Thistledown page 59
October 14th, 2009
What, is Thistle going to annoy the bandits by throwing pebbles at them? Silly squirrel.
(oh, and the “text boxes” are Thistle’s internal monologue. Apparently, you’re not supposed to use thought bubbles anymore.)
Edited on 10/16: I changed the text from “Retrieve a stone from yesterday.” to “Retrieve a stone from pocket five.” Note: pocket five is the fifth pocket in the Belt of Utility, not at all temporally linked to the day before.
October 15th, 2009 at 6:01 am
hmm…. golem?
October 15th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Ummm .. if you read within the boxes … it appears, he is trying to see what happened before the current day. I really doubt the author would be that lame to have an intelligent squirrel throw pebbles. Sheesh
October 15th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
To clarify: Thistle is reaching into a magical belt to retrieve a stone. The belt needs a mental command (Belt of Utility:) to retrieve a specific item stored inside it. That’s why I used the nifty “internal monologue” dialogue box.
Does anyone know why thought bubbles went out of style in comics? I think they make it easier to tell the difference between narration and thoughts. Or are all narrations actually thoughts?
October 15th, 2009 at 8:04 pm
I’m thinking it’s a spell component or a stored spell. A highter quality wizard would be using stored spells.
October 16th, 2009 at 11:13 am
He just retrieved a stone from 24 hours in the past and released the pent up chronologic energy stored within it? That’s gonna make one big BOOM!
October 16th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Aha, the source of confusion was the wording! What I had meant by Thistle’s mental order was “get a stone I put in the belt yesterday”, but it was written as “get a stone from the past”.
I changed the text from “Retrieve a stone from yesterday.” to “Retrieve a stone from pocket five.” Note: pocket five is the fifth pocket in the Belt of Utility, not at all temporally linked to the day before.
October 18th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
I can’t wait to see Thistle uncork the stopper on his magic.
October 22nd, 2009 at 6:00 am
Right now you do have thought bubbles; they are just square…
I don’t think thought bubbles went out of fashion, per se.
For character study comics you definitely need thought balloons.
But some creators don’t like to show their characters thoughts, making the readers into ‘observers’ instead of ‘omniscient observers’.
And I think that is a good trend for storyline comics.
Also, I think the trend is for more “cinematic” comics these days.
In movies you don’t hear thoughts, so thought bubbles aren’t used in that style comic. However, movies sometimes have narration (by a character or otherwise), so some comics use text boxes to emulate that as well. But not all comics need to be cinematic. If you want thought bubbles - use ‘em. I grew up with thought bubble comics, so I’m used to ‘em.
That said, I don’t think it is really necessary for us to see his thoughts on this page. It would be a much more mysterious sequence, true, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Either you could explain in your post comment “Thistledown got a stone from his magic Belt of Utility.” Or even better, let readers wonder what happened until Thistledown has to explain it to his comrades, if he ever does.
October 24th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
who says that he put a pebble in his belt? hes a wizard, that could be a boulder that he shrunk to travel size.
October 24th, 2009 at 5:53 pm
notice he says “release” sounds like removing a spell. size change is the most likely to be usefull in this situation.