Yamara

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 20:03:10 -0700

Habeas Tempus

Yamara

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 07:21:21 -0700

Ironically, the coloring on this one will be delayed because of of a CONTINUUM game in New Jersey this weekend.
The previous ep ("Quit Hovering") will be colored by today's end (Sep 28).

Yamara

Thu, 21 Sep 2006 14:55:54 -0700

Color happened with the last one, and so it shall happen with this one. Also we'll be reviewing the RSS feeds this weekend to see what you're actually getting...

Yamara

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 12:27:09 -0700

Despite a fortnight as complicated for us as the fortnight we were not updating...

We're still updating. Sorry it's still b&w, but color is happening with this one. Also expect previous Arcalula & Kafira eps to be colorized this weekend...

Yamara

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 11:49:56 -0700

B&W now, color later. Go wait in line.

In Soviet Russia, comics read YOU.

Yamara

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 14:01:21 -0700

This should catch us up with our RSS feedees...

Yamara

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 09:32:02 -0700

Yamara

Fri, 19 May 2006 21:23:54 -0700

Yamara

Mon, 15 May 2006 04:05:22 -0700

Halfling Apocrypha
First published: June, 2003. Posted Online: May 15, 2006.

The subject matter and timing of this strip are kind of apocryphal, actually, but ancestral legends and myth are good for that. More on this after a few paragraphs.

Some important housekeeping notes.

One benefit of announcing the previous episode as the final one of the original series is that we can use this space to explain some transitions.

Beginning May 18, 2006, Yamara will run weekly on Thursdays. The first episode is actually already online ("Yamara's Dreme") but the site will be sporting a somewhat different look, to compliment the new online style, so feel free to vote and comment on what you think.

A note to various comic lists and encyclopedias: These are chapters of the same comic, not different comics. We request you not retroctively disqualify us for having fewer than ten strips or some such. The location of our archive page remains unchanged, and that should say it all.

For the curious, we have some 'splainin' to do: It is in the nature of php to be so seamlessly interactive that one can overlook potential applications and modifications, since it's supposedly easy to code them in later. Unfortunately, we are neither php coders, nor do we wish to spend the time or money on creating the perfect webcomic delivery engine. Walrus is plenty great, thank you.

Still, we wanted to do something that Walrus, and the other engines we looked at, couldn't do out of the box: Change the background and format at a certain date, but leave the previous dates with the old layout. Chris has devised a workaround: The Hundred Classic Episodes are moving to a new directory, yamara.com/yamaraclassic/, while the new strips will keep the yamara.com/yamara/ directory, so that links around the web don't suddenly become obsolete.

We're trying to make this as easy on fans as possible:

The Working Title War and The Hundred Classic Episodes will be thoroughly linked together onsite through the archive, the "Scrolls of Plegh" menu, and even special rewind/fast forward buttons.

All the old strips, images, and even the news will be duplicated into the ongoing /yamara/ directory, so if you've been bad and remotely linked one of our strips, then the hour of facing your rightful Day of Reckoning has been postponed.

A link to http://www.yamara.com/yamara/ will still reach the latest strip. However, any addresses before May 18, 2006 linked to a specific date (index.php?date=) will fail– we can't forward them with out #2¢%ing up our engine or layout– and you'll have to update those links to the /yamaraclassic/ directory, assuming you really care.

We expect the RSS feeds to update normally, but we will be watching.

A lot of this info will be repeated in the rant for May 18, 2006, since this is the switching point.

And now, about this episode.

This episode has had considerable cleaning up and some modifications, and it still isn't our greatest work. Sorry 'bout that. As 2003 bumbled violently along, it became clear that the visions of Yamara going to war that Chris had driving home from GenCon 2000 were another one of those annoying prescient things we weren't going to escape, so we decided a step into this wider story arc was a good idea.

In the end, it's cute, but a bit of a muddle. We've always known that the halflings throughout modern fantasy only exist because of one Oxford professor's creation, and we're just fooling ourselves to pretend otherwise. Seriously, dwarves, elves, goblins, gnomes– these are all ancient folk tales. "Orcs" are pushing it, but evil monster armies have been around for centuries. But halflings? No, no, no: they come from just the one hole in the ground. So we figured there must have been some Great Halfling Diaspora from Middle-Earth at some point, plopping these fat boggies down all over the bloody multiverse.

