Cerise Magazine

Darths & Droids, The Comic Irregulars¹

What if George Lucas didn’t write Star Wars? What if the great saga that’s come out of six movies, countless merchandising opportunities and a plethora of spin-off novels was not a preplanned enterprise but the organic creation of a miscellany of people making it up as they went along?² What if Star Wars was invented by role-players?

That’s the premise behind Darths & Droids, a web comic created out of a photo montage of screenshots, with a somewhat different plotline than the canonical movies. It was inspired by Shamus Young’s howlingly funny DM of the Rings which had a similar concept, but I find that I like the Darths & Droids implementation more. Where the DM of the Rings crew is a group of stereotypical gamers who like nothing better than winding each other up and who pretty much deserve the grief they get, Darths & Droids is about a group of stereotypical gamers who have their own preoccupations but will adapt to each other’s game play. In particular, many of the illogical plot twists and bizarre setting information of the canon are justified by the bumbling actions of the players or the hasty invention of a GM who has had to throw away his week’s notes again. It’s fun.

The Meta Game

Darths & Droids has a healthy interest in its meta game. You know, all that stuff that goes on between the players outside the fiction. I often think that observing the people who game is just as interesting as the game itself, and this comic certainly seems to agree with me. Much of the narrative revolves around the workings of the gaming group, particularly how new players are recruited and how their distinctive personalities and playing styles are integrated into the group. Other preoccupations of the strip are following plotlines that get more and more twisted and hard to follow as the players lose track of what their goals are and head off on tangents that work at cross purposes, tenuous technological justifications for what the players want to get away with, and, of course, ways to break the GM – by forcing the plot in weird directions, or throwing him into a scene where he’s managing two or three NPCs at once and having trouble keeping up. All in all, it’s very reminiscent of the golden days of my adolescent roleplaying and I love it for its humour and wit.

Darths and Droids as a Feminist Text

The writers are guys, the GM character is a guy, the majority of the gaming group characters are guys, and yet I stand by what I say: The two female characters emerge throughout the action as unique and interesting individuals, and they definitely hold their own amongst their fellow gamers. In fact, while much of the storyline is poking gentle fun at the somewhat stereotyped “typical” male gamers, Sally’s freewheeling world creation and Annie’s emotional immersion bring significant depth to the fictional game (and are examples of the kind of fun play you can get when people cut loose from the dogma that roleplaying = battles). They’re also notable for doing well at the things the other player characters in the group prize – like coming up with clever stratagems to get through the pod race that the hardened gamers hadn’t thought of.

“Oh…well, yeah, but you guys are still more fun than “Godot.” This story’s really going somewhere.”
– Annie, Episode 104

First Birthday

I’ve been reading the strip for a year, and they still haven’t quite finished Episode I. If the Comic Irregulars keep it up, I’ll be happily reading for many years yet.

¹ The Comic Irregulars are Andrew Coker, Andrew Shellshear, David Karlov, David McLeish, David Morgan-Mar, Ian Boreham, Loki Patrick and Steven Irrgang. Also of interest is David Morgan-Mar’s eclectic Irregular Web Comic.
²Much like real life.

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