Comic for Monday, February 5th, 2018
It’s one of those days where there is this empty box right here, but I can’t think of anything to type into it…
Well, I guess the usual! I’m going to try to get some more sketches up this month, if you have a monthly sketch request or digital painting suggestion, send it along! I’ve done a few sketches playing around with crosshatching and more varied ink weights, but they’ve all sort of been abominations. The sooner things get requested the sooner they get done. Buffer is still a point of failure. As in, it’s a point, and I’ve failed 😉 Maybe now that tooth is fixed and work is a little more stuffed in its box, but next week is sort of busy in general. I really do feel bad – especially as it’s part of what I’m supposed to deliver for Patreon, but at the end of the day, well, the priority is keeping the updates going 😉
And of course, thank you all for reading! You’re the best. Objectively.
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All the scene background here are in shades of gray. I’m guessing your intent was to have a background but to have it drop out so we focus on the characters.
Perhaps you could indicate different locations by using a pastel background with a different color for each location.
I recommend are something you should consider. ?
But im not sure englich is not my first language
That’s a more right/clear way of saying, but dropping the should from “something you verb” is fairly common vernacular, even if it’s as clear.
It’s an awkward usage of words all around, really, but, hmm, for now I’m leaving it. Not because I disagree with the comments, but it’s the speaker is being deliberately sort of obtuse about it.
Page’ll be up tomorrow… maybe; probably pretty late tomorrow at best right. Running really behind on stuff right due to work.
Sorry guys… Friday at best. Might miss update. Work is a donkey’s arse right now.
Take the time you need to do it right. Fanaticism comes from amazing, not from amazingly on time. Note that this comes from someone who not only reads dresdencodak, but also soupcomic. Will the snickerdoodles ever get eaten? (Note: don’t go looking for soup right now, the website’s basically offline.)
Also, take care. At least some of us care about you as well as the comic. 🙂 I’d like to think most of us – probably all of us but that one guy who posts and complains.
yeah… nope. Tomorrow! Page is penciled but can’t work on it much more tonight.
So, unfortunately, I think we are just going to miss Thursday update; we’ll just roll it over to Monday. Sorry guys 🙁
Even if I get it done tonight, I’ll be too far behind in starting Monday’s update. Tomorrow I should have half the day free though, so I’m pretty sure we’ll be back to normal next week.
EDIT: Just so that’s the care know, here’s what we are going to do:
Page will go up relatively early tomorrow (probably mid afternoon) and that’ll be Monday’s page. From there, we’ll reset and procede as normal. I’ve give a longer ramble of excuses in the blah blah for that page.
Also, FYI as it took me a bit “Atarah” = Naomi; her name is Naomi Atarah, that hasn’t come up for awhile. We already knew that she was a Designer Child, but didn’t really have confirmation that Designer Children aren’t from the families. While this doesn’t prove that, it does prove that Naomi isn’t, meaning they don’t have a monopoly on overpowered mages.
As this comic indicates, the families’ dominance in the field of overpowered mages is that they bring any overpowered mages that appear to be appropriately minded into the fold. Naomi could probably get a title if she was more interested in helping and less interested in punching. She might still be able to.
I had the impression we had Word of God that designer children meant rich parents, which had a weak correlation to the families. So they’re frequently families members, but not always. Possibly not even usually, depending on the relative size of the families and the population as a whole.
Also, if I recall correctly, Designer Child is not synonymous with overpowered mage, but there is a correlation there also.
The less Peter is supposed to know, the more you can guess he does know. Current head of MSB being him….he basically wants to annoy Peter for being correct.
Hilarious, petty, and I’m more interested in knowing when Peter finds out about that. ^.^
Ah yes, it seems someone has realized exactly what sending Rovak here means. And they appear to have chosen at least the correct level of force.
RIP Tyler. Calling it now.
This is what we call in the business a “death flag”.
First big panel third bubble. It reads perfectly right up to the ‘and’. Then I lose the thread of what the officer is saying.
I’ve tried reading it aloud as I do for people that are speaking when it doesn’t make sense and it still doesn’t make sense.
Perhaps drop the and, start a new sentence, “Sir, I recommend, you are something to consider.” Meaning that he is of import and should take his responsibilities like that.
Maybe it’s just being used to this comic by now, but I think it’s valid syntax, it’s just hard to parse in text. Maybe replacing the commas with ellipses makes it easier to read:
“The implications that the consul promote you to it are not lost on me… and… sir… I recommend are something you consider”
There is just an implied [the implications] in it; i.e.: “and, sir, I recommend [the implications] are something you consider”.
That’s my point, you used words there which are missing from the initial text. The one thing that you can be sure of though is that the military person is going to be talking with clarity to prevent misunderstandings and the text doesn’t convey that, because, they wouldn’t leave those words out
I don’t see this as ominous. I see this as making sure that there are many, many people with a vested interest in ensuring that Mage Tyler comes out of this alive and healthy.
Can you imagine how many organizations of massive power do NOT WANT Peter Kepler inheriting any sort of title that would give him legitimate political power in his own right?
It seems very ominous that Tyler is leaving wishes on what to do in the event of his death, especially knowing the trap he is about to walk into. Mighty ominous, indeed! It would be a shame, too, since he’s such an interesting character.
That said, I now I’m curious to what kind of “inheritance” would make Peter “suffer a little”. Perhaps it’s something that would heap more responsibility onto Peter?
