'Not A Villain' Webcomic - Kat decides to log out.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 301

Hmm...

62 Comments

What do you think of the idea of doing text-updates? Erfworld has a similar update-speed as you have (i.e. graphics are awesome and therefore take lots of time), so they’re throwing in updates that are lots of text and maybe 1 image at the end. It allows for longer inner monologues, faster plot-development and I think it’s perfect for scenes where little action and lots of dialogue is happening, because e.g. you won’t have to worry about how arms and legs have to be positioned. 😉

Please don’t do text updates. They’re the reason I don’t read erfworld anymore. They are these extremely long wall of texts that are very annoying to read, but you can’t skip them because vital plot information is hidden in them.

I think the text updates is the best part of erfworld. I like them better than the real comics

the videos however I hate.

I’m going with the “please don’t do text updates” either. They work on some very few comics, but even then I want to be able to follow the story from the images themselves.

To be fair, Erfworld has a different artist from its writer. The text update thing was started because of the artist changing a lot and now serves to buffer the Kickstarter demands.

So, note to author: don’t do a kickstarter unless you have minions to handle the deluge of stretch goal obligations! Also, thank you for being awesome.

lol, it seems like not everyone likes text-walls. ^^
And yes, Erfworld started it during some summer-updates when even the 1 image was done by various fans because the artist had problems, so now they’re redoing them.

Well… text-updates don’t necessarily have to be huge text-walls. Most of Erfworld’s text-updates were more than one DIN A4 page (some were probably even way more than 5 pages), so yes, Rob took text-updates to the extreme. 🙂

But NAV does have those interviews from last December and they’re mainly dialogue as well. What would you say to text-updates that are about that length?

Text is a great thing. I read a lot of text. Fiction.

But scenes like this page, if you tried to put them in text…They would read a lot differently. For example, describing all the different expressions that happen in the split second on panel 3, the flashback in panel 1…They wouldn’t work out nearly as well. In case of Kleya, the ears perking up and down are fun visual cues for example.

Another problem, for me, with text updates that I found most annoying in Erfworld was that I associate images- figures with characters in the comic, so reading about them feels fake – the interviews were interesting, but I got the feeling that characters were disturbed from something else during them. I’m bad at remembering names to be honest, so that plays a part as well.

On the other hand, some pages with exposition, like Bandit and Grace meeting during the Game trials, could indeed be handled by, say, displaying texts instead of actually having people talking, though that may not work very well from the L.i.F.e. sense of worldsetting. Oddly enough, reading is faster than watching for me, so some more introspective or worldsetting-driven genres work really well with it.

Comics should focus on “show, don’t tell”

When it starts relying on extensive exposition via text updates making up the majority of the page, it’s not helping any. In a webcomic, additional text accompanying the comic should be expanding the content of the page (links to previous pages or definitions) rather than trying to fit in information that could not be fit in the page image itself.

NAV does lend itself in a way to maybe include “instruction manual” pages where game terminology that has already been explained could be explained with the context of the game instead of the players interpretation of it. But this is extra work for the Artist.

Erfworld pulls off the text updates so well because you’re also supposed to be able to (at least mostly) follow along even if you never read any of them, and only read the comic pages.

Me, I don’t mind the text updates so much. They’re not all text updates (except for Book 0 obviously), and the comic pages makes things easier to “see”. But it does help make the story seem to go significantly faster.

But, this is NaV, not Erfworld. So I don’t know how well it’d go. Some might love them, some, like myself, probably wouldn’t care much either way, and others are clearly against them without even seeing how NaV’s version would go. So clearly Aneeka can’t make everyone happy, even before putting much thought into it.

Ok, I give in. 🙂
I’m going to read the new Erfworld text-update now. ;-p

You kinda know, for some readers english isn’t their first language. And reading big texts in foreign language is annoying, especially if we have to look every fifth word in a dictionary or something.
Besides, I believe that comics aren’t books… and if an artist can’t show everything they want without text pages, they shouldn’t bother making comics in the first place.
Sorry if that sounds too harsh. Just telling what I think.
So far this comic is great, so I believe Aneeka doesn’t need to change the way to tell the story.

I’m German, i.e. not a native-speaker either, so stop whining and learn some more words. 😉

Well, I think you’re too harsh on comic-writers, because that kind of thinking (express everything or you shouldn’t do it) is too black-and-white. Just read some Asterix for example or Mickey Mouse. Those comics have occasional text-boxes, mostly in the upper left corner of a panel.

Peh. you’re german. that hardly counts. at least you don’t need to completely learn grammar from the ground up.

… I like text updates too.

