Annotated 39-28
A good ol’-fashioned cliffhanger here! Unlike a lot of the endings we did, this one would require us to follow up on it seconds later in story time despite being after a break. Next up is an “Axemas” story unlike any other…although they’re all pretty different, when I think about it.
You all got the “FUUUCK/HUUUAGH” fusion here, right? It’s really the only dialogue appropriate for a Friggserker. Per Flo’s instruction and beautifully rendered by John, her glowy hammershit “flows and ebbs like plasma, moreso now than light.”
That’s Ulak grinning on the left. He may be a bit too cerebral to really fit in with the others, but he’s not completely immune to the simple pleasures of life.
Maybe it was just me, but back in the day I would just stop reading the comic during Axemas and wait for it to return to its regular story.
This
Maybe it’s just me, but comments that add nothing more to the discussion than “I personally don’t like X but I feel like sharing that” aren’t worth the bother.
Yet you bothered
How meta of you to do something you hate in reply to someone starting a discussion.
it was just you (and bob, apparently hahahaha). I thought they were dope; if you’re looking for a tightly plotted story with no extra character moments or worldbuilding…..webcomics aren’t the best place to be looking.
wait and bandit’s story here………………………….literally my favorite moment with her. I def teared up at this page http://guildedage.net/comic/2012-axemas-special-page-9/
Same. They were interesting reads on their own but they nearly always interrupted something else that was more interesting.
I mean, no offense taken, but the idea of “regular story” seems kind of limited if it excludes the Axemases. I don’t think there’s a clear dividing line between “part of the meta-plot” and “not”… the origin of Bandit Keynes, the fate of the Penk-Magda ship, Penk’s first baby steps toward his break with Harky, and a pivotal moment in Payet Best’s development all took place during Axemas stories. And when we weren’t doing plot with those, we were doing character exposition… seems like the gamers would not be as interesting in this chapter if you skipped the story that properly introduced them. Only Scipio’s tale is pretty much an island apart from the larger narrative, and skipping it still seems like denying yourself the fullest experience of his character. Nowhere else could we show what kind of man he was when he wasn’t closing himself off from others or influenced by Fr’Nj.
I realize there might be a perceived dividing line, and some of that is on us. We didn’t give the Axemas specials chapter numbers, and we modeled them after Christmas specials, which are often out-of-continuity things. They generally had low stakes—the kidnapped kids in Scipio’s tale are an arguable exception there, but they barely have time to be at risk. And we included plenty of content that was inessential to the main plot, including guest strips and Tomadachi Age. No doubt that further muddied the waters. And hey, not everyone likes the low stakes or the wordplay or whatnot, and that’s fine, too. Still, as far as I’m concerned, what’s coming up is “the regular story.”
My problem never was the low stakes — it was that it would very often leave us on a cliffhanger and then refuse to resolve it until an unrelated (and sometimes even noncanonical) story wrapped up.
It’s like, “oh, you want to know what happened to newly beserkified Frigg? Well, you’ve gotta wait a month to listen to this heartwarming holiday tale!”
I like low stakes stories overall — in fact, I remember liking this axemas story when I went back and read it. heck, one of my favorite chapters in Gunnerkrigg Court is still “Red gets a haircut.”
But it feels better when those stories feel like natural breaks in the action of the characters’ lives, rather than times when the authors decide to put the entire plot on hold because it’s December.
(I especially get frustrated with Phil Foglio for this, since literally every page he writes is a cliffhanger of some sort, and his translations to Christmas stories are as unnatural as you can find.)
Rather than seeing the comment for what it is, people start responding to it.
Think about it. This comment section is a on a second run of a already written web comic with artists comments to providing insight into the development process. SirSiloquoy’s complaint though poorly worded serves a useful function. Even though the artists can’t change how the story was presented years ago. The comment provides an opportunity for the artist to provide additional insight into the decisions made during the original run which is why we are reading it.
The comment should not divide this community.
Another page I forgot about. Really like how Frigg’s armor is now rounded and spiraled vs sharp and angular as usual.
Just like first time through, it made me laugh inappropriately, as her scream went from Friggian to Charlie Brownian
“You tried to make me a berserker AND pulled the football away again?!”
That IS funny! Hehehe.