Well Tyler was just informed that the consul effectively promoted him to a family mage. Which appears to be an inheritable status. Tyler is returning the favor / pain.
Maybe Tyler does have a little of Peter’s gift.
> Maybe Tyler does have a little of Peter’s gift.
Tyler is designed as peter’s foil / not rival. They’re both clever people with goals. However they contrast in how they go about achieving them. Peter does so through secrecy and behind the scenes work. Tyler has a team and is more direct.
We saw how Peter reacted to being put in charge of the MSB. Look at how thrilled he is to have actual responsibility. Imagine having an Aristocratic title to go with it. It would be hilarious.
Of course, I don’t think Tyler’s going to die here. He might, but it seemed to be one of those great off the cuff sayings rather than anything else. My bet is the fact he has explicitly allowed his friend to participate will save his life. Vindicating his “don’t be like Peter” strategy.
More responsibility, and… is he even technically a mage?
It’s possible he could be a subtle mage – one who can cast effects that people don’t notice, in ways that don’t show up even to readers. He could be a mage with such a keen awareness of the fourth wall that he doesn’t cast while he’s in the comic. But it seems like Past Utopia is writing him as the limit of capability for a non-mage.
Peter is almost certainly not what is called in the setting a “natural mage”; this is people like Kally and Tyler, who can just calculate and cast magic spells on the fly.
Peter might innate mage who is able to use Eclipse, but this is highly unconfirmed because we do not really know a) if Eclipse is an innate magic talent, or trained one, b) what Eclipse is or if it really counts as magic, or, most importantly c) if Peter can actually use it. We know that Arron can, and Arron has not been seen to be a mage otherwise.
That aside, characters that are not natural or innate mages can still do magic, they just need an autocaster to do it. While this usually seems inferior to the real deal, that is not inherently the case, especially depending on some answers of how much of Mium’s power is Mium and how much is Miko’s. If Peter can use Mium that same way, he would be a top tier mage (but he probably cannot, Miko implied that she is basically invulnerable and Peter is not).
Do you mean Ellipsis? As in Tom’s hiding method?
Ah, yes. That is exactly what I meant. Too much space news recently has the brain all backwards. I guess eclipse seemed like a reasonable name and my brain autofilled that.
Uh oh. I am around an Eclip-Ellipsis user probably. My mind just seems to be unable to focus on the on the right word…
> That said, I now I’m curious to what kind of “inheritance” would make Peter “suffer a little”. Perhaps it’s something that would heap more responsibility onto Peter?
It could refer to the fact that he is implicated to have some sort of Aristocratic standing now, but it could also sort of be a code. We know that Tyler is fairly involved in the Consul’s plan, so it could just be “inherit his role” and he trusts that if someone tells the Consul that, she would know what it means without him exposing exactly how deep in her schemes he is.
Sorry, but I really didn’t notice the scene change in there for a bit, and I had to reread the last 4 panels to get things strait.
Perhaps there is some way of laying out those last 2 panels so that the scene change is more obvious?
I’ll think on it. Paneling is obviously something that I just sort of make up as I go along. There’s a lot of conventions for it, but almost all are not really made for swapping scenes are prolifically as I do (that should probably tell me something on it’s own, eh?). Scene tagging is obviously the easiest, but it doesn’t really work when I do it back and forth a lot like these last couple pages (and, let’s face it, always).
Funnily enough, I think the constant scene changes work reasonably well in a webcomic format. It means you rarely leave someone behind so long you forget them; at least, if they’re relevant to the current scene.
For instance, in another comic I read with a bunch of characters in a bunch of different places (Erfworld), everyone is complaining about the pacing right now because any update that isn’t about the characters people immediately care about seems to slow stuff down. That doesn’t happen nearly as much in just a few panels of digression, even if the whole story moves just as slowly.
Now, if you ever go to compile this comic into a book… yikes, that might not work as well as written.
I sometimes think that if I wasn’t constrained by drawing the pages, I would lose all self control and we’d have chapter long digressions into characters we’d only met once, places we’d only see once, and magical minutiae that may be entirely irrelevant to the plot.
Having to draw things and publish twice a week is sort of like having an editor, it means that eventually even I have to draw the line in how sidetracked I get.
I think a lot of the snapping around is a side effect of that, and how I write. I basically have “tentpoles” or “checkpoints” that I know I will hit through the chapter, but let myself digress and dialogue a little between those, but basically have to keep snapping back to, you know, the plot. 😉 This lets me sneak in building the world and the characters, while still remaining at least nominally moving along the plot.
How to write and present the comic more elegantly is obviously something to work on, but, well, I’m just a guy with a tablet, no one said I’d mastered this yet. 😉
Not everyone is complaining about the Erfworld pacing. Admittedly, some of us care about *all* of the characters, and so are happy with any update that comes out. And maybe even care about all of the creators, and so are much more anxious about the implications of the skips than they are about the skips themselves. Just saying. It’s a perspective, it exists. Admittedly, it doesn’t get posted to the forums as much as it should, since some of us just have too damned many passwords already…
Btw, I also care about all the characters here, so love every update, and the creator, so I get more anxious about the implications of skips than I do about some missed content…
Oh, no doubt. Personally, I don’t mind the pacing there either – there’s a lot to set up, and Erfworld is often a comic which reads better in retrospect than as it plays out. But it’s a common criticism, and I understand why it’s made.
Not to digress this into being about an entirely different comic, though.