They never did find out what happened to Smeagol's clan, after all.

Plus, spreading the blame for halflings around to all the cultures of Earth is upending their invention as part of a "mythology for England". Still, the entire incident portrayed above shouldn't be treated as strictly canonical. For instance, as we will reveal in the coming weeks, there is a Tooke family gathering planned, but Arky wouldn't be flaunting her cyber-swizzlestick at it... The last character to appear above, Kafira, is a member of Arky's band, Alcott Squad, and was (theoretically) known to Valkyrie readers as a character from the strip that they rejected, hence her dismissal by Stress. Kaf is a freedom fighter from Space, and will actually appear in subsequent episodes of Yamara. Though she'll probably meet Stress before a moment like this at the party, so this never really happened. Like we said, apocryphal, non-canonical. Time travel's likely involved. Make of it what you will.

Meanwhile, back on real Earth, Valkyrie was continuing its uneven publishing schedule. It certainly wasn't coming out quarterly. The nature of much of Dave Ryan's business was in wargaming, rather than paper and pencil RPG, so we were sympathetic; prioritizing is difficult when you have so many things you want to say and do. But we stopped expecting having to really get a strip together every three months; hence our surprise when we were told an actual deadline loomed for the next issue.

Chris called the UK to confirm that this strip arrived okay. Apparently it had, and editor Jay Forster commented on the positive reactions Yamara was getting, and looked forward to running the strip well into the future. He concluded by saying, "You guys are family."

We never heard from them again.

Yamara

Mon, 15 May 2006 00:05:22 -0700

Halfling Apocrypha
First published: June, 2003. Posted Online: May 15, 2006.<

More info on this entry soon.

Yamara

Thu, 11 May 2006 09:37:17 -0700

Everybody's A Player
First published: March, 2003. Posted Online: May 11, 2006.

There goes the neighborhood. The latest D&D rules broke the barriers for nearly every sentient monster to become a player character, so why wouldn't they? Given a choice, most people would gravitate toward higher civilization. Except George Bush, who was Deciding to invade Iraq when this came out. And so, the adventure proved to be an empty hypocritical sham, and no evil magical weapons were ever found.

This is technically the penultimate Classic Episode, for one more was published by Valkyrie, but in every other way, this is where the original strip comes to an end. The characters have said all they're likely to say about early-edition roleplaying games, and with d20 OGL, there's no unassailable authority to make a beating grond. The reign of the Gygaxian Overlords has passed into the mists of time, and it's accepted that we all are capable of devising our own set of rules. Insofar as this measure of egalitarianism is concerned, we won. Good game.

Of course, like d20 itself, any path of empire or globalization– even one with (an unlikely) benign intent– disrupts ways of life and the sensibilities of individuals. Simply, people lose touch with how to understand the world. Do people really feel they are defined by a "core class", and what does that implicate? Why is so much magic military in intent and practice? How can a society not be rent asunder by unequal access to healing? And what happens to your economy when you can no longer rely in getting easy money out of a hole in the ground?

These deeper questions are what the new Yamara series, The Working Title War, hopes to address. It will run Thursdays, beginning next week with the "Yamara's Dreme" episode that's been up since August. While there's a lot of serious business to cover, never fear, we'll still find room for the gamer jokes. But gamer jokes alone can no longer constitute a reason to exist. A deeper question still.

It's unlikely warfare can be abolished, but neither has it always existed. Just as the era of dungeon crawling must come to an end for a fantasy world, so too there must have been a time before the labyrinths were ever dug. Those that were exiled to them long ago now return. Whether this creates a field of battle or a picnic of prodigal siblings will be the measure of us all.

Yamara

Mon, 08 May 2006 02:37:44 -0700

The Tavern of Elemental Drinking
First published: September, 2002. Posted Online: May 08, 2006.

The 100th Episode!!

More info on this entry soon.

Yamara

Thu, 04 May 2006 03:37:31 -0700

The Fate of the World
First published: November, 2001. Posted Online: May 04, 2006.
Iizak smokes cigarettes made from red raspberry leaves.

