Comic for Thursday, August 4th
Someday Peter and Rovak will meet, and they will finally have someone that understands them and their love of endless monologue-ing.
In panel 6 (too many panels 😐 ) Rovak’s spell is just failing to take hold, because of Tyler’s interference and the amount of mana turbulence around a strong mage using magic.
Well, we’ve hit buffer zero already, but that’s not a big surprise as the vast majority of my drawing time is on weekends 😉 Still should have Monday’s done by Friday, so we are making some progress 🙂
Editoral note: Rovak’s magic circles here are blue. This is inconsistent with his last appearance (though technically consistent with his first one). If I hadn’t said anything most people wouldn’t notice, but the discussion on the last comic made me realize they’d be more confusing as red. The magic circles/calculation rings were not really part of the magic system/world before I started the comic, and were only added to make magic fancier and more visually clear (the calculation part always happened, but it there wasn’t really a concept of being able to see it outside of Eidos). All magic circles will be blue henceforth. The magic circles / calculation rings tend to be in constant flux 😐
The reason I made his red originally was because casts them so far away I wanted an easy way to visually read that they were his (like here there is no way of know that it’s Tyler’s in Panel 5, and most people will probably assume it is!). But I decided to go with better world-consistency and figure out a better way for that.
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Wow. I just reread the archives, and it is incredible how much your drawing has improved the past two years.
The paneling in this one is especially good.
Love the story, the characters, the story, the world.
Quickly becoming my favorite webcomic, keep up the good work!
I really appreciate the comment and the kind words 🙂 I hope that in two years we can see that it’s improved that much again (though that might be a stretch 😀 )
Sorry that you’ve run out of story! I hate always hate getting to the end of an archive, but welcome to live! I’ll see what I can to do keep it coming 😉
Tyler seemed very inclined to talk to Peter (who is essentially a criminal) and Naomi (who is a known vigilante), but goes straight to attack on sight for Rovak. I guess that there is a certain line where he doesn’t view it as tolerable anymore, probably not helped by Rovak claiming to be on the same side as the law.
I also notice Jayce seems to have peaced out.
While Peter is a rogue in regards to the IDS, he’s not really (insofar as Tyler actually would know) a criminal, as I doubt Tyler views IDS’ laws as ‘canon’ in his land 😛 . While Naomi is extra-governmental, she is associated with Levenworth and several of Tyler’s more trusted minions. He would probably not be thrilled with either of them if they started blowing up a building 😉
well looking at it from tyler’s pov.
peter has done nothing overtly “bad”. worst case is some hacking that, as a minor sideffect, helped tyler. naomi (tho little of her “save the world by punching things” exploits have come to light) is mostly unkown. so he has one person known to malsa and is a citizen (naomi) and one immagrant that, while playing his own game, has helped (peter).
rovak otoh has admitted to having a rather lengthy rap sheet. is known to be a rather powerful mage, and in fact is in the prossess of blowing up a (relitively) innocent corprate office. while tyler may think avon has stuff to hide. (WE know, but he doesnt) rovak is well; literaly blowing up parts of the building, and killing random ppl.
also as i said a few pages back, i think tyler is at the end of his patience rope.
I guess Tyler generally seems laid back as he is not really much effected by Peter’s gadfly tendencies. When confronted with people actually doing bad things, he’s all “lawman” business.
It will be interesting to see if Tyler is as forgiving with Peter when he figures out more of the scope of Peter’s plan (… well… making an assumption here as WE don’t really know the scope of Peter’s plan yet).
Peter better not end up making enemies with Tyler, Tyler is shaping up to be a pretty darn useful ally.
There may also be bad blood between Tyler and the Orish–remember, he singled them out for special consideration in his instructions to Mione. (see THIS PAGE)
Interesting, yes. I had thought Jayce must have told him that there were the Orish soliders in the building, and he was singling them out as dangerous, but he does call them out in particular.
Tyler might even BE Orish, which could explain possible bad blood. He does have blonde hair that is likely natural (as he is a foreigner) and all the Orish we’ve seen so far have been blonde. A bit of a stretch, but that’s what makes wild speculation wild.
I can only remember seeing two identified Orish characters, Rovik and the soldier-lady. His eyes are red, and we’ve never seen hers. Her eye color might be a clue.
