Comic for Monday, September 12th
I wonder how long it’ll take Kally to notice Mium seems to have replied to a conversation in IDS-speak.
Correspondingly, only the blonde haired agent can actually understand Mium, which is why the armored fellow is not exactly correctly assuming what Mium and Ila said. He does, however, unlike Kally, seem to recognize a phone when he sees one.
Hopefully its waterproof. I’m sure they have waterproof phones. Wonder if it has a headphone jack though…
To be fair, Arron would certainly tell her not to trust any of them, but I think Mium would be fine with that, he doesn’t really want anything from her besides for her not be kidnapped.
Unfortunately we are bit back into pen-to-publish, so this was a tad rushed. Been a bit busy with various things, but will work on getting back to the land of buffered updates soon. For a few glorious weeks we doing pretty good there.
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When the faceless mooksays it’s not worth the fight, even if it’s a planted faceless mook, do not under any circumstance expect the fight to be worth it.
Seriously, guy, he’s got the right idea. Just faceplant on the curb. Same effect, with a lot less effort on every side. 😉
(PS: “secuity clearance”, her rant. Should be an R about halfway through that, I think.)
^– Typo alert above!
Fixed! Thanks guys. Least I hope anyway, fitting an R into a word can be tricky.
If you think about it, faceless mooks are in the most need of senses-of-self-preservation. They are running around a story with no plot armor at all, it’s almost suicide! 😉
Technically I’m fairly certain we’ve seen his face, but I don’t think we’ve seen his name yet. His not even on the cast page. … I’m going to like… need a table of contents for the cast page at this point aren’t I? 😐
Typo alert: Panel 8, 3rd text balloon should read: “…I will have to assume…” [too many letters “S”]
I suppose I could claim she is slurring from just having woken up? 😛 But no, fixed! Thanks.
One last: isn’t the name supposed to be Kepler, not Kelper?
Ah, good catch. Fixed! 😉
I like how utterly reasonable this page is. No idea what is going on? Use your cell phone. About to attack the infamously powerful witch? Realize that is stupid.
These are the sort of things I always think “why did they not just do X”, but here they are actually doing X. I also like Mium’s expression in panel 5, for him that is basically sighing out loud.
This is why logical characters can be a pain in the ass 😉 . Fortunately we have the rest of the cast.
We may soon find out if Mium can nullify a null caster. I’m betting that the answer is “Yes”. ^^
Kally is almost completely back, and seemingly at full power. Let the games begin. ^^
It’s a tough life when you have to be ready to dismember and destroy just after rolling out of bed. I guess she did get her coffee, if not quite in the relaxing preferred medium…
Someone has survival instincts set to high. Which is a nice change.
It is pretty strange. These people a little more experienced with the shit that goes boom in the night than most of the IDS though.
oh yes good old arron. who btw is getting ready to shake your boyfriend down for kidnapping you. yes lets call him… right after knocking these guys back a bit more.
also love the dbz like “power up” thing with kally’s hair. and the red idk power flash of chargeing manna she has going on there. gives it the whole “angry mage is angry” vibe.
The hair-magic hypothesis has been well documented throughout the ages. Magic gives hair a disregard for gravity, hairstyle, and in rare cases has been observed to even effect hair length and volume.
Essentially when I started drawing the comic I realized that magic (the way I had envisioned it) was really really boring to ‘watch’ since it was basically two people just pointing at each other. So I added a lot of bells and whistles to it 😛
Still, I tried to make the actual action scenes somewhat more dynamic, with mixed success.
It’s all more or just artistic flair, and should not be given too much thought 😉
“…I realized that magic (the way I had envisioned it) was really really boring to ‘watch’ since it was basically two people just pointing at each other. So I added a lot of bells and whistles to it :P”
Regardless of the story or medium, when magic is involved, bells and whistles are to be expected. I’m reminded of how an Immortal in El Goonish Shive explained that “magic has a flair for the dramatic.” But then, in that comic, it was strongly implied that the source of all magic was quasi-self-aware or something.
heh hahahAHAHAHAHA sry its kinda like a cross over between a magical girl story, ramna 1/2, and dbz. i mean an insanely powerful guy who turns into supergirl to power up. tho tedd is stil an unkown super rare magic something or other. but i stray.
