Annotated 23-2
Even after we’d decided to do the “you’re trespassing on our newly declared borders” scene, the scheme still needed some revising. I’d intended to introduce a few characters here like Rabbit and Tamara, and we would’ve seen Bert doing his best to stand with his fellows. Might’ve helped you bond with those guys to introduce them earlier, but jam-packing them all into one short scene like this could’ve been a lot. In any case, I was struggling, and Phil argued it was more effective to use two of his early creations as foils and a familiar face as the focal point.
God, I love how well John played with the sunlight on this page. Lending gravitas to S– er, to our mysteeerious stranger here is not always easy. But in panel 3 I can almost buy him as a credible antagonist. That’s partly the dialogue (Phil’s revisions over my second draft, once he swayed me to include the scene), but most of it’s the art. You can’t do a comical subversion (as in the last tier of panels) unless you set up something to subvert!
So here’s an instance where Phil’s socioeconomic way of seeing fantasy paid off. (Well, we both tried to stress that, but Phil did so more persistently than I did.) In an interconnected world, matters of human rights, economics, and politics can closely intertwine. So it doesn’t really matter if Mystery Man here (don’t read the tags) is a goofball or not. If he’s cutting off trade routes, that still has consequences. And in wartime, those consequences may be more severe than a mere nuisance.
Sundar really did have an amazing gift for giving people reasons not to listen to him.
But then, that might have been the only reason none of the actual self-proclaimed Altruists ever decided to send assassins after him.
I assume you’ll talk about it soon anyway, but I’m curious as to whether there was always going to be a literal “altruist” conspiracy, and why it was introduced this way.
I was as in the dark about the specifics as anybody at this point! Phil gave me some notes that amounted to “Sundar’s a conspiracy theorist who talks about the ‘altruists’ a lot now, and he has an eye patch, it’s a Metal Gear reference.” I had no objections, but I don’t think I understood where he was going with it. At that point, Iwatani looked like the only real threat from the government’s end of things.
It got a lot clearer for me next chapter, so I’ll pick this up when we annotate that one.
Didn’t the Altruists turn out to be just a subset of the heads of houses?
Eventually, but that’s not where Sundar got the idea.
I don’t think I clued in until just now that there was supposed to be a mystery man here.
First time around, I think my thought was: “Hunh. Sundar’s about as bright as he ever was”.
Cheers,
Cote
I mean I didn’t know who it was, but that’s more because I had forgotten he existed.
Yup — you can see his face, and the armor is also him. Of course, the first time round, I had forgotten all about him, especially since I’d had a 6-year break or so during my first read-through … but he’s very hard not to recognize if you remember him. If you don’t remember him, well …