time, I didn’t mind referencing the paywall stuff at all. Just like in regular comics when they follow up on something that happened in a book I don’t read, as long as it’s caught up (as it was here), I’m happy with it being unnecessary backstory that I could pay to read later if I wanted.
Or wait until it gets put up for free, decades later! So that paid off for me.