2002-11-15: Two Thousand Years Later

[The Comment Golem]

Discussion thread for Two Thousand Years Later.

New posts about this page or the commentary track version of this page should happen in this thread, but if you're curious the original discussion thread for this comic happened over on the Kyhm Forums. You can read it here.

[The Comment Golem]

Discussion thread for [CT] Two Thousand Years Later

[Ori Klein]

Kurma(k), Poe. How could you forget?

[taltamir]

honestly, I also found it funny.

[Forrest]

I know it's super too late to comment on this, but I really kinda liked the way the old version of this page actually said, on the page not just in the HTML title, "Two Thousand Years Later". At least I think I remember it saying that. (And the first page didn't have "two thousand years ago" on it, either). It made a very emotional transition from young, hopeful, scared Sarine, to "two thousand years later", an apparently cold heartless killing machine.

[Imp-Chan]

The prologue does not appear in the final version of the story. The content from it does appear, just not at the very beginning of the book, it's mixed in later. That's why the pages are lettered differently. The bit with Sarine and Darren appears at the start of the new Chapter Two (which bears no relation to the old Chapter Two) and does not say anything about present day because there's nothing to indicate it might be anything else with the new placement in the story, while the flashback with pregnant Sarine is at the start of the new Chapter 6 (which is also wholly unrelated to the original Chapter Six), and does indicate that it takes place in the past.

Basically, the scenes from the first two volumes of the story got seriously scrambled because we were trying to focus on a single strong story thread. Now the first volume reads like this:

Chapter One: Meji picks her quest and sets out. More or less the same as the original Chapter One, just with more art and better spaced dialogue.

Chapter Two: Sarine kills Darren in the bar. Meji arrives in Saus, meets and rescues Chris, and decides to get the hell out of town. Obviously, this is not the original Chapter Two. Again, more pages, better lettering.

Chapter Three: Meji wanders in the woods and meets Jon. At the very end of the chapter, a hooded stranger appears from the darkness and apologetically beats up a priest. More pages, better lettering. That's gonna be a theme, so I'll stop saying it now.

Chapter Four: Jon awakens Meji with early morning gunfire and they walk to Emerylon. Meanwhile in Eastern Veracia, Sara beats up a bunch of guys with guns.

Chapter Five: Meji tries to sneak into the Heretic Knowledge Vault and it goes about as well as expected. She meets Ian, and he sets fire to things. At the end of the chapter, Jon meets with the Gewehr Wraiths and emerges from his meeting straight into the Arsonist Errant Fan Club.

Chapter Six: Sarine's flashback of her pregnancy and the flashback of her husband's death run together in one big sucker punch of tragedy. She emerges from her reverie to continue asking questions in Saus. Back in Emerylon, Meji and Ian sneak out of the city and Jon catches up with them in time to prove he has an excellent understanding of how Meji's mind works.

Chapter Seven: Our trio plus Ellis wander in the woods talking to each other, and when they camp we get to hear a whole lot of mythology that sounds irrelevant but isn't. At the very end of the chapter Sarine hunts down a thug in Saus.

Chapter Eight: Meji and Ian bond, Jon shoots Ellis, they try to decipher the book a bit, and then Meji takes a bath. Come morning, our merry band of criminals gets back on the road. I really wanted the bit with Sarine hunting down the thug to be at the end of this chapter instead so it could be a stinger for the whole volume, but it didn't fit. C'est la vie.

So, as you can see, all the same content is there, it's just in a much more focused order. We wanted to avoid the original problem where the first three chapters were about three different characters with no idea of how they intersected, and instead give the story a solid touching-off point which new readers would be hooked by. The first page of the story in the revised edition is, approximately, this one, though actually it is not that page at all and is brand new art with only the start of that dialogue and a bit of sarcastic captioning. Because I took one look at the speech bubble dominance on that page and ran screaming from the room until I could figure out how to break up the dialogue to a sane level. Of course, then I changed the book dimensions, so actually I have to redo the lettering and page layouts yet again for that bit of the story.

-_-'

[Graybeard]

Thanks for that dump.

I didn't realize until I went back and looked at this page again, that the town where Sarine wiped out Derren Felmel had acquired a name -- "Bardus Sopora." Wikification coming up. Incidentally, I am not making any changes to the wiki at this time to map the original sequence of comics comprehensively onto the new one. That probably should be done at some point, but best to wait until some of the dust settles.

Also incidentally, if any other people, places or things have acquired names in the reboot that I don't know about, please drop me a line. I haven't done much on the wiki for ages, for the simple and obvious reason that there hasn't been much to do. However, it's still there, and will be updated as more little tidbits like this crop up.