most games, stories, and comics magic has some visual. it could be glowing hands, aura, glowing pentagram/sigils, words made out of fire coming out of ones mouth. any or all of them.
now past i realise your is… some form of advanced algebra infused with mana. but even then there ARE phisical manifistations. take the constructs and the not-disintegrate ray that minoe used earlier. shure you can go oh the ray was invisible and the guns just seemed to fall apart (i think you did mention that) but thats not to say someone with “arcane sight” ability or spell effect wouldnt see what you are showing us, or something like it. but… well a lightning bolt or fireball can be seen, and kally’s red dragon is apperently a well known effect. well known enough that she has a nickname because of it.
still one could surmise that ids, and more importantly ids “witch hunters” that are theoreticaly equipped to “take care” of magic users might have access to said arcane sight spells/equipment to help them identify and attack their targets.
It’s safe to say that the same level of information that is available to the reader is available to the characters even if the effects aren’t “real”. If we are seeing glowing dots and magic circles, they are seeing something of equal or greater information, I’ve just compromised in how I show Eidos and the Physical World interacting into some sort of shorthand. This is one of the major points where my art skills is still drastically short of what I’d like, so I’ve settled on more traditional shorthands.
Now detecting what the spell actually is trickier. How much a character can “see” Eidos varies – presumable to a character that can perfectly read Eidos a magic circle contains a complete summary of the spell.
Of course, even if you COULD read it, most humans cannot read fast enough for that to be very useful in combat, as these spells tend to activate quite fast and there is a lot of data loaded into them.
At the end of the day for the comic though… I mean, after all, realistically the most important part is communicate at some level what is going on and look neat, so… glowy circles! For games its even more important to visually read what’s going on, and being able to rely on “traditional” shortcuts makes it easier for everyone 😛
“It’s safe to say that the same level of information that is available to the reader is available to the characters even if the effects aren’t ‘real’…”
We really appreciate you engaging your fans through the comments. But, personally, I think this last bit about how -all- characters see these magic effects is TMI. It was not necessary and I think the best course is to let fans interpret it however they want.
It sounds just as valid, to me, to imagine that only characters with special equipment or mages with special training can “see” these magic effects the way we see them. That would include nearly all conflict participants on all sides, including IDS forces, Tyler’s Bureau agents, and Peter’s team/friends.
And even if an ordinary citizen can’t see magical lines and glowing stuff (the cause), they would see the effects, like the roof caving in, people falling through the floor like quicksand, a ball of fire erupting around IDS soldiers, etc.
Well, to clarify further may only dig the whole deeper… but… 😉
The information available to them doesn’t necessarily mean they perceive it. Essentially what I’m saying is the the non-manifestation based visual effects are representations of Eidos.
We’ve seen there are drastic differences in how well people can perceive Eidos.
Take artistic renderings in astronomy; though all the pretty pictures we see of colored planets are usual colored in post processing, it’s based on something about the planet, what we know about mineral content, atmosphere, whatever. This doesn’t mean that the average person could see all that about the planet, but the information required to assemble the same level of data is available to them through a different medium, technically.
We just get to see the post-processing artists rendition, cause we can’t really see the Eidos part and – like those space pictures – it would be sort of boring if we saw what the camera would see 😛
I dunno if that helps or hurts 😛 Over explaining is a bit of a temptation I wrestle with, but my compromise is to mostly keep it out of the comic and only the comments and bonus pages.
The point of the clarification originally lies with that while the visual effects aren’t literally, they are mapped to part of the magic system. Well, besides possibly the sillier parts like the floating hair. I leave that up to the reader’s discretion if that part actually happens… 😛
I do appreciate what you’re saying in that more explanation != better. But also have a tendency to blather on. It’s a tricky balance! 😛
Plausible deniability says standing in the middle of a storm might have something to do with the floating hair.
“We really appreciate you engaging your fans through the comments. But, personally, I think this last bit about how -all- characters see these magic effects is TMI. It was not necessary and I think the best course is to let fans interpret it however they want.”
Excuse me but you speak only for yourself. Your comment should start with “I”, not “We”.
I, for one, very much appreciate the author’s explanations and discussions of in-world phenomena. And I suspect that I am not the only one on this side of the coin. Your comments are usually very well thought out, interesting and informative but this one misses the mark.