A few chapters from now, Cybele refuses to give pronouns for her Master, or to say any names, including Cohen’s. Which is pretty smart. Unfortunately, on the earlier version of this page, she flubs both those things…and that’s an error on my part, not hers.
So, surprise! This is the Master’s Edition version of the page, where I fixed it. (Did the same for the omnibus version of page 25, too.)
And here’s why the officer showed up: so there was somebody to drag the next round of Being Rules out of Cohen.
He sure does sound confident about how to handle them, for someone who basically broke one, like, a week ago.
I wonder, if the Cybele incident had happened two weeks earlier, whether Cohen would’ve made the effort to give her a pillow.
That police rep feels like she has a really specific design, and yet it looks like I didn’t even give her a tag, let alone a name.
Bit of an oversight, huh? I knew the police wouldn’t be plot-relevant long-term, but this was a dead giveaway to readers that the police wouldn’t be plot-relevant long-term.
Hey look, the chapter-opening “flashback to Reseda doing Being experiments” scene wasn’t just flavor, it was setup that becomes relevant to the ending!
…at this point, almost 10 years after the writing, I genuinely don’t remember if I planned this on purpose from the start. Feels too well-coordinated to be just luck, but, well, sometimes you do get this lucky.
Also: giant kitty ftw.
Unlike with pre-home-video movies and TV, comics don’t have the option of “fill your fake newspaper/book/blog article with a block of lorem ipsum and expect that nobody’s going to notice.”
So I tried filling the article with lampshading of filling articles with lorum ipsum.
…and then ran out of jokes about that, and just went ahead with jokes about the actual newsworthy-in-universe events we just covered.
One of the characters in the Malachim font is just a rectangle with a vertical line through the middle. Looks really out-of-place among all the glyphs that are sprawling almost-letter-shaped lines with circles at the ends…but I promise it’s one of the real letters, not two “this character can’t be displayed” placeholder boxes (▯▯) squished together.
…Having the escalators turned on (and making Cohen jog up them) could’ve been funny, but that’s a tough joke to convey in a non-animated comic page.
First line:
האם אתה השפן (“are you the rabbit?”)
(Pentacle: Mercury 4)
Second line:
להישאר קרוב אלי (“stay close to me”)
(Pentacle: Jupiter 3)
“Well, according to my research, one of the artist’s major inspirations has a cute rabbit-themed young girl character, and her theme color is pink, so…”
Nice effective crowd-of-silhouettes scenes, here. I like the detail that someone in the first panel is climbing a lamppost to see better.
Another montage, this time of “how most of our major characters (and/or their staff) are reacting to this unfolding news story.”
Except Sparrow and Bianca. This is not the kind of series where they conveniently have the news playing right when it covers a plot-relevant story that’s important to their lives. This is the kind of series where they are dedicated to not falling behind on Inspector Spacetime.
So, Patrick doesn’t get to go “that’s my ex-Master” when Cohen appears on-screen. And Poe got cut off before he could’ve finished his sentence with “they’ve called in your dad.” Lots of artful dodging-the-reveal, here.
The presence of these highly particular name-based rules pointed some readers toward a “Beings are Fae” theory.
Not a bad guess! And it tracks more closely with established real-world mythology than Timothy’s “Beings are creatures of Eden who missed out on the naming scene” theory.
But no, in-universe it’s just another manifestation of the “golems are Very Very Very Precisely Defined By Words” phenomenon.
Could’ve just tagged these two as “MBTA security” or something equally generic, but I entertained myself by going with “Sailor MBTA” and “Tuxedo Charlie.”
In honor of the still-incredibly-catchy 1940’s earworm “Charlie On The MTA.” (Boston farecards are still called CharlieCards, after the same song.)
