New Comics Every M/W/F - Written by T Campbell & Phil Kahn - Illustrated by John & Jason Waltrip
Guilded Age
The Saga of the Working Class Adventurer – New comics every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday!
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I fuckin’ knew it.
What a piece of work is Best! How noble in
Reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and moving
how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel!
In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the
world! The paragon of animals!
In the morning, does his breath not smell like the ocean breeze? Does his nightsoil not smell of roses? Who else could carry such wondrous qualities and still be so humble? None but The Best, I say. None but The Best1
You just know he’s going to rub it in.
Here’s hoping he’ll smack some sense into Byron and get him to man up.
By which I mean ‘smack him out of this funk’. He’s been less than useful with his moping. He’s resigned to death now.
What Hamlet might say with irony, you say with conviction?
Something like that, yes.
I say I still hate Best. Come on, the guy endangered the clients for his own purposes, children I might add, then attacked Byron when the Berserker told him he was out of line and never wanted to work with him again.
You can make him badass, fine, you can’t make me like him.
hear hear!
I heard you quote that before, moi capitan.
To paraphrase Dave and Bob in KoDT: “Why are you talkin’ like Colonel Chamberlin in Gettysburg?”
And yet, what is this quintessence of musth?
Puzzle Page: “What is wrong with this picture?
No Bandit?
Best has apparently jumped in from the golem’s right hand side (going by angle of shooty laser beams), yet was mysteriously invisible in frame #5 where we get a clear view of where he would’ve needed to come from.
(… and also the fact that Best jumps in from behind Byron, and in frame #6 Byron is facing to the golem’s left, i.e. behind him would be to the golem’s right)
The things you see, I don’t see. Panel 5-7 do not contradict each other. Even if Byron didn’t run a few meters between panel 5 and 6, there are still bookcases on the right side of Byron and the golem, and Best could easily be behind one of them.
Also, your first comment states that Best jumps in from the right, and then your second comment has a problem with Byron facing left, Best coming in from the right, and therefore coming from behind Byron. That seems like a contradiction to me.
My money is on the creepy long golem fingers. And Best being nice. That’s never a good sign.
Actually, i wasn’t seriously asking about details:
Bingo.
(Sure seem to be a lot of cats ’round here today…)
I’m sure he’s just doing it for the, um…lady.
Oh, and I seem to recognize the particular cat you have. Jeremy!
No, my second comment adds additional information to the first, reinforcing that Best is in fact coming from the golem’s right; that it wasn’t just the laser beam things that give that impression. “He’s coming from the right” and “he’s coming from the right” do not at all contradict each other.
I see. I interpreted “and also” to mean that it was also something that was “wrong with the picture”.
Check it again; The last panel is shot from in front of the golem facing towards Byron.
Note Byron’s Head is still turned the direction it was in Panel 6.
Note The 2 beams descending down, one from each palm.
So, In Panel 6, Best is entering from the audience’s left,
Which, In Panel 7, has changed to the audience’s right.
I’ll have to chalk Best’s not being visible in Panel 5’s bookshelves up to him being behind that column or still in a row where we can’t see him.
You tell me to check again, but then present the same analysis as me but in different words. “Audience’s left” in panel 6, and “audience’s right” in panel 7, are both “golem’s right”.
Well stripe me, I misread that entirely. Sorry for the unecessary correction!
I’ll still posit Best is running parrallel behind the shelves in panel 5 and exits the stack at that opening we see to perform his rescue.
Too much wacky manga body language?
You keep saying manga this and that. Perhaps you just mean cartoonish? I’ll buy that- Frigg in panels 2 and 3 could come from many classic (American) comic strips, especially from the days they were still called funny papers. Archie, maybe.
I’m referring to specific facial and body expressions that are stereotypical to manga art. But if you want to compare it to Archie, be my guest — it’s not any more flattering.
Your idiocy frustrates and annoys.
There is nothing manga-like about Waltrip’s dalliances into camp cartooniness. It is about as far from manga as one could possibly hope to attain… the style of which is far more akin to Looney Toons or that reprehensible Hannah Barbera nonsense. The kind of drawings with which one would immediately associate particular soundboards of absurd honking noises.
And you keep saying manga.
I realise I’m several years too late to really drive this point home, but you don’t have a clue, do you?
A year and a half later and it still frustrates me. Also my incorrect tendency to add an extra H to Hanna Barbera… but whatever.
