Annotated 41-19
All Flo asked for was that the bodies should form “in the most grotesque manner possible.” It’s a great example of John’s kind of logical creativity that the bodies materialize out of chopped wood, as if Byron’s told himself that he was just chopping firewood all the time he was chopping people.
This sequence sort of conforms to and sort of transcends the “balloon hell/bubble heaven” dichotomy we saw earlier. Some of Byron feels that he deserves a better afterlife, living peaceably in his hometown, and some of him feels he deserves the hell that lies behind the simple imagery. He’s at war with himself still, for a little while longer.
Jason Waltrip and I once did a fantasy sequence in Fans in which our most guilt-prone main character visualized a field of corpses that included all his friends. We could certainly have done that here! However, this is no fantasy: this is Byron’s actual memory of the death of Battleshire, which we alluded to in the “pal” sequence. Of all the things the berserker’s done, it makes sense he’d remember this the most.
(For similar reasons, we couldn’t use the destruction of Pardo’s village, because Byron was dead before that began so he wouldn’t know what it looked like or who was killed. According to Gravedust, even his ghost wouldn’t have been free to haunt it.)
Ahh damnit. I had forgotten how dark this turned.
“Just let it die with me.”
“Yeah… About that…”
You could almost hear a cha-ching going off in Gravedust’s tube when Byron delivered that opening.
Word of God, of course, but I would have said Alisin was the most guilt-ridden character in Faans!
BTW, I’m sure you know, but the Faans! archives are kind of messed up, especially rightt after the Bad Guys destroy the alphabet
Yeah, I read Faans! recently and noticed that as well. Several bad page links (only ones I remember is 199 goes to 100 and 404 is unintentionally a bad one), a few reference .png files instead of .jpeg ones with the comic being on .jpeg most of the time. And the second CRFH crossover is just unreadable.
I’m trying to spread the word and hook a couple of friends on Fans!, and they told me that some links are wonky here and there