Annotated 8-23
Here, the story had a problem. Well, the problem had existed all along, but this brought it to the forefront: we had a lot of heavy hitters fighting each other and not a lot of reference for how powerful some of them were except each other.
It would’ve been deeply unsatisfying to me and Phil if Frigg had gone down too easily facing off against Harky or Byron, but she couldn’t beat either of them, either. We had to make the bronze medal look respectable, and that’s hard to do without dragging the story out too long.
Phil scarcely had to lobby me to get this extra page, and he found a solution that may bend your definition of “berserker” a bit, but I think it’s pretty elegant. Byron, guided by some raw instinct or a split-second flash of intellect, uses his berserker strength to crush Frigg’s armor at the sides. After that, she can’t breathe, can’t get up, and definitely can’t fight. To me, at least, it’s implied that had Byron not “cheated,” Frigg might’ve lasted another crucial minute or two.
This definitely very unimportant but… Doesn’t Syr’Nj’s hair look super straight here? I thought it had some curl to it on the back.
The result of sweat, possibly.
I was always a great fan of how Byron beat Frigg here. It gave me exactly the feeling, you say you were going for: that Frigg is a powerhouse, but berserking Byron smashes through it with a bit of instinctive cunning and incredible raw power to back it up. Frigg doesn’t look weak, Byron looks terrifying.
On a slightly different note. With Harky’s fear you’ve already established that the madness is contagious. So how come it didn’t spread to anyone in this situation, like Bandit who just got Hack n slashed?
Well, Harky says it is, but that could be just his take on it. Later on a form of it is too. But is this one?
Also might be just that Harky takes him for being rabid, which could be more contagious to savage races.
I suspect Battleshire wasn’t the only place the cultists experimented with the berserker curse, it’s entirely possible that Harky witnessed or is at least aware of a similar incident occurring among the World’s Rebellion. As to it being contagious, later on it takes a boost from the cultists and H.R. with Byron as the focus/host to make it contagious. So we can infer a couple of things about the process, first becoming a berserker requires possession by a spirit, second the possession isn’t permanent but it does cause permanent changes to their bodily chemistry (that Syr’Nj can treat) which results in relapses of the berserk state, third the spirits don’t last for long once they arrive but they can transfer from host to host making it seem contagious. So in short this is just a very nasty relapse caused by Byron’s loss of control while dying and not a full mystical infused outbreak.
That covers it pretty well, I think.
It wasn’t really cheating. Frigg (whose probably not used to fighting without her shield), left herself wide open and Byron took the shot.
The question I have is, why did he flip the to the blunt side? It seems like using the sharp side would of been more effective. Was this for narrative reasons?
The blade edge, being further from the handle, and narrower, is more likely to turn, reducing the effectiveness as a bludgeon. Also deliberately hitting armour with the edge is asking to blunt it for no good reason.
Yeah you don’t cut through armour bludgeon it and cause it to break and bend.
From my understanding blades are good for swishy things like meat and flesh, but blunt heavy things are good for caving in armor. So with his berserker strength could he have cut through her armor? Maybe, but using the blunt side makes it more likely to have in the armor making it hard to breath
Yep. If you want to take out someone in heavy armor, you either use something pointy and go for the vulnerable spots, or use something blunt and dent the armor in a way that’ll keep the other person from fighting properly.
Interesting. I could of swore battle-axes were designed with idea of armor penetration in mind. The idea being they have a lot of mass that is then directed to a single edge.
However, my exhaustive (5 whole minutes) Google searching seems to be inconsistent on that note. Some sources say axes were designed to penetrate armor. More sources say armor was designed to foil axes (as well as swords).
The only consistent things I could find was that maces were very effective against armor. So it looks like flipping the axes was the way to go about it after all.
Made for defeating mail, and cloth armour, not plate. When axes (one of our earliest and longest lasting melee weapons) became true powerhouses they were facing plates of bronze, or treated (and plastic-like) linen, as well as layered cloth. The spear is still the king of weapons, but the axe is the queen, and it will hack into bronze like it aint no thang, and do enough cutting damage, and breakage through cloth that it damages the bones and flesh beneath.
Later, with the advent of chain armor, and to a lesser extent scale, the axe maintained its position by being good at splitting links of chain,(when it could) and breaking and cutting what was beneath, causing trauma. Now you might ask “If it’s mostly bashing things why isn’t a mace just as good?” and the answer is, “Blunt trauma doesn’t let those broken bits bleed out everywhere.” It is surprising how effective a melee combatant can be with a broken arm, or even a fractured collar bone,(Swelling, it’s swell) but if they are bleeding profusely at the same time, a great deal of the fight goes out of them (See: Swords and their reason for existing). However, many of the weapons that are good at cutting, are not good at breaking, and are defeated by armour. A sword will do little against mail, and struggle even against layered cloth, while a mace can break things, but has less impact against flexible armours, and doesn’t cause as much trauma. So axes are a lovely middle ground.
