Annotated 9-15
Man, John really was just taking everything we could throw at him and knocking it out of the park. “Hey, you’ve had twenty pages to acclimate yourself to our usual style, now we need a chapter that’s halfway in a completely different style, and we need you to draw these three guys from photo reference and we need you to re-draw five of our six main characters as humans in silhouette, only tweak all five designs slightly, even the ones who were already human, because it’s simultaneously them and not them.” I appreciate “Frigg’s” arms on… multiple levels.
Phil modified panel 2 to make “Frigg” less blustery. He’s the reason she shows a hint of regret and self-criticism there, and it’s a better fit. These guys were happy to be here, but that frame reminds you that they had unfulfilled ambitions, which gives their plight more weight.
There was never a good moment to elaborate on the “difficult events” to which “Gravedust” refers. IIRC, he lost a college-aged child, who just didn’t check in one week and was never seen again, and the grief tore his marriage apart. As a result, he’s desperate enough for companionship that he’s prepared to mischaracterize his fellows a bit. This ain’t actually Madame de Stael territory, but I ain’t tellin’ him that. I have a friend of a friend who disappeared like that, and it hurts to think about.
On a lighter note, I’m currently typing this with one cat on my stomach and another perilously close to my legs. When I had “Syr’Nj” here give the punchline, I just had one cat who kept to herself, mostly. “Cats don’t respect anything?” I didn’t know the half of it.
This page is so great. Also that line about being “alt-tabbed” stuck in my head for years, I only just realised this is where it came from!
Phil deserves full marks for that one. I think my original was “who might be in the bathroom.”
Oh wow, thats some real rough shit for sepia Gravedust.
Forget respecting the squirt bottle, my cat made it part of the game. Scratch at something to get me to go for it, and then the game of tag started.
He was energetic and playful and very kitten-like all through his years. The training I found that stuck was disengagement. Any sort of negative incentive (that fell short of abuse because no way am I doing that) became part of the game, so stop playing and ignore him. We’re wrestling and he scratches too hard, say “ow” and the play stops. Going somewhere he shouldn’t, say “no” move him out of it and then ignore him.
The big thing most people forget is to make a habit out of randomly paying attention to them when they’re behaving themselves. If good behaviour never gets anything, but bad behaviour at least gets your attention, guess what’s going to happen…
OH NO I JUST REALIZED ASLAN IS DEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!
It’s true they don’t respect anything, though. lol
I’m hoping that Aslan was left with a neighbor while she went to the con, and when she didn’t return, the neighbor kept Aslan as their own.
Don’t worry. Aslan is never a tame lion.
If anyone is aware that cats don’t like to be left alone for extended periods it will be proto-Syr.
Anyone else of these, I might be worried, but PS is not going to have neglected Aslan’s needs.
My impression (mostly based on the flashback towards the end) is that the “player” that differs most in personality from their “character” is “Gravedust”. “Syr’Nj” and “Byron” have more similarities, and “Frigg” and “Best” pretty much “play” themselves.
And now my fingers are “stuck” doing “air quotes”.
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I have the sneaking suspicion naming the Cat “Aslan” was to hint to the whole “otherworldly” shenanigans that resulted from the 5 becoming our heroes.
College age kid, huh? So how old was Sepia!Gravy? I figured they were all around the same age (mid-20s-to-mid-30s), although Gravy certainly read as on the older end of that range, but that suggests Gravy really was noticeably older than the others… Or else everyone was older than I thought.
Yeah, I would’ve pegged him around 60, give or take 5 years, and I think you’d be right about the other four.
…..Finding out what the “difficult event” was makes this more poignant, since Human!Gravedust basically did the same thing.
This was the comic that gave me the most issue with the introduction of Sepia World, because it means “Syr’Nj” abandoned her cat and that’s just not done.
It’s not like she knew she was gonna be taken hostage. She’s as guilty as anyone that leaves their cat home to go to the movie theater and catch a single film.
Conscientious cat-owners have a sitter when they’re out of town for more than a day or two.
I am sure Aslan had a fresh set of new subjects already on hand when Syr took that one-way trip.
Speaking as a 64-year-old TT gamer… thank you? By the time you get to this point on the mountain, if you haven’t had a certain share of difficult things you’ve been extraordinarily lucky. Gravedust had more than most.
For the record, I got my first glimpse of D&D in 1977, when the only video games were Pong and this thing called Adventure if your employer had enough space for their own computer. Since then, life has been a set of twisty little corridors, all alike…
I just noticed the colorful jewelry when I got to Sepia!Syr’mg on this page. That’s a nice touch, though I kinda wished it was more noticeable on the last page, coulda saved me some initial confusion on the ifrst read (I wasn’t sure if every panel was “Byron” before)