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Penny Arcade - Comic - Grace, Part Six
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Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Grace, Part Six
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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It's totally correct, it's just an elision, used in a familiar language register, or a childish style
Only a mere 136 pins to go!
I need more.
EDIT - Also, I wanted to say that I love how the trophy turned into a sort of Mjolnir at the end. Super awesome.
She just delivered...
The Coup de Grâce
Steam: adamjnet
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAH!
So I'm thinking 'C'est pas ta maison' is what Grace's mom wanted her to say in the 3rd strip.
'Our way' means with a French accent.
Because she wants to make sure that Grace remembers it. I think that saying it is part of a ritual that banishes these monsters - like an exorcism - and the reason her Mom wants her to say it is because Grace needs it to protect her Dad.
And just like the Nightlight (ie the Lacrosse Trophy) each family's ritual saying is different depending on the child's bond with their parent.
So basically they are killing these beasts with familial love and oh christ there's something in my eye.
Steam: adamjnet
I think this tonal shift clearly represents a "coming of age" for these characters but not necessarily the transition into becoming the nightlight. In the one-shot, it's when the man becomes a father, and therefore the Nightlight. In 'Grace', the transition of style is when the mother is on her deathbed - Grace is confronting the reality of death, and being told she needs to take on the responsibility of protecting her father.
The art, along with these characters' lives, becomes more complex at these points. It's a nice metaphor for not necessarily becoming an adult, but confronting the responsibilities required to be one. We're seeing through their eyes, and the world looks different to them now.
Steam: adamjnet
is it only for children that they come? what age is "old enough" to stop?
are they summoned by a child's fears, and they stop when the child is no longer afraid?
what happens to this one when Grace is finished beating the crap out of it? will she have to deal with the body like the dad in the 1-shot holding the little green guy? will it disappear?
SO MANY QUESTIONS! I WANT MORE INFO; MORE NIGHTLIGHT COMICS!!!!!
think it's more like like the old samurai movies where they dash past each other
Nightlights are an allegory for Sociopaths, perhaps? (Think that's getting a bit out there, but eh.)
My daughter is 3 and the imagination explosion in the last 6 months has been astounding. If the monsters are coming out based on child imagination, the beginning must be around 2.5 years old, and my last childhood nightmares were from around 11 or 12 years old and I know my 9yo nephew still goes in to his parents' room occasionally. This is an insane burden for Grace who is likely only just recently out of this range.
If I'm reading it right, she's swinging the lacrosse trophy like a baseball bat.
I'm "kupiyupaekio" on Discord.
I kind of saw it as her swinging a lacrosse stick.
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Brave girl. Could have been a Daughter
Also yeah, great set of comics!
It doesn't need any extra explanation. Read the words. Look at the pictures. It's all there.
Meh, I think this part is the weakest of the six.
I'll give a little review here now that its over.
The pros: The art! Very pretty art, very well drawn. I'd love to see Mike try his hand someday at the backgrounds for a point and click adventure game.
The cons: The writing. For me, this is a very common complaint with Penny Arcade with their drama stories. The strip was way too slow. Seriously, the first strip was Grace being hugged by her parents? That's not how you start off a story. You need to start it off with some action. Jerry writes these stories like he just assumes everyone is going to read them. I write fiction for a living and I'd never start a story this slow. Six strips, three panels each, and the first three strips are basically pointless. The whole beginning had no emotional impact because it happened to quickly. You can't introduce someone, and then kill them, and expect a reaction from the reader. Which brings up another point.
What the hell was that? The original pitch was what if monsters do exist, but only dads can see them? Jerry took Mike's beautiful pixar idea and made it all grimdark and sappy. "What if instead, the mom dies of cancer and the dad is too depressed to raise his son, so the oldest daughter has to do it instead?" It just seems very amateruish to me. This whole comic was like a satire of Nightlight fanfiction, rather than the real thing.
