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Eric: There's something just right about "Renn Fest" Kestrel in sepia, and "Goth" Kestrel in greyscale, isn't there?

(From the Queen of Wands Rapid Fire Reruns. Click on the thumbnail for full sized avoidance!)

For those of you not following along on the Queen of Wands "Rapid Fire Reruns," where Aeire puts up the once thrice-weekly strips seven days a week and annotates and comments on them, this is a good time to go have a look, because this is the point in Queen of Wands where something interesting is going on.

Specifically, this is the point in the comic where Aeire went for the Cerebus Syndrome. And as one of the very few to actually pull it off, watching the actual points of shift is fascinating.

A number of things are happening here. Beyond the simple elaboration of story and backstory and the fleshing out and deepening of everything that's going on, Aeire's also growing in sophistication as a visual storyteller and as a writer. We went to sepia tones for a flashback (and then -- and I think this is hysterical -- we went to full greyscale for a flashback being told inside the flashback. At the time, I wondered if we'd go to black and white line art and another two year jump back in time next, and then maybe Microsoft Paint....), and her panels began to separate from one another to give more room for the dialogue boxes in between. The story began to fully take center stage at this point. You can even see the lightning path she used to tie her panels together visually appearing here -- interestingly, it's in the foreground, actually changing the shades of the greyscale here.

I was a Queen of Wands fan almost from the beginning -- I don't remember when I did the archive trawl on it, but it was pretty early. I remembered being startled by the more serious tone of some of these strips (and they get more serious still over the next few coming days), but I got pretty caught up in it. Later on, it looked to me like Aeire was moving fully into First and Ten syndrome. But then she hit a twist that threw the whole thing into perspective, and kept going up.

So, students of the form should be following along. They should be reading Aeire's notes on the process. And most of all, they should be seeing the way a Cerebus Syndrome that ended up working looked during the process. This is a good time to be following along with a so-called "rerun."

Posted by Eric Burns-White at June 9, 2005 1:48 PM

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