Questionable Content XIX: Give Jeph Just A *Little* Credit, Here

[Rodin]

Isn’t Marten, like, famously bad at coffee stuff?

Like sure he’s spent a lot of TIME in coffee shops, but I feel like I remember him getting roasted (lol coffee puns) for his barista abilities and his lack of good taste.

Why coffee why not just give him a band what is happening ugh

Yeah, he made the worst latte Dora has ever tasted. He's never shown any ability for making coffee, he's never shown any desire to run a business, has no experience at running a business, is the wrong personality type to run a business...so of course, he's going to run a business.

Sigh.

Anyone else feels like this could be the end of the Comic like it feels like almost everyone is in a soon to be happy ever after state.

This is why Jeph explicitly said the comic won't end. Because it would, in theory, be a place to end the comic. It's about Marten's time in Northampton, it would end when he left.

Frankly, I think it would be a better idea.

Last we saw, Claire was storming off to scream into a pillow. It looks like her and Marten are on the boat home now, but it also looks like they're on the balcony of an apartment. Whichever one it is, I guess Claire never specified which pillow she was gonna scream into.

They're on the apartment balcony that crazy security person was on before.

Not in a million years. Claire has gone full creator's pet and will succeed at this instantly (after precisely two strips of "oh wow this is really hard but I'm gonna do it because I Believe In Liz For Whatever Reason"). I just don't think Jeph has the guts or the chops to write a failure arc. He did, once upon a time with Faye, but I think he's out of practice and he truly doesn't have any interest in doing it anymore - why risk the status quo when it's a lot easier, more gratifying, and seemingly popular with the target audience on Patreon to shoot for "cozy low-stakes" plots instead?

QC has always been some level of slice-of-life wish-fulfillment, but the small believable ways the characters struggled (Faye with her substance dependence and fraught romance life for instance) made it feel very relatable. Nowadays, I just can't relate to any part of the comic. The characters all succeed instantly at whatever job or personal struggles they have. The AI elements are suddenly way more prominent but Fear Not! They don't change society in any truly meaningful way! They're just pastel people walking around who we occasionally invoke for tonally-iffy real world social commentary.

I've been hoping that things would at least go off the rails in an interesting way. But even Cubetown is shaping up to be just more bland wacky AI hijinks. It's hard to feel much of anything about any of it.

The job thing is especially frustrating. I've never had a problem that everybody was working in a coffee shop and managing to pay the bills with little effort because it's meant to be a sitcom. You don't focus on the job and characters don't lose their job for longer than an episode at a time. Giving the characters instant-mega-success calls attention to the job in a very unhealthy way.

If we had this exact same arc but it was Claire interviewing for a small library I would have much fewer complaints. I wouldn't even care if the library was in Northampton - it's unrealistic that there would be a head librarian job available in the smallish town at the exact moment Claire graduates, but it's easy enough to handwave that away in service of the plot. Instead we got...this.