O'course I'm still tryin' t'figure out the

Vore and Zillion return! From Starslip Crisis.

Most of you probably don't know this, but I really don't like posting more than one thing on my blog per day. I've never been a big fan of the concept of the "blog dump", when you just post up a huge amount of things. That just results in a lot of stuff getting lost in the shuffle. I like to let a post sit at the top long enough at least for people to find it, read it, and post any comments they may have before the post gets pushed on down the page. Also, limiting myself to one post per day helps me pace myself and get fewer of these "droughts" between posts (not that it seems to be helping much).

Well, some days there's just too much going on to not talk about it. Today is one of those days.

Starslip Crisis has been on a rather serious storyline of late, with the reveal of the crisis and the "death" of Jovia. We've gotten to see some new depth from Vanderbeam as he struggles with loss and grief, and learned a lot more about both Jovia's father and Obdrath. The humor has been there throughout, as it should be, but it's been more subdued as the drama has taken a more central role.

And then we get today's strip. At the beginning of a new week, Kris Straub presents us with a radical paradigm shift from the Fuseli and its crew to Vore and Zillion. These two have been sitting on the back burner for quite some time, waiting to re-enter the strip. And I'm glad to have them back, as they're two of my favorite characters (especially Zillion. Love that crazy slang). But it begs the question of why? Why are they back? Are they going to be at all related to the crisis? Does one of them have something vital to add?

A younger me would be racking my brains over these questions. But I am much older and wiser now. I've been through the Chronomantic storyline, puzzling and puzzling to try to see how it was going to fit in with the main plotline. And it never did, except possibly for this one strip. By the way, that's a strip everyone should file away in their memories for later. Who might the greatest time offender be? I've got my guess. But the point is that it was a fully complete storyline that was entirely independent of the Fuseli and it's crew. The last storyline with Zillion was Fuseli independent as well, so this one might be too.

I'm entirely positive that at some point all of the separate plotlines in the comic will unify. How could they not? But I don't know when that's going to happen, and quite frankly I've given up guessing. I'm just going to sit back, grab a nice tall glass of iced tea, and enjoy a couple of my favorite characters re-entering a strip that I love. And that's a pretty good feeling.