Magic is hard.
Not my best-drawn page; I was drawing in the midst of holiday stuff and snatching time here and there. But I like Anthem’s stance in the last panel.
Magic is hard.
Not my best-drawn page; I was drawing in the midst of holiday stuff and snatching time here and there. But I like Anthem’s stance in the last panel.
Yup, that stance is good.
Just love the closing sentence of Vish: “It is dangerous to be right when the gods are wrong”. It’s simply great, albeit possibly deeply disturbing, implying that mortals may be wiser than the gods.
I really like how we’re getting into the meat of the metaphysics of this world, figuring out exactly why it’s so effed and what the characters are going to do about it. Hey! Ho! Tamantha has got to go!
The part about gods being fallible isn’t really new, to be fair. Quite a few mytholofies are full of deities making mistakes, being tricked by clever mortals (though such mortals rarely do well after the deities in question figure out they’ve been fooled), etc. Also, plenty of old gods have extremely human tendencies, like Zeus’s penchant for cheating on his wife with mortal women, for example. Still, it’s not a bad thing to take inspiration from the classics, particularly when putting a different spin on the ideas and doing it well, such as the case is here.
I also like how Anthem made a magical item that Vish, a god himself (or at least a demigod, lesser god, whatever he technically is) doesn’t fully understand.Granted, I’d almost be willing to bet five bucks that Anthem doesn’t really know exactly how it works either, not that she’s likely to admit that.
Tamantha is not Zeus, a mere gang leader of some ethnic deities, if I understand correctly it is the Moral Essence itself, yet Vish thinks that it is “useless”, “cruel” and absolutely inapplicable to our (their) world. Vish (a god himself) is declaring Tamantha obsolete.
To that purpose he plans to break four other chains that keep Okidesha prisoner because it seems that Okidesha is a corroding transformation principle that could change The Law itself, making it modern and useful.
This is well beyond the fallibility of particular gods, it is about the fallibility of the Moral Order itself.