Back in college, I used to read buttloads of fantasy novels. It used to be that unless there was a dragon or at least a comely lass in a silky princess outfit on the cover, I wasn’t just that interested. Also, it was a good excuse to make time with the cute and bookish brunette. My deformed bookshelves are currently fighting a losing battle to support The Book of Jhereg, Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars books, Mary Gentle’s Grunts, some Raymond Feist paperbacks, some Steven Brust hardbacks, and others.
While my interested has waned somewhat over the years, I learned a valuable lesson: when a story is set in a strange, mystical world, it becomes very important to have characters you can relate to. My absolute favorite series was Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, mainly because you could put yourself in Simon’s shoes and witness the wonder and terror of the unfolding world through his eyes. Stories set almost exclusively in elven enclaves never appealed to me because when everyone’s alien, no one’s remarkable … and it’s hard to relate to a people whose main purpose in life is to sit around playing sitars and looking pretty.
This should have set of warning bells regarding today’s subject for the Webcomic Overlook, by the way. Everyone in the book, including the few men, are cuties, and at no point do they stop being cuties. Today, we look at Earthsong by Crystal Yates, a webcomic which is not really about singing … or even set on Earth, come to think about it.
