Joyce and Walky!

I’ve talked before about how it’s harder to do fight scenes in webcomics.  Any other medium, including paper comics, and you can have, like, a stream of actions that runs until it ends, read at the reader’s pace.  Webcomics mete out their fight scenes in a limited number of panels per day.    That could be one character punching the other, and the other character kicking back, and that’s it for 24 hours.  It effs the shit outta your pacing.  I’ve tried to get around this in various ways in the past few years, probably most memorably in a quintupled megastrip from Shortpacked!, but that’s not a realistic or desirable solution most of the time.

Now imagine instead of tracking just two characters, you’re showing two casts from two different strips fighting each other at the same time.  You have to be very surgical in what you decide is important, and what you decide you ultimately need to focus on.

Clearly, after a few days of hopping around and showing glimpses of a larger struggle, T and I are about to zoom in on what we thought was the main event.

You knew it was going to come down to this. I mean, maybe you knew because you saw the promo art that aired on Fans or maybe you remembered Rumy and Ally’s conversation from like a dozen strips ago, or maybe you just realized who the biggest action star of each strip was. The point is, you’re smart.

Rumy using her Michael Jordan-meets-Chuck-Norris aeronautic tactics against someone who can actually fly is a fun image, but she needed the loan of Alisin’s signature weapon to attack Joyce’s jetpack and really even things up in this fight.

It’s… not entirely clear how she got it, though. Alisin had it herself here and doesn’t seem to have it here: her outfit’s less likely to conceal it than Rumy’s is. The most sense-making explanation is that she passed it to Rumy in the few seconds when the Fans were realizing a fight was inevitable but most eyes were focused on the pit. I think that’s what I had in mind. It’s a nice surprise, but I think I’d do a bit more to set it up if we were doing this now.