Rich Burlew, as one might surmise, was a big fan of Dungeons & Dragons, and drew the stick figures that now populate the comic to illustrate his games, before deciding to put them all together into a comic. The Order of the Stick was begun in September 2003, the era perhaps to be known as the First Webcomic Boom, following the 1990s which saw their initial inception (bwaaaaahm). Moving on from that then, I’ll try to do my usual review without providing anything to be misconstrued as elitism or fanboyism. But as we all well know, having genetics inherited from someone does not make you identical to that someone, and similarly I don’t think Remember can be considered copycat of OotS. These aspects are what artistically separate Remember from Order of the Stick and are usually the points I use to defend (where necessary) Remember from critics who dismiss it as just copying Burlew, but I obviously can’t deny that Remember has a lot of genes from the pool of Order of the Stick. You need only flip through the archives to see how closely I originally followed his example in drawing stick figure characters, but you’ll also see how much I’ve deviated from his same example in more recent pages with more complex character designs, noticeably different creature designs (the dragon design, for example), effects, lighting, etc. It’s true I owe a lot to Rich “The Giant” Burlew in providing OotS to the world and inspiring myself and many others to take up drawing sticky personages as a hobby and/or profession. In a way I guess this is the burden of justification I took on when I started featuring other webcomics on Remember at all, and since I took that responsibility I guess it’s about time I owned up to it. On the one hand, I can critique the good points of Rich Burlew’s The Order of the Stick (OotS for short) and look like a fanboy in light of Remember’s origins and artistic stylings, and on the other I can critique its failings and look smug and superior despite those same aspects. You can imagine this is a tricky feature for me to write, indeed one I’ve dreaded inevitably writing.