Well, german and english are quite close. I am russian, and russian and english have almost nothing in common. First look on long english text gives to me similar impression as does the first look on long chinese text.
As for ocassional text boxes – they aren’t full text pages, so this point is invalid as well.

I’m russian too and i disagree. Because, you know, 80% of russian schools have at least 7-year long english course.

I’m Brazilian and we have 12-year long English courses at school, but they don’t really do much even at the best schools…

And yeah, full text pages are very different from big textboxes, and if you have to rely on the former, you’re not doing a very good job on comic writing.

None of my points are invalid, Nikary. You just need to stop using a black/white way of thinking, because otherwise you won’t be able to make any valid points, let alone gain the ability to understand the possibilities of art.

I can read German comics (technically read 5 years of German in school), but not German newspapers. Finnish is my native language and it, too, has nothing in common with English. The only reason I’m so fluent with it (in written form at least) is that I’ve been actively and consciously using it to write since 1999. Not everyone can put as much energy and time into learning a new language, so saying “stop whining and learn some more words” is extremely rude and presumptious.

I say give it a try. You wont know until you do. If you like how it turns out then keep it, otherwise you can stop having gained the insight.

I don’t feel NAV is the type of comic that should use text updates, but who knows what’s coming up in the future.

But if it comes, please please please let it be real text in the browser, not pictures of text. Speech bubbles are doable, but a wall of text means I want to be able to highlight, copy, enlarge, and set to a font I find most readable. I won’t read long pictures-of-text introduction because it’s always too small in my browser.

I zoom NAV too a bit, but there’s not so much text that reading blurry text is too annoying.

Not really sure how well text updates would translate in book form- remember, this isn’t just a webcomic.

That being said, I wouldn’t be opposed to it.

I’d imagine people have gotten fairly good at putting text in books after all these thousands of years?

Look at comic books. They don’t have wall-o-text to go with the pictures.

Don’t do text updates, please.

At least not main-continuity ones; side ones (such as explainations of how this or that part of L.i.F.e. or The Game work, for pedantic people who care) could work really well as long as they’re not required reading and don’t replace comic updates.

I’m kinda relieved that the discussion I started didn’t remain as one-sided as the first reactions were. 🙂 Also it’s nice to see that the discussion turned out rather big. One of the main reasons I started this was the mouse-over of page 300. A lot of dialog happens, people are standing around and she didn’t know what to do with arms and legs. Anyway, it was just an idea and I’ll remain a fan no matter what happens.

Note that everyone who followed this discussion is able to read a whole wall of text. :-p

Also my “stop whinig” was meant as a joke and I thought the smiley made it obvious. I know that not everyone can be as awesome as I am. 😉

Is that one of the hacker hunters in the flasback?

Ohh… This is an interesting turn of events. I wonder how everyone’s going to react to that. Will they be understanding, will they be unreasonable, or will they just try to figure out how to help Kleya Smith calm down and get back in the game to play in a “Villain” group.

That guy needs to see a dentist…

I was thinking the same… His teeth look very sharp, too.

The dentists might take over, you can’t trust them with their tiny tooth cleaning implements

I love the teeth in panel two. So well drawn.

And poor Kleya…

I’m not sure there should be a comma in that first line of the flashback. I could construe a sentence where there would be, i.e. “You/she are/is the worst villain, the greatest monster, we have ever known.” But it seems a little jarring, as the most obvious sentence that comes to mind doesn’t have that commathetical. Unless, of course, this is a small part of a flashback that we will see more of later, and the comma needs to be there.

I just finished an archive trawl and, occasional nitpick aside, I really like the comic. The world-building, characters and plotting are fantastic. I’m not usually a fan of media/characters with such a cut and dried outlook on morality, but it makes a lot of sense given Kleya’s character arc, and I assume this will be brought up at some point by someone less damaged (maybe Bandit? From what I can see he’s the only (main) character in the running for sane, intelligent and (probably) not evil). I’ll be pretty disappointed if no one ever addresses Kleya’s obsession with labels, but given the quality of the comic so far, I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

Keep up the great work, Aneeka.

Well…that’s certainly *a* way to solve the problem of being in a villain group… :p

Though I wonder…is the Game starting right that moment? That could be interesting, especially if it locks her out of the game until she hacks herself back in, if that ends up being the case. Furthermore…is she logging out to L.I.F.E., or is she logging out of both the Game *and* L.I.F.E.? The last time she left the server area, she mentioned that she was returning to L.I.F.E. itself. Going only one step back could lead to Sandra trying to get her back in with some understanding, but *two* steps back and D’s the only sentient thing that could console her.

