Song of the Eastern Sands: Title
This week, I’m proud to reveal the Title Page of the upcoming side-story Song of the Eastern Sands, which features our entire main quartet marching off onto some grand new adventure! Or maybe it’s the one you’re about to see? I guess we’ll find out eventually!
These were the original concepts for the four main characters, based on my descriptions of them, created a little over a year ago. It’s always fun going back to see where things started out, to see what the big changes are — but it’s also nice to see Jerome hit the mark so close in his first renderings of protagonists Beck (Lutren), Rook (Polcan), Asha (Ermehn), and Theo (Vulpin).
As Jerome and I have alluded to in the past, the overarching theme of Song of the Eastern Sands is one of lightheartedness — something to lift the spirits a little after the doom and gloom of Chapter 2’s conclusion. We’ll be returning to the cold soon enough, but the warm sands of Nessa seemed a wonderful side-venture in the interim! The characters, which have been teased here and there over the last year or so, have all been a blast to write, and make very interesting counter-characters to those we’re familiar with from the main storyline.
Our story begins next week, and we can’t wait!
This week, for guest art, a great piece that was sent to me straight from one of my mom’s students! Ray is 9 years old and looks like he’s got the makings of a great artist based on this drawing he did of Hardin! Check it out:
Thank you so much for drawing this awesome version of Hardin, Ray! He looks appropriately devious there, dagger at the ready! Rachel and I love it!
Well, this is awesome, and I’m liking the characters here!
…and now we wait for Cain and Yurk’s cameos in the upcoming pages… It’ll be kinda like spotting Stan Lee in a Marvel movie!
Great, now I’m waiting for a huge crowd scene with our quartet wading through the market while Cain and Yurk Waldo in the back corner.
I think we’ve all been expecting that ever since the knowledge that there would be Canid and Ermehn bros on the first page of SOTES.
*attempts to impersonate a Canid General* **ahem…**
alright, Bushtailed Lively Discussion Devotees of the Salmon Party! Let’s go search every pixel of the upcoming pages for the mischievous Canid and Ermehn duo! send search parties! the Sunsgrove allied forces– Canid Special Forces! Tamian Scouts! Lutren Sea Guard! heck, even Mercenaries, for Tesque’s sake! let’s do everything in our power to look for Cain and Yurk! LET’S DO THIS!!!
Don’t count on results from the Felis Foreign Legion. They won’t be able to remember what they are looking for.
Polcan are ferrets, but you’re right… Rook just looks so much like a raccoon… Aaaand I can’t unsee it…
Now I’ll make it worse.
Mentally give Rook the best lines from Rocket in Guardians of the Galaxy.
OH GOD…. NO… NO…NO, NO, NO, NO…. WHY, FOURTH MASTER?! WHYYYYYY????!!!!!!! AAGGGHHHHH
No idea what you were even trying to say with your first comment in the first place. You began with talking about a polcan representative and then…
Alright, no magic marker-sniffing for you, Mr. Vau, you’ve had enough!
Well, just to split hairs, Polcan are modeled on marbled polecats. But yeah, basically ferrets with fancier markings. ;)
Oh gosh, really? ;_; That makes me see them so differently now.
Grah! The colors in this. It all seems like a warm, sunwashed late afternoon, with them on their way to an open air restaurant before attending a production of Snakespeare in the round.
Also, I want Rook’s legwear.
All the time since I can remember, I have a problem with this whole Polcan – I heard that either they were pirates, or it is one of several extinct species after this great bloody racial war, or even something else… And now I see that he is alive… I can’t understand it XD
(After that, this page is doing a big smile on my face, thanks to the pleasant beautifull warm colours ^^:D As always, beautiful color compose Jerome ^^:D)
No, no, no. Polcans come from another continent and live mostly on the sea because they lost their home.
Probably because hunters have been poaching them for their fur and ended up driving the Polcans out of their natural habitat
Say no to fur trade, kids!
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Oh my God…
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… OH MY GOD :O :O :O … It’s horrible :O :C – even I do not know which is worse – you can be killed on racial background because some Ekh*Canid*em think that you are dirty and
some shit carrion and you do not have the right to life, or you are killed only for this because someone needs your fur to his Doubletree/coat ;-; ….. This is for me a kind of cannibalism ;-; ….
It was a joke, Jakub. And it’s the Lutren who hate the Polcan, not the Canid.
This looks fun! I can’t wait to see what these four get up to.
So who else is interested in learning how these four met and started traveling together?
They got together to win a mixed gender, interspecies barbershop quartet competition.