(As an aside, they are not heavy, almost no melee weapon is. The average combat axe weighs in at under 4 lbs. Even a large poleaxe is less than 10 lbs. Swords are usually somewhere from 2 to 6 at the heaviest I’ve seen. There are heavier examples, but they are for display and parade. The power of these weapons was from how their design distributed force, not their weight. Something like a sledge hammer would be next to useless in pitched combat, due to how slow and unwieldy they are. And a wood-axe head is probably twice the thickness of a battle axe, being made for felling trees not flesh and bone. The stories of hundred lb swords are just that.)
When we get to steel plate armor being prevalent, axes are still going strong, but aren’t the best choice for defeating the steel harness. Though they are still widely used, we see more pick and hammer shaped objects (For piercing), or things like the poleaxe, which combines a spear, a hammer, and an axe (or a pick). Axes may cut into armor, (If they are lucky) but won’t make it through the padding beneath, and are used to damage joints,(though not perhaps as effectively as a mace or hammer) and deal horrible injuries to more lightly armoured opponents. We also see many axes with spikes on their backs, or knobs, to deal with what the blade cannot. (Imagine if Byron had a couple of stickers on the back of his, yikes…)
Now again you might ask, “If the axe was so darn great, why didn’t we use them for everything?” It’s not because they’re heavy, they all weigh about the same remember, though the weight is distributed differently (one has a head after all), it’s for a simpler reason than that. Convenience. Okay more than just that, but that is a really big factor. When you carry a sword around it sits in a scabbard, then SWOOSH, it’s out and causing hell. How do you carry an axe? They’re sharp, have to be for all that bloodletting, but covering just the head is tricky. Maybe a holster, with the handle down? But that’s pretty awkward to draw. Just a ring on your belt? Try sitting down without sticking yourself, and imagine if you rest your hand on it after a little too much ale, see ya fingers. So there’s that, vs a sword, sitting pretty in a scabbard. On top of this, you can only cut with a bit of it, and while it is terribly impressive when you do, if you’re not fighting someone in armor, maybe having a thing that is all blade is better. Especially as you can do draw cuts, and thrusts! Parrying is tricky too, some axes had hand guards, especially in India and Persia, (Where plate was more rare, but mail, scale and cloth persisted into the 19th century!) but in general your hand is pretty exposed. All this lead to axes as a weapon of war, and swords as a sidearm for all circumstances.
Sorry to go on, I just love axes.
The seeming inconsistency in the sources you turned up is likely due to some combination of several factors.
First, there is the fact that armor can be made with varying thickness and durability (and let’s not forget, can come in multiple layers and textures), the designs for which, much like weapons, multiplied as knowledge, techniques, and technology improved and spread.
Then, there is the fact that the same was going on with weapons.
Both weapons and armor were also constantly being developed and redesigned in order to counter advances in armor and armaments, in some cases, specifically to enable the user to better handle certain situations they would otherwise be unprepared to counter.
Your initial idea is right, in the case of using axes to damage light armor, especially when it comes to primitive axes, which were more useful as a bludgeoning tool than as a cutting blade (for some reason, metals that don’t hold a strong edge aren’t good for the latter).
However, Byron’s axes bear an appearance that indicates they were designed to be more lightweight than the earlier bludgeoning designs, for faster repeated striking (as I’d expect would best fit a Berserker). So it is definitely of strategic interest for him to use the blunt backs of the heads, simply because he wouldn’t be able to easily generate enough force to cut through Frigg’s plate mail – whereas, axes with long, serrated points on their edges would be better suited to this (and possibly, to nothing else).
To add to the others, check also on halberds, which were designed to be multipurpose (calling them Swiss Army weapon is true in more than one way).
A description by Robert Van Gulik of 9th-century Chinese halberds was this: an axe for lightly armored foes, a spear for piercing more serious armors, and a ball on the opposite side of the axe to crush helmets.
Also… when it comes to plate or mail, slashing weapons are ridiculously ineffective. A sharp blade does absolutely nothing to a sheet of thick gauged metal (Against mail, it just rolls up on the blade and you spread out the PSI over a large area rendering it useless). So if you wield a sword against another knight, they’ve got heavy plate on and all the gaps are mostly covered by mail… thus “plate mail”… so most combat maneuvers in that arena were done with the sword tip, the pommel, shield bash, body part, or by knocking your opponent over turning them pretty much into a tipped over turtle and then stabbing them in an exposed gap. For axes… it is much the same. As Kamino pointed out, in order to dent the armor with the blade you would have to hit at almost exactly a perfect 90 degree angle or the blade will ricochet off. The largest exception to this would be claymores, as depicted in Braveheart, which were never traditionally sharp… it’s just a 15ish pound sword swung with an enormous amount of force. Most swords could cut off limbs because of their razor sharpness… claymores cut off limbs much like how you can cut Jello with a spoon.
