ERBoA Anno 3
My Personal Rank: #5.
FB: When you die cool enough in Guilded Age, sometimes you still get one last turn at the mic.
Pros: Penk vs. Harky, like Frigg vs. Rachel, was a natural conflict for us to revisit.
The rhymes are pretty solid, though Harky’s are better overall—“lying tongues/dying lungs” and the chain of “ung” rhymes they belong to, “Peacemakers/oathbreakers,” and the three-rhyme-per-line structure of “Your hopes…” to “he leads.”
Penk makes up for a simpler batch with some sharper wordplay—“heads roll to ruin,” “like a boss,” “see now what I herald,” and his final line (what they call the “kill line,” appropriately). I’d say Harky’s three last lines are my favorite of the batch, but it’s close.
Cons: Unlike the rest of these battles, I don’t feel like this one adds much to the original besides setting it to rhyme. It sticks to the shape of Harky and Penk’s original arguments, but a rap battle is usually more free-flowing, unleashing a wide variety of disses that are only linked by their target and their lyrical structure. Like, maybe there could be something about here how Penk got shot down by Magda, or his early simping for Strulk, or those jokes about Harky’s grandmother’s stew, or Harky’s ignominious defeat at B’ial Vezk, or Penk having to watch his back with Hammerhead, or the way Harky kind of dishonorably tricked the Peacemakers into the death pit, or the way Penk would’ve remained just a lowly drummer without Auraugu recommending him, or or how Harky kept secret his exact relationship with Gondolessa…and so on. (Dissing Harky for loving Gondolessa would be going too far, but staying in the closet is another story. If Magda had returned Penk’s affections, I doubt Penk would’ve hidden the relationship even if anyone grumbled about “miscegenation.”)
What innovations there are don’t work as well as they could. The self-disses in the beginning are a detail that I really liked in the original…but in this format, it’s easy to lose track of who’s talking, especially since Penk and Harky’s hues are so similar, so it just gets confusing.
The “drumbeat” of emphasis in the last stanza works all right, but it’s just a more iambic version of the standard rap rhythm of four beats per line.
To sum up, there’s nothing too wrong with this one, but I think we could’ve done a lot more with it.
I don’t disagree with any of that, but it really is still very good. Any set of strips where this is in the bottom half is pretty amazing.
I just went looking through the Guilded Age store on Gumroad, and noted that the store still doesn’t have PDF bundles, where multiple chapters can be purchased together. Would you consider making 5-6 PDF bundles an option for purchasing?
That’s a nice idea, but I think we’re done with the business side of GA. Flo’s involvement is practically nil at this point and she’s the one who made the PDF files, and even I’m unlikely to spend much more time with the series after these annos wrap up in early February. Sorry, good suggestion, but we’re just not in a place to follow up on it!
…in that case, would you be willing to make reasonably hi-resolution images available in some form? I find PDF (or CBZ, or similar) a format much more suitable for re-reading and “thumbing” through a story than separate web pages, and though the result may not be suitable for printing (no page borders, page numbering etc, no consistent page size), I could generate a PDF and CBZ from a stack of images in pretty short order, and hand that back to you, to either add to the available ones on Gumroad or whatever else you choose.
I can work with that, sure. Might be a good thing to offer as we close. Hit me up at tcampbell1000(at)gmail.com to tell me how best to do a bulk transfer for you, and I’ll get on this in the next couple days.
Happy New Year, guys!
Happy New Year to you too!
We have once again reached the arbitrary point in the orbital path of the Earth around the Sun that we call
“the Beginning”. An enormous circle comes to a close, and another one opens. It’s been said that ‘people travel in different circles’, but truly… we all travel in the same circle.
Let’s hope it’s a better one.
The start of this one is quite confusing to me, and I think this and the Rachel/Frigg one could have benefitted from being between two characters that haven’t actually interacted that much with each other (directly), as with the ERBoH episodes. Naror’Nj vs. Caneghem, for example. Or Frigg against her God-thingy. Maybe Harky vs. Iwatani (with Penk and Syr’Nj stepping in at the end, to diss them both to oblivion)?
That’s interesting: I figured referencing scenes we’d done before would make things less confusing, not more. You’re right that it might be truer to ERB to do more contests between people who’d never met than between people who had… ERB does the latter on occasion (Adam vs. Eve, Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs), but no more than 1 out of 6 times, it feels like.
One of the reasons I made the picks I did was that the more central a character was to Guilded Age, the more lore from the series we could reference. I talk here about potential lines of attack against Penk and Harky…I’d have a harder time coming up with as many possibilities for Naror’Nj and Caneghem. To be sure, there are some: both are old xenophobes who clash with their young; Naror is a difficult father at best; Caneghem has one friend and no idea how to express friendly feeling. We’ve also got the progress (and lack thereof) of their respective elf societies to talk about. But still, there are huge aspects of their lives we’ve never explored when you compare them with Best or Byron, or even with Harky and Iwatani—and revealing new things about them for the sake of this clash feels like it’d be cheating.
Conversely, the more often a character showed up, the more likely we’d end up with a lot of material to work with. Of the characters we used in the first five raps, nine out of ten of them matched the ten characters who appeared most often in the series. (The exceptions were Harky, who was 19th, and Scipio, who was 9th but clearly not suited to this format.) We did have plenty of potential candidates to draft, but I’m sure you can understand why I elected to play on easy mode.