New Comics Every Weekday - Written by T Campbell & Phil Kahn - Illustrated by John & Jason Waltrip
Guilded Age
The Saga of the Working Class Adventurer – New comics every weekday!
Katsucon XX
(National Harbor, MD 2/14-16)
Smudge Expo
(Arlington, VA 3/8)
AwesomeCon, D.C.
(Washington, D.C. 4/18-20)
Holy crap, a FlashBACK.
The sky is falling. Up is down. Red is chartreuse. Byron is Berserking.
we’re not doing the flash-forward thing this time? awesome.
centered text. that’s interesting to me. it looks natural here, but noone writes like that, because to do so, you’d have to plan your whole line down to number of characters. so why does it look natural here? was this something you guys thought about?
Yes.
It’s not impossible, it just takes a lot of practice. Generally you DO know what the end of a sentence is going to be before you begin writing it. The idea of Gravedust actually learning to write center-aligned appeals to me.
it does sound like him…
except that gravedust doesn’t always know what his sentance will be…he managed to compensate for his mistaken “is our”…
but that’s picky as hell.
That’s a deliberate slip. In case anyone manages to find the paper.
You can tell because it’s still center aligned. :)
I also imagine Gravedust has a knack for it. He seems capable of being fairly poetic. So knowing poetic verse makes you more aware of syllable and sounds and word lengths, making it even easier to know where to write your words.
But Gravedust activates hardmode by only having ink to write in.
^ This seconded. I think out of the 5 of them, Gravedust seems the most cultured, and the most poetic. I’m guessing Gravedust has kept journals before, (Either that or this is the first day he’s ever travelled… ever) So he’s probably used to the spacing his words will take, Allowing him to actively plan out the structure of his page.
Scratch that.
He got an eager-to-please spirit to possess his quill.
OORR… he wrote from the middle out, on either side.
It’s not just “seems” – remember the chapter that starts with the slavery scene? Syr’Nj makes reference to some writer, but it’s Gravedust who knows more about the context in which it appeared. Syr’Nj is knowledgeable the way Wikipedia makes any schmo literate, but Gravedust is well-read.
it looks natural because hand written notes rarely line up exactly along the left side, you expect a certian uneveness of the lines and an exaggerated stylized interpretation of handwritten variation combined with the majority of the lines being long enough to \almost\ match makes it work.
Nice! I could’ve never guessed Gravedust was so artistically gifted
BTW, Did the 3rd creature at the top die of a broken heart?
And does that ink blotch at the last paragraph meant to read: “Gastonia is our ‘enemy’? or something else I’m missing?
He was originally going to say “Humanity is not our Enemy, Gastonia is our enemey” But then he changed his mind. Or at least his mind on how to word it.
One assumes he refers to the fact that the majority of Gastonians are people like anybody else, and it’s the big boys up top and not Gastonia on the whole that’s responsible for whatever bad shit in the past has made them and Dwarves not get along so well.
Alternatively, he forgot his belief for a second and quickly corrected himself.
I like to think it was more out of habit than anything.
Trained to believe it so thoroughly that even when he’s trying to directly go against it, it still comes out that way.
What do you mean? What would be the significance of capitalizing Enemy in the one case, and then spelling it as “enemey” in the other?
More importantly, who could’ve guessed that Gravedust would be some manner of fantasy Marxist or socialist?
You best be trollin son.
Nope.
Heart attack more likely.
His not-quite-live journal.
They should not have had the Salmon Mayonnaise!
Salmon mousse.
Insight, into Gravedust?
Surely you jest!
Jeez, Gravedust. You’re a bit of a downer aren’t you?
Then again, if your parents named you Gravedust they weren’t exactly expecting sunshine and raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.
Dewrose Sunshinekitten had a very different life.
Doesn’t she live in westchestertonfieldville, Iowa?
She has a rain-bow in her hair.
sometimes two. for that goldilocks look.
that’s…twice as many rain-bows. all the way across her hair.
I have to at least acknowledge this for what it is… a full on double rainbow!
what does it MEAN?
Ya know, I think my favorite part of that rant is the scratch out. Most Sage/Seer types are almost always so damn confidant in what they say (even when they’re wrong), it’s nice to see one stutter over a point.
Just shoot it or punch it or whatever.
Percussive Maintenance at its best!
“A machine that feeds on greed and ignorance, and belches forth wrath and atrocity.”
Holy damn. This particular bit of wordsmithing is crazy-powerful. Good job, yall.
Agreed!
Also, Gastonia begins to sound like some modern country I know…can’t think of where…on the tip of my tongue though.
(Where’s the sarcasm button, again?)
You mean all of them?
*chuckle*
Well, yeah.
Estonia or Gabon?
It is actually our capitol which has our largest ignorance-fueled machine installed, as opposed to the house of government proper. Though it might be one’s bias towards those parties in power in the given instance.
He’s a lyrical wordsmith genius, like Kanye West.
I just pictured dusty wig a pair of shuttershades on and it made me very sad.
Dig Gravedust’s sketches and the Gastonia correction was a nice tuch.
Gravedust went to Gastonia on his on mission for peace so I’m guessing Gastomia/Dwarv conflicts are common and though Gravedust doesn’t have a high option of Gastonia, he never said his fellow Dwarves where anything less than hostil towards others.
Lets see who fires the first shot
Greedo.
Blasphemy. Greedo didn’t get a single shot off, because Han rocks that way.
Han and Greedo don’t get to shoot, because Frigg already killed them.
Joe is our biggest troll yet.
Really love this strip. I guess it’s this underlying maturity that brings me back to GA.
The foreshadowing is strong with this one.
I hereby dub this flashback “Dwarf on Death.”
bandit’s diary is the “Gnome Tome”
Oh, Erica- you know I love you like a huge fan loves a consistently awesome comic artist, but I really think the text would have been a lot better if you’d printed it out on that sheet of paper you used for texture, then crumple-and-smoothed it and scanned/photographed it and put the scroll edges around it, so the words weren’t all in exact parallel.
…Unless it’s Campbell’s fault for being the letterer or something, in which case screw that guy, he’s just a consistently awesome comic writer and stuff. Pffft.
I love the implication of the crumpledness, that this is something Gravedust wadded up and either threw out or abandoned for revision/rewrite, but someone has found it and smoothed it out for examination. Creepy.
Clearly, I’m the only one around here who does anything right.
First, T is not the letterer, Phil is, but that’s moot since I did the text on this page. I don’t think anybody would benefit from trying to read a genuinely crumpled page. Besides, if it print it out the way it is now and then scan it in it would still be center justified which is the main complaint. It’s also a terrible idea to completely lose control over the texture and have it on the same layer as the text when I first and easier option is to do it the way I had done it over a 100 times before.
So THERE! pflbbbt!
So I’ve been pondering over the suggestion. It would be an interesting effect. And possibly more photo-realistic – slightly warping the glyphs and lines of text as it follows the contours of the crumpled texture. But that misses a rather important part of the artwork, I think.
Textures are used throughout the comic. But they aren’t used in an attempt to add realism. Sometimes the use of texture is even jarring. But it works because the texture choices are an emotional cue. They add to the feel of the scene. Film Noire has the play of light and shadow. GA sets the tone with texture.
With this particular panel, it looks almost like the writing is inked on film laid over crumpled paper. But that’s too literal a take on the image. The parchment texture is there to add an emotional feel to what we’re reading. And like all the other panels, the texture adds an almost surreal feel to the ongoing story.
Granted – that’s my take. I could be reading too much in to it. This is, after all, Erica’s work.