Oops! I Forgot to Post!

I sat down here this evening to write a bit about the two graphic novels I polished off today, and probably shove out the post that would then cover seven of the suckers. Instead, I've just spent the last two hours reading through the first two-hundred-and-some pages of Darths & Droids, a fumetti webcomic by a bunch of Australian guys, along the lines of the great DM of the Rings.

Let me explain further: "fumetti" means that it's done with photographs, in this case screencaps from the movie Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. And the overall plot is that a gaming group is RPGing their way through this setting, starting with two players as Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan and expanding as other players join the group. (Like DM of the Rings, the assumption is that nobody has ever heard of any of this stuff before -- that this gaming session was how all of the twists and turns of the plot were determined.)

It's laugh-out-loud hilarious, both on the level of jokes and conceptually -- one of the best early bits is that Jar-Jar is a hastily rolled-up character to keep one of the guy's kid sister occupied when she came along to the second gaming session. You probably need to know a little bit about gaming to get the point, but only a very little -- I haven't role-played in twenty years (maybe more) and it was all perfectly clear.

It's exceptionally funny, has remarkably good characterization (both of the players and, when appropriate to them, their characters-in-the-game), and actually, in its demented way, makes the plot of Phantom Menace make sense. They've just started on Attack of the Clones in the last few weeks, and I'm adding this to my RSS reader immediately.