As Jdorr pointed out, the true enemy of plate is bludgeoning weapons. By and large they are slow and clumsy and cause extreme fatigue in a hurry (Go outside with 100+ lbs of gear on, grab a sledge, and just shadow-box while swinging for 10 minutes against a “moving” target… That’s why most knights didn’t use them… swords are much more balanced and efficient against most targets… which is why I’ve always been impressed with Frigg wearing full plate, a tower/scutum shield, and essentially a maul one handed… she could easily be lugging around 150-200 lbs of gear)… but if you get a solid hit against plate… both the body and the armor will indent… except normally your body gets to bounce back to its normal form, but the plate is now stuck in that shape and thus now your body is forced to stay in that shape. So if you get a double rib shot, like Frigg did, and he breaks multiple ribs and forces those ribs to puncture her lungs, those ribs are going to stay in her lungs. When she breathes, her lungs will expand and further embed themselves on the ribs. If she moves… she’ll be shifting her lungs and they will pull against the ribs and physically tear and rip open. So you can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t do anything but face the inevitable or wait for someone to save you. It was an awful AWFUL end for a ton of knights.
You seem to have picked and chosen your sources, Drake, and most of them appear to be bollocks.
Ever since the Roman army, no soldier or warrior has carried around more than about 70lbs of kit, almost all of it armour. A full set of 14th Century plate armour, known as full harness, weighed around 70lbs on its own. Heavier suits of armour did exist, but they were for tournaments, where combat was carefully controlled and safety and protection were of paramount importance.
There is no melee weapon in existence that weighs 10lbs, let alone 15lbs – as Lurklen mentioned, even the largest two-handed weapons topped out at around 8lbs (some polearms were heavier, but they are intended to be rested on the ground between active strikes), and anything heavier is purely for ceremony.
By the time people were wearing full harness on the battlefield, swords had also developed into much more dangerous weapons that could indeed cut clean through chainmail with a skillful strike – and against a plate-armoured opponent, the weapon was wielded more like a hammer with the pommel and quillons used to punch through the armour. Against chain, a sword was employed like a lever to maximise striking energy; against plate, it was employed like a hammer to maximise force transfer in a small surface area. And even before plate armour became common, an arming sword could cut through chainmail and scale armour with only a little difficulty.
And finally, there is no such thing as “platemail”. A full suit of plate armour was called full harness, and consisted of articulated plate sabatons, gauntlets, poleyns, fauld, couters, gorget, and solid plate greaves, cuisses, tassets, cuirass, vanbrace, rerebrace, pauldrons, and helm. This still left gaps, between the pieces and behind the articulation points, particularly on the back of the legs. These gaps were, of course, armoured – and the toughest and most flexible armour to put in those places was chainmail. It came, as it were, with the set. There was also half-plate, where only the torso head and neck were armoured with plate, and the rest armoured with chainmail. Neither of these harnesses were ever described as “platemail”.
“Chainmail” is also an anachronistic term. It was just “mail”.
I will apologize for a couple things. I certainly apologize for grossly being inaccurate on the weight of the claymore. I do not know why that number was in my head. I also want to apologize for what I meant by “plate mail”. I merely meant that’s why several people know it as plate mail. In the earlier editions of D&D it’s called “plate mail”. Ask an average person with a basic passing knowledge of medieval times what a suit of armor would be called and they’d probably refer to it as “plate mail”. Throughout the rest of my text I refer to it as plate… both before and after.
However… I never specified a time frame. Plate armor has weighed all sorts of amounts through the ages. The Roman army almost never even wore plate, but instead a half plate like described. You take a look at Frigg and she is wearing heavy plate, closer to (as you said) tournament armor. You can also frequently see that she’s wearing a mail hauberk under her breastplate. She’s also frequently using a shield, which appears to be a fair bit larger than a scutum, which on average weighed around 20-25 lbs. So hers might be around 30-35. She’s also wielding a mace with a ridiculously large head and a fairly large haft. It’s not meant for single hand use. So I stand by my comment of 100+ pounds and swinging around a sledge. The one point where you are absolutely wrong is that swords do not cut cleanly through mail.
