Annotated 28-17
The return of the land sharks, in the biggest single swarm we’ve yet seen.
This is the sort of splashy page that I resented at the time we developed it, because we had so much to do, and I was worried about boring the reader by skimping on story for the sake of art. You can get away with that more in a longer work, and GA in its entirety is pretty long, but in another sense, it’s a page at a time.
But as two-panel layouts go, it’s pretty solid. Like Rana’s sequence, it carefully deploys simplicity to show the simple perspective of its characters (including, at the moment, Penk, whose terror is obvious, and Harky, who is doing his best to think land shark thoughts as he commands them). The storytelling will get more nuanced again soon enough.
… I just noticed someone in the background, cutoff by Harky’s panel but you can clearly see his shoulder and a portion of his (hammer) head.
IF the art is good, it never bores. Part of the medium is the appreciation of the visuals. You guys have always had good (often great) art.
Thank you!
Arby’s™
We have the meats™
I can’t read that phrase and not see “We have the meat sweats”.
The Land Sharks are part of what made me read this daily – between the humorous parts and the fish brains were some interesting people.
How did the landsharks get involved in the rebellion? The landsharks don’t have a representative on the war council. And Harky is hesitant to even deal with landsharks.
I can’t imagine Iver or the Don having what it takes to recruit the landsharks (unless they had a platoon of bodyguards). Gondolessa might have been brave enough (albeit, probably while strategically perched in a tree or on a tall rock).
But in my mind’s eye, it was Madam Arfa shaking her shillelagh at a group of landsharks while giving them a “vigor in her loins” speech. Possibly while Auraugu is wrestling a landshark in the background. :-D
I’m struck by “we gotta save some for the other guys”
Me too, but on reflection, we shouldn’t be.
Half or more of the land sharks’ dialogue throughout this comic is actually just them shouting what any other species would consider orders, at each other – but they’re all essentially “bros” (or “guys”), so instead they help each other by communicating in ways that compensate for their individual inability to form complex reasoned strategies on their own.
In other words, by telling each other what to do, the way that “bros” might help each other cheat on tests, they actually have a very socially-oriented mindset. A pack mentality is still concerned with the interests of the pack, after all.
Sure, they’re shouty and probably couldn’t collectively change a lightbulb without breaking it, but it’s not that they have no sense of what’s good for each other – it’s just primarily patterned on their own self-interest.
Still, it does seem to conflict with how readily they’ll kill one another.
The thing about being guided by self-interest is that, ultimately, pursuing it above all else tends to mean ignoring or betraying the interests of others – the conflict is a bug, that tends to get weeded out by more sophisticated social instinct-based survival strategies