Annotated 27-22
Okay, I’m sorry. I know John tried his best with the instructions we gave, but I don’t think anybody failed to guess the punchline we were trying to hide until the next page. When you have your only two important characters suddenly facing away from us or with only their eyes visible, people notice.
Maybe we should have just viewed them from a distance and abstracted their faces a bit, the way Byron and the others’ faces are abstracted in panel 2. That’s a little more of a specific stylistic tic of John and Jason’s, and it might’ve fooled a few more of you.
Had to think Frigg’s claim in her last balloon over a bit. Of those present and seated, only Byron was one of the three whom Gravedust resurrected. But Bandit owes him for rescuing her from Auraugu at B’ial Vezk, and what he did a little later for E-Merl, Syr’Nj and Faereksch’Nj might count, too.
There’s a punchline? I don’t remember that.
I admit that the prank had slipped my mind and so it didn’t click until the last panel that their faces were never shown, and why. So it didn’t entirely fail.
The anticipation of viewing the prank can be as good as the prank sometimes. You’re in the clear here.
I’ll admit, I completely forgot about the punchline because of our perspective shift to Sepia world being a complete shift in tone – and also because the word balloons in every panel had way more “action” going on in them than the images they shared them with.
This, in hindsight, reinforces my belief that visual gags need to go solo in the spotlight if the punchline resembles “is there something on my face?” – or at least get called out with language that hints at what the punchline is supposed to be. The latter option obviously wasn’t what you were going for (or at least had a high hurdle to clearance, due to Frigg’s intimidating personality getting in the way of her communicating details like that).
But the former didn’t land with everyone, apparently, and I think that’s because there’s too much to read on this page for the imagery to have eye-grabbing distinction from it – at least for people with my standard reading style.
Which is really to say, I start to gloss over images when there’s a lot to read, even though a comic is supposed to be a visual medium and I should be approaching them that way if I want to fully enjoy them.
The intent here was for readers not to guess that there was something on Frigg’s (and Gravedust’s) face, just to be vaguely clued in that something was up. In terms of comedy, this whole page was supposed to be setup for the punchline in panel 2 of the next, which then led to another punchline of sorts in the following panel. Didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but it wasn’t a complete disaster either: that second punchline did it for most of the audience, seemed like. And as Jim says, watching and knowing what’s about to happen does offer up its own pleasures.
Yeah, and I’m not a habitual re-reader, and am far from a mnemonist – I’m here without fresh memories of the next page in particular, and so this second time around, this page still has an inherent cliffhanger at its end that may or may not be resolved by the next one, and is essentially self-contained until I’m shown otherwise.
So that’s contributed to me failing to anticipate the joke, too.
That was supposed to be a reply to T. Whoops.