Annotated 6-24
Someone pointed out here that even though it had apparently been completed, this party of five had no magic(k) user. This never struck me as a deficit, because Syr’Nj’s science was to fill that role as needed whenever Gravedust’s mysticism did not.
I wasn’t always charmed by Bandit’s cute-or-cutesy antics, but I do like her meme-able poses and expressions in the middle row here.
You may recall from Chapter Three that Byron gave Bandit his trust freely and fully in the flooding prison. He values being able to do that. But he doesn’t quite know Bandit well enough to be doing so here, hence his polling of the others.
I wasn’t always charmed by Bandit’s antics, but I also always felt that the charm (or failure thereof) was a character trait that Bandit was actively projecting to get people to like her, rather than an attempt by the author to force me to like her. That’s not always the case with cutesy-boop characters.
Well-put! I don’t know that I had ever formed the idea together that succinctly myself, but on seeing it spelled out, I immediately felt the same. She’s an annoying character, but not an annoying *character*.
“Who’s got two thumbs and steady employment? Dis gal!”
I thought Gravedust was the magic user. Being able to talk to the dead and fashion them into weapons is pretty magical.
Whoops, meant to reply here but it wound up two comments down.
I saw this page when I checked GA yesterday, so I just assumed that it hadn’t updated yet today. And I would’ve just left and checked back later, but for some reason I clicked “previous” and… found a page inbetween this one and the one I thought was the previous one. So today’s update wasn’t late – it was early.
That’s happened a few times before, but it’s always been obvious that a page is missing. This time, I didn’t notice.
So the irony here is that this scene still makes perfect sense without the previous page, and yet that page is one of the most defining character moments of the entire comic. :)
The intelligence-based spellcasting class was actually called “magic-user” in the earliest editions of D&D; the original “standard adventuring party” was fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief.
In this paradigm, Gravedust is closer to cleric role. He doesn’t manipulate metaphysical forces directly; he communes with other beings who are inherently magical (for the classic cleric this is usually a deity, but restless spirits fit the concept) and they assist each other toward mutual goals.
(Meant to be in reply to Gorcq…)