A few weeks back, the folks over at the THAC0 Podcast talked a bit about when it’s time to stop following a title. I find that it’s when the series stops being what I liked about it. I’ve commented on this before in regards to anime, but I think I’ve just about gotten to that point for the Order of the Stick.

Rich Burlew started the strip as a way to poke fun at the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, its game culture, its rules, the tropes of the genre. It was funny. It was insightful. It provided a few nice little pauses in my week. For the past several months, this has been more the exception than the rule. The Order of the Stick has drifted away from its comedic roots and has strayed into the realm of dramatic fiction. Wandering off for a couple of strips into serious exposition in order to deliver the main characters to a fresh set of comedic material is certainly fine by me. I can wade through some un-funny text for a while to get back to the good stuff.

The recent reappearance of Belkar the hateful violent little Halfling has served to highlight how far the value of this strip has slipped. We’ve gone from “I think I missed a spot check” to this:

You’re not missing anything subtle. It just isn’t funny. Or heart-wrenching. Or entertaining.

I must admit that it’s been over a decade since I’ve followed the inter-title continuity of western comic books. I couldn’t tell you which titles were involved in the Marvel Civil War, or give you a cogent description of what DC’s Countdown was about. So I don’t really know who Terra is. Or was. Apparently she had something to do with the Teen Titans. I inferred this while reading the four-shot series Terra.

Terra follows a young newcomer to the superhero scene of the DC continuity. She has been very busy recently, popping up from the Earth to save the day from all manner of subterrannean threats, saving coal miners, staunching rogue lava flows, et cetera. It’s all very heroic, and the behavior of the new heroine is markedly naive.

This series does something that I had grown alien back in the late 1980’s and 90’s when I was regularly following the convoluted plot conceits of superhumans-in-tights: it doesn’t really explain things. I don’t know who the first or second Terra were. I don’t know what their powers were, who they associated themselves with, what perils the faced, overcame, or were defeated by. I have no idea how powerful they were on a scale of The Question to Superman. Terra doesn’t bother telling me. It’s important that there were two previous metahumans named Terra that had similar powers to this title’s protagonist. That’s all I needed to know, and the writers were kind enough to leave it at that. If I hadn’t known who Hawkman or Geoforce were, it wouldn’t have mattered and they didn’t tell me. Thank you, Gray and Palmiotti, for keeping the continuity in your pants.

The art, by Amanda Connor, is interesting. Stylized with a fair amount of detail but leavin enough room for the colorist to get some detail in, she does a great job conveying motion, keeping it easy to follow from frame to frame in a way that many artists often fail to. The faces, however, showed some inconsistency that was a little disappointing. All four covers were great, but Connor falls into the trap of defining a character by a few overt features (costume, hair color & style), and lets things blur from there. In some scenes featuring Power Girl, I was certain that a change in coloring work would have rendered the two superheronies indistinguishable.

Overall, I found Terra to be a refreshing glimpse into the DC Universe. It didn’t smack me about the face and neck with seventy years of back-story. It told a story from beginning to end, showed character growth (terribly rare in superhero comics), and ended appropriately. The artwork was solid if not perfect, and is certainly worth picking up either individually or as its inevitable TPB.

Hey look, I found another cartoon to watch. Hooray for me. How bout I tell you about it?

Chaos;Head is about a (wait for it) socially-awkward high school boy and a (wait, wait, you’ve never heard this before) bunch of beautiful women who intrude in his life, resulting in (oh precious suspense) awkward semi-romantic situations intended to titillate the socially-awkward male demographic. This is all terribly formulaic, all very focus-group-tested and sanitary.

But this isn’t a romantic comedy, no no no, this is a suspense/thriller. There is a string of bizarre deaths in Shibuya, where the protagonist lives. The protagonist is an unreliable witness, which is the key leverage used in telling the story. He is prone to delusions. He lives in a cargo container on the roof of a building where he collects anime-related figurines and plays video games all day. He has an imaginary friend (an anime character he thinks is his wife). He thinks somebody is watching him, sometimes even in the solitude of his own room.

The pacing of Chaos;Head is excellent. The intro and ending theme music are hideous. The character designs are visually pretty typical for a romantic comedy, which adds to the creepiness of the paranoid tale of supernatural horror. The invisible super-swords are retarded. The production quality is uneven; sometimes nice but often lackluster. Clearly this is a product of a production crew with a limited budget and timeline trying to cram a very complicated video game plot into half-hour chunks. So far they’re making an admirable run of it. I look forward to the next episode, and so should you.

Bonus points for including nutty URLs on-screen that you can actually visit online. Nice.