Old chapter covers
└ posted on Friday, 5 September 2014, by Novil
Click on the image to see the large version of it:
This image was originally posted as filler art but I removed it from the comic archive after a week so that the flow of the story isn’t harmed by it.
The title and cover for chapter 4 make me think that the symbols on the divine door and Viviana’s hand in TS: 49 represent the three pieces of the Tear of Gaia (= crystals of life?), which would support the theory that our heroes need to obtain all three pieces before they can enter through the door. I really hope Jael gets around to explaining more of the details of her vision to Lilith soon. And I think it will be funny whenever she inevitably runs into San and recognizes her (but will San recognize Jael?).
Chapter 6’s German title is missing an ‘e’. It should be “Treuebruch” instead of “Treubruch”. 😉
I find it fascinating that the chapter names have taken off so far from before. Makes it interesting to wonder how much the story line has changed.
Drunken Nordmann wrote:
Whatever it says, I believe I will have a true brunch instead 😀
@ Scrutinizer:
Did I miss something? Why would San recognize Jael and v.v.?
All-Purpose Guru wrote:
San was the one who appeared to Viviana as cyan girl back on TS: 47-48. Many of us think it was future-San, though, projecting the vision back in time, so Viviana would likely recognize San before San recognizes Viviana.
My favorite chapter cover of these is #1.
PMark wrote:
Same, though every single one of them is simply amazing in their own different ways. All show remarkable talent in craftsmanship of the cover.
I would like to know what game this was a mod of, and if it was ever finished. d°±°b
@ Drunken Nordmann:
Actually “Treubruch” is correct 🙂 Both spellings exist. http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Treubruch
@Arthiem: From the beginning of About/FAQ page:
Also, I guess the covers here aren’t too spoiler-ey, considering that the third chapter is already something different compared to the current storyline. Probably the most revealing is the fourth chapter cover, indicating that the “three” pieces from the symbol on door indeed represent Tear of Gaia fragments (as Scrutinizer pointed out) rather than something, I don’t know, more Trias-ey?
(unless Trias is actually related to the fragments? That would be actually interesting twist, considering that I recall mostly theories about Trias being above Gaia and Bhaal, or something ^^”)
Now to wait for Mooondaaay~!
You know, looking at the “Black Moon” title for chapter 5 made me think about astronomy in the Gaiaverse. After scouring through the entire archive, I find absolutely no views of the sun, moon, stars, or planets. Does this mean there are no other astronomical bodies, or is it just artistic convenience?
I found 84 pages with the day sky or sunlight visible, 17 pages with the night sky or “moonlight” visible, 10 pages with bad weather skies or scenes visible, and 26 pages at either dawn or dusk (all this including flashbacks, flashforwards, etc). On none of these pages is anything visible in the sky except clouds.
However, light rays coming through windows, cycles of light and dark, and the changing of seasons (hinted at with the names of the months in the Glossary) would seem to indicate that Gaia has a sun, that it rotates on an axis, and that its axis is tilted in its orbit around the sun; the existence of months in itself indicates the presence of a moon. The alternative would be that Gaia uses magic to generate all these cycles on its own for the sake of the creatures that inhabit it, but Occam’s Razor suggests that more likely, Gaia does in fact have a sun and a moon. I guess we just haven’t seen them for artistic reasons.
Now the question becomes, where do the sun and moon fit in with the cosmogeny of the Gaiaverse? What is their relation to Gaia and Bhaal (or Trias for that matter)? Did Gaia make them? Were they already there? Did other magic stream filling the cosmos construct them, or did physical matter floating in space congeal to form them naturally?
And that brings us again to the question of stars and planets. Like I already said, nowhere in the comic do we see any stars, whether in the night sky during dark scenes (RH: 13-15, SD: 84-92), or during zoom-outs that show Gaia contrasted against the black emptiness of space (SD: 5, 65). (Now that I mention it, Gaia does seem to generate its own glow in SD: 65, which might provide daylight in lieu of a sun or “nightlight” in lieu of a moon; a subtle glow in the sky is visible in all of the night scenes. It also looks like Bluestream dances around Gaia in large arcs, not unlike a chaotic magnetosphere. I don’t know.) It’s possible that the entire universe consists just of Gaia, its sun, and its moon.
Of note is the common phrase “Dark Heavens”. The Glossary says it refers to the War of Light and Darkness at the end of the First Age, but could it also mean more than that? Could the heavens actually be completely dark beyond the sun and moon? I don’t know.
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tl;dr — Do the sun, moon, or stars even exist in the Gaiaverse? I can’t find any.
Scrutinizer, two things I realized:
1. My screen is dusty. You’re right, there’s no stars there, I just need to wipe down my monitor.
2. TitS 9 appears to have stars, but I’m not even sure on that.
It occurs to me that there’s a great deal of light pollution on Gaia–so many sources, perhaps even the planet itself.
Having that much light pollution would make other sources of light impossible to make out against the backscatter of light.
It’s plausible that even the sun(s) and moon(s) would be occluded by enough energy vibrating in the atmosphere, so we’d never see stars, and the people of Gaia would never imagine them to exist.
@ Sunflower:
oh I had that game. wasn’t as good as the first one but was way better than the MMO.
Scrutinizer wrote:
I wondered how long it will take until anyone finds out…
Looks like my post yesterday didn’t get through? There was no error or email so I’ll just try again. Fortunately I kept a backup.
Sorry if this has been brought up before, I don’t always keep up with the comments and may have missed someone else pointing this out.
I just took a look at a couple random pages and noticed that the wording in Shadowdancers 072, panel 4 is different.
You might want to try recalling the wording yourself before rereading panel 4 before the new wording distracts your memory.
That little arc starts here: Shadowerdancers 069
The original wording made it explicit that Lilith had bewitched Ryn (according to Sarah’s beliefs, not reality obviously) and that the illusion would fade after Lilith’s execution. The new wording makes no such concept explicit, it may be weakly implied though.
Sarah: Once the traitor receives her proper punishment, you’ll surely come to your senses again.
I’m not complaining, this is a cosmetic change that doesn’t really matter to the plot. Mainly because Sarah herself doesn’t matter (she serves a purpose, certainly, but she herself has not appeared before or since), barring some kind of dramatic re-entrance where she’s trying to track down Ryn and free him. Actually, that might actually be pretty interesting if Ryn has gotten over what she said. But anyway, what I am really wondering is just how many little changes there have been and do any of them, say, add or remove foreshadowing? Could be important to our speculations or simply to see what improvements Novil has tried over the years.
Aha! So the problem is that you can’t post links! …But that can’t be right, an HTML tag for link is provided right below the rules.
–Putting my link within that tag still fails to get through so you people will just have to get to the page through the archive.
@ Silhalnor:
I have found that for some reason, links to the “sandra and woo . com / gaia” domain make the comment system give up on posts. Links to other websites, however, work just fine. Otherwise, I would be putting links on all my references to other pages of the comic.
Novil wrote:
I realized a few months ago, but I never got around to bringing it up until now. So does that mean that there are in fact no other heavenly bodies, or just no stars? Sounds kind of lonely.
Scrutinizer wrote:
If you ask an inhabitant of Gaia than he will say that there is nothing else.
Novil wrote:
So, is it the backscatter? There’d be no reason for day and night if there wasn’t a celestial body, but the possibility of it being obscured is definite.
I have a feeling that the three tears of Gaia are something you initially had to acquire in the game, so naturally the playable characters (presuming some of our beloved characters) have to acquire them as well.