Comic for Monday, January 4th, 2021
Happy new years! Welcome to 2021.
The shield summoned by family mage seems quite sturdy indeed; there’s various factors to it, including what it is (or is a replica of) and how close it was summoned to the mage. The kidnapper goon is perhaps more than meets the eye… or perhaps bluffing after all.
The family mage calls her an Arduni hound; Arduni is the Family name of Ashvalt and Arkday. This may or may not means she’s recognized Naomi, though probably not. As Naomi is a non-Families friend of Arkady, a wanker like the Family mage may call her a dog of the Arduni, but she may also just be making that assumption because she showed up to try to save the kid, who is presumably also an Arduni Family member.
This one is up late even by my standards, but it turns out I’ve been fairly busy; as some of you know I have another hobby, which is making stuff for D&D and some of that stuff will be moving toward a Kickstarter… tomorrow. Eeeck. If, by some happenstance, you are in both a reader of this and in the market of for D&D 5e homebrew content, feel free to check that out. That’ll go live on the 5th, and probably somewhat determine how I spend the first part of 2021, though I don’t anticipate it changing the comic schedule one or the other either way.
Once that’s up and running and in the hands of fate I things will continue to march on here.
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A bit of artistic critique here – panels 6-10 are really tough to follow, and it’s because you’re rotating the camera too much. I think what’s going on is…
6 -> 7 Camera moves left and rotates 90 degrees right as Naomi runs through the camera position from panel 6
7 -> 8 Camera moves overhead and rotates about 70 degrees down by 45 degrees right.
8 -> 9 Camera returns to its orientation from panel 7, but from a position some distance further to the right.
9 -> 10 Camera moves left without rotating to follow Naomi
10 -> 11 Camera pans left to follow Naomi without moving.
However, because the camera’s both moving and rotating erratically, there are several places where one movement could be confused for another. For example, here’s an alternate sequence of events.
6 -> 7 Camera pans right as Naomi runs in a circle around the green mage
7 -> 8 Naomi does a 90 degree turn and abruptly jumps at the mage, arcing well over her head…
8 -> 9 …but falls short thanks to a wall
9 -> 10 Camera follows Naomi as she vaults over the wall and somewhat away from the camera
10 -> 11 Camera is a first person view from the green mage as Naomi lands near her, looking at the suit guy.
This only falls apart in panel 12, when we see where green mage is actually looking.
Wait a god damned minute. You are KibblesTasty? This blows my mind.
Indeed! It always is interesting when people end up finding both of my hobbies independently 🙂
And for those that do follow the D&D stuff I do… the Kickstarter is live. And fully funded in 3 hours. Completely incredible. Now I guess it’s time for new goals for more stuff.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kibblestasty/kibbles-compendium-of-craft-and-creation
I wonder if we are going to see actually angry or enraged Naomi soon…
I am not sure I want to see her angry, in a hot rage or worse a cold rage… It likely wouldn’t be healthy for whomever she’s angry at and anyone who gets in her way on route to there.
Thinking it’s a tossup at this point
a) Fluffy
b) Kally
c) Mium Classic
d) Interface Mium
e) ALL FOUR….
I wonder if Fluffy’s fire is accurate enough to just clip off like… the head without hurting the kid.
Nah.
… Fluffy’s teeth though …
I agree. I’m guessing Fluffy is finally going to find out if humans are tasty.
one claw either side of the head, then scissor action…
I actually think the goon is being pretty smart, here. He knows he’s outmatched and doesn’t think that something as powerful as Naomi would blink at killing him for having been involved at all if he handed over the hostage and surrendered, so he’s upping the stakes to get himself extricated.
If he’s particularly smart, his plan is to get far enough away he thinks he can escape, and throw Arkady the other direction so that Naomi picks rescue over revenge.
The 5e material looks interesting from that one page. If you get it published, I’ll probably consider it. But I cannot support anything on kickstarter, sadly, right now. BLM, Inc. thinks black lives matter as much as the antebellum South did, and for the same reasons, and is actively destroying lives and livelihoods of real black people. I cannot, in good conscience, support something that will send part of the profits to that organization. (Not trying to start an argument, just explainig why I am not participating.)
