Do you remember when last we saw Luther? Waiting for a date who never showed up? Poor guy had a rough night.
The website finally has a little favicon! I don’t know why it makes me absurdly happy to see a teeny little Luther face up there in the browser bar, but I’m not going to question it.
With a new Pope comes the inevitable wave of mainstream media types talking about the first Nicaean council and what the difference is between a Jesuit and a Franciscan. This means that normal non-religious people are briefly interested in weirdo bits of church history!
If you’re in the mood to take advantage of this, allow me to suggest that you browse the handy Wikipedia entry for Christian heresies and brush up on some of the theological disputes that plagued past centuries. (My favorite one is Docetism; find your own!)
Yes! Finally, Luther is back! You know–and please don’t take this the wrong way, because I love this comic–but for the past few months I’ve been so frustrated with Family Man I almost gave up on it. (Note the ‘almost’. Reality is I started checking for updates once every two weeks instead of every Friday : ) )
But I really did have some problems with the last bit. Please see this only as criticism of a reader who loves your work and who will keep on reading it, and who will also buy the second volume the moment it comes out. It is, however, definitely criticism.
Before Ariana’s trip into the wood it was a catchy, sweet, intellectual romance with the thrill of something bestial lurking around the corner. I like the Luther/Ariana romance, her relationship with her father, the studying…and then we are suddenly introduced to all these women we’ve never seen before, and they keep on talking about things we know little to nothing about, referring to one another as if they should mean something to the reader–and they don’t. 9 wolfwomen (or is it 10, or 8, I forget; a lot). Bam, 9 more characters, just like that, interacting mainly with one another and occasionally with Ariana. Two months of chattering women I simply don’t care about, because they’ve just been introduced and honestly do not seem that interesting, and all they do is snipe and cook and cure a pelt and talk about family…things.
I’m sure they are very important to the story. So far your storytelling is great, so the way they’re introduced must have a good reason. I will reread the whole bit with them and see if their conversations make more sense to me if I read them in one go instead of in little bits. It’s not that I don’t understand who they are, it’s just too much information at once. And I’m not sure if their introduction to the comic could (or even should) have been done in a different way. All I can say is that their intervention seemed like a very long and rather boring one, and that I am very happy we can finally leave them and return to poor jilted Luther.
No worries, Kitty! One of the weird features of the page-at-a-time web publishing is that sections which might go by quickly in print are stretched out to several weeks. Which can be kind of fun when you’re particularly enjoying a section, kind of maddening when you hit a bunch of exposition or a story detour. This is probably the longest section Luther will ever go off-screen for, though, and later on I hope this section will pay off for you!