I don't think Jerry is on the same level as Mike. He never wrote anything, except newsposts, whereas Mike has been drawing his whole life. Now Mike is ready for the big time, and Jerry just isn't. He has so many problems with his writing that come from being new, that at his age I don't think he can fix them. Writing is a craft, and Jerry never practiced it. He was practicing playing with words, not writing fiction, and it shows. The only thing Jerry pulls off is interesting word play.
I think it might be time for Mike to take his idea elsewhere. He should be collecting his oscar for best animated movie, and Jerry should be doing tech support for the local school system. Honestly, at this point, I think Mike is letting Jerry writing these things out of pity but he needs to start worrying about his own future.
And yeah, it looks to me like she dodges out of the way, uses that momentum to impale the monster (keep your eye on the square base), then runs alongside to unzip its innards.
For those interested I thought I would break down our take on the story. That's not to say this is the "correct" one. We like to write loose stories and my guess is that will always rub some folks the wrong way.
In this family the Mom is the monster slayer because the Dad doesn't have the "spirit" for it. He is a sweet soul and an artist and he can't even see the monsters. In the first comic he asks for Grace's help killing a spider. This is an indicator that Grace has a strength that the Dad does not possess. This is something Mom would be very aware of.
In comic 2 we cut forward in time to the family returning from the Mom's funeral. Now Grace has a little brother Clancy and seeing Dad overcome with grief she decides to take over the bedtime responsibilities.
comic 3 goes back in time. Mom is now in the hospital. She has cancer and knows she doesn't have long. She needs Grace to accept her role as family protector but is hesitant to describe the very real very scary details of the job because Grace is still so young. She has been teaching Grace a secret phrase in french that is in reality a sort of spell but Grace doesn't know that. Rather than talk about monsters Mom tells Grace that Dad will need help with the "spiders". She is not talking about spiders.
comic 4 goes back to the night of the funeral and Grace has to put Clancy to bed. She opens the door and sees the monster. She is older now and when she sees the monster she realizes what her mother was talking about. Her Mom is gone, her Dad is a mess and she knows she has to go in that room.
In comic 5 Grace sees her lacrosse trophy and notices the monster seems to be repelled by it. I think she probably feels a special power from it as well. Nightlights need a totem, something that they draw courage/strength from. In the very first comic the Dad had a baseball bat. For Grace it is her trophy. As she picks it up it begins to glow.
In the last comic Grace stares down the monster. It lunges at her but she spins out of the way and jams the trophy into it's side. She then runs along the beast opening it up like a zipper and destroying the darkness with her light. I did my best on this one but action scenes are not my strong suit and this was pretty hard for me. Some people got it though so that makes me happy.
again these are the thoughts that Tycho and I had. Some of the ideas on here are just as valid. We like to make things and leave room for interpretation. I think our take on it is just one of many possible reads of this comic. I hope you liked it. Monday is a Witcher strip:)
A lot of the newer stuff just doesn't impact me very well from the writing side. The art is amazing but the story behind it just doesn't do it for me. The one line pitch from Mike's blog post had my own imagination racing and the idea behind it is amazing.
Jerry may have written small stories apart from the blog posts but he isn't quite on the same level as Mike. I'd like to see a full Nightlight comic done exclusively by Mike with his ideas in it.
"I'd never start a story this slow... The whole beginning had no emotional impact because it happened to quickly."
I'm a big fan of that last panel! One of those cool images that could only work in a comic.
Mike,
You are taking this quote out of context. The first panel was very slow. The only information we got was that the parents loved their Grace. It wasn't until we got the other parts of the story did we realize that the dad was not the nightlight and it was the mom.
I completely disagree with the guy who says that Jerry doesn't have the talent to write fiction. I'm sure he does. But most people aren't insane enough to try to write an entire world and emotional arc in a total of like, 21 panels of still pictures and maybe a couple of hundred words. Or in the case of some of the Eyrewood ones, even less. Mike draws really, really well, and in this one in particular he communicated a lot of the emotional payload that there wasn't room for in the words, but good lord. I might say that Jerry doesn't seem particularly well suited to microfiction, but that's hardly a failing.
Also this was by far the most comprehensible short work they've ever done outside of Automata, so it's weird that this is the one that gets the big rant.
...
What
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