There are videos and shows (Deadliest Warrior) about people swinging swords, or even the legendary katana, at pigs covered in mail and there is no underlying damage after multiple blows, let alone cutting clean through. There are also videos of axes being stopped dead in their tracks. Sure a good blow will bust open a couple links, exposing more area to strike, but against a new set of mail they are useless.
Sabremeister, yeah on Sword vs mail, I gotta side with Shadowblade here. If you were lucky, some of the blade types of the late 13/ early 1400’s became more narrow at the tip, and could get in with a thrust through some mail, though penetration was not excellent, but mail stops most cutting actions in their tracks, it’s kind of the whole point. Axes can do some cuts through mail, most particularly on hard bone areas, such as the collar, and the joints, or the hands. Places where the flesh is close to the bone. But even with the axe it was not a guarantee, though broken bones and trauma were very much likely, and with later better made mail it became less viable. But swords are pretty much stopped dead by mail. The thing to remember about armour is, if it didn’t work, they would not have kept using it. (Especially considering how much it cost, in time, effort, and money.)
Now as one caveat to all of this. No item in service is in 100% good condition all the time, and it only takes some half-assed repair job, or a bad bit of weather, and little down time, for rust, or poor craftsmanship, or negligence to damage even a few connected links. This combined with variance in production, and quality of product, could mean that sometimes mail was not what it was meant to be. We have no statistics on equipment failure rates during the middle ages (It would put so many internet arguments to rest if we did) so we can’t know just how often an unexpected blow that should have been blocked became a wound, or possibly a killing stroke. It could be that this failure rate was high enough that these weapons were considered to be worth using against mailed opponents, or that the type of damage accrued was bad enough without the armor failing, for the use of swords and axes to be viable. That said, in a perfect white room scenario, someone in mail should feel secure that a sword will not cut through it, and that even a large axe will struggle to cut them through it.
(Another small aside: First, mail was very form fitting, we see it often depicted as loose and open, but in fact when looking at contemporary sources we find that it was fitted closely to the body. This is likely for ease of movement and to minimize weight. Secondly, mail was not distributed equally across the body, even in a full suit (which there were, dudes just head to toe in chain) the areas most likely to be struck, outer arms, upper legs, chest, shoulders, were thickly armored, with more connections and layers of mail, while other parts had only a thin covering. This is also for flexibility and weight, but also ventilation, layers of metal and padding get HOT. However, this means there are areas on the body, less protected, and so easier to injure with a precise strike. This is where we may see some action with the sword, or spear, and somewhat the axe (though less so as the vulnerable spots are more open to thrusting) and why there is such a mixed interpretation of the viability of some weapons against armour. Also because Hollywood thinks of armor as shiny bulky clothing.
(Another point for axes (Sorry to go on again) is they are cheaper to produce, having only a head, and a wooden pole.)
I checked the original comic the other day, and people were discussing *this exact same thing*. Approximately 46 years ago, by my calculations.
But since we’re talking axes, one nitpick I have with the otherwise excellent visuals in this fight is the fact that each of Byron’s axes is bigger than Frigg’s mace in panel three. The ratio is not like that in the rest of the comic, AFAICR.
Of course the size of those blades, and their sockets, is cartoonishly exaggerated. Realistically they’d be less than a quarter that size. Same goes for the mace, where a really big head not only gets unwieldy but loses impact pressure.
I don’t count this as an artistic failure. In fact, considering the nature of this comic (a pastiche of WoW), it’d be a failure if they weren’t cartoonishly exaggerated. Now you mention it though, I notice Frigg’s mace does seem to change size between panels 1 and 3.
… oh for an edit or preview button.
Yeah, I don’t have a problem with cartoonish exaggeration. It’s just that if both a handaxe and a mace are oversized, the mace should definitely look and feel heftier throughout – it’s relying more on raw mass than any bladed weapon.
More evidence in this page of just how terrifying the berserker rage really is. Adopt the ‘over the shoulder dual wielding’ stance in Panel 3. Now, move, slowly, to emulate the maneuver in Panel 4. In order to do this without actively swapping their position (something he doesn’t have time to do with Frigg right Friggin’ there), the only way to do it is by twisting his arms like a corkscrew–while still bringing them in with enough force to pinch the armor.
Just casually trying to emulate the maneuver without any force, I could feel tendons in my elbow and wrists stretching painfully. Doing it this way? Yeah, had Byron been KO’ed after this and woke up later, his arms would be like limp noodles dangling to either side. Instead, he brushes it off and keeps fighting without pause. HIs arms are only functIoning right now because of raw muscle strength.
That is a scary, scary virus.
Oh damn. I forgot about this page.
Yeah, the terror of Byron just grows and grows. We go from the slightly comic whirlybird to the crazy, cunning, and super-strong.
Zerkerzombies are NO FUN AT ALL!