Nesuko's Useful Kukri

I'd forgotten how needlessly difficult it is to make a pdf file, the new Boschen and Nesuko issue would have been up hours ago otherwise. Anyway, it's online now here. This is the cover:

Here's what the whole drawing looked like before I crammed it into the cover:

I drew, inked, and coloured that in less than two hours to-day, apparently too fast to think of fitting it into the right shape. Oh, well.

I ended up colouring all of the last five pages of the new issue yesterday which took a lot longer than I thought it would. It felt kind of good giving a whole day over to my comic, though. The only thing I stopped for was to watch the finale of Game of Thrones which I absolutely loved. I don't think it's a spoiler if I say the fight scene was my absolutely favourite kind of fight scene, one where you don't want either party to lose but know one of them will have to.

Spoilers after the screenshot.

There were only two things I thought were stupid in the episode--The slave asking if he could sell himself back to his old master was one thing. I mean, if you want to go live with him, go live with him, or is there a law against room mates?

I can't remember now what the other stupid thing was which I'll consider a blessing. Maybe it had to do with Shae--I found out the really dumb scene from earlier in the season, where Tyrion basically treats her like a dog he can't afford to feed anymore, wasn't in the book, which makes a lot of sense. But that badly written scene kind of took some of the punch out of the scene where Tyrion finds her in the finale.

I loved how this was maybe the most Dungeons and Dragons feeling episode yet, not only because it featured dungeons, dragons, and even dragons in a dungeon, but also the skeleton warriors. I know, it's really Ray Harryhausen, but if the show were following the modern template for skeleton warriors in fantasy, they'd be the glowing Listerine green of the ghosts in Peter Jackson's Return of the King. It's so nice to see walking, rotting skeletons again. And fireballs cast at them--or maybe they were magic missiles, I don't know, but it was a damned D&D moment.

Again, more than anything I loved the fight and the scene of Arya contemplating the dying Hound. I love how there's maybe one rational reason to like him and fifty to hate him but I bet not one person watching wanted him to die. I love when the viewer's cosy morality gets a knock and Game of Thrones is great for that.