First four-page scene! This one is largely Phil with my edits, so I feel a little bad critiquing it, but there are a lot of pros and cons on display.

The good: Guilded Age wastes absolutely no time telling the reader what kind of comic it’s going to be. Sure, we had ambitions to talk about the nature of reality and personal growth and all that deep stuff, but you gotta build to that. Exotic locations, exotic monsters, exotic religions, snark: if you were the kind of reader we wanted, this had a good chance of hooking you. Plus, Erica, Phil, and I had done a lot of pre-work designing the six main characters in this opening chapter, so we were able to send them roaring out of the gate with a lot of confidence. Frigg’s first bit of trolling is on point. Readers did eventually have some trouble with the amount of flashbacks and flashforwards we threw at them in the early chapters, but it was the right decision to show this scene first.

However, even after all the prep work we did, there were some things we only figured out about each character after we worked with them for a bit. The last panel is the first and last time that you’ll see Gravedust treat another race so dismissively, the first and last time Syr’Nj will talk about Byron as if he’s just some meathead, and the first and last time Gravedust will refer to a Christian-like idea of Hell.