Michael B. Duff

I am continually amazed by Rich Burlew’s Order of the Stick. This is a comic for everybody who played roleplaying games as a kid.

Rich writes about the real experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons. Not the ridiculous media version or the pathetic pop culture stereotype, but the quirky, funny, and surprisingly touching experience of solving problems and telling stories within this particular set of rules.

His latest panel is particularly poignant. His protagonist, blown out of the sky by one of the bad guys, is calling on every resource he can think of to save his life while plummeting to the ground.

An average writer would bend the rules or have the hero pull another trick from his sleeve, but Rich Burlew is an old-fashioned storyteller, and he knows exactly who he’s writing for.