Annotated 49-47
FB: Recruitment brochure Carol read at the Vassar job fair: “Much has been made of our reality-approximating engines, but we believe that’s not the real source of interest in games like Kingdoms of Arkerra. Technology is nothing without vision. We at Hurricane succeed because our games have heart.”
I feel like I should say something about HR at the moment we say goodbye to the villain who shaped the series, but in this final moment, there’s not much really left to say. With his power and resources, he could’ve done almost anything, become almost anything. But Arkerra will only remember him as a raging bargain-basement Cronos. And Sepia World, on the whole, will see him as either a madman or a once-good game designer who went all Howard Hughes.
Thanks as ever to John Waltrip, who took everything we could throw him and made it beautiful and compelling.
Alt text is repeated from chapter 48 page 42, but appropriately, I think.
The opposite trajectories of the two missiles—arrow and bullet—had a certain symbolic resonance to us. We saw it as the final separation between Sepia World and Arkerra, two worlds that, with the death of the man who once brought them together, will never intersect again.
I have to ask. Was monologuing his undoing? If HR silently went about destroying the Five Carol wouldn’t have known what was going. She could’ve mistaken the change in gravity as his way of helping her since she gets back the gun. The way I see it neither the Five nor HR could truly defeat the other, but he could destroy Akerra and then return to Sepia World leaving the others floating in a void. Once he returned to Earth it’s Armageddon and too late for anyone to stop him.
My take, monologue or not, he had a vibe rank enough to carry Sepia all by itself.
Carol was already awakening to reality.
And now it was time to do a vibe check.
So HR will be remembered here as John MacAfee with (slightly) more murder but (presumably) less whale-fscking
Fantastic panel design by Jhon, just astounding!
Thanks, Plygrim! It was a doozy!
The really hard part was deciding which section of shattered glass was which world. They both had to be represented fairly equally, but chaotically.
How did Byron get from where we last saw him to where he is in this page?
Not *quite* sure but we saw him exiting HR’s body on the previous page, so he could have made it back to the others during Gravedust’s monologue plus change.
The actually more interesting question is: How did he know it was time to go meet the others, rather than continuing to cut tunnels through what passes for HR’s Arkerran body?
See, this is why I love reading the commentary as well as the comic: until I read the line referring to the respective paths of the projectiles, I never even saw the arrow or bullet. Damn good layout all the same.
The first time around, I took panels 5 and 6 to mean that Gravedust, Syr’Nj, Byron, Frigg, and Best were sacrificing themselves to kill HR, so I was pretty surprised (and pleased!) when chapter 50 proved that wrong. So are those panels meant to signify that they’re putting their spirits into this attack in a non-fatal way, that the Five from Sepia world (whatever parts of them are still separate from their Arkerran counterparts) are sacrificing themselves, or something else?
Basically the first one!
The Sepia Five’s only role in this series, ultimately, was as inciting incidents. Some of them lives on in the Arkerra Five in some sense…and obviously their fates affected others like Shanna and Carol. But as thinking, conscious, independent beings, their story ended with their entry into the Bubble.