One note before I begin: Because Emma and the Fairy Queen is an all ages comic, I feel obligated to mention that Goblins is not. It’s a wonderful comic, but there’s violence and gore and adult themes. It isn’t a children’s story.
My favorite thing about Goblins (at this particular moment) is the unexpected moments of tenderness in a comic so centered around humor and action. There will be a huge battle sequence, and then we’ll have the immense privilege of meeting characters like Pan and Yala right in the middle of it all (I’d give you a link to the page, but you won’t get the full impact unless you’ve read the parts leading up to it). I love how many emotions Thunt takes us through. One page I won’t be able to stop laughing* and another will be dead serious and I will hate the bad guys with a hatred so deep that no death is too gruesome.
*Note on the link, the single page isn’t that funny. It’s that page plus the three that follow it that make me laugh.
Again, we have well developed, interesting characters who are flawed but beautiful. The interactions are lovely. The internal struggles are lovely. But we never completely lose the humor that started the whole thing moving, and if one scene is heavy on humor or action or character development you know that the others are going to circle back around soon.
Something I love about webcomics is that the pacing allows you to fall in love with every page. You can’t jump forward and brush past it, each page must be lovingly crafted and lovingly received. If there is only one new page every week, or two pages, or even three, you have time to spend with that page rolling around in your head and you can revisit that moment or go back through the archives, but you can’t rush ahead. Each page has it’s own few days where it is the single most important page on the site and in the readers mind. Each page gives you time to let you fall in love.
It can also be extremely frustrating when you’re dying to know what comes next and you have to wait for the next update, but I think it’s worth the trade off.
Perhaps a darker influence of Goblins on my work would be an increase in my tendency to kill off characters. There was a period in high school where being one of my characters was a very high risk job. There was a rather steep mortality rate, and Thunt has a little bit to do with it. He wrote a blog post at one point about how letting one character die shows the audience that you are willing to go that far, that you aren’t bluffing when another character is teetering on the brink. So when that character is saved, the sighs of relief are all that much deeper and when characters are back in harms way the fear is more real.
I was already planning on killing off one of the characters. I mean, he was kind of doomed from the beginning. But then I decided that killing off this other character would raise the stakes (which was a really good decision) and allow me to put another character in mortal peril and leave his struggle hanging, unsolved, for several pages at least (not so great of a choice), and then we got to a really big battle and I got kind of murderous. Off the top of my head I can only think of three important characters who lived through that story. There are probably more. Maybe. It’s been awhile.
Goblins has pulled back on the wanton killing of characters we know and love, but there were a lot of deaths towards the beginning. It helped set us up to understand the danger the remaining characters are in and the risks they are taking. It let us know that no punches would be pulled and no one was totally safe. Unlike Order of the Stick (another comic I adore) being a named character doesn’t mean as much as one might think in terms of their likelihood of surviving a given battle.
There have been some slow times, but more often than not this comic leaves me thrilled to be in a world where there are webcomics and geeky storytellers. This is home, guys. The internet gave us webcomics and through them gave geeks like me a community and a whole host of worlds to travel through.
Since I’m already being sappy here, I’d like to share my single favorite Tolkien quote.
“Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.”
We’re not here immersing ourselves in fantasy worlds because they aren’t real. We’re here because they are. Goblins is a place where we find not just humor, not just action, but ourselves, mortal, flawed, incredible human beings.