19

May 2014

Chapter 4: Page 15 - More Dakka!

Posted by / in Comic / 65 comments

Happy Monday all! Hopefully you had good weekends and stuff.

My apologies to those who thoughts the monks would have super wushu-tastic fight moves, but it is hard to compete against tanks. Also, there is a special little bonus easter egg on this page. Two of the frightened NPCs may look familiar, if you look hard enough ;)

Don’t forget to vote for us!

EDIT: Just found out we got a nice little cameo on today’s Black Mudpuppy page. Thanks Ethan :D

  • Sebastián Píriz

    Terrific page!

  • Amberlight

    A shame that monks had no RPG. The bandits would get hell of a welcoming otherwise.

    • Very true. Unfortunately they didn’t get started on the arms race with bandits until much too late. Pacifism and all ;)

    • CitizenWill

      I’m not sure even an RPG would have done the trick. MBTs can usually take a licking from one of those.

      • Amberlight

        I’m not sure that a direct hit of super-heated plasma string can be survivable… Well, if the angle is steep enough than yes, not always fatal. But well-aimed shot will most likely leave a centimeter-wide hole on the outside and a completely charred everything on the inside.

        • It would probably depend on how awesome this tank is, and how awesome the RPG was. Then answer to both is probably not very. Most all weaponry by this point is 50+ years old.

          • Amberlight

            And then another question arises - what the hell is Abrams doing in China?:D
            They use their own tanks and Russian imports.

          • Probably got left behind by the US during some sort of invasion/battle/occupation thing. Or maybe it just looks cooler :P

        • That looks like an M1 Abrams mod, in which case a regular RPG would bounce off. Unless you get it in the engine grille in the back- a few M1s were lost that way in 2003-2004. Iraqis would have to wait until the tanks rolled by, which is hard-core enough; then they pop out among all the support forces, run like rabbits to the back of the tank at point-blank range, and put one right in the engine. Boom.

          Iraqis that did that never got second chances… but that’s because an organized army always has follow-on forces and support units nearby. If the bandits aren’t that professional, the monks might have been able to do it- had they known.

          • Oh yeah! You actually know answers to this sort of real life stuff! Remind me to email you with questions :D

          • Any time! :-)

  • Jason Clayton

    as per the Easter egg faces, i assume that you aren’t referring to Tenzin And Indira smack dab center of the crowd

    • Hehe no. But if you look slightly to the left, you might see some guys who look a little out of place. (Hint: I left a monster give-it-away clue on the FB page update text).

  • That Evil Wolf

    Amazing page and amazing comic. On another note “Boss! We needz moar dakka and shiny bitz!”

    • Thank you very much sir! “Yarhg n we let out da zecret weapon boss thingy!” ;)

      Mind me asking how you found us? It’s always good to know which promotion strategies are working :D

      • That Evil Wolf

        I used to be an ork like you, but then I took an Eldar to the everything.

        If I remember correctly I think I found you guys by voting for one of my long time following Web Comics on TWC. I noticed the ad. and decided that I might check out the web comic. Very much glad I did now.

        • Oh excellent! That TWC square ad has definitely been one of the best ads we’ve done.

          I look forward to hearing more of your thoughts on future pages :D

  • Mark White

    I like the perspective of the tank! It’s…..boom! It’s there and bullets and brass are flying. Great action shot!

    • NickDA

      Yeah, I like how Nico’s play with the panel boundaries allows the tank turret to come “out” of the page :D

  • Delta-v

    Different machinery, same slimeball types attacking. Some things just keep repeating themselves.

    I also notice that the front-line defenders seem to mostly have edged melee weapons. Even without the tank, there’s not much they can do against firearms until they close to hand-to-hand range. I saw the automatic weapons rack, so that puzzles me a bit. Artistic licence, possibly? :) In any case, it’s a great action page. Well done, Nico! :)

    • Indeed.

      And that is partial artistic license, and also partially that it didn’t quite come off that they had very few, and only crappy weapons on that rack, and that most of the monks had to make do with something else.

      • Delta-v

        Yeah, I got just the opposite impression, so that explains a lot. The poor monks didn’t have much of a chance, then even without facing the tank. It’s still a great page, though. :)

  • Karla Sharp

    The Nick and Dan monks look a lot happier than the other ones :)

  • In case you didn’t figure it out, that’s a cameo of Nick and myself in Panel 4, on the left behind arm-sling guy :D

  • jerry mcmasters

    Cool coloring on the tank. Even has some graffiti.

