The Apple of Discord

You may recall… ok, you probably don’t… but back around here Horn left the confines of the comic with some of the cast on his way to a giant cross-comic party.  It was also revealed a bit later that Horn, unlike the others, did not quite make it back.

I love the idea of comic crossovers, but to me they always pose an interesting bit of a conundrum, especially when dealing with “webcomic aware” characters.  The general approach that I take for The Apple and it’s characters is that the characters (well, most of them) are aware they’re in a comic, but that to them it’s about equal to being on a reality tv show.  There are cameras (panels, technically) that capture their every movement and show the most interesting things to the outside world, but for the most part they leave the “comic” part of it alone and the comic hypothetically leaves the characters alone unless they do or say something funny or reality starts breaking down.

The same principle applied to why and how Vivor realized something had gone wrong back at the beginning of the Apple of Chaos story – back then the “title” panel was a standard feature, so when there suddenly wasn’t one (and the bit where everyone else failed to show up for a ’staged event’ comic) he started to get suspicious.

Which characters can see what is also somewhat in flux… usually the more magically/mystically sensitive the individual is, the more aware they are of their overall surroundings.  Art, who can freely travel between dimensions (that’s an entirely different story) can definitely see titles and frames and is aware when passing from one “comic universe” and another… but his brother Doyle is as thick as a brick and is barely aware of his actual surroundings, let alone his metafictional constructs.

And that’s probably more info than you needed.