Comic for Monday, August 8th
Did you know for the first year my average panel count was around 5 panels a page? 😐
This page has too many panels, both in the sense of drawing it and the sense of ideal reading. To be honest there was editorial decisions that were not entirely thought out 😛 The next page technically has 11 panels, but is much more reasonable… 😐
I waffled a bit of we were going to see Rovak’s thought bubbles here. I knew that eventually we’d see him as a PoV (point of view) character, but wasn’t sure if it’d be here or not till I was thumbnailing the page. Not that it matters too much, as I’m fairly certain I’m the only person that worries about the difference between a PoV character and a not PoV character. On plotting out the page I decided he’d work best as the narrator of wtf was going on, and we’d get a (tiny) peek into Rovak’s weird little ticker 😉
Just because I think it may need clarification, yes, there are two of the Orish soldiers here 😐
Thursday’s page will go up on Patreon tomorrow afternoon; this means that last week was buffer neutral as that’s when last weeks Thursday page was finished. That’s not as a bad as it sounds: I lost about half a sketch to a tiny power outage, above editoral decisions caused me to draw the full sketch of a future page before drawing this one (I was planning on cutting away after the last page, decided to stay on this scene), and this page was an abominable monster in terms of plotting out, shoving onto a page, and then drawing. I’m fairly certain there are over 20 panels, but I can’t count that how, so idk.
Maybe the last few panels will be a hint as to why the Orish soldiers have swords, but I don’t think I’m ready to launch into a full explanation of them yet 😉
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I’m impressed with your pages, and your version of the film Inception. as in panels within panels. on a scale of 1-10, off the charts.
Well, as cities everywhere can tell you, when you run out of horizontal space, the only place left to go is vertical space, unfortunately 3d Monitors aren’t a thing yet, so panels within panels it is 😉
I think there is some distance to go with the strategy here, but I think it’s a good compromise of keeping an “action flow” without sacrificing all the backdrop space.
Hmm Somehow I have the feeling that somehow, somewhere Naomi is subconsciously feeling she’s missing out on some fun…
Peter will have to be careful that Naomi doesn’t ditch him to go join the MSB if she here’s how much evil they’ve been smiting… 😉
If Tyler succeeds in making friends with Peter, Naomi will, for all intents and purposes, be IN the MSB. 🙂
Tyler has gained so many ranks of badass in a row now. I keep thinking he is done and he keeps proving me wrong. I definitely am curious how this going to go. I really can’t guess what will happen if/when he meets up with Miko. If I am remembering correctly, Peter didn’t tell him about Miko, but I’m also assuming Miko is a non-combatant which Tyler seems to have a soft spot for.
I still don’t believe Peter would risk Miko (considering how badly he reacted to Kally being in actual potential danger, he doesn’t seem to like actual risk), so there may be something more to it, maybe involving the F5. It’s possible MYM is running around basically unleashed right now, which means there is a huge chance for a fairly literally Dues Ex Machina (a MYM Ex Building if you will).
The wild card here is the IDS. I think they are probably fairly serious business – they went with four soldiers pretty confidently, and we are talking about Kally’s former colleagues here if I understand correctly. As many badass rankings Tyler has gotten recently, I’m going to guess Kally is a whole different ballgame, especially since we have a better idea what the red color means (and she’s got a literal moniker over it).
I really want to know Peter’s reason for not taking Kally with him on whatever he is doing. Naomi is a badass on her own right, but Peter and Kally seem like they had the perfect combo (brains and brawn).
It is curious. Peter’s plan has several large gaping holes. Glaringly obvious shortcomings. Chips left on the table. Someone should probably tell him. 😛
My own personal beliefs about Peter and Kally run like this. Peter can’t take Kally with him because she won’t go along with his shenanigans concerning skirting (and sometimes flouting) the law. She also doesn’t like his treatment of I.D.S.personnel he once worked with. To put it into gamer terms, Kally is Lawful Good, while Peter is Chaotic Neutral at best.
Peter seems to be working toward a goal he considers to be Good in the gamer sense, but his definitions of good and evil have a certain elasticity to them. He also no longer trusts the I.D.S. to do “the right thing”–correctly so, as we have seen–while Kally is still pretty much a Company Lady. That attitude may change when she finds out who kidnapped her.
I also believe that Peter is being such a horses’ butt to her in order to protect her from the suspicion of her superiors, and that he still likes her. Why hasn’t he told her this? Because she can’t act worth a darn, and he has to make her think he doesn’t like her anymore so she’ll react the way she needs to react to keep up the charade. Which, taken all together won’t keep her from wanting to kick his butt when she finally figures it out. ^^
So if Tyler can do that, then I suddenly really want to see what Kally can do, since she was holding back in the last battle, and is far less humble than Tyler.
