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Axing Nicely...
 (From Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. Click on image to see full-sized image. Older archives of RoCR are found on Modern Tales and require a subscription in order to read.)
Heh. It's a touch strange seeing Kel drawn this way. I'm not talking the black and white line drawings... but with the (from GPF) Ki-like eyes... and there's something slightly different with the nose as well, I'm not really sure what. Maybe it's a tad more bulbous. Still, it's interesting to see what's not changed, such as body styles and hair, and the fact that Reinder is able to go with a variety of facial designs instead of sticking with just one basic design.
I mean it. If you look at CRfH, most of the characters have the same basic body design (and definitely similar facial features - it's easier to determine people by their hair than their faces... which may be why I have some troubles distinguishing characters in other comics who have similar hair, I'm used to distinguishing characters due to a small number of comics I read for years).
Reinder shows his skills as both a storyteller and someone who can tell a humorous story here. The thing is, this story is a decade old. I don't know how much Reinder did (I think he had the old scans still on disk, but he might have rescanned the old artwork itself which shows he takes far better care of his older works than I did mine *grin* And he had to translate them into English while making it funny...) to get them up to this level of quality, but I have to say this is absolutely superb work.
The joke helps. I mean, Kel is threatening a man with an imaginary invisible frog. Well, with the threat of being turned into an imaginary invisible frog, but still. And the guy falls for it! (Of course, I get the general feeling shopkeepers aren't exactly bright in this century, as Otra proceeds to rob a bunch of stores with impunity and get away with it without any sort of guards chasing them down. Though she does hex someone in the final robbery, so... (not to mention hexing Tamlin for being a twit).
Kel's final comments help fill out the joke, of course. I mean, it's such a (pardon the pun) transparent ploy that it shouldn't have worked. But it did. (Of course, I have to wonder at the feasibility of hacking through a wooden stockade to get into a festival; wouldn't someone overhear the axe hitting the logs over and over again?)
Still, it's nice to glimpse into the past of RoCR and see how the characters became who they are. Seeing them in such clean crisp line art unlike oh so many other old comic archives is a nice bonus.
Robert A. Howard
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