Well, I suppose something written by a guy named "Fire" should move pretty quickly...

Bipartisan romance! From Winger.

So I'm sitting here waiting for my part-of-speech tagger to finish marking up some text for my research (intriguing, eh?) and I find that I've got some free time as a result. So what to do?

Get some serious writing off my chest!

It kills me that I've been neglecting The Webcomicker. You guys probably don't realize how frustrating it has been for me to go through my daily reading and keep seeing things I want to talk about, but just plain not having enough time to put them into cohesive words. Ugh.

So anyways. Winger. Winger is a comic I absolutely fell in love with when it first began, probably mostly because I'm a conservative and the vast majority of webcomic creators seem to be fairly liberal. Now, this is not to say I'm some kind of ultra-conservative "Bush is God" type, but I just tend to fall on the conservative side of most issues. But this isn't about me. I think Winger was a legitimately good and funny strip outside of being a political strip that tends to cater toward conservatives. I thought Dab being forced to flame internet trolls was pretty funny, and this strip made me laugh for a good long time.

But then, almost out of the blue, things started getting weird. First there was Dab claiming to be a demon. But I let that slide as just an odd tangent. But then there was the (in my opinion) unnecessary transfer of some old Elf Life characters, And a weird talking cat... But I figured "ok, Carson Fire wants to take things in a little more surrealistic direction, that's cool. It's hard to do straight political humor every day and not come off as just a pundit."

And then came the latest storyline. And Fire's changing things up. Now Minion's gone off to be an Assistant Marketing Director, breaking the wonderful dynamic that we had of Minion and Dab manning the bookstore floor. Which made me sad. I thought that dynamic provided some of the greatest material for the strip. And now Minion and Dab are going out on a date, and as evidenced by the strip I've thumbnailed above, it looks like they're up for some first-basing.

And it all seems kind of sudden to me. I mean, Winger is still a freshman strip. In my opinion, the characters hadn't fully settled into their roles yet, and Fire's already changing those roles. I wanted to see more of Minion and Dab as political enemies slowly becoming friends in spite of their differences of opinion. I wanted the political differences to be a huge stumbling block, as they usually are in relationships. Instead, we see Minion coming over to Dab's side really quickly. Heck, she's even agreed to freaking go to church! It's just unnatural. People don't change that fast. I mean, assuming the Winger strip is following a roughly real-time pacing (and it seems to be), Dab and Minion have only known each other for about three and a half months. And Minion's already gone from book-burning liberal to more of a centrist. We've lost most of the main conflict in the strip, and as we all know, conflict is the essence of humor. So we're losing the biggest goldmine of humor as well. And it makes me sad.

I'm hoping Carson Fire will prove me wrong. I'm hoping this is just a false start and this date between Minion and Dab ends with a huge fight, setting them at odds with each other, politically at least. I'm hoping Minion truly does use her marketing position to advance her liberal agenda, and Dab fights back with conservative means. I hope the push and pull of their relationship continues, with them craving the constant back and forth, as they did in this strip.

Don't let me down, Fire. Don't let me down.