Annotated 8-10
“Wait, do you have no money for arts and crafts, or do you have that MASSIVE PIECE OF ART we saw earlier that Bandit tried to steal a gem or two from? Ha ha, get your story straight! OWNED!”
Gondolessa was one of our characters conceived “on the fly” (har har) and both his name and original role in the story (logistical operator and unofficial acolyte for someone who’d describe himself as a “war [leader]”) were borrowed from a real-life political figure. We changed his gender at some point in his development, which would have certain implications down the road. But more than that, I immediately started writing him as a very different personality than his inspiration, thoughtful, cranky and a bit slick, someone who actually cared about changing Syr’Nj’s mind even as he led her and her party to imminent death. And it’s the fact that he was prepared to engage in intellectual debate with her that earned her respect and made her slow enough to fall into this trap.
I don’t remember Gondy having this…Gnome-like speech pattern… He’s definitely speaking more formally by the end.
Perhaps he’s just trying to speak to these lowly humans in a way they can understand.
I noticed the same thing. He is so sophisticated in later pages, I had forgotten this was his first iteration. I definitely prefer the latter.
I found (and still find) this page all sorts of confusing. Gony’s speech patterns throw me off, and going from him standing regally as he presents the pit to bandit dashing toward the exit throws me off (“why’s that goblin running away, I thought he was a bird…?”). I guess Gondolessa just flew off after the trap set?
Just something about the flow of this comic is extremely confusing, requiring 2 or 3 reads before I get straight exactly what’s happening. I think it’s some growing pains showing
I try not to get defensive about comments, but I think John did a fine job setting this up: there’s the external shot of the pit to the right of panel 1, we see the team going into the passageway in panel 2 and Bandit looking nervously behind them as they do so, panel 3 notably shows the three members of the team EXCEPT Bandit. That’s a lot of setup for her fleeing, and it’ll be very clear that Gondolessa starts flying away on the first frame of the next page. My storytelling ideas can get ambitious, so I need either someone who can reinterpret them aggressively as something clearer (like Erica) or who can make them crystal clear by adding the details they need (like John).
Thank you, T. That’s very gracious.
There’s also the pigtails on the fleeing silhouette of Bandit.
If there’re growing pains here, it’s definitely not on the part of the artist…the details are quite clear.
That’s okay, Abnaxis. It’s all good. Sometimes it does take several read-throughs to get all the details. It doesn’t mean it’s lacking good execution, it just has a lot of stuff going on in the page.
…and there were a lot a growing pains too. ;-P
Bandit’s genre savviness kicking a second too late there.
I love how she doesn’t even try to warn anyone, she knows it’s already too late.
Not the first or last time she is savvy enough to jump boat and come back later to save everybody’s else bacon.
Well, not fast enough this time.
I love John’s designs, but I feel like they sort of instantly aged Syr’nj. Erica’s Syr’nj had a sort of youthful, literally wide-eyed naivety to her (which to be fair, matched the more light-hearted material of the first 7 chapters). To me, John’s Syr’nj already looks like the world-weary, politically-savvy leader she was destined to become (despite walking into the trap on this page). It could be that I’m just more familiar with the latter than the former, though.
Anyway, I’m loving this trip down memory lane. I’m checking in to read T’s and John’s comments almost every day, even if I don’t post much (it doesn’t help that the webform won’t remember my login details and sometimes eats my posts).
Wait… Gondolessa is male? I don’t think I ever figured that out. I think the name sounds so feminine that ignored any overtly male traits.
That, and avians, like the birds that inspired them, don’t really have a lot of surface gender expression in their appearance – at least, not any that most humans (myself included) would bother to try and sniff out, or even pay attention to in passing – which, to be sure, doesn’t encourage recognition of that fact.
That said, excluding a brief bit of innuendo and a spare few disparaging remarks, the plot doesn’t overtly pay attention to it, either.
Gondolessa’s character is actually kind of rare in any media, in the sense that it could count as “covert passing” instead of “overt representation”, and in that the audience still has a way to notice this.
Birds, as a group, have a wide range of colorations, but the general trend is: if one is drab, and the other is colorful, the colorful one is the male.