Chapter 2: Page 74
Benefiting from Rachel’s background in animation and storyboarding, the beat-by-beat panels of action sequences like this really spring to life for me. The key actions can tend to string together into a single cohesive, dare I say “animated” scene in one’s head, helping it to pop off the page.
While not every action scene we’ve done uses this technique, certain sequences (like the Quinlan vs. Crim fight in Chapter 1) lend themselves to more “key” movements than others. This is a life-or-death struggle that in full takes maybe a few seconds of actual time to transpire, so in adapting our ideas to the page we need to choose what actions to omit or decide how we’ll slow the action down to fill out a page with interesting action.
In this case, the lightning-fast back and forth battle of oneupmanship between Quin and his Ermehn adversary lends itself to many key movements as they each gain and lose then regain the upper hand — until of course the sequence comes to its end at the conclusion of this week’s page.
This week, I want to share a heartwarming piece of guest art that Veigue put together over Valentine’s Day featuring a lil’ baby Dakkan and his two loving parents:
It’s possible that noises closely related to “D’AAAW” escaped from me when I saw it. Is it a thing for a picture to be too cute? Maybe! Just maybe. If so, this one comes close! Thank you so much for the wonderful artwork, Veigue, and I hope all our readers had a wonderful Valentine’s Day last week!
Oh… oh no. Not One Eye.
D:
Ever since Quinlan’s sword went over the wall I had a suspicion that this sort of thing might happen to either One-Eye or Quin.
Since Quinlan is a high-jumping Tamian, he could probably absorb the shock of impact without getting hurt too badly. One-Eye . . . not so much.
Great page! Looks like One-Eye will at least be kept from bothering Quin and Dak for a little while, if he survives hitting the ground. Though I must confess curiosity as to how Dakkan’s end of the battle is going.
Veigue’s picture is without a doubt the cutest piece of BWD art that exists. You cannot stand the cuteness. YOU CANNOT STAND THE CUTENESS!
*Fourth Master’s head explodes due to cuteness overload*
I like the way Veigue does the little dot eyes.
Oh, one other thing I forgot to mention: I really hope that, at some point, all the comics in BWD that are done in bluescale get colored, but I especially would like to see that done for the battle comics, such as this one and next week’s. The other colored battle scenes in the rainy night of Deltrada are just amazing.
They will. It’s just impossible for me to do alongside the pages atm… as evidenced by the fact that I can’t even get some of the week-to-week pages colored in time, lately. @_@
It’ll be something that I probably start doing during the post-chapter 2 hiatus.
Huh, Quin is missing a tooth. I wonder since when?
He’s not. That’s the border between his regular molar-y teeth, and his rodent incisors. Realistically it should probably be a big gap, and aesthetically I should probably have left it a single white mass in that panel, but eh.
The big gap wouldn’t look bad
http://imgur.com/4LMkTlA
COP THAT YOU SPIDE-FACED, MONOCULAR SON OF A JILL!!!!
Committing that insult to memory because it genuinely made me laugh a little.
Does the word “Jill” have some special meaning in that insult?
Male ferret and weasel like things are sometimes called hobs and the females sometimes called jills.
Jill = female ferret
Hob = male ferret
Sprite = female ferret (spayed)
Gib = male ferret (neutered)
Kit = baby ferret
Business = group of ferrets
Thus concludes this week’s episode of “Ferrets: Fun, Facts, and Furriness”.
Well…. he’s dead. He’s dead, he died, he aint living no more. Good night sweet prince. My only regret is that we never even got to know his name. At least in my mind, I’ll refer to him as Dorga. Unless of course Alex and Rachel already came up with his name lol. Btw, I’m always honored when you guys share my corny stuff on this site.
Why Dorga?
I dont know, I guess it sounds cool maybe *shrug*
Corny stuff has a pleasing taste and it aids digestion.
I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling that it would involve the phrase, “Jerkface powers, activate!”
