Annotated Chapter 28 Cover
I think I said we were now past the midpoint, and therefore long since done creating characters who were going to be crucial to the narrative? Well, don’t let these guys hear me say that.
It depends on how you count, though. Each of these six folks will have an arc. Each will make major contributions to the stories where they’re central, and more modest contributions to the overall series arc. Aside from Penk, who was introduced earlier, none of them are going to be such key figures that I couldn’t imagine big events unfolding without them, but they’ll have their roles to play.
I think Phil and I both resisted, and were right to resist, a sort of aversion to new faces that creeps into a lot of comics series after a while. I don’t have hard data on this, but there always seems to be a point where the nostalgia value of bring back old villains, and even supporting characters, starts to outweigh the excitement of designing new ones in the creators’ minds. You can’t help some of that–you don’t want to throw away everything you’ve built–but we tried to keep throwing new designs into the mix whenever we got the chance. Phil would say that helps Arkerra mirror a game, where every day, new players join with ideas they’ve sweated over. I’d say it just makes our world a more exciting place. Narrative conventions should be defied when they get in the way of your goals, and one of our goals was the feeling there was always something new on the horizon, that the old didn’t have to persist just because it always had.
Yeah, and we have yet to be introduced to JJ and Shanna’s eventual allies.
If I may ask, what’s the story behind deciding that HAMMERHEAD would always have his name be in All-Caps?
That was Phil’s innovation, so I’m not completely sure, but I think it was a bit of a tip of the hat to his primal nature. He would even tend to write the name in all caps when describing him in the scripts. With our fonts, of course, it didn’t really make a difference in speech bubbles.
It probably wasn’t so much Phil’s innovation as his experience as a gamer; there are MMO players who always insist on writing the names in ALL UPPERCASE. Maybe he wanted this to be in contrast to the names of The Five, which are bad puns and/or real world references, another form of player naming stupidity.
Anyway, Auraugu is another one of these six who has already been introduced (before Penk, even) and also has some narrative significance.
Solid theory. Probably true.
I can say as a writer of middling talent, that introducing more characters makes the plot and the cast harder to juggle.
My own aversion to introducing new ones is entirely based on this premise. A certain limit to my own creativity also requires avoiding creating more designs that need inventing.
All in all, it’s a hazardous exercise.
Y’all pulled it off, though. Kudos.