I’m never sure if things are entirely as clear as I’d like them to be, but in this scene, the spear is pinning Roka to the wall by going through his shirt sleeve, not his actual body. His face would definitely be registering a lot more pain if it were his body!
And here we find out something interesting about Jayd’s energy weapons: they dissipate! Ideally I would’ve liked to convey that it takes a bit more time for them to slowly disappear, but I couldn’t really find a way to do it. I feel like I would’ve had to show Roka getting pinned by the spear, cut away to some other action, and then come back to Roka as the spear dissolves. I think it would’ve been do-able if I just had some other random fight beat to cut to, but I wanted the next beat to be a big Bocce moment, and it would’ve felt weird to come back to Roka after that. So I just kept the two Roka moments together in a single beat.
I am curious. What inspired you to create Runners? I bet it was Mass Effect game, lol. I love & admire the unique diversity of aliens, characters, environment design, & interesting plot. Great work as always! Kudos 🙂
Ha ha! Actually RUNNERS predates Mass Effect by many, many years. It actually predated Star Wars Episodes I-III! I thought up the series back in the mid-1990’s when there was a pretty big drought in sci-fi. Star Wars was kinda dead at that point, and having grown up on the original trilogy, I really wanted to do a comic series that captured that same sense of fun space adventure, especially since nothing like that was being done at the time (my series also predated Firefly). The first volume of RUNNERS actually came out in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, it has taken much longer to get going on the series than anticipated, with various stops and starts due to freelance work. But I have a much better plan now to balance that out, so I aim to tell the remaining story (which is fully planned out) without significant pauses.
The spear sequence is very well drawn.
I’m not sure it makes sense to show the whole sequence in one flow though, because now the spear seems to disappear rather quickly and it takes some flow out of the fight. If you did show Jayd get a few hits on the others her strategy becomes clear right away and it pays off for her.
But… I think we something big when we turn the page? 🙂
Out of interest, did Jayd spare Roka purposefully or was it sheer luck he only needs a tailor and not a doctor. We have seen that Jayd has no particular compunction against killing.
It was on purpose. The way I saw it, in the previous scene with the random thugs, she was dispatched with specific orders that allowed for her to take them out. In this case, she was sent to retrieve info only (since Tylo did not know that Roka actually had one of the Sky clones on his ship). In seeing Sky, Jayd changed the plan to bring tangible proof back to Tylo. But she knows that Tylo would then want to decide Roka’s fate himself. So she spared him…for now!
What a considerate worker Jayd is. She better get employee of the month for this.
I think she gets it EVERY month. But only because everyone else smartly declines.