[335] Who're you talkin' to?

Huh.

Considering how many insects there are, he/she must not get a minute's rest.

There are multiple guides for humans. It's still alot for each of them, but it's got to be easier than what Ketrak gos through.

Theres probably a separate guide for different insect classes like one for ants and such, still the shear numbers for just flies alone must me incredible.

I'm sure Kat will get to that.

This page is full of adorable and pretty. Annie's smile in the third panel makes me melt.

So we got the guides thing right hooray for all of us.

I agree with the general idea that the guides might respond to the personality (culture and such) of the people who die (although I wonder, why Hermes?)...what do atheist get when they died?

I want to see Ketkrak!!!

Atheists get a big glowy "Game Over" sign.

Something I just noticed, I don't know if someone already mentioned it before. Something in today comic hit me as unusual so I checked the first comics of GC, if you do you'll notice that Annie and Kat look different. Maybe it is just the natural change and evolution of an artist, but maybe Tom is actually showing how the characters are aging and growing up, and if it is the case this is some incredible level of attention to details rarely seen in comics, web-based or not.

What do you think?

I wonder who carved "S <3 B" in the tree. The only characters so far with those first initials would be Surma, Basil, and Bob the gardener.

Or maybe Tom just picked those letters because Sb is the chemical symbol for the element antimony.

Clever work on the chemical allusion, Mezzaphor. I'd guess that's what it is, unless we get some extra info relatively soon. (There've been a lot of students over the history of the school, I'm sure. Can't have everything in the world revolve around the main characters and their plotlines, or they might get big heads.)

Todd, have you considered that the figure on page 157 you call Reaper might be Odin himself? I'm not sure if I've ever seen Big O represented with a scythe, but the broad-brimmed hat and cloak are consistent with pictures I've seen. Also, his hands in the picture are not skeletal, and something about the way he is rendered tells me that he is just as culturally specific as the other four Guides.

Best match I can find for the Egyptian one seems to be Neith, a war goddess. Crossed arrows are mentioned as one of her symbols. Hindu is probably Agni. (Wikipedia) Note the axe. The last one is evasive, but may be the horned serpent who associated with Cernunnos.

I notice a tendency towards the more warlike and destructive of the psychopomps available from each mythology. Significant?

Also, I believe that Ketrak must be either small or invisible, with small being the more likely of the two.

And cenit, I could see explaining the atheist question one of two ways: one is the truism that nobody dies an atheist. You always believed in something, even if you never acknowledged it. (I don't think that holds true in actual practice, but it's an easy out for a storyteller.) The other is that the old gods have always been around, and they continue to do their jobs the best they can in the realms they have been charged with. So a person of Greek descent would be under the care of Hermes, whether they believed or even knew the stories about him. (Being largely Welsh, I suppose I would find myself dealing with the snake-ram dude. In which case, I agree with Yin: give me Death of the Endless any day.)

**Edit: Silly proboards tags. Links are forum-friendly now.

the reaper with the large hat and scythe may be Ankou.



Still no idea who the snake dude is.

The psychopomp with the hat is surely Ankou. He's usually depicted as using a cape, hat and wielding a scythe.

I've sometimes wondered what the webcomic will be like when Annie moves into adolescence. I can't imagine her having a lot of the traditional problems associated with teens, but then, Tom can show her witnessing, and occasionally offering a helping hand, her schoolmates suffering from those problems - with a Gunnerkrigg-style twist attached to them. (We know that Kat and Aly's story in Chapter Thirteen was a combination of first love and a friend moving away because his parents got a job in another town, so a precedent's been established.)

Veles is fascinating. And I'm gratified to see that I was almost right with my guess about Cernunnos (Seems they may have been related/identical in some of the earliest Eurasian traditions) even if it was just a stab in the dark.

However, I'm most fascinated by Ankou, because he seems to have been the prototype for, if not the analogue of, the western Reaper. He's like stealth gothic. Also, his name seems eerily similar to the word "ankh", even though the ankh is an Egyptian symbol. (What I don't know is whether the name has any relation to the phonetics of the Egyptian glyph, or whether it was a name made up by English translators in the 19th century.)

popo or AluK (or anybody else)--where can I find out more?