Batman: A Word to the Wise - Atop the Fourth Wall

Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. In this episode, Linkara concludes PSA Hell Month with a comic about how you should read ABSOLUTELY EVERY SINGLE THING WITH WORDS ON IT. Also: the beginning of the "Gun and Sorcery" storyline!

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Originally uploaded May 28th, 2012.

ORIGINAL INFO: Zellers teaches you why reading is important! Also: cowboy hats.

RUMINATIONS: This is an important episode – the beginning of a new storyline, implications and hints for the future, the introduction of a new character…

…and all I can think about is how annoyed I was that I didn’t push my hair back up under my hat.

No, seriously, that kind of thing happens all the time – just some stray hairs and sitting at a weird angle and I could have easily fixed them but I didn’t notice and so I DO notice it in editing and it just pisses me off so much.

Hmmm? Oh, yes, the storyline.

Thus we begin the storyline “Gun and Sorcery” or the Gunslinger arc. Many believe it to be the longest storyline I’ve done, but that’s inaccurate. If you include the introduction of Linksano, the longest storyline would be the first Vyce arc at 52 episodes. It only FEELS like it’s the longest because this storyline had so many episodes with storyline in them. EVERY episode from this point through the summer had storyline in it. It was primarily because I needed Linkara to be at a certain place before the Halloween arc began, which meant a lot of stuff needed to happen. I then introduced a whole bunch of other story stuff to fill the time, which meant even MORE stuff had to happen.

Still, the storyline exists for one main reason: I couldn’t make a bigger threat. When you have “Lovecraftian monster trying to devour all of reality,” how exactly are you supposed to top that? Well, the goal SHOULDN’T be to top yourself – it should be to just keep making good stories. And in this case, if we couldn’t escalate matters by creating a bigger threat, things could be escalated if we turned the characters INWARDS, as in doing character development. Whether or not I succeeded at that is up to you.

The storyline actually had the most changed from initial conception to realization. What you see here is the only thing that stayed from start to finish – a new enemy, meant to be a dark reflection of Linkara (even using his own magic gun), is defeated rather easily and Linkara starts boasting of his superiority. There are a few differences, however. Initially, the reason the magic gun turned off was actually going to be JEALOUSY. Yeah, the magic gun would be pissed that Linkara was using so much other stuff INSTEAD of her, so she switched off in a fit of jealous rage… which basically turns the magic gun into a vengeful girlfriend.

You can see why I dropped that idea fairly quickly.

Still, the idea was planted there. People were beginning to ask to have storylines on DVDs, and while I maintain that’s just not possible, I wanted to leave myself open to that… but that meant dropping the copyrighted material. So with that initial storyline idea, Linkara and the Gunslinger would go in opposite directions. Over time, the two would have multiple battles, Linkara shedding himself of more and more of the Power Rangers and Star Trek stuff and be left as just a guy with a magic gun, while the Gunslinger kept trying to up his own arsenal and failing miserably. I’m frankly happier with the direction I DID end up going with it.

However, the storyline DID present itself an opportunity, which we hint at with the Gunslinger almost breaking the fourth wall by wondering why the explosion didn’t do anything. More on that next episode…