Comic for Monday, February 5th, 2024
I had initially hoped to do a ‘full page’ comic today, since otherwise the action scenes take quite awhile. Unfortunately, plans went awry, and as you are here to witness we are getting a typical half-page a day late, so… what will be will be I suppose.
Anyway, comic!
An aside about magic…
To analyze slightly the magic involved, Kally’s dragonfire is similar to the ‘rupture’ magic that we just saw Kally use (and several other characters have used). In a way, it’s probably the ‘greatest’ form of that magic classification, and that’s magic that is a primarily data driven attack that causes other data to be destroyed. To somewhat oversimply, you can think of it like a command telling any other data it comes in contact with to destroy itself; the more power put into the attack, the less other data can resist the command and more the violently it explodes. This is why it’s hard to defend with magic, which is essentially more weakly typed data than material reality, since that magic will just destroy itself as well unless the caster can keep it from being overwritten.
As Elizabeth noted in her fight with Camilla, rupture based magic is something commonly used by Central mages as it’s tends to give them more bang for their investment when attacking magically reinforced things than attacks using a material medium (like Camilla’s light based attacks or Ila’s projectile based attacks). On the other hand, Ila demonstrates though being capable of both projectile based attacks and rupture based attacks, using a medium has its own benefits. Ila’s range and precision with her projectile attack vastly exceeds her range with rupture based attack. More tactical class attacks are medium (or material) based than not for this reason, since they can use physics as a crutch to maintain deliver the phenomena beyond their immediate control.
Of course, Dragonfire generally functions with the best of both worlds. If other mages could replicate it, they would, but so far we haven’t seen another mage besides Kally (or more specifically, her dragon) that can use that attack. Kor’s World has more experience with attacks like that than most, but the best they can do is mitigate or deflect it. That’s just the nature of the dragonfire attack: whatever is downrange of it is going to have a bad time. What they did here was like reactive armor on a tank. Rather than let it hit their shield, they throw a magic attack to cause dragonfire’s annhilation to trigger before it hits their shield, and rely on the shield to protect them from the aftermath. It’s a good way to deal with the attack, though ultimately not something most mages could pull off or survive anyway, and only really effective enough to stop the first salvo. We’ve seen Kally use dragonfire a lot stronger than what she used here (when she was attempting to shoot down the skyhammer projectile or attempting to destroy Atter and didn’t really concern herself with collateral damage).
Perhaps confusingly, dragonfire and the rupture branch of magic is a separate mechanism to what a null-caster does which would be more accurately called ‘breaking’ data, but itself isn’t dependent on coherent data; which is why the nullcaster we saw a long time ago thought he could probably stop the dragonfire attack, though that was never tested. Mium’s power works much more like a null-caster, though might be more accurately called ‘erasing’ data. Those that know his nature may guess it simply be a hyper-efficient version of nullcasting, but that isn’t really confirmed by anything beyond speculation of characters.
Next page should be 2/19/2024
Loading ...
I hear banjos.
To PastUtopia
Just saying, you could almost cut this into 3 normal sized pages to spread the comic out into more of a M/W/R update schedule. If you look at your comics from the beginning the pages were much smaller and the update schedule a lot faster and more consistent as well. Granted, the quality of the art is higher now and that takes time, but most updates are at /least/ what a week worth of updates would be before. Furthermore spreading out the updates like that would mean that a on two weeks/off a week actual update schedule could be spread out to just drop one weekly update when it happens for more consistency while putting out the same content.
The biggest issue with this idea is on the authorial side of things. Perhaps putting the comic out all at once creates the pressure that the you need to finish. Some people just work better under certain conditions. Perhaps breaking up the story at certain points just seems stilted and not something you feel comfortable with. Or maybe there is something else that I don’t know about.
Either way, speaking for myself at least: your audience does appreciate the work you put into this and none of us want to see you burnt out or demoralized by not attaining perfection at it.
Agreed. Especially with the current layout this doesn’t feel like a “half” page at all.
I suspect the issue is that then the scope creep would set in again (since the page can always be just a *little* longer) resulting in longer and longer pages until we’re getting current-size pages on an (air quotes) “every week” schedule – where “every week” actually means on average one every 2-3 weeks as pages get delayed (so same schedule, reduced consistency). Just from what I’ve seen of Past’s comic habits thus far – it seems like “shorter comics” never quite work out to be shorter.
Correct. I’ve seen this pattern with a number of other artists as well. They have their own idea of what size of update they’re satisfied making, and they’re not satisfied making less.
Past has been very willing to humor us, but we keep returning to this. I’m not going to ask that he goes out of his comfort zone in that way again, because it’s been pretty well clearly established that it won’t work for him.
To be clear I mostly brought it up to point out that what Past is doing is closer to a 2x or 3x a week update schedule, just crammed into one update at a time. I figure it is good to point that out every so often when they start talking about how they aren’t doing enough; like when they call a comic that is three updates worth of content a “half page”… Otherwise it is far too easy to give into certain perfectionistic tendencies and first not understand the good of what you are doing which then can lead to discouragement and burnout. I mean, seriously, can you think of another webcomic that has been around for almost a decade and is still updating regularly?
Panel 6: thing that blow the arm off -> blew the arm off
in layman’s terms regarding the description: Fluffy can attack faster than that Iron Man Reject can calculate.
It all feels very meta. 😉
Thanks, Past!
Fluffy needs to hit the Kor’s World guy in the Iron Man suit ASAP. The Kor’s solder has used 8 calculation circles which surpasses the 6 Ila has used. However, it looks like Control is forcing the soldier to do this attack. It will be interesting to see how Kally and Fluffy defend themselves.
On another thought… Is it just me or is the Kor’s guy in the grey suit and ball cap seem like a robot? His stilted speech has a word or phrase usually followed by a command. He has strange angular facial features and what appears to be a tattoo or part number on his neck.
I feel that is unfair.
Fluffy was promised they COULD eat the next one…
Well, if the combat suited Kor’s soldier and his supervisor don’t get obliterated, maybe Fluffy can eat one of them and have the other for dessert.
Did the Kor’s World soldier use 8 calculation circles? I have my doubts. I think his suit has one or more EIdos network cards in it, and at least one other entity is casting on his behalf. To be clear, I don’t know if that is in addition to what he’s doing, or if it’s just remote spells we’re seeing. But in general, it’s my guess that this is just par for the course when dealing with Kor’s World.