The Epic of Thay Taruu 2

So here we go, page two of the comic. Not really too much exposition here, just setting everything up for the next few pages.

I suppose I could talk about something here, if not the plot. Hmmm....

So let's talk about costumes!

The Tarot Card that I based Pent off of (the big, gruff guy with the eye-patch) shows the Knight of Pentacles in full armor, riding a draft-horse with really beautiful regalia. It's actually very pretty. The suit of Pentacles is generally associated with the season of harvest, Autumn, and the colors of the card (gold, red, and green) reflect this. So when I went to design Pent, I kept all these things in mind.

His fur-colors are based off of skunks and badgers - mostly because I wanted to. But also because I associate those animals with foraging - which is a kind of harvest, right?

The hard part of Pent's costume was his armor. He can't have metal armor (however impressive it is) because his people don't have knowledge of metallurgy. This is obviously a big problem for them, if they're fighting "something" - so some sort of armor has to be in-style. I decided that being a hunting society, he would have knowledge of leather-working.

Then I decided that as a tip-of-the-hat to the suit of Pentacles he would have round, coin-like pauldrons on his shoulders (which, of course, is a stretch of the imagination since pauldrons weren't developed until plate-armor anyway buuutttttt, this is a legend, right? So he can have things he really "wouldn't" have had.) When I first sketched out the first few pages all he had was his pauldrons and his eye-patch - but eventually I decided to also give him a loin-cloth and leather greaves so that he would look more like a warrior.

Then we get to Rod; based on the Page of Wands (or Rods, as my own personal deck calls them), the card itself portrays a snappily-dressed young man holding his staff. The suit of Wands is generally associated with summer-time and the areas of the mind, and the card usually has the horizon-line in equilibrium with the sky - which seems like a good symbol for being imaginative and grounded at the same time to me.

It should be pretty obvious by now why I decided to portray Rod's only weapon as being a staff. She can't have anything metal (since, like Pent's people, her clan/tribe doesn't have knowledge of metallurgy, either), giving her a staff seemed pretty logical, and would be congruent with the symbology of the cards.

As far as the "snappily-dressed" part, I tried to keep how well-dressed she would be in the context of a pre-Agrarian culture. The clans/tribes to which Rod and Pent belong to don't have farming technology, which means that everything they own must first come from the land (or animals that live on the land) around them. All fabrics required intensive amounts of farming and processing - techniques that her people have very little knowledge about. Thus having a very long, highly-dyed piece of fabric around her neck could be construed has being a very ornate piece of clothing.
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