Kally is indeed far less humble and restrained than Tyler, and also has a lot more combat experience, and some of it against things that actually required the big guns.
That said, Kally is less well rounded in her skill set then Tyler. She actually had some trouble against Naomi in tennis because she couldn’t rely her typical trump cards. While she might be able to pull something like this off, she probably wouldn’t try to in the middle of combat.
If your goal is that “the building is still standing”, you probably want Tyler and not Kally 😛
PS: If you want a character icon for comment avatar just let me know.
You and me both. I cannot wait to see Kally in action, and I sort of get the feeling the IDS has committed to an entire plot JUST to keep her out of the action. I am REALLY looking forward to it failing.
Well I am impressed. I just finished putting together a cryomancer on skyrim. It has boots of water walking and other fun goodies! My favorite part of him is that he is completely immune to magic and absorbs all spells. He is able to cast spells from conjuration, destruction, and alteration fo nothing, while restoration cost nothing until master. He is amazing and chilling(pun intended). My jaw dropped when I have seen what Tyler is doing, and I have taken down Harkon in one spell!
For non skyrim players Harkon in the final boss in the Dawnguard DLC. He is extremely resistant to one hit kills. I countered this by using ash shell, making all spells more effective against undead, using the shouts dragon hide(?), with the bonus of full marked for death and drain vitality, the dragon priest mask for frost damage, the stone that is the blizzard one use power from the dragon born DLC, and finally hitting with a combo of poisons I place into his inventory while sneaking and reverse pickpocketing, the poisons being specially made weakness to frost 400% and weakness to magic 400%. For those of you who know about the way I did this, yes the restoration potion glitch was used for a small bit. Also I wear no armor on this character besides for the armored jewelry. Also this was on legendary.
I played a bit of Skyrim, though no where near enough to follow most of the details here 😉 The blessing of Skyrim is the ability to do crazy cool shit like that, the curse is that I can never get passed trying to endless tweak things to be perfect to play the plot 😀
For some reason the term ‘reverse pick-pocketing’ amuses me endlessly.
One of the grimmer moments of gaming relating to the comic was when I started naming X-Com characters after the webcomic cast. Needless to say, I save-scummed a few times on that play through 😐
I was thinking about what Tyler was doing. At first I thought “undoing” meant breaking them apart; undoing as in making lots of smaller pieces. I then noted that its coming back together.
That seems kinda wasteful in terms of power usage. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to divert it to the side?
I’m guessing its about limiting terrain that could be used against him. Holding it up would be costly (gravity is a cruel mistress) and diverting it to the side would leave dangerous footing (ice mage is probably all to aware of that) but it also leaves things that physically enhanced people can throw. By locking it back in place, he probably only needs a small bit of juice to lock it and then he can move on. He might even be able to release it quickly, meaning its also an unlikely weapon.
Am I at all close, or was it just to show off?
He is doing sorta both. He is limiting the enemies abilities and maximizing his advantage. The difference is he is showing he is more powerful then he looks, I.E. “You blew something big up and I put it back together perfectly! Who is more powerful?”
I say this based on my universal understanding of magic in media, be it movie, book, comic, manga, anime, etc. The act of resorting something to a previous state is taxing and extremely difficult, based on a power from the anime D-Grayman. The more that is destroyed the harder it is to fix.
In anime we see people who are insanely powerful. I will include a list of lesser known and not blatantly obvious, like bleach, one piece, Naruto, and dragon ball z. They include:
1.Problem children are coming from another world aren’t they?( a main character defeats a water God which is next to impossible without breaking a sweat.)
2. aestetica of a rogue hero( the main character breaks a block of ice with his fist that not only should have shattered his bones and not been blemished, like the crystal ice sheets form one piece, and controlled the breaking of the ice until he was out of the building and a few blocks away.)
3. tserei tsukai no world break, where people have powers and abilities from a past life. The main character has powers from two previous lives, which is unheard of, and in both lives he was overpowered, in one he defeated an army by himself, and in the other froze an entire country solid. In his present life he was able to kill a dragon that ends eras by becoming the strongest person in the world. He also made somebody that was evil and a complete B**** beg for her life, which is ironic because she made people do the same and killed them, and spared her. The best part is she told someone to call who I am guessing leads Russia, where she lives, and to tell them a mountain range would “disappear”!
I think it is a pretty universal that putting things together is harder then breaking them, even before bringing magic into the fray. I know that I can certainly wreck a drawing faster than making one 😛
Anime heroes are often interesting as they have a frequently different story telling perspective then most western shows, frequently allowing the main character to be a lot more ‘overpowered’. I’m far from well versed in them, but I definitely think it can be an interesting dynamic for a show, and tends to let them animate more ridiculous (and sometimes ridiculously awesome) scenes.
