Axemas Bonus Anno 1
Time to go through some of our bonus content we haven’t yet covered, methinks. We (meaning John) did a few “Savage Axemas” pieces before Flo and I decided the World’s Rebellion had different customs like Traal, but (1) these were clearly meant to be just one-off little improv ideas and (2) there’s not really that much of a continuity issue: it certainly doesn’t matter if this dinner is in celebration of Axemas, Traal, or some other holiday.
I’m not even gonna get up in arms about Hammerhead and family having a sort of Brady-Bunch-like setup and how consistent that is with the hive-minded, not terribly civilized land sharks we normally portray. It’s just a fun piece. Ya gotta relax sometimes.
That shark on the lower right who’s looking into the camera does make me a little nervous, though.
Since you don’t mention it, the image composition is based on Rockwell’s Freedom from Want, also known as “I’ll be home for Christmas”.
I was wondering if anyone would notice that. Sharp eyes, Disco!
The Norman Rockwell painting is also associated with Thanksgiving.
Was it ever mentioned why Hammerhead is the only hammerheaded land shark around? Even in this family picture he’s the only one.
I don’t think it is ever mentioned in the comic, though maybe he’s the only hammerhead in a similar way that a clownfish colony has only one female. Other land sharks have the potential to be a hammerhead, but since Hammerhead is present, they don’t. With this theory if our Hammerhead ever kicked the bucket, the new “loudest” might change into a new hammerhead.
Alternatively it might be more… proactive. The hammerhead form seems significantly stronger than baseline land sharks, so if any land sharks seem to possibly be this larger and stronger form, Hammerhead might… remove future challengers, like bee princesses
The Doylist reason is that we didn’t want any other intelligent land sharks to complicate our picture of Hammerhead and his race any further. There isn’t really a Watsonian reason given but I’m not sure that there needs to be one. He’s a mutant, a one-off: he won the genetic lottery.
Weirdly enough I did remember seeing a couple of others (normal landshark sized), took me a minute to find them (may have been spotted in other parts):
http://guildedage.net/comic/chapter-47-page-5/
I take it they’re rare but around.
The third one from the bottom on the right looks like he might be eating his own arm, or that of his neighbour … (though that’s probably not a landshark claw at the end of the arm). And it took me a while to realize that Mrs. Hammerhead is wearing a shirt which has almost the same colour as the background, and is not some strangely-levitating landshark head.
She also seems to be the only clealry-identifiable-as-female landshark we ever see, I believe. But Landsharks are a bit like time travel in stories, in that you shouldn’t analyse them too much, but just accept what you see and move on.
Fine by me, I like the scene. Not sure why Hammerhead seems so grumpy, though, but I bet he never has to search much for a reason to be grumpy.
If eyelashes define a landshark as female, then Hammerhead has at least two daughters. Apart from eyelashes the only other attributes I can identify are body language and (maybe) dress. No wonder landshark females are hard to spot! I’m not even sure we’ve seen enough to be certain there’s more than one gender among them.