EQ Readthrough: Issue 11, Lair of the Bird Spirits

[elf]

Issue 11: Lair of the Bird Spirits
Questions for this issue:

• What was your impression of the red-and-black sending?
• How old did you think Lord Voll was?
• Was the bargain he struck fair for all involved?

Main OQR post with prompt questions
Note: These aren't mandatory questions; they're meta prompts. If you don't care for any of them, or want to tangent from them to some other topic, that's fine too.

Comments

[elf]

This was my favorite issue in the original quest. My best friend & I damn near wore it out; we thought Strongbow was the sexiest character ever created, and we read it over and over.

Um. Also, it was the last issue on the rack when we discovered Elfquest. We had to wait three months for the next issue. This might've had something to do with our obsession. From this point on, we were reading slooooowly. It gave us time to really think about all the minor points in every issue. (Which I'm not doing a good job of covering in this readthrough. Busy life, and all that.)

I have made approximately eight zillion icons from this issue and I'll make a separate post for those, I think.

My favorite bit is one I barely noticed when I was younger: Cutter, on bent knee to talk with his cubs, saying, "This is Lord Voll... a friend!" When I first read these, I was a kid. I'm now a parent, who occasionally has to introduce my kids to people in authority that I don't really trust.

He's giving Voll a look that says, "these are my children, and I'm smiling because they make me happy, and I'd like you to be happy to meet them, and if you hurt them or scare them, that feathery robe is going to be in bloodstained shreds so fast your tribe will think you've learned to teleport with a red afterimage."

[dancing_serpent]

I'm now a parent, who occasionally has to introduce my kids to people in authority that I don't really trust.

I'm not a parent (yet), but I do remember my first reaction when I read that part as a young girl. To me, Cutter's thoughts were "They are still young and I want to keep some realities of life away from them. Play along and don't dare to betray my trust, or else..."

Reading it today, that's still what I get from Cutter here.


From this point on, we were reading slooooowly. It gave us time to really think about all the minor points in every issue. (Which I'm not doing a good job of covering in this readthrough. Busy life, and all that.)

*sigh* Same goes for me with all the visits to doctors and physiotherapy in the last three weeks. In less than twelve hours I'll be in hospital for surgery and I have no idea when I will be home and online again.

[eldriwolf]

Yes waiting for the next one to come out made a big difference---I think I had to start waiting at issue three...
... and the color!
The red-and-black sending was black-and-white

[arcanetrivia]

What was your impression of the red-and-black sending?

Visually speaking, you mean? I loved it. The "sending star" shape has had a powerful place in my personal magical symbol library for a long time, probably because I was introduced to it at a fairly young age (11, around the time I was starting to dabble in candle magic and crystals and all that). This "black sending" version I even used once around age 13 or 14 to attempt to inflict a psychic attack over a long distance (ah, youth ^_-) and the target claimed to have been affected, so *shrug* But in any event I still use the shape itself in certain psychic/magical contexts.