Best did something seemingly noble?
yep
I figure that it’s that the golems were supposed to be using their little finger beams to avoid damaging the books, which they are clearly doing the first panel that they fire at Byron. The moment Byron stops for breath, it chooses to unleash a double hand blast, despite him still being in the same aisle he was in before (thus, presumably, having the same chance of collateral damage). Maybe it’s because he’s stationary; there’s probably a reason it chose to do that, it just seems a bit mysterious.
He’s clearly not stationary, then they wouldn’t hit him at all.
(can’t believe we missed that one last go-round)
Bandit still gone, and Best in her place?
Golems are stupid. A good strategy is to trip it up, try to make it attack itself, or curl up into a ball and rock back and forth gently while sobbing to your mother. After all, you can’t crit them. And your only magic user is a necromancer, hardly useful when there aren’t ghosts around.
Someone is obviously forgetting,that you can ALWAYS “do science to it” :3
Ack!
Indeed. Resin and soda ash- explosives, I’m thinking.
Should have kept her feet on the ground, might have avoided such a shattering fall.
What do you mean you can’t crit them? Roll a d20 to attack. Natural 20? If yes, then crit. Simple as that.
You can’t critically hit anything that has no discernable anatomy. Gelatinous Cubes, Ghosts, Golems… none of them are really made of flesh/blood/organs. So no particular spot is vulnerable to a critical hit, because no particular spot is particularly vulnerable. This was how it was in 3ED, at least.
If you’re doing house rules, the argument could be made that a crit on a golem would be hitting one of its core joints, but that begs an entirely different set of area-specific damage.
No, fuck that. I had a DM who had a house rule about hitting golems. Your weapons stood a chance of breaking depending on how well you rolled.
3rd Ed? Never met it. My group still kicks it old school the way we started 30+ years ago.
Besides, justifying D&D rules is a lost cause. Half of it is carryover rules from miniatures wargames. The other half is keeping the storytellers (both players and DMs) from getting too grandiose.
The function of the critical hit is not to simulate a specific type of damage, but to give every player a chance to make that heroic strike that lays low the foe and turns the tide of the battle. (That it also adds a sense of danger and impending doom when it is used against the players is merely frosting for the DM.)
Disallowing critical hits because of some physiological oddities of the foes is bad rule-making on the part of the editors. A good DM takes incongruous results and turns them into interesting events. The explanation of these oddities is half the fun of tabletop gaming.
The idea of monster that are immune to critical hits is to add a measure of challenge to them. you can’t count on the guy who’s got the keen greataxe any more.
It’s a measure that stops pumping your crit mod from becoming the be-all-end-all.
No such thing as a “crit mod” in 1st Edition either. Or “feats”. Or “taking 20″
There were just enough rules to prevent chaos, and enough bad rules that everyone felt comfortable making house rules as necessary. It was a golden age, at least that’s what nostalgia tells me.
And you also dislike nested levels of fiction, but are somehow perfectly fine with one… You really have no right to use that name.
You get the automatic hit on a Natural 20, but you don’t do any more damage with golems, i.e. a critical hit. Personally, with the more mechanical golems, like iron and flesh golems, I houserule crits and sneak attacks are allowed to represent attacking the joints. Things like clay and stone golems? No, you need magic like Golem Strike for that.
Or just hit it a lot of times.
You think he’s saving Byron, but really he’s just fallen prey to his latent homosexual urges.
I have no problem with this either way
No…
no no no No No No NO
NO!
This is not good for- Oh Jeez, jeez… this is a disaster!
(Also: very real reaction from Frigg)
Frigg looks stoned in the 3rd panel.
What you did. It is there and I saw it.
Well, you gotta admit she’s hit rock bottom.
Got to a grit with you there.
This experience has been crushing for her.
I dunno, the assertion might rub(ble) some people the wrong way. I’d say she’s certainly been grounded.
I think shes done a smashing job.
But now, she’s caught between a rock and a hard place.
surprise batsecs!
The only strategy is to remove the head or destroy the brain.
thaaats zombies that you’re thinking of…
They’re zombie golems!!! NOOOOO!!!
