Penance » Archive » 3-29 Excellent Drops

3-29 Excellent Drops

Friday, December 21st, 2007

The next post will be up on December 25th as a Christmas treat. The next page of the story will be up January 11, 2008. Wow, is it next year already? See you then. -J.D.

- Commentary -

Craig: Leon’s problem is that he just doesn’t know when to shut up.

J.D.: Why should he? He seems to be very serendipitous.

Craig: What do you mean?

J.D.: Everything seems to work out for him eventually. So long as he’s willing to endure the discomfort along the way.

Craig: I absolutely love Leon’s aside in panel 1.

J.D.: “He started it.” We had an alternate version of panel 1 in which Azriel retorted “Did not.” But we decided that it would slow down the pacing, amusing though it was.

Craig: Besides, Azriel wouldn’t say that, not really.

J.D.: Out loud.

Craig: Well, for Azriel, this is quite serious. He’s been publicly humiliated by Leon –

J.D.: — and yet he brought it upon himself. He couldn’t just let things go and let himself be proven wrong. If he had had any grace, he could have bowed out with dignity and not further embarrassed himself in front of Lillith and the watching archons.

Craig: Leon never found out what it was that Azriel was there for in the first place.

J.D.: Except that Azriel said that he wanted to make a deal.

Craig: Our astute readers noted that in panel 6, there is a portrait of Marcus hanging in the room behind Azriel. I think it was his tendril of black hair hanging between his eyes that gave it away.

J.D.: I like Marcus’s tendril. The tendril in front of his face feels to me like a physical or outward expression of the imprisonment he feels most of the time. Trapped in servitude to Ignatius.

Craig: I think it gives him a little vulnerability — he may be a powerful (if unwilling) vampire, but he just can’t seem to get his hair to behave.

J.D.: It seems there was some confusion about the realm of Haven and the city of Mythband within it.

Craig: The realm of Haven is colored pink, while the realm of Mythband is colored green. Although one lies within the other, they are separate places.

J.D.: The Maintainer built and maintains Mythband, but it is situated within Lillith’s realm of Haven. So anytime someone leaves Mythband via the gates, they leave the Maintainer’s jurisdiction and enter Lillith’s.

Craig: Lillith partially explains this in page 2-20, and Hector makes it clear in panel 5 of page 3-3. In panel 6 of page 3-3, you can see the outer wall of Mythband (green) on the land of Haven (pink).

J.D.: Poor Lillith. She’s still wearing her outfit from the night before because Angeline didn’t show up for work that morning.

Craig: I like her earrings.

J.D.: Hee!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Penance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

14 Responses to “3-29 Excellent Drops”

Ojomax Says:
December 22nd, 2007 at 5:26 am
Well, what is the answer? Does Lord Azriel drop {excellent} items? Most Azriels I’ve met only have the | DROP_GOOD | flags but every Azriel is different so this one might have | DROP_GREAT | Anyway, good items can luck out as excellent…
Timo Says:
December 22nd, 2007 at 6:33 am
Hmmm… Lilith says “My realm”. I always thought mythband is Maintainers realm, but it seems that the more powerful one of the two is Lilith.

Leons comment “he started it” is hilarious. Back to normal Leon.
Janus Duo Says:
December 22nd, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Any reason why leon lost his chin-spike in panel 5, or is that just a continuity error?

It makes him look pretty girly, hehe.
Nameless Says:
December 22nd, 2007 at 10:15 pm
This is the kind of page that makes Penance awesome. Humour, clever roguelike references, character conflict and revelations. = Win.
Seamus Says:
December 23rd, 2007 at 5:38 pm
What Nameless said.
Z Says:
December 23rd, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Timo, this all happens in Haven, not in Mythband. So this strange boy was Azriel? (Pity that there is no transition between his forms…) Somehow I don’t like the black boxes inside Lilith’s speech, there must be some artistically better way to achieve this effect. Maybe have dots on white background instead, and then another text bubble on black background?

Don’t mind my slightly negative comments, I think this page is great regardless
Craig Says:
December 24th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
Duo: Whoops! You’re right, I forgot to draw Leon’s soul patch in this page. Thanks for pointing it out, we’ll fix that after the holidays.
Maverick Says:
December 24th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
So it seems a pretty fair guess that Leon has discovered his heritage.

I think I’m going to go into withdrawals waiting the 3 weeks until the next bit of the story comes out. Lol. As always, superb job with the comic.
Charles Says:
December 24th, 2007 at 7:25 pm
This web comic requires attention to detail:

First, the image of Azriel in human form appears in the “Return” ish. Second, Azriel’s voice appears in “Two Ways Out.”

It would seem that Azriel is close to the Nameless One called the Maintainer, but distant from Lilith, his wife. The Maintainer is a Nameless One contraposed to another Nameless One calling himself Rex Caligo “King of Darkness” for those of us that read Latin. Nyaah.

Leon absolutely needs to become an Uebermacht in order to survive … and then he needs to become proficient.

And Azriel means “God is my help,” being Hebrew. It also has cabalistic significance. If Leon “the lion” gets his head on straight, he should fight someone other than Azriel. The latter, however, needs to discover the Gospel.

Oooh! The Light is divided against itself, the Darkness is waxing, and fate is decided by the weak. Someone knows how to do proper eucatastrophic, if not evangelical fantasy. Someone knows what books to read, and that goes for the Vanished Planet material too.
joel Says:
December 26th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Great thoughts, Charles. A few more…

If Azriel is the guy seen in “Return”, then he’s also the one in “Inside the Network”. Is he perhaps acting as some sort of parole officer, keeping an eye on the Maintainer during his penance? Also, in “Remember”, where we see more of the confrontation between Leon and the Maintainer, Leon says “There was someone else there too” and it shows the Maintainer’s tentacles recoiling a bit as he looks toward a reddish aura. At first I had wondered if that was Naked Smelly Guy (Ignatius), but nothing came of it. It seems clear now that it was Azriel coming on the scene, at which point the conversation seen in “Two Ways Out” would have taken place.

More thoughts, without issue references…

Of course Leon has fey power now, because his blood was spilled on the contract making him Lillith’s son and granting him Ignatius’s power. But since Ingatius wasn’t dead yet, the power he renounced was returned to him. Lillith knows Marcus is out of the crate, but I don’t think we know if she knows Ignatius is still around. She seemed exceptionally distracted when cleaning Leon’s blood after he escaped the jackals; perhaps her “…” here is more than just “that’s news to me” — perhaps she’s starting to piece things together.
joel Says:
December 27th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Oh, and is that a picture of Marcus on the wall of the room behind Azriel?
Maverick Says:
December 27th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Wow Joel. Nice call. It’s small things (I don’t always notice) like that which make this comic so great.
Janus Duo Says:
January 13th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Hehe, you fixed the soul patch! *does happy dance*
Maverick Says:
January 18th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Azriel is really big compared to Lillith…

3-29 Excellent Drops

14 Responses to “3-29 Excellent Drops”

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