Dresden Codak is a webcomic created by Aaron Diaz. The comic focuses mainly on the Singularity and machine intelligence. It's first page, "Tomorrow Man", was posted on June 8, 2005, and the comic has updated at an unpredictable and slow rate ever since. However, the lack of speedy updates is entirely forgivable because the quality of the artwork and depth of the stories presented are phenomenal.

The best way to describe the format of the comics is "very very big". Though a few of the comics have only a handful of panels, most of them have at least twenty, and every once in a while an ambitious one comes along that is upwards of thirty. Occasionally it can be hard to follow the order of the panels, though, because Diaz switches unpredictably between the Western left-to-right convention and the Eastern right-to-left order, sometimes within a single comic. A close reading of the dialogue can usually produce a reasonable guess in these cases.

Dungeons and Discourse

Dungeons and Discourse is a fictional roleplaying game explored in two of the Dresden Codak comics (titled "Dungeons and Discourse" and "Advanced Dungeons and Discourse"). The game borrows its underlying mechanics from Dungeons and Dragons, but rather than modeling characters, settings, and abilities after medieval fantasy, Dungeons and Discourse models them after philosophical theories. There has been work by members of the Dresden Codak forums to create a fully-playable game from the ideas presented in the two comics.

HOB

HOB was the title of a series of Dresden Codak comics running through 2007 and 2008. The series dealt with what could happen to a society that had rejected the Singularity but was forced to use its high technology to survive. Much of the character of each of the three main characters (Kimiko Ross, Dimitri Tokamak, and Alina Tokamak) was also developed as a part of the HOB story. The conclusion of the HOB story completely separated the Dresden Codak timeline from the present timeline, changing Dresden Codak's genre from modern science fiction to futuristic science fiction.

Diaz's impressive character development and fantastic art make Dresden Codak one of my most anticipated comics every day. I earnestly await the time when he achieves his goal of updating weekly. In the mean time, he is hard at work producing a television spin-off of the comic (though I do not believe that it is intended for television-television.




Dresden Codak official site.

Five years later, Dresden Codak not only doesn't update weekly: until June of this year it had in fact updated once in the whole year.

I did some counting earlier today. He has been working on this storyline since June of 2010; that is, for just over four years. On the occasion of the anniversary he had completed thirty-one pages; but he published another within days after the anniversary, so let's be generous and say thirty-two. 32 pages though 4 years is an output of 8 pages per year.

Out of these eight pages, exactly zero per year are well drawn. Doorman Kojak doesn't know the first goddamn thing about pacing, layout, legibility or even anatomy. He isn't even good at differentiating the facial features of his characters. He's a passable colorist, however, which seems to be the fount of all praise given to him. This is a notorious illustration of Düsseldorf Claptrap's total inability to draw comics, using less-but-deservedly popular comic Gunnerkrigg Court as a contrasting example. Gunnerkrigg Court updates three times a week. All of this is entirely without going into his appalling writing.

»So what«, you say? »So what if Durden Carmack updates less than once a month on average? So what if after ten years he still doesn't know the first thing about drawing a comic? It's just a hobby.« ERNT, wrong! This is what Frankfurt Kolchak does all day.

...Well, no. He hangs around on Twitter all day, being petulant. But anyway.

He makes a living off his comic. He claims it's his full-time job. He is perpetually saying that »he wants to update weekly« but, despite doing nothing else at all ever, he doesn't even update bimonthly. He recently claimed that »anyone who makes a webcomic knows that 80% is dealing with things that aren't drawing the comic« and that's why he never fucking updates. Listen, dipstick: the artist and writer of the genuinely good webcomic Paranatural, who, as far as I know, do not do it full time, manage to put out two pages a week, every week, each perfectly comparable in size and art quality to one of your pages, and they're even legible, to boot! And there's a plot! Jesus Christ, and they're funny, as well! You're a worthless hack, Mormon Laughtrack.

Yet even this I could forgive. If he somehow manages to make a comfortable living off not updating his terrible, hacky comic, good for him, right? Only no. Selling spinoff merchandise and website advertisements, as indeed he does, is one thing; but he also ran a Kickstarter which took in half a million dollars and which he boosted by dangling the carrot of weekly updates in front of his fans, and he is in the process of setting up a Patreon subscription service so that people can non-subscribe to his un-comic, receiving the no updates in advance of everyone else. This borders on fraud, but from the wrong direction; from the circle of treachery, the depth of Hell.

Revealing his real talents, München Kühlschrank makes matters even worse by spending much of his »free« time on social media puking nonsense about »the male gaze« and similar un-theories, then turns around and draws something like this. Or that. Or... look, I don't want to link to any more of his shitty cheesecake art, you can find that for yourselves if you've got to have more. Mind, I don't think he should stop drawing it if that's what he likes, I'm cool with that. Hell, if he were just producing completely anodyne work to satisfy his own stated shithead principles, I'd still cut him some slack. No, my point is that Dortmund Cheaphack shouldn't condemn other people for doing the exact same thing he does himself, and that, since he can't possibly be unaware of what he does, he's throwing his own people under the bus to get in good with the adherents of an ideology that hates him; it's the most pusillanimous, two-faced cowardice imaginable.

Not to mention pointless, because even retards have eyeballs.

It would be wrong not to give Hamburg Hatchback his due, however. He does have a certain knack for gentle absurdism (»I'm starting to hate Copenhagen Interpretation Fantasy Camp.« »How is this possible? Is it because your wave function collapsed?« »No.« »Is it because of Sokar?« »Yes«; »Victor Hugo once got so mad he threw a baseball through a dog!«), and he certainly did manage some good science gags before he decided he would no longer have the slightest truck with humor and apparently forgot even the most rudimentary science. These virtues, along with his reasonably adept coloring skills, are presumably what gained him the audience he has been exploiting at full blast for the last nine years(!!!). So he certainly knows the art of the hook, line, and sinker. You gotta give him that.

Finally, here are some local comparisons with people who don't try to defraud you:
User Sam512 has been working on Ra for over a year less than Dark Science has been running. I don't have a word count, but it must surely equate to at least a short novel by now; in any case, it has an almost alarmingly cohesive, erudite plot with better made-up science than the simple real science of Dark Science.
User Zephronias registered after Dark Science started its run; literally all of her work under E2 auspices, fiction and otherwise, and all her art anyone here has seen, has been created during the production of the last thirtyish of Köln OMAC's sub-par comic pages.
User The Custodian has been here for fourteen years, and in that time has produced somewhere in the neighborhood of one and a half million words for the site. Taken purely on average, that means that during the run of Dark Science, he has written, here alone, in his free time, half a million words; about half a dozen novels. He has also found the time to learn to fly, like a bird, in the air.
There is only one conclusion: Vermin Knickknack is a shiftless, lying, hypocritical, fraudulent hack.


For shame, Berlin Carpark. For shame.


Update, July 2021, seven entire fuckingly years later: Holy fucking shit! He's still on the same goddamned storyline! The latest page is only #108! How is Bayreuth Flimflam even still alive?! At this point I can only assume that people are giving him money out of sheer cruelty, to prolong his wretched existence. Incredible. Unspeakable. Criminal. Vile.

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