Undead on so many levels…
Basically you would be right… it depends on the mechanism of the animating spell. If it is technological, then there is a form of a machine brain, which you can destroy. Though it is stupid to put that into the head, because that is a vital part, so it is better protected inside the chest. If the golem is magical, then you are screwed, unless the runes bind the artificial or summoned sentience to animate the golem. Everything has a weak point if you do enough science to it. A necromancer is mostly your best choice to deal with golems, since they can destroy the spirit or banish it. Spirit bind is the cheapest way of giving a golem thought. Though real golems were sacred protective statues, and there were no animation there. If they were really working, then they weren’t destroyed even if hacked to pieces. This last thing is only my thoughts. It is still a sacrilege to hack a golem to pieces and likely to bring the wrath of the holy men, whom created them.
Syr, like many technical geniuses, seems to have an organization problem. As a former medic, you’d think she’d see the value in keeping your supplies quickly accessible.
She needs Batman’s utility belt is what I’m saying.
Or a wood elf fanny-pack.
I think it may have been better organised before she was killed and resurrected…
The bounding potion was her last prepared potion. Now she’s trying to put something together in a hurry. The puzzle is, given how much she relies on potions, why she didn’t concoct some before they went in this dungeon — they didn’t seem to be under time pressure.
Hm, either Best developed at least a sliver of genuine heroism since they last met, or he’s always possessed it and it just didn’t have a chance to shine previously because of all the jerk-ass-ness, or he’s simply really competent so he doesn’t actually let his team-mates (or henchmen) die, *or* it’s just by chance that he saved him and it’ll turn out to be because Best had some jerkass motivation.
Still kind of hard to tell what the intent is. He was painted with such outright negativity when we first met him that showing him doing something positive without a clear character development arc leading up to it leaves us curious.
Prolly three or four but we’ll see.
He did it for gloating rights, I’ll wager.
Hopefully he only has the Best intentions.
Frigg is so flustered she was reduced to euphemisms.
Man he really has the Best timing doesn’t he? I wonder what Syr is gonna cook up.
Science.
that’s the best type of cooking, especially if it involves explosions
Win.
Payet may not get a chance to gloat; the Basin of Foresight could show that he was never the hero of prophecy, which would likely cut short any boastfulness on his part.
What we have here is a failure in inventory management, probably due to a badly set up UI for bags.
Ah… that gives me fond memories of Ultima VIII ;) (damn, where did I put that keyring again)
ugh.i somehow have again the strong feeling that the creators kind of -want- us to like best,no matter what.
Well screw it , he is still a douchbag and i hope that he will someday not only land on his face but die an really slowly humiliating dead.
Frigg is really Funny i think she could be the first Paladin i#m really going to like.she has that…natural charm you could say ;)
Also Syrs “bag of hundred potions” is just hilarious, just hope they find the right ingredients in time.
want us to like best? Well, that could be true… Or the characters could actually be changing. Shocking!
BEST. SAVE. EVER.
If you zoom in a lot, pinch your eyes and look between the last two panels, you can almost see David Caruso putting on sunglasses.
Admit it Mr. Comic Writer – you deliberately named him Best just to make this one joke. ;)
Also, great pew-pew lazers.
Amongst several others, yes.
Is she trying to craft a potion? xD
In DA:O it always felt very cheesy to craft mana potions or health potions while paused in the middle of a fight…
It doesn’t look like the fight is paused, in this case, markedly reducing the cheese factor.
Normally there’s a price to being a distraction, but it looks like Byron didn’t Payet.
I’ve a feeling it’s up to Best to pwn the second golem though I wonder how. Perhaps a ‘Legolas vs. Mumak’ kind of scene with the difference being that Best would make it look good.
Oy. While that scene was funny in the movie in how ludicrously over-the-top it was, it contrasted markedly with the book, in which it was being established that Gimli and Legolas were perfect equals.
What I think is a little odd (and I looked it up to be sure) is that everyone hates Best with a passion, but he seemed like a… normal person and even had a somewhat humble opinion of himself at the beginning. Then the whole town built him up like crazy and it went to his head. He’s held on to the douchebaggery since, but he didn’t start out that way. Maybe his core personality is just coming back a bit.
I think you missed the glimpse we had of Best’s player in Sepia World in Chapter Nine.
On the other hand, we may find Best has more depth than the tremendously competent but arrogant and vain PITA we’ve seen so far.
Saved by Best…never going to live that down.
Saved by Best again.
Now Byron owes Best his life twice over, and he didn’t want it in the first place.
Byron’s near death and Best apparently being noble are both good reasons to freak out yet, for me, both were drowned out by how adorable a panicking Gravedust is.
He opted out of the Shaman Speed-reading class.
Maybe Best is just trying to Payet forward.
Bactine, Baking Soda, and Aloe Vera.