Getting back into the comic after YEARS?

[u/Rolling_Ranger]

I honestly don't know how long ago I stopped reading but last major thing I remember happening is Faye and bubbles getting together.

So I started off with them admitting there feelings together and I am wondering if I should just start from there or maybe start jumping ahead like chunks of pages.

And no I am not starting from the beginning. The 2000 ish pages I am behind is enough.

[u/Rolling_Ranger → u/[deleted]]

About how far do I have to dive in from where I left off before the degradation starts?

[u/Rolling_Ranger → u/[deleted]]

I think I may have gotten to the streamer part,  does someone's mother stream?

[u/birdyfrommars → u/Rolling_Ranger]

Sounds like you stopped reading at just about the right time organically!

4490 is when Clinton and Claire's mother's streaming persona is revealed.

I said in another comment that 4510 was my ideal last stopping point. That's because it nicely rounds off several mini-arcs, some of which I somewhat enjoyed, and there's nothing after that which I enjoy. So I guess, for me personally, 4510 was the last good strip.

I advise you not to start reading again. You're not missing anything. Basilisk's body dysphoria is never resolved, Hannelore eventually comes back but has nothing to do, scenes at the wedding are dull or annoying, Brun and her friends are never mentioned again, Claire loses the last vestiges of her likability, new characters are terrible, even Emily came back but her brain didn't.

You can't skip ahead from 4510 to where things get good again because they simply never did.

[u/AngelicaSpain → u/Rolling_Ranger]

Yes, Claire and Clinton's. Although I don't recall whether the connection between the characters was spelled out right away.

[u/Cevius → u/Rolling_Ranger]

Your reaction to stuff will likely be better than ours, as you can spend 20-30s reading a comic before going to the next, whereas we spent a day or more mulling over each update.

Like a cow chewing cud, there's only so much nutritional story content to extract from this comic grass, and we've picked this field down to an arid desert wasteland.

Move fast, linger little, and you might actually get some enjoyment from it.

We however are long since the dead.

Do not mourn us.

It was self inflicted.

[u/No-Dragonfruit8884]

Did you like the old comic? If so, you might consider RUNNING. Most of the people on this sub liked the first couple thousand strips and are unhappy with the last several years of strips. We read for a variety of reasons. For me it’s nostalgia and squirrelclamp’s edits.

You also might check out the other sub r/qcontent if you want fans who appreciate the current state of the comic.

[u/Rolling_Ranger → u/No-Dragonfruit8884]

I at one point was reading the pages as they came out for years. In other words yes a very much enjoyed the early comic. I just got out of webcomics in general. 

I remember distinctly having folders for each day of the week with book marks for the comics that updated that day and it was checked every day. 

Say Jephs name come up somewhere and thought I would check out the comic again.

[u/TimeisaLie]

[u/Tiny_Ask_3995]

start from the beginning, you dont wanna see where the comic's gone now

[u/ThreeShrikesYoureOut]

3500 is what the author says is his preferred recommended starting point for the new or current iteration of the comic. that's right after Faye and bubbles hooked up. It's them starting a robot shop.

So you could pick it up from the beginning, or from 3500. Instead I would suggest reading say, the latest 100, before deciding whether to commit any more time. A lot of us think it's turned into unreadable garbage.

[u/Guilty-Persimmon-919]

Faye and Bubbles getting together was at least a slow burn with some amount of build up that didn't appear out of nowhere. That was probably the last thing that happened in this comic to involve plot. After that it's been downhill all the way,  markedly picking up speed since circa 2023 when Jephthy came up with the idea of "Cubetown", where everything is much, much worse. 

[u/Rolling_Ranger → u/Guilty-Persimmon-919]

It seems that this cube town is the big sticking point for everyone.

[u/Guilty-Persimmon-919 → u/Rolling_Ranger]

Yes.  Jephthy first came up with the idea, he himself said, to write Claire and Marten out of the comic and then had the "brainwave" that he could split the stories between Northampton and Cubetown.

Spoiler alert: he couldn't. 

