Bandit Axemas Anno 1
After some trial and error, I hit on the notion of “everyone gives their gift to the next person down alphabetically” as a nice way for us to include everyone without wasting a lot of verbiage on who was whose Santa. But Rachel’s refusal to play by the rules keeps it from being too mechanical.
So that’s E-Merl’s gift to Frigg in panel 4 there. Nice try, bro, but the discount rack just doesn’t have maces as durable as the one she relies on. We’ll see her working out with it on the next page, though, which is as close to gracious appreciation as one could expect from her. More subtly, Gravedust sits on a leaf-stuffed pillow in the last frame, a gift from Fr’Nj. (Frigg’s “gift” to Fr’Nj will come up later.)
We needed a few weeks’ gap here in part because the last chapter was set in autumn, and while Axemas may not fall EXACTLY on the solstice, it seemed like the general idea of “winter holidays” was an important parallel.
I never noticed it before, but the red-nosed reindeer mounted on the wall is a nice touch.
Thank you. I can’t remember if it was in the script or not. You may also notice that wall has “real” or non-mythological animals: deer, moose, and I think that’s a warthog behind the word balloon. The opposite wall has fantasy animals: a Cockatrice or Basilisk (I can’t remember which), a Rhinosaur, and some un-named reptilian beast. The room is Ardaic’s Trophy Room. He definitely got around.
Ohhhh… I had forgot it was Ardaic’s trophy room. That answers a question I had about how they got all these trophies.
That’s actually rather a decent way to do it if you don’t care about keeping who got what for whom secret. I’ll have to remember that.
Scipio got cheated. Rachel was getting him a present anyway, so he didn’t get an extra one.