Today’s comic begins begins the final arc in an ongoing story that has spanned not only this comic, but several others…

As you may remember, back in April, Arthur “Art” Castle, the (former) main character for the regular-cast portions of The Apple of Discord, left amidst scandal.  He has since appeared in several other comics, seeking work or something to prove his worthiness to hold on to main character status.

It hasn’t worked out that well.

One of the things he’s discovered is that, well, the problems with the real-world economy have trickled down into the webcomic world economy, and that there just aren’t that many jobs out there to be had.  So after venturing far and wide, we now witness the final leg of his journey… to Germany, and to a real-world photo comic called Union of Heroes…

For those of you who don’t know, UoH is a magic (and somewhat tragic) world where the reality-hopping The One Who Knows (think Professor Xavier, only with hair… and legs… and the powers of Q from Star Trek) has recruited the non-superhero-ed Marc from a different dimension to replace his mysteriously-missing counterpart The Erzengel to continue the war on crime.  Marc gets thrown head-first into the role of Other Marc, discovering that this world – while very like his own – is also very different.  For starters, his ex-girlfriend in his home dimension is still his girlfriend in this dimension, except for the bit where she’s really the other Marc’s girlfriend… it’s all very complicated.  But good.

UoH and AoD had a little… run in… during Frumph’s WAR game back in March (Amy of Epic Fail and I were about to do a Fusion, all DBZ style, to kill UoH, when we got swatted out of the air) but since then Arne and I have worked together on the Webcomic Planet Collective.  This may be another one of those webcomic “firsts”… not only is it a cross-continental comic collaboration, it’s also a cross-format cross-continental comic collaboration.

Also, since Art started as a sprite comic character and has migrated to hand drawn (crayon, pencil, pen, and marker) and digital (raster, vector, and Paint Shop Pro “Art” medium) and now photo… I think he may be going for some sort of record for cross-format appearances.