A large portion of Stygans are martially obsessed – they’re not totally a monoculture like Klingons or Ferengi, but the ones that aren’t are like an Asian guy in the 80’s. Everyone just assumes he knows kung fu.

Maxima’s not wrong, that a Stygan turning down a duel would be notable, especially one wearing an armored cuirass in public – but it’s not like there’s never been a Stygan that’s gone out on the town looking to get some dinner, dancing, dating and dueling in, and wound up eating a fermented Brax roe burrito and discovered that his sphincters are sequentially and rapidly losing their own duels with his meal. Saying “I’d love to duel but my butt is about to dishonor me all over the dance floor.” is a perfectly acceptable response. No one wants to experience Saturday Night Dengue Fever in the middle of a grapple.

Yeah, there are Stygan dickheads who will look for non-martial edges to bolster their own egos, but it’s really martial reputation that most of them are after, and some guy who squirts Visine into his opponent’s water bottle with wind up being ridiculed and shunned, not lauded for his prowess. I mean… usually. There are always little echo chamber cliques of cult-of-personality sycophants, but they are thankfully few and far between in Stygan society.

I realize while reading the page just before posting it, but in Panel 5, Samketh (the mouthy punk) is supposed to be implying that him talking during the duel up to this point was his attempt to distract Max/Egoma with banter, but unless you happen to have my brain, (and I suspect very few people do) I’m not sure that’s at all clear. I think it reads more like he’s implying that Max was the one being chatty, except that doesn’t make sense as the only thing she said since the duel started was “Give me back my funnel cake,” and that wasn’t even directed at him.

And by the way, “Egoma” is my attempt to extend the naming convention I used with the alien mercenaries that attacked the team in New York. They were all anagrams of Greek letters. Egoma is obviously Omega, Detla… I hope I don’t have to tell you what letter that is. Lapha is Alpha. Garamm is… Well, it’s Gamma, only I somehow managed to stick an “R” in there cause sometimes me not brain good. I probably can’t run with that scheme for too much longer because a lot of Greek letters have very short names. I mean, “Rho” can only become “Roh” or “Hor,” probably not the best name. Or “Ohr,” or “Orh.”

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Ooh, look! A new vote incentive! And it’s updated with color!

Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.

By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.

 

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Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.