Flight of the White Cat

Writer - Brady Dommermuth

Story - Brady Dommermuth, Doug Beyer and Jenna Helland

Illustrators - Greg Staples, Rafa Garres & Dave Kendall

Letterer - Brian Dumas

Art Director - Jeremy Jarvis

Based on characters by Brady Dommermuth and Aleksi Briclot

Released October 2008

SUMMARY

It can be found here.

Part one: Jazal puts his brother Ajani on patrol, though his fellows say he's jinxed because he's albino. Humans show up to hunt Ajani and his pridemates abandon him. Jazal shows up to save him, and takes a scroll from the humans with a picture of a white, one-eyed nacatl on it.

Part two: During the festival of Marisi the shaman Zaliki sneaks into Jazal's place. Ajani follows her. She goes away with an excuse and he sees drawings of himself on the walls, wondering "brother, what have you been hiding". That night someone saying "Please forgive me" drops an artifact that summons monsters in the pride's camp. The monsters kill Jazal, which triggers Ajani's spark, sending him to Jund.

Part three: After running from Karrthus, Ajani meets Sarkhan Vol, who is revealed as the "stranger" he was telling the events of the previous two parts to in the narration. Sarkhan talks a bit about magic and revenge. In the end Ajani figures out how to planeswalk and heads back to avenge his brother.

REVIEW

My previous webcomic reviews ended up a bit focused on continuity issues and dropped plotlines, so maybe I haven't made it clear enough yet, but I really, really like these! They are essentially the first foray in into regular free story content on the main Magic website, which would eventually culminate in Uncharted Realms, probably the best set-up for Magic's story we've had. I'd have loved to see more of these, but making them all full painted probably upped the production costs so much they were limited to once per set. Which is a shame, but I'm not going to complain about a comic looking gorgeous.

The attention to detail on them is also just fantastic. Not only is the art amazing in general, I also love little touches like having speech bubbles overlapped by narration/panel borders to indicate speech that isn't being paid attention to. Lots of props to the letterers on these comics!

Holding the art to the qualities of that on the cards, rather than going for something more cartoony, probably necessitated using multiple artists on each one, but that is no problem here either. By having each chapter a distinct section (the first one happening years earlier, the latter two happening on different planes) the differences in art styles add to the feel of the scenes, rather than being an odd style shift in the middle of an action scene, like they were in Fuel for the Fire. It's also worth noting how dynamic the art is. Sometimes artists who can do fantastic work on singular pieces of card art aren't as great at depicting the movement and panel-to-panel flow a comic requires, but that is no problem here at all. 

As for the story... we'll, it is just set up, pointing us to Alara Unbroken to get the full story. But it certainly piqued my interested back in the day, so I guess it did it's job.

All in all an excellent entry in a series I have fond memories of.

CONTINUITY & TIMELINE

In his first chapter in Alara Unbroken, Ajani mentions the first part of this comic as having happened "once". The later two chapters are adapted entirely in the novel (or perhaps this comic was adapted from the novel, it's hard to know how much of that book was already written at this point), though with significant expansions here and a few key differences:

• Marisi's speech doesn't match up. In the novel he alludes to reconnecting to the Cloud Nacatl. This ties into why someone might want him dead, so it's a big omission here.
• Ajani actually finds the scroll Jazal took of the humans, and its translation, not just the drawing on the wall.
• Zaliki tries to keep Ajani out of Jazal's hut after the attack, and there is a whole bit where he starts hallucinating from shock after he see's his brother's body, and after that a description of his time in the Blind Eternities, rather than him just ending up on Jund with only a "then ... is was here".
• Finally, he jumps into the volcano wondering if it's going to kill him, but ends up with the Cloud Nacatl, and only after an encounter with a local there does he swear vengeance against the killer of Jazal. Very different from the version here, where it is Sarkhan who convinces him to become vengeant.
• The attack on the pride is shown through other character's eyes, so the culprit asking for forgiveness is not in the novel.

This makes it a bit odd to pick which version of events actually happened. With previous comic adaptations, like the Mercadian Masques one, I've gone with the longer version in the novel, yet this being a free online source probably means it is the more well known version of events for a lot of people. On top of that, the first chapter of the comic definitely has to happen since that is where Jazal picks up the scroll Ajani finds later. The easiest solution is probably to consider part one in-continuity and the other two as alternate adaptations of in-continuity events. You're really only missing those three panels shown above, though it does feel weird. I think I'm just going to put both versions on the timeline, but note parts two and three as an alternate telling of parts of Alara Unbroken.

Speaking of which, while chapters two and three overlap with Alara Unbroken and thus fit in 4556 according to the Visual Guide, placing chapter one is really hard, as we never get anything more specific than that it has happend "once" and that Jazal had been researching why the humans were after Ajani (and other mysteries) for "years". Ajani and Jazal do look a bit more lithe than in the later chapters, but whether that's an indication of their age or just a difference in art style is hard to say. Jazal is already kha, so they can't be too young, but the Visual Guide reveals Ajani is in his mid-40's, which still leaves quite some space for this story to happen. I guess "Years before 4556" is the best we can do. Which is fine for now, as we've got nothing happening between Lorwyn (~4520) and 4556 anyway, but will probably need some more attention once that space starts filling up with other backstories.

You'd think the human attack at the beginning would be how Ajani lost his eye, but no, that has already happened some time before. As far as I know we have still never heard about how he lost it.

There's a bit more to talk about, like what exactly is up with those humans hunting Ajani, but we'll get to that in the Alara Unbroken review.