Annotated 8-25
This page was silent in Phil’s original script. At the last minute, I added some dialogue that built off the last spoken line from page 23. I think that was pretty clearly the right call.
One consequence of the age difference between me and Phil is that I came up during the period of comics fandom when Alan Moore was considered the next best thing to God, and Phil didn’t get there until after Moore’s legacy started looking more complicated. So I don’t think this was true for Phil, but when outlining this chapter and the next, I was certainly all kinds of inspired by Moore’s first major American work, “The Anatomy Lesson” and its lead-in, “Loose Ends,” issues #20 and #21 of 1982’s Saga of the Swamp Thing.
There are some cute (mostly unintentional) parallels and some more meaningful ones. As lead-ins, both “Loose Ends” and this chapter end with the death of a plant-person whose body absorbs way more ammunition than seems necessary at the hands of low-level grunts. More to the point, for both Syr’Nj (and friends) and the Swamp Thing, this apparent death is more than an obvious cliffhanger. It’s the beginning of a new phase in their journey, which is about to blow up the reader’s understanding of who and what they really are.
In that sense at least, the “end Act I” label in the alt text is appropriate. But there’s at least two more candidates for the real “end of Act One” label, and heh, we’ll get there.
Also, the “shrinking blackness” at the end here is a very George Perez bit.
Coming to this point on my first read through, I was devastated and left with so many questions. Luckily I hadn’t caught up, so the beginning of the answers were just a click away.
And so ends my first chapter of Guilded Age. A pretty dour beginning for a new artist; to draw all the main characters dying… and just when I was getting the hang of them. But this was not the end. Little did any of us know, the real story was only just beginning.
I am… torn. By the prospect of this page being silent instead.
You lose the moment of Syr’Nj’s convictions enduring this trial by fire. You risk the reader’s lasting impression of the World’s Rebellion being a scary faceless line of archers without the suggestion of a better outcome.
But man, that could have really sold the bleak gut punch of this moment.
Same. I think this page being silent could have easily been an excellent choice.
I hear y’all, but I guess everybody in the series dying in largely unheroic ways is all the bleak I’d want. My wife has taught me the value of seasoning.
I for one think it would be out of character for Syr to stoically face death without a sufficiently stoic quip to go along with it.
This is it. You’re going to die. Your enemies are a throng of similar-looking beasts.
But you’re going to spend your last breath telling them they can be more than that.
Because you’re never going to get a better platform for that than your own dead body.
Yes! I remember just loving this page while still being devastated by it. After the fast paced action of the pages before – that were really great in their own right – seeing Syr’Nj going down while standing up with poise was (and is) very impressive to me.
But more than that: Her words also foreshadowed the later development between our heroes and the “savages”. Them really having a choice surely was a surprise to many readers.
If I’m 100% brutally honest, I am not a big fan of the copy-paste line of archers in the middle panel. I’m not even 100% sure they’re copy-pasted, but I would have preferred they were a little less similar. They’re part of the World’s Rebellion, they’re not Stormtroopers.
They’re disciplined.
That’s a participle for a reason. To be disciplined is having something done to you. You’ve been boot-strapped for cohesion.
Land sharks haven’t. It shows. Trolls have. That should show too.
There’s a difference between discipline and having every single member have the same body shape and proportions. Having them stand with discipline is fine, but making them clone troops is a bit weird.
Ever seen a modern army? That’s pretty much what you get.
They’re recruited based on a set of criteria, they train by a different set of criteria, and succeed by a third set.
In the end the ones that last look pretty alike. Certainly if you’re a different species!
Sure, if these were the irregular troops, or if these were scouts or long-range recon, you might expect less cohesion, but archers work in formation, and train for reliability (because they might have to fire into or near melee, where friendlies are going to be close to the line of fire).
While I’m with Abnaxis on the point of how “realistic” the depiction is, I really like how the archers work nice as a kind of ornament. The whole page is beautifully designed, almost musical in its rhythm – the archer-panel helps with this.