Annotated 5-2
During this period, we were getting a lot of attention from World of Warcraft-focused blogs that were able to pick out our main influence without much effort. We’d done our best to foster this. Most of those blogs, I find now, are sadly no longer with us: this image is from archive.org.
Erica was gradually taking more and more liberties with the breakdown of the action as her run on the series advanced. I usually liked the results at least as well as what we had originally, and she wasn’t the first artist I worked with who reworked pacing as she saw fit, so I was generally cool with that.
What I had here originally was a four-panel sequence, and Gravedust’s words in panel 3 would’ve accompanied an image of Byron’s uncomfortable face, maybe with Gravedust off-panel altogether, as well as Byron’s “are we pals?” response. Erica stretched that into four panels all on its own, giving us a lot more of an awkward pause.
Only Gravedust can make “I respect you” sound like an insult. :P
Aw I don’t see it like that at all. He’s like “Hey we’re not that chummy but we’re not in a bad place” in my opinion. Hey I respect a person that don’t loosely throw the word “friend” around super casually but I was just raised weird, y’know? So he gives me the vibe he’s courteously saying “not yet, honestly”.
Also, “pals” is kind of a strange word to use in this context, I feel. It’s a bit artificially chummy. Friends don’t have to ask who their friends are, so this was always going to be a strange conversation, but I think “I… respect you,” in response to “are we pals?” is rather generous!
“I’m not your PAL, NTSC!”
“Well, I’m not your NTSC, SECAM!”
“I mean, I’m not saying you’re a total douch-canoe like Best, but that chip on your shoulder is bigger than you are.”
Well maybe you have a lack-of-attitude problem, Berserker.
“It’s not al ATTitude problem, it’s an ALTitude problem, but I’m not going to walk on stilts to fix it.”