Annotated Chapter 41 Cover
What a design. This is one of my favorite covers and a wonderful display of John’s visual imagination. The ascension of spirits, rendered through ancient dwarven iconography.
For all that it uses fantasy cheats to defy death, this chapter was a kind of death, a death for Gravedust as we knew him. The things that seemed to be central to his concept…his status and mission as last of the mystics…would be coming to their conclusion here.
It was a conclusion I didn’t expect and may have argued against at the time. I was always more into the idea of Gravedust’s mysticism than Flo was, in practice. And it’s true that we would occasionally struggle to give him stuff to do after he discarded his defining tasks.
But in the long run, it was the right call. As when he did stand-up comedy, as when he put down his pen to hear Bandit’s anecdote, as when he will take control of the Savasi, Gravedust is at his best when allowing himself to become something new.
That said, he wouldn’t be Gravedust if such transitions were easy for him. And none will be more difficult than this. On the next few pages, the stormclouds begin to build…
So just as a heads up to whoever handles your site/IT, your cookie pop-up is currently making the site near unusable, as it pops up on *every* page, rather than just when initially joining, this makes reading the archives extra frustrating, and even coming here to write this comment I had to deny everything one more time.
I haven’t encountered this, but I’ll pass it along.
Hmm, dwarven icnography yes, but it also sort of has an old-videogame look to it, which appeals to me.
It also works well with both the meta narrative and matching the dwarves angular metal works.
Ah, and some of them drain down a hole,, and some of them ascend into the light.
Nice.
I started typing up a huge thing gushing about Gravedust, but I stopped about 20 minutes into my composition as I started going through the comics to look up specific examples and crap; had I continued it might have been a novella. So instead I’ll say:
I’ve always seen Gravedust as an excellent example of being informed by tropes but not copying them. He is a quintessential dwarf in a lot of ways, but also wholly original. Its hard to say who my favorite character is for sure, it seems like that is whoever is being highlighted in a given arc. But between his design and the actual nature of his arc across the whole story, Gravedust is def at least tied for first.