    • Well you wouldn’t want to just have a boring tank without some personal decorations on it, would you? ;)

    • Not just the graffiti- the mountain goat skull on the front, too. Ha!

      • They normally keep a teddy bear up there, but the raider boss made them switch it out with something more intimidating before the raid ;)

  • Hey I thought the Big Action Scene was over! Is Tenzin going to quietly reflect on this in the future? Is this the Thing he is rather remorseful about that He Couldn’t Do More To Save Them?

    • I feel like those capitalized phrases should link to TV Tropes pages.

      And since this is a flashback/nightmare/memory, I’d say Tenzin is currently reflecting on these events.

  • Ydo Ucare

    I think my favorite bad guy is the one with the gut sticking out of his crappy armor. Everyone else has washboard abs and he’s just like “What, we don’t have beer bellies in the future?”

    • Hehehehe! I’d never noticed that! So true. Bravo Nico for the attention to detail ;)

    • Yeah, that’s a cool detail as well- different body shapes, etc.

  • Shame is, with the proper training, the monks could have -if not totally beat these guys- at least made it painful enough to force them to withdraw. It would have been costly, though. Infantry vs. tank is hard, but it can be done. The bandits appear to be undisciplined thugs (hence bandits, duh) so the monks could have done some real damage.

    • Too bad you didn’t live in this monastery ;)

      • Dreadogastus

        I gotta’ say, what happened to the monks grabbing up their own auto-rifles?

        • Twas a case of “too little, too late”, and that the previous page made it look like they have more guns than they actually do. It was supposed to look like a very sparse armory, and that most of the monks would have to use melee weapons instead.

  • Adriano #WR

    Omg, a tank ???

  • Well this is a little bit of me not thinking of it, these particular monks not thinking of it, and the plot as you see it needing to happen.

    But now I totally want to tell a mini-story where a band of people are surviving in a sweet cave set up with tons of crossbow traps :D

    • Demetri Ermak

      That sounds like a great thing just waiting to happen!

      Anyway, they could think that their little valley is, you know, “totally safe”. And the bows wouldn’t make much of a difference if the raiders are so keen on advancing the script. “Push on men! We need to make the boy’s PTSD nightmares even worse! Shoot the elders! Make obscene gestures! Did you bring the puppy we wanted to kick?” Raiders love a good comics, anyway.

      • Hehe, I forgot my other go to excuse: this flashback is actually a PTSD nightmare and is not necessarily 100% historically accurate ;)

        • Demetri Ermak

          I think this is the best reason: it’s a nightmare. In the nightmare he can’t remember a single Raider dying before they advanced, even if they actually lost a couple men and an APC to mines, for example. It could be a long siege with dozens of raiders and monks dying before that actual siege took place - because raiders found a derelict tank in that valley and managed to make it move, but not shoot, and all it did was that it knocked down the wall and crashed into the column - but that’s just not how he remember it.
          It is even possible that both sides were armed with bows with only a handful of rifles on both sides, but he just didn’t remember them.

  • Delta-v

    The monastery itself most probably pre-dated the war and plague, and caves have their own problems, usually with ventilation-getting oxygen into the back areas-because if you do have ventilation, it means you have an exploitable hole somewhere. And you’re right about crossbows, but these guys didn’t even seem to have many ordinary bows, either. They seem to be more in sharp-things-and-pointy-sticks mode. As for the firearms, my father once told me that a poorly-maintained rifle is nothing more than a fancy club. :)

    • Demetri Ermak

      There are “mountain monasteries” that are not located in some underground caves - more in caves that are over the ground, allowing for an easy defence with even small forces. I’ve seen those on Sri-Lanka, I will try and find examples right now.
      One is on top of a flat-top mountain with a single place where you can climb up - and it’s like a ladder five to six meters high. The only way to get up is climbing. A single guy with a hammer could kill dozens (it’s a something close to 30-meter fall on granite, deadly) This was a Lanka’s King palace.
      Another is a monastery with lots of rooms that goes up in the mountain wall. The actual road is hidden behind a 140-meter long wall, so that it could be protected from inside but those laying siege wouldn’t see what’s going on inside andor shoot from ground up.

