She’s magic! She’s angsty! She’s exited, stage left!
Okay, now we have a pretty good general idea of Miranda’s Deal. And she’s pulled a strategic retreat, at least for now. Possibly freeing me up to go explore one of the other 3-5 shadowy ominous figures who’ve been lurking in the background of the plot…
All right, time to start making these translations public, and open myself up to the internet’s judgment on how close I got.
Hebrew:
לקחת אותנו אמא
“take us to mother”
Pentacle: Fifth Sun
It’ll be spelled out much later where Miranda’s mother is around now.
Yeah, that arm’s still broken.
A lot of Patrick’s bravado comes off as over-the-top bluster. And in many cases, it is.
But you know what, when let off the leash and directed to take it seriously, he really is good at this battle thing.
There is (apparently) a moon and stars in the sky, but it’s established later that there’s never a sun.
Setting this at “night” was a clever tactic to make the Beings’ glowy sigils/magic-blasts/etc easier to render. I can mess around with lots of blending modes to get feasible effects, even cool ones, but putting them on a Screen layer over a dark background is the simplest.
First on-page Magic Fight between two human-shaped characters!
Poe’s light-blasting powers are vaguely feather-shaped, Patrick’s are vaguely paw-shaped. (The first one of those was intentional.)
For whatever reason, Annotated Chapter 5 page 9 didn’t post on schedule, so click back and check that out if you missed it.
There’s also a new Patreon update about the Master’s Edition — check it out. (Backers can view it on Kickstarter, too.)
There was an early BICP plan where, as the battles went on, the battle-spaces would pick up more industrial features. Not just the “occasional stone ruin” we’ve seen so far (and will keep seeing), but to the point of “this is clearly a modern-day bridge we’re standing under, concrete/steel/graffiti and all.”
Didn’t end up doing that. Partly because there wasn’t a satisfying way to conclude all that buildup, partly because I was never motivated enough to draw city architecture when I didn’t have to.
Bringing this all up now because, if I’d gone there, the naturally-occurring stone arch in this scene (next page we’ll see Miranda standing on top of it) would’ve been foreshadowing.
See, what did I tell you about “Patrick getting beat up” as Ongoing Theme.
If Bianca wasn’t so consumed with “stop so the Beings don’t get hurt any more,” she probably would’ve added “stop so we don’t cause serious property damage that you’ll be liable for.” (Unfortunately, Miranda would’ve been willing to push her on that too.)
Soooo many chairs.
Patrick’s “how long are you going to me keep this up?” also applies to me, having to draw chairs by the dozen.
Oh, hey, there’s a bit of using-the-setting, with the collapsed Patrick fallen down the stairs.
Probably going to get better when we transition into the battle-space, though. Again, those were planned from the start to create “cool settings that I find easier to work with.”
Sidenote: about 6 months into these annotated reruns, and we just passed the one-year anniversary of the original run.
Although we’re getting close to the “decreased update schedule” point in the archives, I’m going to keep posting the reruns 5 days a week! At least for now. Probably going to take a holiday break around the end of 2021, and decide from there what to do next.
Poe wasn’t one of the original characters repurposed from Shine, but he probably has the most Hellsing fashion sense of any of the characters so far.
He’s got the dapper vest + collared shirt combo, and the rolled-up sleeves + thigh-revealing short-shorts.