The guy with the kid has several bullet holes already… and they haven’t seemed to slow him down. He probably has a history of being able to get away.
But yes, he has never met an angry Naomi yet.
— — —
So, is Kickstarter actually supporting BLM? or are you upset at them pulling down content that they don’t agree with (in a very biased way)?
(i do not recognize names, and so it was one of that group of companies that did such and such… and there may be other things i haven’t hear of… and i don’t have a CC so i never cared to straighten out who’s who. In other words, what specifically did you mean)
He also has obviously dyed hair. From what we have seen, Naomi’s hair seems to grow when she recovers from being shot (which is why her hair seems obviously dyed but it’s only been a few a days probably). The effect was too subtle to notice prior to her being shot (you can could see it, but you had to zoom in) to it being obvious after she was shot, and is now really obvious now that she has slept (likely regenerating more fully).
If we assume the true is same for this guy, he may have some degree of healing factor/regeneration, which is why his hair is now obviously dyed.
Kickstarter is currently (this morning anyway) displaying a BLM banner. I saw that, and didn’t see where Past’s materials were available yet, and decided to close the page and think about it later.
I don’t think I’m very far from center. I think it’s reasonable that everyone should be given a fair shake, and no one should be left out of society for want of a few dollars. I do think that some people have had a harder life than others. And while that’s unfortunate, I don’t see where beating everyone down to the same level somehow makes things fair. I don’t think someone should be punished for success.
I stopped short of commenting earlier, I don’t want to turn Past’s site into a political mire. I don’t know much about Kickstarter’s political slant. I do know that Patreon has booted people who were expressing their opinions, and then got caught up in their own crappy tactics. I still use Patreon anyway, not because it is a perfect solution, but because I can support Past and several others who I believe very strongly SHOULD be supported. If I am supporting Patreon which does things I think they shouldn’t in order to support specific artists for doing things I think they should do…? Maybe that makes me a hypocrite? Or a pragmatist? Or?
I buy a lot from Amazon. I don’t pretend they are a good company. They had a BLM banner earlier this year. To me, it seemed it went away pretty quietly. When I went looking for WHY it went away prior to writing this, I discovered a lot of accusations against Amazon that suggests the BLM banner was a bit of hypocrisy. I don’t know. Jeff Bezos doesn’t answer my phone calls. I’ve never worked there.
If I’ve offended someone, you have my apologies. I think everyone here has been great. I have no idea what color any of you are. Well, I suspect that a couple of you are a sort of translucent bluish from years of nothing except monitor light. But that doesn’t tell me what color skin you were born in.
I would like to think if we all got together such things wouldn’t interfere with having good time. Your skin color, eye color, gender, gender preference, religion, nationality, blah. All important things, but also irrelevant to hanging out and enjoying life.
Regarding the kidnapper’s hair color? I missed that. All the more reason to assume Naomi did something, anything other than dye her hair black.
And it also makes the argument for hair color coding stronger I think. Perhaps ANY magic use tends to grow hair and such? That would make hiding your hair color WHILE magicking much harder.
But in that case, where is his 5 o’clock shadow???
Well, to throw my honest two cents in, I’m using Kickstarter because in the business of getting strangers online to give you money for making a D&D Book, Kickstarter is the only game in town that makes practical sense.
Sort of the same reason I use patreon. I know there’s folks that don’t like one or the other or both, and I completely understand, that’s fair. I don’t ask folks to give me money on a platform they don’t like, but I also sort of realistically need to use those platforms if I want folks to give me money in general.
I’m sure there’s better smaller companies, but people are a lot more willing to turn over payment info on a platform with massive name recognition, as well as to trust a creator is legit. And for things like patreon is has pledge bundling and the like, and for things like Kickstarter it’s where many people will be able to find my work for the first time, as well as simply being the trusted name in that industry when it comes to actually handling the money and what not.
