Page 05-17
Wow, okay, so the bad rap wyverns have is evidently totally justified.
Wyverns, while loyal to their own family groups or comrades, are extremely vicious and cruel to outsiders, especially when in battle, one of the many reasons they make such devastatingly effective soldiers.
Not all wyvern species are like this. The wyverns we’ve seen so far in Eryl are all northern river wyverns, which are among the most intelligent and aggressive species. There are others that are more vicious, but smaller and less intelligent, and others as smart but much less interested in consorting with humans. Most species live in very specific habitats and are small in number. The northern river wyverns are by far the most populous, due to being able to adapt to a large number of climates.
Well I definitely didn’t expect that, so much xenophobia and tribalism. Not so different from humans after all…
But those burn scars in the last panel – that’s Ka, isn’t it? How did he survive the explosion? At least it might be someone knowledgeable enough to deduce how did Sleet appear in a village in the middle of nowhere.
(Also I really dig the rain in the first panel. You don’t get to see that done so well very often, and for some reason it really drives home how isolated and alone Sleet is among them.)
If it’s an enlightened sprcies (i.e. can speak human languages) you can expect that to also come with the same kinds of flaws we humans possess. There is plenty of racism / speciesism / xenophobia in this world just like on Earth… they just have dragons and magic on top of it.
I actually have a photoshop trick I use for rain, so it’s super quick to do (well, I have photoshop tricks for pretty much everything – it’s the only way I can paint this level of detail into a weekly comic page *ignores the fact that calling updates ‘weekly’ is stretching things*). I just paint a bunch of white-blue dots and then use a zoom filter, which gives it the illusion of raining down. 😉
Humans have been getting steadily less violent to each other since history began, likely before, but even before that only about 1/3 of the non-disease environment felled humans were killed by each other before 30 or so. Animals, on the other hand, well, most social animals are comparatively quite violent, no matter what Disney says.
Also, as for in-group out group interactions or exterminating other, closely related groups … anyone ever seen wolves and dogs/coyotes, or dogs/coyotes and foxes? How about social cats? Ants? Termites? Baboons? Chimps (their bonobo cousins are not only being exterminated by them, but maintain their weird social peace by what we humans would call female enforced generalized rape of all females in a social group, and, like elephant females, the ladies will kill each others’ offspring at times.)?
Humans get a bad rap amongst ourselves because we often choose to behave unnaturally, that is relatively well, to related outsiders. Heck, we’ve even bred a fair bit with Neanderthals and Denisovans.