But the whole ‘fixing things is harder then breaking things’ is one of the key reasons mages in this setting are typically viewed as weapons/artillery; if you want to maximize your bang for buck, specializing in destruction is the way to go. Rovak, being Rovak, is a good example. Though his a quite a decent mage in his own right, he’s not quite up there with Tyler in terms of talent or power, yet could probably do more damage (SQMAPS – Square Meters Annihilated per Second, if you will 😛 ) on a battlefield than Tyler could.
You’re on the right track. Holding it up would be dangerous, as it would take a lot of his concentration and power tied up, and letting it fall would be hazardous for a few reasons – all the rubble would block his lines of sight, be an endless source of essentially frag grenades for Rovak, and he’s in danger of the whole room essentially coming down.
While getting buried probably wouldn’t kill him if he had a bubble up (most of the weight couldn’t fall directly on him) it would be hazardous and possible very hazardous to his companions, and almost certainly let Rovak get away to cause more mischief.
@BladeofBone and you both note that what he’s doing is a lot harder then letting it fall or just keeping it up, but it’s also the best win condition and the safest for him, his deputies, and bystanders (who knows how much of the building will start to collapse if Rovak has free reign). In a direct confrontation Rovak is looking to be very disadvantaged at this point – his magic cannot so far directly hit Tyler, but Tyler’s has begin to directly effect Rovak, so it’s pretty much in Tyler’s best interest to keep the terrian as is, plus reduce any risk of bystander harm.
Rovak, having decided he didn’t like the look of things, decided to essentially flip the board over instead of keep playing. Unfortunately Tyler is powerful enough it looks like Rovak cannot get away with it.
Frankly the series of panels along the bottom probably should have been their own entire page.
At least in part because Tyler and Rovak deserve more space for being badass here.
I agree, but as it’s own page it wouldn’t have been a particularly good one, but it wasn’t something I felt I could entirely skip.
As a rule of thumb I try to make sure there are two ‘actions or ideas’ a page. Basically two sentences. Preferably, that the reader learns two new things about either a character, the world, or the plot per page.
You can see this pattern in most of the pages for the better or the worse, and here we have the “Tyler’s power grows more effective against a mage the closer he gets” and the “Rovak blows out the whole ceiling, Tyler rebuilds the whole ceiling” – a sort of upping of previous estimate of just what can a powerful mage do, as well as a sort of cool scene (you know, in idea if not necessarily execution 😛 )
The next page would have only really contained that the Orish swords can break through Eidos object – something we’ve already seen hinted at when Jayce refused to try to block it directly as he had against previous physical attacks, and couldn’t go much beyond that as the next page has a scene that takes at least 2/3 of a page. The art is still a long way from pure action scenes being worth a whole page most of the time.
All of that is to say that I have a long ways to go in learning to adapt the story to comic pages.
Impressive work as always. I read a lot of webcomics. A few of note in my opinion are Twokinds and YOSH!, as I have read them the longest. I only follow a few comics on a daily basis and this is one of them. I hope to be here when this comic has been around for 10 years and beyond!
I think Tyler finally impressed Rovak–I know he impressed me. ^^
Yeah, this page was quite a bit more chaotic than the last, and it took me a couple of tries, but I (you should only pardon the pun) pieced it together. 🙂
TWO Orish soldiers? Don was fussing about just one (see THIS PAGE). Who brought the other one?
There a handful of other groups in the building. They probably make most of the others uncomfortable.
I haven’t done a great job at the scope of the operation, in part because I hate drawing crowds of people, but occasionally tried to reference that we haven’t seen everyone.
To be honest I basically just combined a few pages into a few less pages, and this page took the brunt of that change.
Still torn, Rovak being appealingly deranged here, Tyler being uh normal?? in his reaction (bonus for not having a god complex) and creepy sword lady still creepy. This calls for a bunny with pancake on it’s head.
???
Just wanted to be clear on this one… 😐
🙂 Although I find I misused the meme. According to knowyourmeme it is normally used to be dismissive of someone else’s statements from confusion. Not the case I am not confused by the comic and certainly not dismissive of the author.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pancake-bunny
Haha, you don’t have to worry about me, I’m more or less meme-illiterate.
Which is why I had to draw a picture just to make sure we were on the same page. 😉 I had sort of thought I was taking literally a non-literal idea, I’m a little perplexed that it literally refers to a bunny with a pancake on it’s head. I don’t know what to think of this. The internet.
AWWW! IS A CUTE BUNNY WITH A PANCAKE ON IT’S HEAD.
I’m not confused, just sad the original pancake bunny died.
But IT’S SO FLUFFY!
Meoi Lass
PS. You should look up the origin to the meme. It’s a heart warming story TBH .
PPS. Yeah, unbreaking things is harder, entropy, science, all that fun stuff. Pretty impressive, and must use a TON of energy.