Volume III: Page 04
There they are! Our completely lost adventurers XD
Hey, did you know next week (on halloweeeeeen itself), I’ll be starting up another webcomic? It’s called Banquet and it’ll be up at www.banquetcomic.com! The website is still under a bit of construction but there you have it. It’s for a bit of an older crowd than Bird Boy so it may not be your cup of tea if little cuties like Bali are your kind of characters, but there are some similarities too (all of my comics may or may not just be vehicles for me to draw strange monsters, sooo….)
Anyways last time I tried working on two webcomics at once I imploded, but now I am older and wiser so I am used to imploding on a biweekly basis anyways so I’ll just…deal with that.
Anyways I will see you all next week! *implodes*
As long as you can keep this comic going as well as your new one, I’ll enjoy looking at both.
Oh no worries there. Since Bird Boy actually has deadlines and such, there’s much more of a chance the other one will just be a bit slower if I need to reorganize priorities!
Also, I’m loving the rock carvings. Can clearly see Rook man lifestyle going on. Fun to speculate what those pictures mean.
Bali has been elevated to a higher level. They grow up so fast! Or, he just climbed a tree.
Anne Szabla, if you keep imploding it’s not healthy!
Re: Banquet.
You seem to have a fascination with scythes, swords, and other pointy objects. I can see you running with scissors as an ankle-biter.
Oh, Bali. Of course there is a river. I can see it.
(Hey, I hail from Aridzona. There, most of the rivers are nice and clean beds with no nasty water to make it harder to see them.)
Not to mention tusks of all types, horns, horns and tusks for teeth. Hard to imagine how the beasts can eat with them, but they look cool.
Speaking of which, what did the beasts eat before there were people? What do they eat when no people are around? Do beasts eat other beasts? I hope we get to see.
this is the first time we’re seeing Bali without some kinda headdress right?
2nd or 3rd time I think. We saw him w/o it when he was floating down the river and I think the time where he took it off to sleep after finding Sid. But yeah it seems uncommon for him to take it off, but a shame because he has a cute face.
yeah
The pillars with little trees on top reminded me of baobabs, a resemblance I suspect was intentional.
Given the lack of more obvious utility (particularly in the warm area of the inner Liminal Wood), I figured that for safety a mask *had* to be worn when in the open as some sort of ritual protection, especially in the Wood or its margins (either as proven effective measure, or as a superstition). Maybe against some danger of being turned into Rook Men or one of the varieties of beasts we’ve seen (like the human-forelimbed, human-mask-faced wolves) that have masks that are parts of them?
Note that the city dwellers from before the exodus, as shown in page 2 of this chapter apparently went about maskless. Then it shows them with masks as they flee. However, the Nuru people shown all the way back in Volume I, page 1 (which, according to the history described in this chapter, must have happened later, after the Nuru became a separate people) were again not wearing masks.
The carving at the lower right appears to be the story of the Halfway Beast and the Rook Men shown on V. I, p. 1 (drawn a little differently here but clearly the same story). It raises the question of who engraved it. By the the time of Mali Mani’s battle with the Halfway beast, the exodus from the wood had already happened, it seems. So were these erected and engraved by the Rook Men? Beasts?
By the way, it seems unfortunate that the disappearance of the old pages took with it the old pages’ comments. (Including authorial responses.)
If the general procedure will be that chapters disappear from the Web as they get published in print, will there eventually be a series of chapter-by-chapter synopses, standing in for the missing chapters?
You might be able to find the comments and old pages on webarchive. http://bird-boy.com/
To see the earlier pages you have to go to the Wayback Machine header where it says “87 (or however many) captures)”. Click on that, select a year, and then a highlighted date in that year’s calendar. Whew!
Is this the first time we see him with out a hat?
no.