Though if Tyler were also Orish, I would have expected Rovik to have said something about it. He might still say something, however. As long as he’s conscious, he’s talking. ^^
I don’t think Tyler is Orish. Obviously it is too soon to be positive, but the clues so far are against it:
1) Orish tend to be militaristic and dismissive of civilians. From the World Page “notoriously aggressive”. Tyler is more of a negotiator (most of the time at least). Yes, this is a generalization, but usually if something runs counter to the clues there are hints, and I haven’t seen any so far.
2) Blonde hair and blue eyes is a fairly normal phenotype. We’ve seen several earth-like phenotypes outside of the “designer children” so I don’t view blonde hair as a credible tie.
3) “Weber” doesn’t fit with with “Stas”. These don’t necessarily correspond to Earth cultures, but the names seem to have some consistency; this is only really a pattern in the Malsa names as we don’t know enough of the other ones, but again, it’s the absence of a clue.
Wild speculation or not, I think I will vote “not likely” on this one.
So conflicted. Rovak is my favorite insane person and Tyler is the good guy. Who to root for? Not a problem about the sword lady of creepiness, her I don’t like so far.
Hmmm, that is a tough a problem. The time old question of Chaos or Order? 😛
But what if it’s the sword lady vs the rather unlikable Marc? 😛
Marc has my sympathy from being scowl shamed a few pages back 🙂
Rovak: “I think there is a misunderstanding, Mr. Webber. We are blowing this building up in the name of the law!”
Is he being serious, or sarcastic? Even if IDS had legal precedent to shut Avon down, only an insane person would claim that it was lawful to blow up a building with people still in it!
And here I though Rovak understood that his team’s purpose was to cause a distraction and give IDS reason to respond, find their illegal research, and shut them down. Unless… Was that his dialog an attempt at covering his IDS involvement?
I wouldn’t quite call it sarcastic, but more… Rovak logic. We are talking about the same guy that apparently hands out business cards that say he’s a good guy.
Rovak seems to grasp that his job is cause mayhem, but I’m not sure he sees that as particular ‘wrong’. Or any more wrong than anything else. I’d say he operates on a bit of an blue-and-orange morality as they say.
Notable, while in his last encounter he stated that he was “even one of the good guys right now”; this tends to imply that he was previously not, and doesn’t seem overly concerned by that.
From his point of view, “good guys” and “bad guys” are sort of like sports teams, so now that he’s working for the good guys, why other good guys still want him to stop is a little baffling, though he always knew there was something wrong with good guys (they aren’t quite right in the head, those good guys, even if they have nice job perks).
you know i almost expected tyler to go “I AM THE LAW!”
the first bit was after i read the first few panels.
after reading your notes… i almost could see them (peter and rovak) getting into a monologue war.
and the magic circles… i honestly thought it was us (the readers) getting something like magic sight. yeah we may not know anything about magic but we know its happining. in a way its like when we first met ila. there was a scanner on the ids drop ship. and one of the crew goes on about the ammount of psions she’s putting out. (6 pages before the shoot him link) but for us its always sctive. to make things more visualy appealing, and so we know what the action is.
Yeah, I think it’s generally best to think of the magic circles as more on the artistic licence effects side. Though I do want them to at least make sense 😛
I think Tyler pretty much said that, but used a blast of magic instead of his words. If I had to guess, Rovak claiming to be on the side of law upsets Tyler a wee-bit. He seems to have something against the wanton destruction type of criminal… 😐
*Sigh* Tyler, Tyler, Tyler. Another chance for backstory thwarted by someone’s impatience. ><
I'm still able to follow the action. So far so good. ^^
Knowing how their conversation went made me feel bad at your last comment 🙁 And Tyler was so eager to talk in other encounters. I think he’s fresh out of patience at the moment, though.
We’ll see if can keep the action sensible. I think the overlay panels are good for giving me more panels without fragmenting too much. I think there is a lot more that can be done with angles and the like, but… we’ll see!
Heh, I’m actually not upset at the way things went between them. I’d like to know more stuff about both if them, but I’ll wait ’till you get around to it. Don’t feel bad about that. ^^
Mostly I was having fun with it. 😀