The Guild Comics Add to Characters' Backstory
The Guild is more than a typical webseries. Created by actress Felicia Day in 2007, the series has evolved into an entertaining sitcom worthy of standing alongside such classic television comedies like Friends and Seinfeld. After multiple seasons, meanwhile, the characters on The Guild have evolved into actual personas that viewers have come to care about in the same fashion as the ensemble casts of The Office and The Big Bang Theory. Although they are welcomed into the homes of fans via a computer screen as opposed to a literal television makes no difference, as the connection is still real regardless of the medium.
For the uninitiated, The Guild follows the adventures of six online gamers who struggle with life in the real world while escaping into the fictional realm of a World of Warcraft-like environment. The star of the series is Felicia Day’s character Cyd “Codex” Sherman, but she is joined by a supporting cast that is as vital to the show as the employees of Dunder Mifflin are to the NBC comedy The Office. While The Guild itself offers a multitude of individual and intersecting storylines to further flesh out the nature of these characters, Felicia Day has also been able to bring their backstories to the forefront with the assistance of Dark Horse Comics and a collection of graphic narratives involving each of The Guild members.
Dark Horse initially commissioned a three-part series that centered on Cyd Sherman’s transformation into the online Codex who viewers met when season one of The Guild debuted online. The webseries offered small snippets into Codex’s pre-game life—including a father who turned out to be gay and the fact that she herself was a child prodigy violin player who once set her ex-boyfriend’s cello on fire—that the comic books in turn integrated into an “origin” story that filled in the gaps. As a follow-up project, Felicia Day and Dark Horse produced a string of five standalone comics that center on the remaining cast members and offer fans further insight into their individual psyche.
Like the original three-issue series that centered on Codex, each of the standalones incorporates references from The Guild webseries into its narrative. “I don’t usually have visitors,” Guild leader Vork explains in season two. “The last one took grandpa away in a hearse.” The Vork one-shot thus expands on the real life Herman Holden and his relationship with his ninety-four year old grandfather that likewise intersects with his online partnership with the Knights of Good. At the end of season one, meanwhile, the group blackmailed fellow Guildie Bladezz with advertisements featuring the teenager posing with “Mighty Meat Sausages” and cowboy outfits. “This could all be faxed to your school newspaper,” Codex tells him as incentive to return the game gold he stole from them. The Bladezz comic book in turn centers on his initial efforts at professional modeling and own transformation from the clueless Simon into the conniving “Finn Smulders.”
In the Clara one-shot, the wife and mother who often neglects her family obligations is forced to clean the house when her husband leaves her stranded without Internet access. Instead of sorting through the remaining boxes of their recent move, however, Clara finds mementos from the past and reminisces about an earlier time in her life. The story not only features how she met future husband George Beane but also the details of a tantalizing bit of information revealed in season two of The Guild—“This is the best party since my senior prom when I accidently set my date on fire and had to pee on him to put it out.”
Given the closed-off nature that Tinkerballa has showcased throughout The Guild, it should be no surprise that the Tink comic offers the least amount of new information about the character. During the inaugural season, for instance, she insisted that her real name was the same as her online avatar and used the storyline of the ABC series Ugly Betty as her fictitious career path. In the one-shot, meanwhile, it turns out that Tinkerballa has spun similar false yarns from literature as a means to keep her personal life a guarded secret from her fellow Guild members. “It doesn’t matter,” she tells them when they confront her about lying to them. “It’s the Internet. You know exactly what I want you to! God, I love technology.”
The final entry in the Dark Horse series centers on Zaboo and his smothering relationship with his mother that also contains an amusing narrative device featuring the character weaving his way through various obstacles like a player in a video game. While each of The Guild one-shot comics take place after the initial Codex trilogy but before the start of the webseries, the Zaboo storyline serves as a direct link between the graphic and video mediums as it ends at the exact moment that The Guild season one begins—with Zaboo appearing on the doorstep of Codex.
“I knew a little about their backgrounds, but some of them I had to go back to square one and ask myself, ‘Who is this character and why are they like they are?’” Felicia Day explained to MTV Geek in July 2011 about the comic book series. “Finding the strange sadness with Vork and his grandfather, sympathizing with Bladezz because of his broken family, those were so fun to discover, like using a metal detector on a beach. And then figuring out how to do an issue on Tink without spoiling her closed-off mystery, that was the most challenging and ultimately rewarding.”
Given the ensemble nature of The Guild and the fact that it features a collection of supporting characters that are as interesting, entertaining and enjoyable to watch as Cyd “Codex” Sherman herself, fans of the show have been equally rewarded with the solo adventures of Vork, Tinkerballa, Bladezz, Clara and Zaboo. Thanks to Felicia Day and Dark Horse Comics, the Knights of Good are just as compelling in graphic form as they are on the webseries, with backstories that are simultaneously faithful and complimentary to their personas—both online and off.
Anthony Letizia (January 11, 2012)
Discuss on the alterna-tv.com Forum
