If you're not working carefully, the comedy can come out toothless and meandering.There is something to be said about indulging in specific. Snark, criticism, and insults are easy by comparison. The problem is, at least in my opinion, wholesome comedy is a lot harder to get right. Remember how Yelling Bird was a staple of the comic and then Jeph suddenly retired him? I think that was an intentional shift prompted by "holy cow, this character is really dumping negativity into my comic in a way I don't like anymore." And it rippled out from there to turn QC into the "comfort food" version we have now. I think Jeph made a conscious effort many years ago to shift away from mean, snarky, or combative jokes. I realize the line I'm toeing here, but as a caveat this is not trying to speculate on Jeph's personal life: As the cast has shifted Sillywards, the Mean characters are increasingly moved into the Nice category. So Mean characters, who Jeph is quite good at writing, only really thrive when they've got other Mean characters to bounce off of because they can snark at each other. Silly/Silly scenes are just farce, and wear out their welcome quickly. Nice and Silly scenes are classic Straight Man/ goofball stuff. Mean characters tend to shift to Nice when sharing scenes with Nice characters and Silly characters, because being mean to a Nice or especially Silly character is just kicking a puppy. Nice and Nice scenes are cute, but don't naturally lead to jokes, like, you can HAVE jokes, because people tell jokes to their friends, but it doesn't automatically lead to much. So you regularly had them bouncing off each other. When things were mostly CoD focused, you got a lot of Faye and Dora scenes, and Jeph writes Mean characters quite well. Like, if we split the cast into three categories: Nice (Martin, Momo, Claire, Hannalore these days), Mean (Faye, Dora, May) and Silly (Marigold, Old Hannalore, basically everybody we've met at Cubetown, most AIs) His best work tends to be sitcom fodder, which requires characters to be at least a little horrible to each other. It's been months since I actually enjoyed these updates, rather than ticking a box on my daily readlist, and now I'm enjoying it very much.Maybe the issue is that Jeph's started writing too many nice and silly characters. Give me characters sniping and snarking with each other.
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