Annotated 6-10
Is Frigg’s mace actually crappy? Probably not, considering how much she puts it through and the “faith” she’s later shown to put in it. I think it’s more likely it’s just not the kind of thing that fetches much of a price.
In other circumstances, it might’ve read as “too easy” to put Frigg’s armor and weapons so close to where prisoners were kept, but I could see Scarlett torturing her by keeping them within sight. “Just break loose and take them, whelp. Well?” Perhaps she plans to have Frigg smelt them herself once Blood-Bonded.
It’s funny– this split has a lot of things in common with the pirate ship sequence, including the girls going into a darkened prison area to set someone free while Byron and Gravedust prepare an attack on the big boss and stumble into a surprise. But I don’t recall this one confusing people nearly so much with regard to where everyone was.
It helps that there’s a) only two sub-parties, and b) no real room for confusion, even if both parties ended up doing something different than planned.
It also helps that the groups’ actions are arranged in panel groups, so… top three panels, Syr’Nj and Bandit talking about being where Frigg isn’t; fourth panel, wide shot of Frigg and Scarlett; bottom two, Byron and Gravedust talking about kicking down the door to where Frigg is.
Compare the three strips that were causing the confusion. 4-6, Byron tells Syr’Nj and Frigg to find the children who might be under “the topsoil” of the ship while he and Gravedust find Carnaj. 4-7, four silent panels of Byron and Gravedust bursting through a door, then one wide panel with one sentence word balloon that has a tail leading to the bottom panel; wide panel below that one of Von Carnaj, but this is not a reverse view from the above, it’s a different part of the ship. 4-8 (so now we’re at two MWF updates after Byron laid out the plan) we have one wide panel of Byron/Gravedust/Taro in the cabin, two panels of Syr’Nj and Frigg, and then back to the cabin. It jumps around a lot more without doing the same work in establishing how every panel relates to the ones around it.
I just think this section has a much better flow to keep everything clear.
And reading the comments under the Chapter 4 pages, not just looking at the pages for reference: a lot of people are saying the same thing about 4-7. They thought it was a shot/reverse shot, not move from the cabin to the deck.
Well, for one thing, you didn’t have one of the groups react to something unseen, and then in the very next panel show what an entirely different group saw (without that different group being in frame)
Frigg’s mace may not be shoddy workmanship, but it probably looks “well-used”. And Bandit, being a thief, probably has more interest in shiny things and might easily underestimate the material worth of the mace.
Is that a bag of holding that Syr’Nj is, er, holding?
Considering Bandit is looting from a gamer perspective she’s probably seeing “common” gear and a meh weapon that her class doesn’t even use: Junk drops.
It makes sense for Frigg’s gear to be in a chest right where they were holding her in an RPG game though. How many times has your character been dues ex machine captured and right after you escape all your missing gear is conveniently in the first chest/locker/box you find?
I’m having Chrono Trigger flashbacks now.
(This is not a bad thing.)
It happens in newer games as well. “We Happy Few” has an inventory recovery after imprisonment just like that.
I don’t recall, did Gravedust’s ability to see lifeforces ever play a part in anything later on?
It was in the first few pages of the comic, which are chonologically later than this one.
Yeah, not sorry that they dropped the flash forwards either.
Cheers,
Côté
I think the real issue is that we’re already familiar with the grounds. We’ve seen the sisters walking around the temple, we’ve seen the torturing Frigg in the dungeon, we know the geography. When the party says they’re splitting up, we know where they’re going rather than the split happening while also introducing an unfamiliar place.