Either way, looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Back to reality. It was so amazing looking before I wonder how much better it is going to be since you originally drew reality. Especially since you keep going to art workshops and devoting your time to increasing your ability.

Actually, a lot of people really really like villains, Kleya. Just be the magnificent ba*tard kind, and you’ll get all the fangirls.

Wait, that only works for guys… I guess it’s time to show some cleavage. Marketing says that usually sells. (j/k, I like that the costumes aren’t super revealing and stuff.)

Perhaps it sounds strange, but the broken teeth in the flashback are great! 😀

Panel #2: ouch. It doesn’t say it, but I suspect that Kleya is mentioned by chipped tooth by name – to everyone on the planet.
It’s not just “kill all the hackers”. It’s “kill all the hackers, but especially their leader”.

We are getting bits an pieces of what happened, and we are running under the assumption that she did something horrible before the start of the comic. We also know that she is the best programer in the world (based off of this: http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-229/). I’m wondering if what happened was not really her fault (but that she had some sort of tie to it), and she is just being used as a scapegoat by the higher ups.

I think that if it wasn’t her fault, she’d be a bit less torn up over it. I read her as trying to atone for something she did, and using public perception as a metric for it, rather than just trying to change her public perception.

You do have a point, but still, we only really know about the aftermath, not the details of the actual disaster and who/what caused it. In terms of how much she is to blame, it could range anywhere from here unleashing the disaster without realizing how bad it would get, to someone else using some program she crated without her knowledge and then blaming her. It is easy to manipulate people by using an argument that will result in them feeling a certain emotion. Anyways, all we can do is wait and see if the author will tell us exactly what happened

Very good points. She doesn’t need to be the one who made things get so bad, so just had to be the one who made it easy for the ones who did. She could have been a leader of a group, but groups can do things their leaders don’t want. Without the leader knowing until its too late to do anything or say you had no part in it.
Besides, people can convince themselves of anything. Some can convince themselves they are blameless. Others can do the opposite. Both can be wrong.

Given the information we’ve been given so far, hackers (Kleya in particular) were deemed solely responsible for the cataclysm that’s made life in the real world so difficult. The turning point for Jake (and probably many others) was that Kleya’s mother was killed in the chaos, and this has been portrayed as a premeditated action by Kleya.

So, in a nutshell, the chances of real-life Kleya being redeemed are virtually nil. Added onto which, it seems as though some at TENka (who now run The Game) are hoping the real-life Kleya will log into The Game, and use it as an opportunity to track her down, for reasons that aren’t clear.

However, given the deliberate choices Kleya’s made to honour her mum’s memory, it seems far more likely that whatever Kleya was doing at the time, she was so caught up in it that she didn’t realise her actions would result in her mum’s death until it was too late.

She now has a deep psychological need to feel liked, to be recognised for doing something good – when she’s portrayed as an evil villain in real life, the last thing she wants is to be portrayed as such in The Game. Given the flashback, maybe even a touch of PTSD. Of course, there’s pretty much no-one she can talk to about this, for fear she’ll be exposed and her connection traced back to her real life self in the submarine.

Hopefully, she’s only logging off temporarily to gather her thoughts and deal with the conflict in her head: help her new-found acquaintances but be portrayed as a villain, or abandon them, create a new account, and try again.

Given Sandra runs her own server and is in need of a programmer, perhaps if she could arrange a session isolated from the rest of the network (so a kind of VPN), maybe eventually in that circumstance, Kleya could open up a bit more (obviously not revealing the whole story, but maybe saying something to the effect of there are certain people who’d very much like her dead for regrettable actions she did in the past).

its gotta be directly her fault, unintended I could believe but the heart of it would be something she did.
_____

the best she could have been was lash out in some sort of self defence and it escalated from there get mother by mistake when she tried to stop you sort of thing

also I could beleive starting a group that then got out of control and went in its own direction as a sort of mob mind thing being part of it

You know, I think Kleya might have a few mental issues.

Who would have thought a young woman who has been reviled and blames herself for somethings that are horrible beyond words would have psychological issues, right? :3

Whoever that person is in Reality, they have some jacked up teeth.

The fact you chose to make his teeth jagged adds up the the realism of the comic. I love it 😀

Apparently people were afraid dentists would take over the world before the programmer rebellion, also farmers (now they eat processed paste because there’s no more real food), doctors (who are now so rare that nobody can get help from one outside of a city) and anyone else with skills outside of facebookery or playing L.i.F.e. and The Game… What kind of horrific post-apocalypse is this?

