Annotated 8-6
Iver was conceived at a time when politicians were known for smiling while stabbing you in the back, not for loudly shouting what a demon you were in public. Sometimes I miss the Ivers, just a little, but then I remember they’re still out there, using the shouters as an extra smokescreen.
“All these things say ‘war'” is a somewhat subtle Watchmen reference/homage/steal. Ozymandias also analyzed the behavior of his culture to determine whether a war was imminent or not.
All this business about rightful homes is surely going to remind some readers of the Jews’ displacement from Israel, and I can’t deny that was an influence. The purple tent-painting of the mountains is inspired to some degree by the tabernacle of Moses as described in later Exodus. As it is in Gastonia, purple dye used to be an extravagant luxury item in Earth’s ancient cultures, but the design notes spared no expense for it.
How expensive could that die be if it is so close to the same color as the sand. :P
It’s early evening or early morning there. Everything looks purple in twilight.
It’s true. And in typical conditions, at least on Earth, shadows at many times of day appear to have blue in them (with some variation depending on what the material they appear on.
I know, twas a joke.
Google tells me that back in the day purple dye was made of snail juice, which people had to extract from thousands of snails by hand…
The purple dye used in the tabernacle was certainly wildly expensive, but virtually all of the materials used in the tabernacle’s construction were looted by the Israelites from their masters as they made their way out of Egypt. So, it wasn’t necessarily that expensive for *them* :P
(PS. How do I turn off my gravatar?)
Gravedust’s “the young women are still brazen in their sexuality” line is, I think, the least sympathetic he is at any point in the comic. But it didn’t take Iver long at all to establish that he’s utterly evil.
(shrug) Ol’ stick-in-the-mud mystic dwarf gotta… stick-in-the-mud mystic dwarf.
John’s style can look pretty similar to Jason’s a lot of the time. This is the first page he illustrated to strike me as really “Fans!-y”, and that happened more and more as time went on. Of course, it doesn’t help that Jason did some work on it too, here and there.