But I’m also not here to tell anyone to do this or that, make the decisions that’ll make sense for running projects the best I can (to eat and pay rent and things 😀 otherwise I have to go back to the corporate office job IT of trying to get people that wear suits to make good decisions about software… which… uh… yeah 😐 )
Uh huh. I can’t help but notice your dodge on the 5 o’clock shadow question. Nothing on the dude’s dyed hair? Nothing on the bullet holes in his clothes?
I’m calling you out on cherry picking the easy questions on real world social issues, while completely ignoring the really difficult comic queries.
Why isn’t there a like button on this site? Seriously. I want to upvote that so hard right now, lol.
My guess is that not everybody *gets* facial hair. Those that get it don’t all get the same amount. As much as some people with facial hair would like you to think it’s associated with strength, it really isn’t. It’s just fairly strongly correlated with being male and not being from a select few backgrounds.
Sooooo…? Not everyone can simply grow a beard by concentrating on it? I suppose that makes sense. Some people must have a chin that behaves like the top of my head.
For some reason, I always imagine you as a blue-eyed man with a full head of amazing blond hair but no face fuzz to speak of. I’ve no idea why. 😉
For what it’s worth, my brother managed to get most of his hair back by taking 25mg of zinc every day and being incredibly gentle in the shower when dealing with his hair.
Personally, I don’t feel it’s worth the bother. Still, it’s an easier, cheaper, and less painful solution than having ones scalp and chin skin surgically swapped.
Sorry for starting the derail. All I am really saying is that your project looks cool, and I will support it if I have a means to do so that doesn’t require me to support Kickstarter as well. (And an explanation as to why.)
I’m glad it’s remained civil, but still, I do apologize for starting the side conversation that has so little to do with this comic and its topics.
Comes under the heading of “die tired” I guess.
“Yes, Fluffy. You can eat that one.”
It’s such a bad precedent…. but I agree!
I think she made a mistake: Naomi was never trained to fight mages (otherwise the fight would probably already be over). Naomi’s solution (as always) seems to be “hit harder”: that probably works against the majority of mages.
I think the person who actually knows a thing or two about fighting other mages might be about to step in????? Maybe Fluffy does get to eat someone after all (I’m hoping it’s the goon pulling the “shoot the hostage” scenario).
If Naomi was given any training, she slept though it because it bored her.
I’m pretty sure she’s gotten training, and did sleep through a certain amount of it due to boring.
I think more to the point, she was given training, but they never managed to teach her the point of it, because she could just power through anything they gave as “this is what you can’t get through if you don’t have the training.”
But she didn’t sleep through *all* of it. Because of the training she didn’t sleep through, she can propel herself into the air just like people who can fly. Sometimes, she might even be able to manage to give herself a second boost before she lands. (Like if she “flies” off a really tall building.) Her inability to fly is simply the fact that she can’t string enough of them together.
Fine manipulation such as would be required for hostage rescue isn’t really Kally’s strength either, it’s more Mium’s style. Though Kally might be more convincing for “no, you aren’t going to escape”.
I wouldn’t be too sure of that. One of Kally’s main abilities (outside of Fluffy) is telekinesis (exbibit A and exbibt B).
Not sure how fine she can use that (as you’re not wrong that her power tends to be more suited to large scale destruction), but I’d bet she could grab the gun. She was flinging the Tennis ball around nearly purely with her mind with little effort – she wasn’t necessarily beating Naomi, but she was doing it while standing in the middle of the court with her arms folded(more or less) ( exbibt C). It was only later on she started using tricks like just putting up a wall.
She even at one point use a psuedo-Ila-railgun like ability… with a tennis ball.
Actually, the transforming the air to poison trick might be a better bet, it seems pretty subtle and Naomi is being a fine distraction.
Alright, I’m a little jealous. Ferrus managed to post THREE links!
I thought we decided that she didn’t transform air to poison, but rather dispersed an agent through the air? I think somewhere we discovered that transformation is very, very difficult. Which is probably good, they’re going to discover uranium sooner or later.
My post went into the moderation queue due the links. The spam filter seems to be working overdrive. I think Past just manually approves them on an erratic schedule.
Doesn’t matter. I’m still jealous of you. You’re freaking awesome!
Well someone found a brain. And its not the green haired mage.
You’d think people would stop leaving those lying around…