“Who are you?”

That… is a very good question indeed.

Other good ones: Why are you here? And what in the hell is going on?

The scene is Dungeon and Dorks, a fantasy webcomic parody of a certain famous roleplaying game. For a long while, I considered DnDorks to be among the top such comics, to have nailed its rendition of gamer humor as well as the best of them.

Then it lost me. Not in the sense that I no longer enjoyed the strip – no, it lost me in that all understanding of plot went right out the window.

The figures to our left are Venger, an apparently recurring villain, and Mac’thulu, who is as he says he is.

I’m not entirely sure where either of them came from. I’m not sure why the story is focusing on them, nor what has happened to the main characters, or the side characters, or the NPCs, or any of it. I suspect a full read through the archives would clear some things up, if not all… but this is also a comic I started reading within the last two years. The archives aren’t really all that far from memory.

Let’s begin with a basic description of the strip. DnDorks is about a bunch of gamers, and at the same time, it is about the characters in the game they play. These stories are told essentially hand in hand, often to good effect. Over the first four or five years of the strip, it combined clever jokes about these few iconic gamers, while also developing them as interesting individuals with lives of their own.

A little over a year ago is when the confusion started to arise. The main cast of gamers was set aside for DnDorks – the Next Generation! This featured younger siblings of the main crew trying their own hand at DnD for the very first time – which, on its own, is a perfectly cool idea. A chance for adding some new blood to the strip, walking down some similar paths and some new ones, and setting things up for an all around good story arc.

It was a little confusing for me, mainly due to the transition – the new characters basically showed up, with little explanation of who they were. I gather, looking at the cast page, they may have shown up previously as filler – but for me, they were all new and out of the blue.

But hey – that alone wasn’t too big a deal. The new cast was well-rounded and enjoyable to see in action. Once the initial shock of the shift was over, it made for a good read.

Then they decided to start remaking the earliest strips in the archives, updating them with art consistent with the new format. Not a problem in and of itself – in fact, a damn good idea. Except… they posted the new old strips like regular updates. If you knew what was going on, it was possible to keep the stories separate – but it also meant you had to actively be paying attention to do so. Each update, you had to mentally file the page in a different place.

It wasn’t much – but it muddied the waters enough that when the real confusion hit, it made things oh so much worse.

The latest storyarc has involved, as far as I can tell, a blurring of the lines between the gamers themselves and the characters they play. Through strange machinations, the “next generation” has been brought into their game world by this villain, Venger – and in order to stop whatever evil scheme this is a part of, the original cast was brought into the game world by this other fellow, Mac’thulu.

So – hey, I can describe the general story that is going on, so that means the comic hasn’t descended into complete gibberish. The problem is that the general understanding is as far as it goes – I haven’t been able to follow any given strip, or precisely how all this has come to pass, or the motivations behind anyone or anything.

The core of the problem is that we have a crossover between both the new generation of gamers and the old generation of gamers and the characters both teams play – while in the background, classic strips from the archives are running in-between. With new and important villains coming out of left field. With dramatic reveals at every turn. With an art style that is very nice to look at, but also includes a layout that tends to jump past important bits of the action – usually relying upon narrative to fill us in on the blanks, which works a whole lot better when the reader remembers where the characters are and what they are doing.

Therein lies the problem – any single one of those elements wouldn’t be enough to leave the reader bewildered. But all of them together…

And it’s a shame, because I like all these characters. I like the idea of having characters sucked into their game world, I like seeing the new dynamic of the younger crew matched against the familiar stasis of the old, I like the fact we have a miniature Old One named Mac’thulu. It’s all clever and fun, but I realized the other day that I had spent the last year reading the strip without being able to even name most of the characters anymore.

That’s not good, people. The more confused I got, the more frustrating the story was, because I didn’t have the time each week to go digging through the archives to try and set each new thread straight – especially with the classic strips still popping up out of order, even in the archives. I wasn’t losing the strip because of the characters or the story or the jokes, but because of simple poor organization.

It doesn’t mean I’m going to stop reading the comic, unless it continues to pile layers of convolution on at every turn. Right now, it looks like the current story is getting close to the big ending – which I am desperate for. Because until then, every update just means I glance at the page, shake my head, and wait for things to make sense again.

