Law of the Riverside Part 2 Page 6
August 12th, 2012Almanac References: Dragoon
Page 6 of Law of the Riverside Part 2 is up. One of the Phoenix Men asks, “You’re no lawman. What’s this to you anyway?” Ald answers with acts, not words. To see a preview of the final page of Law of the Riverside Part 2, please vote for Snow by Night on Top Web Comic. It’s well worth it. I think it might be Naty’s best panel for the entire vignette.
GenCon is coming up this week. I leave on Wednesday. This is going a great convention. I have a book being released (Menzoberranzan: City of Intrigue) and I’m judging a lot of D&D Next, the new version of D&D. It’s a very good system. I’m looking forward to running it and sharing the wonder and imagination with as many people as possible.
I just figured out the blue tone was a flashback to a shameful past, then looked back to the comments to see if I was the only one who missed that initially. A long way of saying I could have used a hint too.
I talked it over with Naty. We’re going to make some changes to make it more clear. I’ll let you all know when those changes are made.
Before I read this, I was really confused. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how you got from “We’re going” to the houses being ablaze, or why the woman with braided hair seemed to think it was Ald’s fault (it didn’t help that she looked rather like the girl who came to him for help). I think I did figure out that the scene in the tent was a flashback, but I didn’t make the connection between that and the blue-tinted panels a week later. In fact, I didn’t even realize that there *was* a difference in color until it was pointed out — I just took the blue shades as visual shorthand for “nighttime”, given that the other scene also takes place at night, and the “blue” panels have bright orange flames in the background. If you really want to make the difference noticeable, you should do the whole panel in grayscale or sepia tones, something like that.
I’ll discuss this with the team and see if we want to make any changes. The vignettes are where I’m trying different storytelling techniques and seeing how they work in the sequential art media. So they’ll always be on the experimental side. Thank you for your feedback.
I disagree. I would find captioning like that (at least in this application) too-obvious, maybe like talking down.
i have a question about the recent pages.
i’m kinda slow, so forgive me if this is stupid, lol.
are the scenes switching from past to present? like are the blue panels in the past or something?
Yes, the blue panels are flashbacks to events earlier that summer before Ald left Saronne and came to Aradie. Does that help?
Hmmm. I was hoping that the blue tones would say “flashback.” If you’re not picking up on that, then maybe I need to go back and add a caption box to the first blue panel that reads, “Earlier that summer in Saronne…”
I had no trouble picking up on the flashbacks, but I think that your suggestion makes a lot of sense.
I figure they had to flashbacks since they didn’t flow with the story, but I think you shouldn’t caption the first panel. Especially if I was the only one confused ^_^,,