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Wow! Four whole pages means this marks about the one-month anniversary of Thay Taruu "going public"! I've got some things in store, and pretty soon we'll be getting out of the totally expositional phase of the comic and finally get into some actual story!

Remember on the first page when I said that I was trying to stay away from exposition but it was really hard? The big reason is because the experts on writing always say that you should "show, not tell." This means that when you write a story, for example, instead of saying "Jimbo felt angry" you would say "Jimbo punched the wall so hard his knuckles bled, but the only sound that escaped his mouth was a primal grunt." Which one is more interesting? Well the second sentence, obviously.

It was a very difficult rule for me to implement into a comic, where if I wanted to stay away from "telling" about the ravaging of the monsters I would have to illustrate them doing something nasty. To do that, I would have to take too much of the focus away from Rod and Pent way too early in the story, and I felt that would be too confusing.

So randomly one day while I was stuck on this page I started thinking about what early Xzeejee art would look like - you know, like petroglyphs, wall-paintings, and their like. Since these pictures have absolutely no language associated with them historians, anthropologists, and other scholarly-types have had a dickens of a time trying to translate them; some seem to be warnings - like a guy illustrated running away from a bear might mean "WATCH OUT FOR BEARS!", or a whole bunch of elk being hunted by a group of men may mean "THERE'S GREAT FOOD HERE". However, once we start moving along man-kind's timeline we start getting to paintings inside of structures that we have made like the frescoes in Crete, and those seem to be illustrations of their way of life, family histories, and even "prophecies" of what their kingdom should look like in the future if everything goes alright.

That got me to thinking what Xzeejee frescoes would look like. What would the paintings "talk about"? What would their message be?

Then it hit me, I could illustrate what was going on in the Xzeejee world using ancient paintings and have the characters discuss those instead. I really feel like this experiment turned out well, because all my friends I have shown the comic to say that this page in particular is their favorite. When I ask them why, they say either it's because the color-scheme is totally different or because "I like the ancient feeling of the page." This is great news to me, and makes me want to cackle like a mad scientist.

I got really attached to this particular style of story-telling, and you'll see it pop back up later on.