Queen of Wands and the marble game
Posted 25 Feb, 2005 at 15:46 by matt in /Arts | Permanent link
There's a game that actors (or at least student actors) sometimes play, one of a number of "closing night" games, that involves a marble. The first person on stage carries a marble, see, and that marble is not permitted to leave the stage within the constraints of the play's direction. The marble is supposed to be passed from actor to actor, on stage, and preferably without the audience ever noticing that there's something strange going on.
Earlier this week, Queen of Wands came to an end. The main character drove off to Boston and a new life. Speculation was rampant that she would join the regular cast of Something Positive, as there had been several past cross-overs between the strips. Well, yesterday that question was answered fairly definitively.
Now, if that was all there was -- random character killed off as a twisted sort of tribute -- then that would be funny enough. But then other cartoonists started to grab for the marble, most notably Straub of Checkerboard Nightmare. (Eric Burns at WebSnark -- an online comics commentator, how cool is that? -- has been tracking appearances, so see his site for more.)
The cool part about this, and the part that reminds me of the marble game, is that most of the sightings so far have been in passing... that is, there's nothing happening that mightn't normally happen in the comic in question. Someone dies in the background; in Something Positive, that's not entirely unexpected. Vaporware kills a random pedestrian; this is entirely in character. The Kestrel references aren't the focus of the strips: they're clever, but not in some sense the point. And so -- if you read one of these "tribute" strips without knowing the background -- it's as though there's nothing strange going on.