Annotated 43-6
The “gas leak trap” plan discussed here was on my original drawing board, and I remember Flo objected to it. I forget the exact reasons, but I believe a lot of them translated into Chrissie and Lia’s reasons for veto. It would have been a flashy, spectacular climax to the Sepia gamers’ journey into becoming adventurers themselves, and a bit of an echo of the series’ first few pages. But remember how we don’t necessarily want to present adventurers as a bunch of reckless murder hobos?
Shanna has to calibrate her closing line a little bit. She’s come to respect these people, so she stifles the urge to patronize them. But the part of her that blames herself for Kaye and Ferris still has to close this discussion with a warning.
FB, riffing off the Fourth of July: “Sorry, guys, GUILDED AGE’s Fourth of July fireworks have been canceled due to issues of public safety and the rejection of eye-for-an-eye morality.”
Is there any significance to the glowing glasses, as in Panel 2? HR looked that way most of the time and I’ve always been curious about it.
Generally, artists blank out glasses lenses when they want to conceal a character’s eyes, the windows to their soul. It can be justified by a trick of the light, as it is here, or artistic license. Sometimes, as in HR’s case, there might be a more supernatural explanation for it. But HR spent a lot of time in darkened areas, so it could often be a trick of the light for him, too.
We did it often with HR to make him look more mysterious and sinister, but that’s clearly not our goal with Chrissie here. I think we conceal her eyes as she stands up to Daniel and Xan to give her a bit of a shield in this moment of vulnerability, like giving a shy person more modest clothes to wear in a scene. (John may weigh in differently on this, though.)
Thank you, T. Well said. There’s really no significance to the glowing glasses here. Just lens reflecting the light in the next room, nothing more.
Thanks for the clarification, T and John. On first read, whenever I saw the glowy glasses on HR, I always thought “what black magick is he secretly cooking up now?”
Well, apart from ethical concerns, death traps are illegal. So even if they take down Hurricane, they’re guilty of murder. Not a great outcome for them.
Blowing up a building to kill one guy is more of a Hollywood thing… Unless we are talking about a drone strike, that happens all the time now.