Crim would have subdued all three ermehn with his manly physique early on, so he wouldn’t even get into Quin’s situation in the first place.
Word.
I KNEW IT! And so One Eye goes over the side and ends up in a sweet embrace with the cold, hard ground, and well, there goes the first onscreen death at Deltrada. I’ll miss the menacing fellow. (Honestly, all the eulogies in the comments are amazing). I love the flow of action through the whole page, and how Rachel draws teeth, as weird as that may sound.
And in contrast to the grim death, we have Veigue’s adorable drawing that made me go “nooo ;_;” the first time I saw it since that amount of functional, adorable family is illegal knowing what happens to them. I d’aww’ed at the same time my heart broke. Thanks, Veigue.
One-eye may be over the side but I’m going to invoke the Game of Thrones rule: until you see the smashed, broken corpse (or severed head thereof) assume no-one is dead.
If he has gone to his rest then we can at least take some comfort in the knowledge that his lack of depth perception probably made the fall less terrifying. Or more terrifying.
I don’t know.
“When am I going to hit the ground? Now? Now? Now? Now?”
*SPLAT*
That’s hilarious and terrible, haha.
Why, thank you. It’s my pleasure.
Okay, true; that is probably a wise rule to follow. I just think he looks a little far gone, and unless Quinlan catches him, he’s dead. But it’s a possibility I suppose.
Or, as doctors would say nowadays…he’s not dead until he’s warm and dead.
I love how everyone’s singing their eulogies for One-Eye even though he hasn’t even hit the ground yet. Hey, he might catch himself who knows?
He’ll catch himself, or land in that conveniently placed wagon of hay and suffer no ill effects…
Wait a minute.
I’m fond of the ‘pulls a knife and jabs it into the wall’ theory myself.
Now what if Quilin saves him.
This is the part where Quinlan grabs his hand before he falls, only to be attacked once more by One Eye, but Dakkan puts himself in the way between Quin and One Eye, and gets stabbed in his place.
Mortally wounded, he pushes One Eye to the abyss and gives Quin an encouraging farewell before breathing his last.
Deeply shaken by the loss of his friend, it takes all of Quinlan’s willpower to get back on his feet, for now he is the only one left who can defeat the dark lord and save the princess.
And then Quinlan makes the following noise:
Because it turns out that, in his rage, he killed her.
Foamy the squirrel.
One-Eye ;_;7
So did Quin get bit last page? Even without color, it doesn’t seem like there’s anything that could be blood.
He dies of tetanus a few months after, by the way.
I also didn’t get Feyn’s tattoos in on this page, so make of that what you will. ;)
Though truth be told, there probably won’t be much visible blood anyway due to the thickness of Quin’s neck fur. It’s not like a huge chunk got torn out of him.
The mystery is solved! One-Eye’s name is Feyn!
*gasp* He has been named. And yeah, fuzzy animals tend to soak up a lot of blood when the injury isn’t huge; hope Quin doesn’t have to have his shoulder shaved in the future to tend to things if he does end up with a more serious injury.
Fret not. The more serious injuries will be already devoid of hair without any third party involved.
Better than his tail
Ah Snap! Info got leaked!
This is what we’d call a “controlled leak” :) We’ll be revealing his name officially in the comic eventually, and knowing his name isn’t important to the overall story, so we felt okay sharing it.
Ah, so if his name gets revealed later, I imagine he survives this fall somehow.
You might even say he…*sunmonocle*…Feyns his own death?
that or someone has a eulogy
I called him “Willy”.
Hey! Dunno if it’s a problem on my end or yours, but it seems the RSS for this hasn’t been updated since the 20th of December last year.
That’s… Interesting. Most of the remaining updates showed up when I unsubscribed and then resubscribed to the feed, but it still stopped on page 70.
I wish I could help you there, Noodles, but I don’t know much about solving RSS issues.
It’s looked fine on my end this whole time, so who can say? :T
It’s working fine now! Must’ve been me, then? Very strange.