Annotated Chapter 18 Cover
Phil uploaded this particular page late because he was out at karaoke. Why he didn’t just finish and set it to auto-update before he left, I couldn’t say, since John was always turning the pages in early.
Or maybe I can. A lot of cartoonists, including most whom I’ve worked with, get addicted to the rush of finishing something and instantly sharing it with a world that’s likely to give quick and positive feedback. It’s basically the same dopamine rush as you get seeing likes on your Facebook post, and arguably that’s a lot of what the internet runs on. Me, I’ve always wanted to have a little bit of lead time, and the Waltrip brothers, fortunately for me, have enough print instinct that they never really fell victim to this.
Still, Phil was very rarely late, and it’s easier to dwell on his small failings than my more numerous ones. I wasn’t exactly a model of punctuality at this point, myself. I was constantly late with mailings and with content for Guilded Age Plus, not least because I was preoccupied with the end of another series and the fact that I just wasn’t making enough to keep living in my then-current space. I’d like to tell you that this battle-focused chapter was a thrilling adrenaline shot in the middle of all that, but I think it was more like we were riding the creative momentum that we’d built up in Chapter 17. Which isn’t as bad as it could be, I guess.
The cover seems to reflect that. “You know that great environment we engineered last chapter? Burn it.”
I think Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House” is more apropos, but an acceptable alternative is Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
A unique feature of webcomics (opposed to regular comics) is that you read them scrolling down, which means you get to see the top of the page first before you see the rest of it. This page works really well in that regard. You start at the top, you see one of the huts is on fire, you think: “Uh-oh, how bad is it gonna be?” and as you scroll further down, you realize how bad it really is.
This is certainly not the first time I experienced that while reading Guilded Age. Kudos to John Waltrip for really playing the medium to its strength.
Thank you!
You know that is a really interesting point. I’ve never considered how the top to bottom reading style might affect the way the reader gets information. Neat.
Also a forest fire of that intensity in a living healthy forest means someone really wants it to burn. I think a resident would be so shocked it was actually burning, because there’d be no indication that was going to happen in their magic, healthy, living forest. This would be a nightmare for the elves, and one I’m not sure they’d even have proper systems in place to combat. The idea of being trapped in a burning forest :shudder: I don’t like it I’ll tell you that much.
Graiya’s Bough having already been stolen, it’s possible that “living, healthy” is already starting not to apply.
As to nightmares – people get used to “home” being solid, safe. Any event that challenges that framework – a house fire, an earthquake, a tree falling through the room – is therefore highly traumatic. So insofar as the wood elves view their forest as home… well, yep.