By the way, Chris wants you to know that in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, which came out eight months after this strip saw print, the aliens melt in water.

He has no problem giving up spoilers when they are rank stupid. Consider this a service.

As many (including Chris' girlfriend at the time) have warned: Don't think you can work in a genre if you don't know all its details, history, and parameters; serious SF is the most demanding genre of all. Aliens melting in water is one of the worst tropes imaginable– H. G. Wells set the bar higher in 1898 with the bacteriological twist in The War of the Worlds– so an interstellar invasion force defeated by one of the most common molecules in the universe is just a joke.

Seriously, was everyone involved completely clueless? Perhaps Shyamalan's sure grip on the ghost story and superhero comics of his preceding films made everyone assume he could do no wrong. But apparently, this time, he decided his star empire was run by creatures who share DNA with the evil witches of Oz. His upcoming film, Lady In The Water, has him taking his damp theme back into fantasy, where it belongs.

There's no way disbelief can survive the tumble down the well: Signs' aliens run around naked in cornfields at night, presumably making their spooky space art. A staunch Trekspeaker could devise a tortured explanation as to why they just had to invade naked. But not only are Earth plants chock full of water, they attract it out of the atmosphere, in an amazing unexpected twist of science called dew. Shyamalan's IMDb bio notes he grew up in a "posh suburb" of Philadelphia– but did he never spend a single late night, or early morning out on a lawn, and feel the wet on his hands, messing his clothes? Did he never take a moment to simply consider how dangerous our planet would seem to his vulnerable antagonists?

Was there no other possible course for this thing to take, than to write something so blatantly, stone-numb terrible as this?

Yeah, yeah, it was four years ago, but the blind awfulness of it all always comes back. And it always burns like the abundant water Mother Earth has waiting for M. Night Shyamalan's stupid stupid aliens. WHICH YOU CAN SEE. FROM. SPACE.

. . .

So this is our episode responding to September 11, 2001. As opposed to the clairvoyant one.

There's a lot going on in our heads here, but it really boils down to conversation being the bane of ignorance... and vice versa.

After all, if you assume you know the aliens have a stupid weakness, but never ask about them, or try to speak with them, you might act on your assumption without considering what the aliens think about their own lives, and about you. You might take a potshot at a seemingly easy, welcome target.

When you toss your glass of Evian on your naked foe, he might not melt. He might just wipe off his face with his hand, continue to approach, and use his unique and subtle knowledge to crush you with your own arrogant blind folly.

If there was only some way you could have known.

Yamara

Mon, 01 May 2006 05:23:16 -0700

Precognition of Reality Show
First published: July, 2001. Posted Online: May 01, 2006.

There are things we're reluctant to write about. Oh, fictional things, mostly. If something in reality needs to be said, we'll say it. But we hesitate, all the time, to invent scenarios that detail catastrophic consequences which might actually happen. Because the stuff we write about as fiction almost always comes true.

We can hear you saying it from here. "That's stupid."

Okay, fine. A handful of privately-noticed coincidences does not a Cassandra make. Even if we are somehow seeing the future, it doesn't mean that our writing it "makes" it happen. It just warps the creative process is all: If you write something down, it's supposed to happen to your characters, not to your friends, family, nation or mankind.

By and large, we either get over our paranoid trepidation and forge ahead (with some tweaks,) or we find something else to write about. A good solution is to write about a pre-existing crisis– like violence in schools. Roleplayers have had to wrestle with the ignorant on that issue since ever. We even wrote this accompanying essay pastiche for this episode as a Radio Free Wyhtl.

In the summer of 2001, Chris had an overseas girlfriend! Liz Holliday, the British SF author and editor, to be precise, and she was coming over for the Millennium Philcon, the 59th Worldcon in Philadelphia. Liz used to edit one of Dave Ryan's magazines, Odyssey, and while their working relationship no longer survived, Liz did get us the contacts to get into Valkyrie in the first place. We wrote this episode knowing that making fun of the Harry Potter franchise while beating up on reality shows (the great anathema to creators of fiction then and now) would be a big hit with the Worldcon attendees, and that at least a few copies would be available to pass around.

The con was fabulous, and full of joy and energy. There were conferences and parties, time travel games, Double Exposure-run con suites, comics, and love.

