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While 8-Bit Theatre and Order of the Stick can be said to belong to the artistic school of “I can’t draw Very Well”, a few web comics are of the smaller genre “Fuck Artists!” Darths and Droids is one of them.

Inspired by Shamus Young’s popular and LOL-able DM of the Rings, which takes scenes for the Lord of the Rings and replaces dialogue with that of a RPG group playing the characters as a commentary on gaming norms, the creators of Darths took the wildly creative and risky choice to do the same thing with The Phantom Menace. Given the quality of this movie, one must respect their choice to go after difficult fare … right. Darth frames the story in way that blames inattentive, ignorant and illogical players for the plots problems, sort of exonerating Lucas as a well intentioned but in-over-his-head GM.

Qui-Gon in particular is played by a role-playing idiot that nevertheless has great personal knowledge of science: a nightmare player for a space opera GM, especially when party leader. Obi Wan is the common sensical decent player that serves as straigh tman, his younger sister plays Jar Jar with a penchant for imaginative exposition (hence most TPM’s crazy names for things). Artoo is a number crunching combat-thirsting power gamer that spends most of the story critiquing everyone else. This is a sufficient cast to destroy the Star Wars franchise, obviously.

Many of the strips are jabs at the scientific infeasibility of the Star Wars universe. Naboo’s water system wouldn’t work unless it had a huge moon, which is why it has one near the end. Anakin’s Jedi powers come from a blood transfusion with Qui Gon to fix the podrace to cheat weapons for the Queen’s ship - which he claims is his cause he destroyed droids for it (RPG Rule of Loot 1.0). The Jedi blood has made the boy, intended to be an NPC, emotionally unstable as a drama student focused on character depth now plays him.

A lot of the GM’s ideas seem to make the prequel a quality believable story, so in a way it redeems Episode 1. Its fall is the source of humor that jabs tabletop tendencies, which the writer discusses as story morale in a sidebar after the strip. Were the whole saga abortion the fault of the GM, like a greedy famous director long bereft of creativity and taste, you couldn’t get a group to stay the first session - unless you once were great, that could get them to attend another two campaigns.

The art skill of the strip is still present in the form of selective sampling, which the creators do achieve well. A ridiculously confident but ignorant line from Qui-Gon, like Jedi being a form of cheese, is matched up perfectly with a picture of Liam Neeson expressing that same emotion. This delivers humor and allows regular updating, since it can’t possibly take as long as drawing each strip - unless you use stick figures or low-res sprites.

I look forward to the story turning to the other prequels. Check it out.

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