Monday, Monday

(Daa daaaaaa, daaa daa-daa daaa)

Since I started playing in Joe's 4e game, I haven't been able to shake the notion that that whole setting would make an excellent comic. D&D comics have been attempted before with varying degrees of success, Goblins being perhaps the most prominent offering, but that particular comic has... well. Art issues. I have been known to enjoy tea in the past, and suffice it to say, Goblins is not my cup of it.

The whole notion of a shared storytelling experience vis a vis the Dungeon Master is a concept that has an incredible amount of potential. Players have been participating in this experience for years, and if there wasn't meat there, they wouldn't return to the table. Much of the potential fun, of course, lies in the "table experience" - a mediocre story is often overshadowed by the fact that everyone is having a great time simply playing the game - but I have played with DMs who create stories that could hold their weight when compared to any of the mainstream fiction writers, given a little narrative tweaking.

Comics, particularly webcomics, have seen something of a renaissance in the past few years, and although it can take some effort to sort the wheat from the chaff, we've seen some incredible stories take shape - Spike's Templar, AZ (occasionally NWS) and Tom Siddell's Gunnerkrigg Court spring immediately to mind - if you aren't reading those comics, you really should be. The power of the comic lies, in my mind, in the ability to craft every part of the narrative, to show the reader exactly what you want them to see. It subverts the imagination on occasion, yes, but it also allows an author complete control over their work in a way that mere text does not.

What I would love to see is a confluence of those two concepts. Incredible stories are being played out weekly at game tables the world over, and if someone with enough artistic ability, narrative skill, and an ear for dialogue were to try their hand at translating these stories into an appreciable medium, the resulting work would be quite a thing to behold.