Actually, I’m pretty sure it was on a 3 hour tour Cain and Yurk where giving.
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful tour
That started from this desert town
With this here desert four
The guide was a mighty canid man,
His friend brave and sure.
Four customers showed up that day
For a three hour tour, a three hour tour.
The temperature was getting hot,
Tempers all were lost,
With help from the wits of the fearless duo
They started getting sauced, they started getting sauced.
The tour set down and started bonding and became friends,
With Cain
And Yurk too,
The polcan, not raccoon,
The lutren
The vulpen and the ermehn too,
Here in the Eastern Sands.
I would watch the bloody hell out of this.
I’m embarrassed to even ask such a thing, but is Beck male or female? It’s hard for me to tell since the way his/her body looks kinda looks like it may go either way. Besides that, I cant wait for some zany desert adventures with these characters, they all seem very likeable!
Also, Alex you been teasing BWD to school children havent you….Oh those poor souls; once they see the upcoming parts.
I remember Alex saying that Beck was female a while back (he called her “Ms. Lutren”).
The Eastern Sands looks like more cosmopolitan setting than what we’ve seen before. Are cross-species couples common? Can they conceive children?
I seem to recall this question coming up when people asked if Kenosh could have fathered Hardin during his time among the Ermehn (which would have made Hardin and Dakkan half-brothers and allowed for a terrible Star Wars reference), and the answer was no. As different species, the seven races are genetically different enough to not be able to conceive children, even though Vulpin and Canid are both canine races, and Ermehn, Lutren, and Polcan are all mustelids.
When replying to tronn’s post above, I remembered something I’ve been curious about for a long time.
A long time ago, when Alex was planning out the seven races of Dunia, was there any particular reason to include three different members of the weasel family? That’s near 50% of the total species devoted to being weaselly. Seems like a bit of an odd choice to me, if nothing else.
(I was going to say that the unifying thread of all the species was the Order Carnivora, but the Tamians ruin that. Rodents are herbivores.)
At the very least, I’m surprised that there aren’t more kinds of rodents in Dunia. Or other kinds of mammals not seen at all. I guess all I’m trying to say is that I’m not sure I understand Alex’s thought process here.
Yes, yes, you’re right. This is what happens when I get sleep-deprived. But still, taxonomically, I have a point. Class mammalia is the closest unifying thread between the seven races.
Yep, the overall rule is that mammals are sentient. Birds, fish, and invertebrates are “animals.” We’ve also hinted at the Dunian population not being the full extent of sentient species in the world, so there are more out there than just these seven. You probably won’t see many non-Dunians outside large trade ports or kingdom capitals, though.
The more frank, out-of-universe answer probably has more to do with the fact that mustelids are awesome, but I’ll let Alex confirm or deny that one. X)
What Rachel said! :)
The races we picked are partially-inspired by Redwallian races that we liked, or races that would serve as fun counterpoints to one another (wolves and cats, foxes and wolves, squirrels and otters with their treetop/underwater dichotomy, etc).
We briefly considered mice/rats in the original seven races, but changed that because we wanted to avoid overt comparisons to Mouse Guard and Mice Templar, as well as the clear throughline to the Redwall series.
//Sentient Dolphins.
So does that mean that we might see individuals of completely different species than the seven we’re familiar with during our interlude in Nessa? Interesting . . .
(Oh, and did you two ever get that piece of art I sent in a few days ago?)
We’ll definitely see some other races — though perhaps not in Nessa. More likely in Gair, which is the largest city in the Four Kingdoms and also an easily accessible port city.
And we did get your (awesome) art, Fourth! :) Sorry I haven’t responded yet — but we love it, and we’ll definitely be posting that up with the first page of SotES this upcoming Saturday!
Glad that it was a hit, Alex!
Alright! New fanart from Fourth Master! I’ll tell the fifth not to come just yet!
As for other races, do remember this little intermission from 2013:
https://westerndeep.net/comic/intermission-week-3/
Don’t forget about those damn treacherous octopi.
Yes, they say that was just fanart but…. no, no it’s not!
I’m interested to see what mishaps these four can get into over the course of the next adventure. Looks like Theo is one of those Vulpin scholars. I’m also excited to learn more about the Polcan through Rook. His friendship with Beck must be an interesting one.
The little splotches of color (red, blue, and green) in the upper portion of the cover seem a bit out of place. What are they supposed to represent?
It looks like scraps of cloth or confetti of some kind.
I love the colors. Especially how every character has a different bold color in there clothing.