Annotated 4-16
This may be a blessing in disguise, as von Carnaj was only a day or so at most from realizing the impracticality of his plans or having that impracticality demonstrated to him, violently. If he had to be foiled, surely he’d prefer to be foiled by the great Payet Best.
See, here’s the problem. Aerial piracy on a “big balloon” really isn’t practical when there are no other extant airships to steal from. Maybe you can sweep into a town with the element of surprise, but once the people realize you’re an enemy, it would not take much doing for them to disable your craft during its slow and vulnerable takeoff or landing. ESPECIALLY if you’re using highly flammable gas.
In von Carnaj’s mild defense, he doesn’t seem to have a goal beyond living in his own little fantasy world, and by that metric, he is wildly successful. Considering how committed he is to his role and that he already knew Best was on the boat, one wonders if he’s genuinely surprised here or just turning his back so Best can “surprise” him.
The alt text on an earlier page may’ve teased some readers into thinking Best was in over his head by taking on the whole pirate crew, but nope, not this time.
While heavily mitigated by a lighthearted tone this is arguably one of the darkest and most violent scenes in the whole comic. Best just single handedly butchered like 15 people and they weren’t cultists, deamons or whatever. That whole deck is covered in guts.
Ironically Von Carnaj was to distracted by his flight of fancy to notice the carnage.
Not sure that the cultists are really more deserving of death than the pirates.
Most of them seem to be the death cult equivalent of ‘Christmas and Easter Catholics’…and even if they’re devout, they’re only slightly more likely to actually kill people, aside from the Brother Tom types, so I think the pirates are more dangerous on average, though in aggregate, the death cult as a whole is – though that’s, again, due to ultimate goals of the leaders, not the actions of the rank and file.
Pirates are also the most widely used XP! You fight them at level 1 and max level!
Also that ship must be huge that the battle didn’t agro the Boss. Or maybe it was one of those must kill X number of XP to trigger Boss battle scenarios.
The boss is the kid. He aggroed alright.
I grew up about a hundred miles from Albuquerque. Take it from me, during their balloon fiesta every year you could see “airships” from a LONG way off. There’s no way Carnaj is surprising anyone who isn’t in dense forest or something, not once they learn to look up.
I think Von Karnaj had one real opportunity–assuming the oar/rigging dealies are capable of managing modest turns, he could use his aerial ship to raid regular ships quite easily. “Lower sails, drop anchor and let’s see those cannons hit the waters, or we’ll just drop big rocks on you ’til you sink–like we did the last five ships that thought we were just bluffing! Okay, good–now, fill the net we’re lowering with goods.”
Mind you, I’m not sure VonK would come up with the notion of extortionate piracy, but it would be a viable option.
One of the nest things about Payet Best was that he isn’t just a clueless, arrogant ass; he really is that good at his job. I find it far more annoying when a shit-talking jackass is right about how good he is.
That should be “best” >.<
He kind of reminds me of Archer.
Just an FYI, the previous page does not link to this page.
I think I know what happened there, and it should fix itself with the next update. Thanks!
I never was 100% into the exposed midriff (I think because of the long sleeves) but I really, really liked this getup for Best. Was it decided from the get-go he’d be changing into different musicians or was this, at some point, to be his one set like everyone else? How were the other ones chosen? Who chose them?
Please excuse my excitement at rare imagery of a Bard kicking absolute ass.
I’m not 100% sure, but it was my impression that changing Best’s outfits was a concept Phil and Erica had from the start (I was mostly happy to leave fashion to them, as Erica had a gift for research and Jason and I struggled regularly with more reality-grounded fashion on Penny and Aggie).
Clearly instead of filling big bags with hydrogen (or helium, whatever) you want to power your air-ship with captured air-elementals. Much more stable.
MAD skills. L337 skillz.
I mean, he could be planning to go after the Sky Elves. Kinda doubt that would’ve worked out, but maybe there was a method to the madness here. A *stupid* method, but a method nonetheless.