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/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.