Call of Duty 5-6
The limitations of our format mean this is the best we can do in terms of accommodating today’s “double-page spread.” It’s legible on my screen, but if you’re having trouble, here’s the promised link to a higher-rez version.
Syr’Nj is maybe not being 100% fair to the wood elf tacticians she’s insulting by implication here: “man, even they know better than this.” But her basic point stands; incompetence on both sides is making this battle bloodier than it has to be.
I didn’t want to give the game away here by pointing to page 3, panel 3, when Faer packed this log “for emergencies.” She was probably imagining Syr’Nj needing a makeshift bridge or raft to escape or something, not a battering ram to blow through the opposing army’s defenses.
It’s log, it’s log, it’s big, it’s heavy, it’s wood ♪
It’s log, it’s log, it’s better than bad, it’s good! ♫
+1 Internet. Even if John Kricfalusi is a creep.
I’m a bit confused by the last few panels here. Who pulls the log out of her satchel, and why?
One of the separatists (the one swinging an axe at her in the previous panel?), probably either to rob her or try and grapple her.
Why did their shields go from heaters in the first panel to bucklers in the second?
I only see the one that I can for sure tell to be a buckler. The other one, mostly in silhouette, I could convince myself is the top edge of a heater.
The alt text is awesome today.
Wait, so…was she in retreat? It certainly don’t read that way, but that’s the only way this makes sense as a good thing and not…y’know a crippling loss for her side.
It kinda is a crippling loss or a victory that is so costly (Pyrrhic) it hardly counts as one. A bridge or natural choke point offers an excellent defensive position but not if you try to defend the enemy’s side. Syr’Nj’s lament is that their commander has placed them in a position where they not only lose the advantages of defending a choke point but gained disadvantages their enemies should have had.
The first panel says they’re surrounded. The enemy closed the distance after the archers softened them up.
Yes! The Ballad of Log!
My face was 2 inches from the screen, squinting to read all the text and understand the details of the page, until I finally got through it all and see at the bottom “Click link below for full size.” Slow clap.