Annotated 41-4
I like this, and I hope it comes across. It’s about as subtle as I wanted to get. There’s a tranquil exterior to Gravedust here but a storm raging inside him, just visible if you look at him just right.
The parenthetical digressions are the biggest clue. They’re informed by sentiment, by emotions he’s less comfortable with than thoughtful poise, but emotions he may be powerless to deny. Then he pulls the old rhetorical trick of “My FRIEND would say…I mean, this isn’t me talking of course, but SHE would claim…”
The Tranquil Gravedust Exterior fights to maintain itself. “It would betray everything I stand for,” the exterior concludes, and if that was genuinely true, the discussion should be settled. Is it?
Cleverly put. If a part of him, especially a loud part of him, wants to do the deed, perhaps there is something else he’s stands for now as well.
The internal conflict comes through, especially with the parentheticals. I wonder if it might be different if he weren’t the last living mystic. But seeing as he’s describing Frigg in panel 5, did anyone else fail to see the middle two letters of “buttonhole” at first? It reads with a slightly different tone when you do that.
yep. 100% I saw butt hole
““My FRIEND would say…I mean, this isn’t me talking of course, but SHE would claim…”
What the actual FUCK, destiny?!
Asking for a friend.
Frigg on Gravy’s mind, her mental image staring at him while getting uncomfortably close to his face:
“Are you tired of being nice?
Don’t you just want to go ape shitt”
Gravedust is very good with words. He uses them carefully, with precise meaning. No had ever called him Gravy before E-Merl – verbally noting that was not the same as giving E-Merl permission to do so. Byron may indeed have been the only person to call him “pal”, but many others will have called him “friend”, or “mate”. Words are his tools – they are not much use amidst silence. Belief does not require evidence; but Gravedust has seen evidence of things already violating the natural order – which is perhaps why he amends his line to “everything I stand for”.
But he’s sitting down.
“And so now he has passed on. Peacefully. That is an assumption of course”
my first thought was that that’s pretty silly to assume. He knows how Byron died, even if he wasn’t present. There was practically nothing peaceful about it.
But of course, he’s not talking about how he died, but about what happened to his soul. As he will find out, it’s still not peaceful at all, either, and I think Gravedust may have a lot more doubt about this than his words would make it look…