    • Demetri Ermak

      So, the Lankan mountain “fortresses” I was talking about are Sigiriya - the Lion Mountain, the one with a palace
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigiriya

      And the second one is Dambulla Cave Temple.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dambulla_cave_temple

      I consider myself really lucky that I got a chance to see both of them with my own eyes)

      • Sounds to me like if I were to write a short story of anyone in Sri Lanka, that Sirgiriya would have been a great HQ for a new organization/government. Assuming people with mortars and bombs didn’t just blow it up first :(

        • Demetri Ermak

          It held siege against English in XIX for a couple of years with all their artillery, so I guess it is formed of some extremely sturdy rock.
          One could take out everyone on top out with a single attack helicopter, but I think you need a hell of organization to have a working helicopter that far in the future, especially when it’s about the IndiaCeylon jungle - everything is covered in jungle and rusted beyong recognition in mere years. I saw cars not older than 2003 that looked as if they are standing there since WWII. The roads will be destroyed in, like, 10-20 years, and the cities will take about as much in that kind of weather. Though the people there are living a pretty homely life, so probably they’ll just revert back to the way of pre-colonisation. Except for tea, it grows great in Nuvara Elia. So if it took British a century to conquer Sri Lanka with all their Empire might, no raiders could withstand the need to destroy a buddhist society that will be returned to their “original” state.
          Especially since guerilla warfare is something they are really good at, and rice is plenty. Some guy will just announce himself the new King. So, it’s less of a post-apocalypse and more of an Apocalypse Now thing.

        • Demetri Ermak

          Daniel, by the way, did you try out the book I recommended?
          I have a question, maybe you know someone who’d like to help me out with editing what I’ll translate? I’m thinking of actually trying to translate the “Wolfhound” book, and a book by a friend of mine, “Black-blood diamond” a marvelous fantasy that is.

          • I have not had the time yet (been real busy with baby and with big med school test), but plan on it. And if you can get it into understandable English, I can help it sound more natural and fluent. @disqus_8XKHAw4roh:disqus translates our stuff from English -> Russian, and maybe would be willing to help you to do the opposite if you asked nicely?

          • Demetri Ermak

            That would be more than I even wished for, a help from someone who writes such dialogues like the last one. I think I’ll start with my friend’s one, then, and go on with the second part. I think the best idea would be making a digital copy and providing Amberlight with one - if he’d like the book as much as I did, we could work out some kind of translation alliance. I will look for real translator communities, I’m sure they could provide at lease useful software and tips, those would definitely help. And thanks again for an offer.

          • Np. Just email me at dan at demonarchives when you need to talk about it :)

          • Demetri Ermak

            That’s great. I won’t bug you, I promise, I will send you the first chapter in full as soon as I’ll finish it)

  • Azyzl

    It looks like someone brought knives to the tank fight.

    • Yeah, this is a common theme in the next couple sequences too ;)

  • Augh, poor people!

  • Citrus Reaper

    Fact: During World War II, the British Home Guard issued a bunch of Anti-Tank pikes. I don’t think anyone actually knew what they were supposed to do against a tank with spears, but it’s pretty amusing.

    • Wait, seriously? Awesome! I want one :D

    • Bob Dillon

      Fact: The pike’s you are referring to were known as Croft’s Pikes and were never actually issued to any British Home Guard troops. Neither were they meant to be an anti tank weapon, but your ignorance is pretty amusing.

      • Citrus Reaper

        For the sake of Dad’s Army based comedy, I choose to disbelieve you.

  • theRoUS

    Okey, weird throw-pattern for the spent brass.. And does the Big Gun still have its tompion installed?

    • Heh. Well I do have artists who AREN’T gun enthusiasts. And even with google I’m not 100% sure what a tompion is XD

      • theRoUS

        A tompion is typically some sort of plug for a muzzle, to keep rain and other detritus from getting into and fouling the barrel and fragging the crew on the first shot. :-) Never been happy with films showing wide-aperture muzzles being used as head-on battering rams..

        • Oh it wasn’t a battering ram. It exploded the door/walls in and then just drove thru :)

          • theRoUS

            Okey, so that’s smoke coming *out* of the muzzle, not stuff dangling *on* it. Good enough.

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