OK, may I suggest that Mr. Tooth is Daddy? We can start adding up evil characteristics, mix in some enjoyment of the adrenaline rush and a dislike of taking responsibility for his own actions. Brilliant, mad, irresponsible . . . mom was gentler, Kleya loved her, mom is dead . . .

Oh!

I was going to say the same thing. After all, what’s a webcomic without wild guesses based on incidental information?

I say that it’s her father (The Pink Cyborg Overlord tore out her father from the picture after he distanced himself from her this way; he said this to distance himself from her because it would look bad for his image to be the “Father of the Evil Cyborg Hacker”).

Also, to make this guess even more wild, I’m going to say that he’s also Saisuke, as he’s searching for someone and who better to search for someone than the uncaring father who wasn’t even present when his wife died and then blamed it all on his daughter?

Also, to make it incredibly inaccurate, I’m going to say that every character in the comic except Kleya and Annie is really an advanced AI with emotions programmed in, and Kleya’s D created them as Kleya slept so she wouldn’t feel so lonely in the world, and Annie just “happened” to survive.

Also, I’m going to make yet another wildly inaccurate guess and say that we’re going to cut to Annie’s story again soon.

Also, as someone who has chipped teeth before (in fact, the exact same chipped tooth that the person there has…maybe that person is really me! Gasp!), I’m going to say that chipped teeth are painful at first, but after the first month you don’t really notice them any more until someone points it out to you. Then, you promptly forget it again.

Also, I’m going to stop using the world ‘also.’

Probably.

I love the way you think.
Like seriously.
Like, If you were a girl, I would totally date you.
Like, it’s like I totally like, “like like” the way you think.
Like, if the way that you think was a girl, I would totally date her.
Like, I would like the way you think on facebook.
Like yeah.
Like I don’t even know what gender you are, so like just, like, ignore, like, all of this.
Like, I should stop making this even more, like, awkward.
(like this could possible be any more awkward)
Like, I’m sorry I’m like, so impulsive.
maybe.

IN A LESS INSANE MIND:
Yeah, I thought that might be her father as well, also, I am extremely curious as to what Bandit/Jake is thinking right now. The pace this comic moves at is sometimes frustratingly slow, but I understand that I cannot expect it to go faster. I am also extremely excited for the next book in the Chaos Gods series, so any time spent on that instead of NaV is time well spent.

ha, I was just thinking how this guy has the exact same teeth *as me* maybe we’re the same person and I just forgot writing your comment

Kleya’s dad must be the chairman of TENka, so that it would all work out. Sweet, loving mom, who’s dead because of evil overlord dad who took advantage of trusting, innocent daughter, who subsequently became vengeful, self-blaming master of all things computery. This is based off of an assumption of truth of only the first four paragraphs of Orange Blossom’s Violist’s post.

other flashbacks it sounds like before she was a daddy’s girl up to the moment mom died and now shes all about how great and nice and good mom was so thats klea’s thing now.

D***it, we must learn about her backstory as soon as possible! I’m coming up with all sorts of theories but I don’t want to make any stupid guesses that’ll be too far off from the truth!

I love Kleya’s moral dilemma here! I can’t wait to see how she works it out. I also agree that more backstory might be fun. I’d like to see some of what she is trying to make up for–the killer robots or hacking the Earth’s magnetic fields or something. And how she wound up doing the wrong thing–was it being guided by ruthless people, or teenaged carelessness, or believing things that were not true?

P.S.: These issues interest me, because I feel I spent part of the last century believing some things about people in other countries that weren’t true, and it continues to trouble me when I think about what I should advocate for in today’s world!
[Like right now, I’m listening to a new story about trouble in Egypt. I ask myself, “Is it wrong that a democratically elected government (deposed Pres. Morsi and his Muslim brotherhood supporters)–which were going in one “iffy” direction–has been replaced by a more conservative and modern-oriented one, even at the cost of some freedoms for Egyptians?” There are NO easy answers here. I feel sorry for the Egyptians.]

“Beam me out, Scotty!” 🙂

I enjoyed watching your art style develop :-). The story is riveting even though I feel like I have little idea what is going on (other than the Apocalypse, and vr and what not).

I wonder if the flashback guy is the President…

I skip text updates. 🙁

Sorry, but they’re exceedingly boring when used to replace actual comics, especially if they take up an update day. I like my eye-candy.

However, my eyeballs are happy to gobble up text stuff in the extras section, for some weird reason. Maybe because it’s not pretending to be a comic? *Shrug* Who knows..

Regarding text updates, if you are Homestuck, you can even pull off T3XT L1K3 TH1S 4ND 4LSO 1N TURQUO1S3 and people will still read it (= Still needs illustrations though, and only really works for dialogue sequences where nothing changes visually/

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 301