2-23 Birthright
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007– Commentary –
Craig: This page doesn’t lend itself to commentary. It spells things out pretty well on its own. 🙂
J.D.: It’s nice having characters like Ignatius, who can believably rattle off long monologues of exposition.
Craig: One thing we’ve learned about Ignatius: He likes to hear himself talk.
J.D.: I was just thinking that.
Craig: Marcus provides his own commentary, at times confirming and at other contradicting Ignatius’s diatribe. It’s as though Ignatius doesn’t hear him.
J.D.: Ignatius in that sense is a little like Tolkien’s Gollum — he’s rehearsed his arguments in his captivity to justify his desire for revenge until he can’t even hear Marcus’s side of things.
Craig: I very much enjoyed drawing panel 3. I did some research into the kind of clothes worn in the 1700s. Marcus and young Ignatius are dressed like gentry. Lillith is dressed like a wealthy landowner, and the Maintainer is dressed like a common worker.
J.D.: The Maintainer likes to be comfortable. If he’s married to her as Marcus states, then he ought to be dressed more like Ignatius and Marcus are. But then he doesn’t really worry about what other people think of how he dresses.
Craig: Drawing panel 4 was interesting too — I had to think about what Ignatius’s clothes and hair would look like underwater. You can’t see it very well, but Ignatius is bound around his upper arms with thick metal chains.
J.D.: Sorry about that. But he was talking so much there wasn’t room for them. The page is already tall enough!
Craig: Yeah, we thought about splitting this into two four-panel pages, but we didn’t want to interrupt the flow of conversation. If we ever turn this into a book, it’ll a challenge to lay out all of our wierdly-shaped pages. 🙂
J.D.: Well, if we did it as a book, we could just split the eight-paneler into four, because you would just flip the page. But when you’re waiting at least several days between pages, you can’t break up the conversation because it’s sort of a mental breaking point too.
Craig: The glass in the back of the store in panels 1 and 2 reads “Goth Topic”.
J.D.: I like how Marcus has taken the least vampire-looking outfit in the entire store. His “Not a Ninja” T-shirt is like a silent protest against what Ignatius has forced him to become.
Craig: It just struck me that Ignatius still wears his hair like he did in the 1700s. I don’t remember if that was intentional or not, but it reveals how he’s…
J.D.: Stuck in the past. Marcus is capable of moving forward, whereas Ignatius is dwelling on events that took place two hundred years ago.
Craig: And in the last panel, we see Lillith and the Maintainer beginning to realize the enormity of what has been going on in their basement.
July 11th, 2007 at 1:29 am
I was wondering about Lilith.
In Judaism Lilith is a terrible she-demon, the 1st wife of Adam (before Eve), and usually she manipulates and seduces young males.
She’s also responsible to the birth of many Hell-Spawn, by stealing Vitality from humans.
And last but not least, she’s now the Devil’s wife…
July 11th, 2007 at 3:28 am
This page is so much a rather crude and obvious plot dump.
AKA 100% all-natural Plot Thickener. 🙂
July 11th, 2007 at 1:15 pm
There is something Leon-like about the way Ignatius speaks. The manner in which he accuses Lillith of everything is very similar to how Leon accused Maintainer of everything after the break-in. It is very easy to believe Ignatius is an ancestor. (Unless the reason Ignatius sounds familiar is that he is very similar not to Leon, but me…)
July 11th, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Brilliant!
I love this comic… 🙂
July 11th, 2007 at 3:34 pm
Some interesting info I’ve found about Lilith
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith