Fortunately (for him), DM has a lot of experience in recovering his dignity quickly after mishaps. He’d willingly trade it for a lower frequency of mishaps, of course, but as long as that isn’t on offer, quick dignity recovery is better than nothing.
And he needs a bit of gravitas for his role in today’s strip, for he’s unveiling the ultimate weapon. Always a heady moment for a villain, even if his clothes are wet and smell of sewage. Considering those circumstances, he’s doing pretty fine, although a better-situated villain could have easily employed thrice that amount of pompousness without feeling ridiculous. But you can’t go overboard like that if everybody just saw you climb out of raw sewage you almost drowned in.
He still manages an appropriate dose of smugness for the reveal, and it’s not entirely unjustified. It seem like the villains really invested a considerable amount of thought, let alone vast amounts of mana, into assembling an effective anti-team team. Guided by Sun Tzu’s statement that “he who knows himself and knows the enemy can face a thousand battles without fear”, and the example of countless scifi and fantasy stories, they’ve come to the conclusion that the best anti-team team imaginable to confront the team would be the team itself. Probably even accounting for the fact that the team isn’t entirely themselves, these days.
On a behind-the-scenes note, it took me a couple of attempts to get back into how to draw these guys, after not having drawn them for so long, despite these design being only from the last chapter…their second chapter versions are much easier to recover, probably because it ran for so long.
But how will the party react to seeing themselves again? – More on Thursday.
If it makes you feel better, I had to go back to the previous chapter to remember how everyone was supposed to look like.
This should be interesting. The protagonist team (I decided after the 4th conditional tacked on to “good” that “protagonist” was the better word choice) has changed so much, their evil versions also double as ghosts of their past. So not only do they have to overcome themselves, they also have to face what they’ve become! Economical!
Yeah, it’s all quite existential, pitting who they are against who they were. They’ll probably learn a thing or two about themselves in the process, but I’ll likely not elaborate on that too much on-screen. XD
Hey, and it will answer the geeky question of whether the old team or the new team is more powerful in a fight, I’m sure the uncertainty about that must have kept some people awake at night*. XD
* That, and the video games and energy drinks.
“Everyone is judged by their own self?”
“It’s a bit metaphysical, I know, but it’s the only fair way…”
Yeah, people tend to be their own worst critics, anyway…if that translates to general enmity, it should be an interesting and tense fight.