2505 Dorks In Love.

What’s that old phrase? Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly?

I didn’t even notice she took the glasses. I had to go back and look. And she snatched them by the lens, so now he’s going to have massive prints all over them. Good job Nina!

What do you mean this is why I can’t find a girlfriend?

Dorks need love, too. How else will there be a new generation of them?

Wow, for the first time ever, I’m caught up. I’ve only been reading for a year or so. Jackie, I just wanted to say I appreciate you bringing so many consistently high quality comics to us. Even the possibly non-canon “Times Between” were comparable to the main comic in my opinion, with the Puppet Arc being some of my favorite comics in the whole archive.

I recently bowed out of Questionable Content at comic 5000, but I should have left years earlier. The only reason I kept reading is because of a subreddit where me and other like-minded individuals lamented the precipitous fall of quality in a comic we used to love. As they say, misery loves company. It’s just interesting how much we hang onto media we experienced in our formative years, I read QC back in high school and that was almost 20 years ago. I really didn’t want to let it go.

I’m a Patreon supporter of yours, not a big one, but a dollar a month isn’t going to kill me, and it’s literally the least I can do to thank you for filling the hole in my rom-com webcomic routine.

The full-face-plunge into the Woke Vat didn’t help it any, either. He didn’t drink the Kool-Aid so much as he ritualistically drowned a puppy in it.

It’s not specifically that it’s “woke”, it’s that it feels performative, and just feels like he’s checking boxes.

Also the transition to be a mostly AI-based cast (who are all the same type of quirky and bland so it’s hard to tell one from the other) and the abandonment of most of the complex characters we’ve grown to love was disheartening as well.

Honestly, I’m not sure I agree with that, for two reasons. One, I mean, this is the guy who, upon Obama winning office, fled to Canada because that still wasn’t liberal enough for him. I’m not judging him, I’m just saying he’s definitely dedicated to his politics, he’s not just trying to fit in or some such. Second, man, at the point where I bowed out of QC, it seemed far more than performative to me. A lesbian couple would be performative; making EVERYONE some sort of oddity, gay or trans or notably overweight or non-binary or severely socially awkward or a weeb stereotype, and sidelining the few mostly normal, hetero characters (Raven, Penny, Steve, Sven, Angus, if I remember the names right, it’s been a while), is way beyond tokenism. None of these were bad on their own, really, but it got sort of tiring that characters felt less and less like characters and more like character traits. I loved Bubbles and Faye though.

Personally it’s for me that the farther and farther Jeph withdraws from the original cast, the less I’m enjoying it.
The current arc seems to be dedicated to removing Marten, the original MC snd POV, entirely. When that happens I’m done.

First of all, thanks for giving my work a try, I’m glad you enjoyed it. Hopefully you will continue so to do. I appreciate the patreon support as well. It’s been a rough few years but somehow I managed to keep afloat without the quality dipping too much.

Secondly, I understand how you feel about QC. I’m still in it, in spite of the fact that Jeph seems to have stopped being the even tempered person who started the entire affair. Every other webcomic I used to read either ended, or the author took such a drastic personal turn in personality I couldn’t keep reading. I’m holding on to QC because it, more than anything else, felt like home to me for the longest time. It’s been rough as that has become less and less true. His former twitter account almost managed to sour me on his work completely, but in that one case I was able to at least partially separate the art from the artist. As time goes on more and more of Twitter Jeph seems to be writing QC. It wasn’t as noticeable at first but it’s becoming almost impossible to deny in some cases now. It hasn’t become openly contemptuous, but it feels like it’s just a matter of time. I don’t know what I’ll do once I have to give up QC. It won’t have a decent ending. I know it can’t at this point. It’s like watching someone die of cancer. A grim exercise in loyalty and love… I can only hope that I manage to keep that from happening with my own work. I have a long enough outline that I should be able to keep things on course for a long time to come hopefully. I’d like to see my own story to its conclusion, but on some level that’s not up to me.

Anyway, I’m sorry I didn’t reply to this when you posted it. I didn’t have time to sit and really gather my thoughts until now.

Hey, thanks for responding! Yeah, I know exactly what you mean with Jeph seeming like a different person than he used to be. All we can do is try to make the best decisions for ourselves. Sucks sometimes.

It was punk-ish when it started. Out-of-the-box rough around the edges comic-wise.

But typically, as time goes on, most punk-ish people tend to fall into the traditional categories because they are rigidly who they are (anti-SOMETHING). Change is HARD, man, and they have a message that doesn’t evolve well over time, so it goes downhill from there.

Same with Jeph. He considered himself rigidly anti-establishment and pro-activist. But he failed to take the curve when it came and drove through the railing and off the road. Unfortunately, but most people like him end up there.

Ha! Y’all can bail out of QC, but I love it more as it delves into interesting questions about humanity and sapience, mixed with lots of gags.

It does?
It’s got weirdly repetitive. I’ll do an archive run every now and then and I’m always surprised how similar they are. It’s at the point where the christmas comics are the only ones worth reading now.