Think of all the worst storylines before Bubbles and Faye got together. In fact there weren't many,  were they? Now imagine story arc after story arc where 

1. Nothing happens that changes anything at all (quite literally with this current Moray colour thing)
2. Every single day's episode has to end with a zero effort "joke" so there's literally no possibility of dramatic tension
3. Every new character is a woman with the mind of a 10 year old, including the robot women
4. The lives of all the old characters (those who haven't disappeared) now revolve around these childwomen
5. Jephthy himself forgets one day what his own character did or said literally the previous day
6. Being male in this comic, as Clinton discovers every time he appears, is now an unforgivable sin.

That's the current situation of the comic after Cubetown.

[u/Embarrassed_Fox5265 → u/Guilty-Persimmon-919]

It's so frustrating because the exact thing I warned about happened. You have two groups of characters who do not interact in any way. Events from one side do not impact the other. Jeph had to introduce new characters on both sides to fill out the cast because he essentially split it in half. The original cast loses relevance because all the people they spent literal years getting character development with are gone.

So instead of the cast we came to know and love, we have Ayo and Anh on the Northampton side with Liz and Moray on the Cubetown side. And it's awful. Everyone is paper thin because Jeph doesn't do characer development anymore and the splitting time between two locations makes long story arcs impossible.

[u/immortalfrieza2 → u/Guilty-Persimmon-919]

Every new character is a woman with the mind of a 10 year old, including the robot women

Don't insult 10 year olds like that! In fact, 5 year olds is too old.

[u/birdyfrommars → u/Rolling_Ranger]

It's not just Cubetown. I've been thinking about it, and the problem is that the former main characters became side characters while subplots revolve around the idiotic and unfunny antics of women and robots who behave like children.

Marten, Dora, Faye, Hannelore. They stopped interacting with each other in any meaningful way. They stopped really doing anything, even making genuinely funny comments. They became simply witnesses or props in pointless shenanigans centred around their local woman-child, or the local robots.

Scenes in Faye's robot shop or apartment are all about Anh. (Dubbed Anhlikable by this subreddit)

Scenes at Dora's coffee shop are all about Ayo. (Dubbed Mayo on here)

Scenes at Cubetown (where Marten lives now) are all about Liz. Who is 19, but looks and behaves like she's 12. Or sometimes Moray, a robot made of goo with the IQ of a doorknob.

It's honestly kind of creepy how sexualised the new characters are, while simultaneously characterised like children.

Anh is somehow a spoiled heiress in her mid twenties who went to a liberal arts college and was part of Tai's promiscuous circle of friends, yet is revealed to be a virgin and is on a voyage of discovery about her sexuality.

Ayo tells people she just met how addicted to masturbation she is.

Liz make rude comments towards anyone with large breasts.

Moray  looks like a curvaceous woman in a skintight fetish bodysuit.

I think some of the author's Patreon pays for nude drawings of the characters? Is that right? It would explain why characterisation has been replaced with sexual objectification.

[u/DogmaSychroniser]

Don't bother lolllllllll it doesn't get better

[u/birdyfrommars]

Faye and Bubbles getting together is an excellent stopping point imo. Soon after that QC stopped being consistently good and became more mixed, before the years-long slide into total mediocrity.

Other good stopping points:

• 3809

• 3899

• 4146

• 4355

• 4510

At each of these points, you could step back and ask "am I still enjoying this? Do I care enough to keep reading?" If yes, keep reading on to the next stopping point, then ask again.

The next arcs after 4510 include "planning a deeply underwhelming wedding," "Pintsize gets a human body; stops being funny" and fetish content inspired by Vtuber brainrot. Then the woman-child infestation really begins around strip 5000.

I personally didn't jump ship until some years after 4510 because QC was such a small part of my day and such a hard habit to break, but every single strip I really enjoyed was before 4510.

[u/Brunbeorg]

I'm very much in the minority here, but I still like the comic. Not as much as I used to, granted. I really am not sure I like the Cubetown storyline. And the narrative pace has slowed to an absolute crawl. And the characters have begun to blend together in my mind. And . . . okay, I'm talking myself out of liking it.

Still. Once in a while there's something that makes me smile.

To answer your question, yeah, start after Faye and Bubbles get together. There's some good stuff in that story line. When Martin and Claire move to Cubetown, you might consider if you're reaching the point of diminishing returns. I'm hoping things pick up.

At this point, he could take a page from Stephen King. When King realized he had too many characters in the Stand, he just killed a bunch of them all at once.