And if that is the response that a storyline that could be wildly entertaining is having on your readers, it’s time to ask yourself why it is happening – and what you can do to fix it.

It is always a shame to see a comic starting to go downhill.

If a comic is flat-out bad… well, that’s a different story. There are a lot of webcomics out there that are trash, sure – and usually it’s because the creator is new at this, still learning how to draw, how to tell a story, how to make a joke. Ok, no problem – I’m not going to criticize them for still being in the middle of learning the process. Especially not when given how many strips started out weak but developed into something fantastic over time.

But on the other hand, when a strip has it, and is doing great, and then goes downhill… man, that sucks.

And it sadly looks like Abstract Gender is falling into that category.

It would be easy to blame the new artist. Switching artists is always a tricky business, and while in some cases it works out brilliantly, all too often it is a sign of the comic’s imminent demise. I had high hopes in this case – Abstract Gender had switched artists before. Several times early on, in fact – but the third artist, Kiey, held the title for most of the strip’s run. Replacing someone seven strips in is tricky, but not world-ending. Replacing the artist that help define the strip? That’s a different game altogether.

But it isn’t just that change alone. It’s part of it, sure – the new artist, Asuka, started off with a rocky run and a slowdown in updates, and even now still hasn’t quite clicked for me. Backgrounds are often ignored, resulting in characters that seem to perpetually float through space. The characters are well designed and expressive, but also sometimes overdone. The art isn’t bad – it’s actually quite nice – but I still haven’t gotten used to it after six months of work, and that doesn’t bode well.

But it has been the story and the writing that has been causing vast amounts of frustration.

Our latest storyline involves our main character, Rachel, unwillingly getting naked for a massage she doesn’t want, while on a ‘relaxing’ outing she didn’t want to go on, taken there by friends she doesn’t want, from a team she didn’t really want to join.

Now, to be fair – the theme of not being in control is the central theme of the strip. Rachel Hawke was previously Ryan Hawke, and the core of the strip involves him and his best friend Brian investigating a haunted mansion – and finding themselves mysteriously turned into girls.

Of course, his friend Brian seems to also have the ability to change back. Rachel does not, and is far from happy with the situation, but competely unable to do anything about it. Done right, that is a great premise for a series, and seeing Rachel’s helplessness and frustration – and how she acts because of it – has been key to driving the story along.

In that core premise – being turned into a girl – she doesn’t have control. Her frustration over it works. In all those other situations since, however, it just doesn’t make sense. She is in a situation she actively doesn’t want to have happen, and yet she goes along with it. I can buy her friends bullying her into joining them on a trip – sure, okay, that’s what friends do. Letting them persuade her into have a strange man disrobe her? When she is already very uncomfortable with her form, being it isn’t technically her own?

I don’t buy it. It is being played for laughs and for fanservice. It is letting the strip slide into sitcom silliness – look, this character has managed to get into a stupid and embarrassing situation they don’t want to be! Hah!

That’s my issue with where this strip has gone. I hate seeing that sort of mindlessness here, because Abstract Gender has a lot of promise. Dealing with the mystery as to how it all actually occured, dealing with the different characters react to their new situation, seeing the friendships broken over it – that is genuinely interesting stuff, with a bit of mystery and school drama and personal reflection combined.

We’ve even had a lot of that good stuff recently, with Rachel actively investigating who is behind her transformation. That is the sort of behavior that fits, having her pushing the action forward as she tries to control at least one aspect of her life. But the constant lapses into passive obedience – usually to bring about some silly situation for us to laugh at – just don’t work.

I’m not saying the comic can’t be funny – it has been a humor strip from the beginning. But it was also a strip that seemed to have a story to tell, and early on, had no problem balancing the jokes with the plot. And it has kept the plot moving, I’ll give it that – but it also seems willing to toss it aside for the sake of a few cheap laughs. To sacrifice characterization for crass comedy.

If it works… well, more power to ’em. There have been quite a few successes out there – in all forms of media – built off of nothing more than fanservice.

It’s just a shame to see it from a comic that had the potential to be a whole lot more.