Annotated 35-36
Double-stack pages took John and Jason twice as long to do and cost Flo and me twice as much to produce, so we only pulled them out for the really special occasions. But if you like this, we got a few more multi-stacks coming up in the chapters ahead.
Whatever the Beast has absorbed into itself, all the life energy that gives it mass, is all now imploding into nothingness. Even WAV may not be prepared for the resulting atmospheric disruption. It dies as it lived, freaking out everyone with entirely alien stimuli.
I appreciate the readers who thought the last frame meant that Frigg was gonna completely undo the truce. It wouldn’t be better for the story if she punted Penk and Magda and WAV into buildings and then smashed the remains of the settlement before anyone could stop her, but it amuses me to have had the option.
It struck me that panel 3 is like an inversion and subversion of two different cinematic tropes. Usually in the movies, when you have shot from the monster’s POV, it’s a stealthy predator stalking its unsuspecting victims. Here, though, it’s more like a POV shot of someone getting their face bitten off by a bear/shark/velociraptor.
Completely true. For a moment there, I almost felt sorry for the beast. Which had just erased my favourite character…
I guess from its own point of view, it had a fairly tragic story, too… alone, misunderstood, unable to achieve its goals, yet getting so close. Escaping Cyberia to find a better world but being followed by those who chased it out of there, and ultimately finding the new place to be just as hostile as the previous one. There is just no place for a corruptor beast to live in peace.
That last panel should be captioned “An exchange between a kettle an a pot“
I love that Magda held on while the implosion occurred.