Annotated 23-23
Now, if Phil and I hadn’t been in a tug-of-war over the stakes, this moment would’ve stood out more, because it was the one high-stakes moment that I intended right from the first draft. It’s all fun and games until someone loses a game of chicken with a robot. (Robot chicken?)
I guess we were starting to lean a little too much on teasing Fr’Nj’s death, though.
And no, I don’t know what the hell is going on with Bert in this page either. He’s up, he’s down, he’s in frame, he’s out of frame; it makes no sense unless he can teleport. Apparently he’s gone from being the least mobile character in this story to the most.
Not Bert’s best moment with that line in the first panel.
Like Braggadocio earlier, it highlights that the Fightopians see no connection between the Gastonian attitudes that they’re rebelling against, and Gastonian attitudes that didn’t directly impact them. Their new society will properly esteem adventurers; everything else about Gastonia is worth emulating without thought.
Especially since they have gnomes like Rabbit as well as a few unnamed elves as a part of Fightopia.
I vaguely recall someone stating that Bert was putting on a show, intentionally displaying callousness to convince his opponents that he was more willing to fight even if less able. Not sure how true, but he does immediately drop the entire thing at the first sign someone might actually get hurt so I’m willing to reserve judgement on that one.
I see Fr’Nj subscribes to the Prometheus school of running away from things moving in a straight line.
this here strip was the single one i was more bothered during the whole comic run. I really considered it badly thought out, badly scripted and badly drawn. it has so many flaws…it made me pretty much disregard the whole plot and lose a lot of interest for a while in the comic as a whole.
I can see what visual effects were being aimed at here – it’s almost as if someone’s forgot to draw Bert blurred out but still in frame in panel 2, and panel 3 has some janky depth of field problems relative to the previous two (look at the horizon relative to Bandit in all of them, and the vanishing points the road is implied to meet it at).
Technically speaking, the layout is fine – it’s the in-frame composition that is all messed up. I want to assume it’s because the scene is intended to be complete chaos, but then I have to focus on Bert in panel 3 again because he’s suddenly appeared there, like he somehow had time to get back up between frames and then started to fall into the road… which doesn’t make sense.
When I initially read this page in the first run, none of that bothered me as much as Bandit jumping onto a contraption she could have easily just dodged and let fly past her, compete with a motion trail that is indistinguishable from the action lines (which, frustratingly, only read well from the top of the page and are just as inconsistently rendered in terms of dimensions and perspective as everything else I’ve mentioned).
What she should have done, to begin with, is tackle her partner in not-crime since her reflexes are comparably awful, get both of them out of the way, and then deal with Bert, who is the only real important target in this entire scene. I should also mention I’ve completely lost track of who the narrator is, but that’s more a personal problem than an issue with this chapter… I think.
Not saying any of this to be mean or overly critical; as I’ve probably stated before, I’m an artist myself so I like to break things down to their details for analysis’ sake.
The narration here seems to imply that part of the plan is to divert the Peacekeepers’ attention and send them packing by apparent show of overwhelming technological superiority. The biggest problem with this plan (and its plausibility) is that an apparently integral weapons developer, whom both sides want to monopolize, has done a terrible job of executing this plan – and this page, I think, unintentionally showcases that, because I don’t think his designs in principle were supposed to be useless, and the events that transpire seem to be intended to underscore that.
Anyhow, I didn’t take issue with any of this on first reading, because I didn’t think I was supposed to take Fightopia seriously as a whole, and as integral as he might have been, Rendar didn’t strike me as any more competent than his compatriots. The daily nature of updates allowed me to neglect the details that should have made this preposterous, as I didn’t usually make a habit of rereading the previous pages each day (helped that I also have the attention span of a jellyfish, I’m sure), so I can’t say this lessened my enjoyment of the first run.
The thing that really got my goat the first time around, though? The thing that still bugs me, that I’m going to feel really bad for providing any criticism of at all, because of how plot-inconsequential and artistically negligible it is?
The plausibility of these whirligigs being effective fighting machines in any capacity is lower than if they were being fired at an enemy army from an aerial cannon. I can’t even discern their actual means of locomotion, let alone how they don’t just fall over (I’m assuming counterweights in motion balance each other out, but that doesn’t explain what’s making them move in the first place, let alone move in a straightforward path).
I feel like part of that is probably due to them being a callback to Rendar’s originally stationary designs, that doesn’t really deviate from those designs significantly. A mobile version of these constructs should probably have tank treads, since we saw those in the comic already in Gnometown. I know that wasn’t Rendar’s handiwork, but the military is being assisted by people who have experience destroying such machines and who should be able to talk a guy like Rendar into taking a stab at that innovation. Surely that’s within his capacity to do.
So yeah, that’s the dumb detail that bugged me the most. Not the composition, not the scripting, and not the characters’ behavior or movement, but the visual presentation of the fighting machines themselves, with their punching bag stand bases that shouldn’t be able to make them move. Johnny 5 in a Dalek costume would have been more believable in this scene.
Now you see why I say I feel bad, because I actually have a lot of respect for our artist here. I can deal with any of the other technical quibbles I mentioned, but there’s just something about that particular design that brings out my inner d-bag, and I don’t feel good about that.
That said, it did cause me to imagine Johnny 5 in a Doctor Who cosplay, so in all, fun was had.