PaRARGdox 138
Look, up in the sky! Is it a bird? uh, kinda…??: Jaxine Jax is a second year cadet, we’ve seen her here and there before. Most noticeably in the Olaf Mystery when she failed to rescue poor Svetty… lucky her, she can still fly. Or maybe not so lucky… (Some readers did dispute her ability to do this following the depowering… I still contend her ability is physical, not magical, in nature… 🙃)
For anyone who remembers page 9 of PaRARGdox… you may already suspect what’s about to happen. Spoiler alert, it’s not good for Jaxine.
Update schedule: This page is a day early, for reasons. The good news is that I have built up a nice buffer of pages, and I’m hoping to roll those out twice a week for the time being. 2022 is off to a good start.
Happy New Year: 2021 was pretty rough on most of us, I hope you and your loved ones are safe, healthy and able to navigate the year ahead. It’s been pretty rough on all our Magellan characters too… might there be light at the end of the tunnel? I’m fully invested in telling this story and getting the voting incentive story back up and running. Not a resolution, but a firm intention! Thank you for reading Magellan – whether you’ve joined in the last week, been in and out for a while, or a hard core long term reader for many years, your enjoyment of this little comic I make is deeply appreciated!
Patrons: Over on Patreon page 143 is now up – page 144 soon…
Next update: Sunday, January 8, 2022: Jaxine’s fate (I think we can all pretty much guess it by now…!)
I like the detail of the zippers on the back of her shirt
Thanks! 🙂
Agree, so many fliers apparently have so flexible wings they can get them through small holes …
She can be spotted in panel 5 of page 9 of this chapter.
I’m guessing that people pointed out tgat her wingspan isn’t big enough for Jaxine to fly so she needs a magic power to fly? Worse comes to worse you can always say she’s got a biological process that alters how gravity affects her. Ambrosia’s entirely natural power messes with how time works for her, it’s really not a stretch by comic book standards.
What about Olaf having *all* his powers, including levitation? Why IS Ambrosia’s mental timeslip unaffected? The best answer right now seems to be “the plot requires it”. Maybe there will be an in-the-Magellanverse answer later 🤷
I used Ambrosia as an example because her power is apparently completely biology-based, while Olaf seems more like a magical power that also includes an internal energy source that means he doesn’t need to be connecte?
I imagine an engineer could potentially calculate the maximum weight she would have to be to gain sufficient lift with wings that size (granted, not a knock on Grace’s artistic skill, but I don’t believe Jax’s wings have been illustrated with a rigorous attention to consistency for size).
I believe I’ve seen before that the wingspan an adult human would need in order to fly is over 6 meters? Granted Jaxine is not an adult, and she has a light build, but I can see why some might feel that her wingspan is insufficient.
Definitely. Her wingspan is not big enough, she couldn’t have enough strength for vertical liftoff and the ANGLE her wings are in looks incorrect too.
(I suspect I was one of those who commented in past that her flight must be magic-assisted. Or assisted by something else, but definitely not pure physical. On the other hand, it’s true that the depowering didn’t disrupted ALL non-physical powers …)
But that doesn’t account for the fact that she might have hollow bones, or internal gas bladders or something else completely physical to help her fly.
Yeah, she definitely has something else going on inside. I get that physics dictates that a pair of wings alone won’t guarantee flight, otherwise humans would have solved the riddle centuries earlier… so I figure that biologically she’s physically different enough for it to be possible for her.
When it comes to the anatomy of mythical and mystical creatures I figure the centaur is as good a great example of a perplexing combo… like, do they have two hearts or one, do they have two livers or one? Four lungs? What about a double set of ribs?? Etc! They’ve effectively got two torsos but surely they don’t need double of everything but either way the biology and anatomy has to work in a way that lets it all happen.
I figure the same for Jaxine, she’s from a mystic realm – the ‘laws of that reality’ allow her to function in our reality (same as centaurs, etc) and the depowering ray did cause her to cease to exist and likewise didn’t strip her of the ability to fly.
There’s one thing about the representation of winged characters in TV & movies that really irks me, and it’s how their feathered appendages fold away to a flat nothing or disappear immediately they’re no longer being used. OK, it’s practical for the props/SXF/CGI people working on it but it’s still a gyp! (rant over!)
Oh, and yeah, an I freely admit my wing drawing ‘skills’ are significantly lacking. While drawing Jaxine I thought to myself “why, why why do I draw anyone with wings???” 😀
Well, I think the wings look fine. However, if you’re curious as to a resource I think is good, I found this one online before, and am more inclined to use it: https://ragswarrior.wordpress.com/tag/wings/
Grace, your artistic skills far outstrip my own!
Lest you’ve forgotten I Blame Danny.
I don’t mean to be unfairly critical of your talent. I just think your particular style isn’t grounded in scientifically accurate realism. Which suits the stories you tell very nicely, I think.
Thanks – yeah. I figure they look decent enough to convey what’s going on, but accuracy in this department sure ain’t my strong suite!! lol
Maybe have Kaycee fire a few shots in front of her, and hope she takes the hint? It’s probably not going to work, but worth a shot, right? There should be about 50 seconds before her grisly demise if this Ambrosia jumped back to this point.