That's what September, 2001 was supposed to be about.

Panels 7 and 8 have ever seemed like our curse coming in at last. Buildings on fire, passionate cries for death in the air. The best among us, sitting and staring helplessly at the screen with glassy eyes.

Stay Tuned.

Yamara

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 01:02:46 -0700

Fan Service
First published: March, 2001. Posted Online: April 27, 2006.

Around the millennium, the Sailor Moon phenomenon reached larp speed, and we began to encounter some of the most horrific images in all cosplaydom. And not just images. These Sailor Moonboys were walking around the streets of Milwaukee in broad daylight, wolfing down hot dogs, and trotting breathily to some GenCon appointment for which they dared not be late, their cases of gaming supplies jammed under their sweaty, costumed armpits.*

Now, don't get us wrong. We love our fans, and fandom in general. Long have we been annoyed by the creators of such series as Star Trek and Buffy for taking precious screen time to gleefully reinforce negative fannish and gamer stereotypes. Luxuriating over taking the p!$$ out of the neurotic among us is a vile practice that is better left behind in high school. Sadly, and unsurprisingly, the powerful often refuse to act adult. So we've been careful not to take easy potshots at fandom.

We also have the deepest respect for the transgendered and -vested; respect for the playful side, as well as respect for the serious challenges that such a life entails.

And, importantly, whatever non-life-threatening kink gets consenting adults off in private is their business, and not anyone else's.

Clear so far? Good.

Because grown men should not be going around in public dressed as underage schoolgirls.

To review...

This is not something the "straights" can get their head around, nor should they. There is no way to explain fantasy roleplaying as being for adults with these clowns walking around. And we mean "clowns" literally: Circus clowns are scary to many kids because they are adults acting like children. Add a prepubescent gender reversal, and the distinction between one of these guys and a roving molester gets that much thinner.**

And this why we paired Yamara showing off her new "guns" with the bitter pathos of seedy men in matching children's dresses: They are unequal opposites. Hers is a long-term decision of daring self-improvement, and theirs represents a passing moment of obstinate bad judgement.

Conflation of the adult and the pre-adult is not something a civilization can long maintain. You can move the demarcation line, between 12 and 21 years old, or so, or even leave the transition open for a decade, as the modern West does. But these are simple physical facts of Time: That at one stage of a human life, it is too young to know or understand itself; at a later stage it is too old not to be responsible for its decisions and actions.

Whenever these conditions are reversed, no one is an adult.

And that's just wrong.

-----
*Scott "Goat" Rienecker, an acquaintance of Dave Fooden's during their SVA days, did a more timely job of warning the world about these beings in an episode of his 1999 MTV street gem, Downtown.

**For a lively debate on this issue, and one that should relieve you of the heaviness of our rant, please read here: Mystery Science Theatre 3000, or "NAMBLA". Gaah.

FAQ:

Q. Wait, Stress and Yamara inherited a house? Ralph is an interstellar magnate?? A BABY?!?

A. Like we said last time, we touch upon the larger plot in these Valkyrie episodes, rather than address it head on. Rest assured, we've been thinking about how Ralph inherits Glathheld's industrial empire for awhile now. A nice perq for having suffered as his last familiar, we suppose.

And as for the kid? Perhaps you haven't been paying close attention to this site...

Q. Why did you make Yamara so huge in the panel on the top of the site?

A. Well, actually...

Chris has noticed that keeping Yamara's size consistent has been tricky. She's never been close to the claimed 3'9" she's supposed to be, but after a four year absence, she suddenly got super-huge.

And we're not talking about those muscles, those are intentional. It's like she's from a verse with a much higher Thrust, and is just dimensionally larger, and you'd have to have read a copy of the old pre-release of NªRCISSIST from 2000 to even get what we just said.

Chris has fixed this episode from how it was originally published. It's like Yam cast "weapon shrinkage" on herself.

Betcha ya got that reference.

Before and After: I was 37 pound weakling...

Fan Service, panels four and five (comparison).

Q. Tiny letters... in my soup.

A. Tiny letters... Blibdoolpoop.

Fan Service, panel one (detail).

Fan Service, panel seven (detail).