Penny Arcade - Comic - A Malevolent Banquet

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Penny Arcade - Comic - A Malevolent Banquet

Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.

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Valerois

Going off on a tangent here, but I can't help but ask: Is the text depicted in the comic a deliberate hyperbole for the benefit of the punchline? Or is the prose from those books actually that bad?

Jean-Luc

Bloody blood blooded all over the blood covered floor. That's when we knew shit was serious.

Pyrian

Valerois wrote: »

Going off on a tangent here, but I can't help but ask: Is the text depicted in the comic a deliberate hyperbole for the benefit of the punchline? Or is the prose from those books actually that bad?

There's like a million of them and that is far from the bottom of their barrel.

Rhesus Positive

Jean-Luc wrote: »

Bloody blood blooded all over the blood covered floor. That's when we knew shit was serious.

https://youtu.be/PXBBGjUjy2c

RatherDashing89

It can't be a real quote, it didn't say anything at all about effluvia or buboes.

Emperor Megaman

that first panel would make a great "out of context" with Gabe's satisfied face.

furlion

I have only read a few of the books but one of them was Lords of Silence, which is basically a chapter of the plague marines and holy shit. The text in the comic is, if anything, underselling it.

Golden Yak

Valerois wrote: »

Going off on a tangent here, but I can't help but ask: Is the text depicted in the comic a deliberate hyperbole for the benefit of the punchline? Or is the prose from those books actually that bad?

The prose is actually that good.

Overkillengine

RatherDashing89 wrote: »

It can't be a real quote, it didn't say anything at all about effluvia or buboes.

And certainly nothing described as muculent.

HerculePyro

It really is a case of depends on the author, and depends on the subject - Games Workshop's in-house publishing house, Black Library, has a stable of regular authors, although it's changed a fair bit in recent years as they search for fresh talent to develop. Of the 'old guard', Dan Abnett can turn out good stuff pretty regularly (His Eisenhorn/Ravenor/Bequin books in particular), as can Aaron Dembski-Bowden (though the latter does go back to the 'fuck you space-dad' well a bit too much). Josh Reynolds was one of the their stronger fantasy offerings, but he's since moved on from working with them, which is a crying shame - he got that the properties have an element of very, very black humour in them.

The problem with the Horus Heresy novel series, I find, is that the series was stretched out too long, and as such, there's a lot of mediocre trash in there, written by people who just aren't putting out good books. Good, one-shot ideas and concepts (usually invented by Abnett, ADB, Graham McNeill and John French) that work well for a book or so become integral concepts that are worn into the ground (Perpetuals!) that pull away from the core narrative of grand galactic spacewar by a human empire, high on xenocide and its own triumphalism, ripping itself apart to setup the somehow even worse human empire that still gets high on xenocide 10,000 years later, but has also broken into full-tilt theo-necrocracy.

It's tie-in pulp, so don't except high art, but when it's good, it's good tie-in pulp.