Death of a storyline
A long time ago, during my first job as a coder, I was introduced the geek lifestyle. Being a geek is different from being a nerd though most nerds have really good unexploited geek potential. Being a geek is to be proud of your nerdiness, to a point where you expose it defiantly to the world. Geeks wear t-shirts with cryptic code snippets and talk with each others in a obscure jargon. Geeks don't enjoy the morning coffee while reading the newspaper, they do so while reading Slashdot, User Friendly and many other geek oriented comic strips.
One such strip, Megatokyo, was really influential in the development of my early geek persona. To truly understand what I mean you have to look for the early strips of Megatokyo. The characters in User Friendly are professional geeks, the ones working in tech related jobs but the ones in Megatokyo were the college computer nerds type. Now thats something someone who just graduated can really identify himself with.
Megatokyo was co created by two persons, an über geek and a manga style artist. That combination was perfect, you had excellent geek cliché stories illustrated in a talented artful manner. Unfortunately, this wonderful collaboration came to a clash. Sometime in 2002, Rodney Caston (the geek) left Megatokyo and Fred Gallagher (the illustrator) went to run Megatokyo all by himself. What happen was subtle at the time and since there was no noticeable change in the drawing stile, you might have thought that everything was going fine. Until one day you wake up and say "WTF, how many boring strips in a row did I swallow?".
Now that you know when too look, you can go ahead and see for yourself. The story got filled with love stories, slow moving plots, Largo was turned into some evil character and geek elements were removed, one by one. You would have a hard time to find a real game reference in the last year of strips. Even the l33t feels wrong nowadays. Fred Gallagher is a talented artist, he doesn't have to be omni potent as long as he get in touch with people who can fill in the blanks. For that reason, I think that it is time to act. The Megatokyo fan base will walk away if we wait too long and that great comic strip will fall into irrelevance. You can save Megatokyo, write to Fred Gallagher and ask for the return of Rodney Caston.