It's one of those touching, yet chilling scenes where the dichotomy of Vanye's home life is brought to the fore.  Vanye got a dim sense of "family" somewhere in his childhood.  Certainly not from his father, since his mother died in childbirth and his eldest brother, Kandrys, would have happily drowned him at birth.  That leaves Erij as the focus of whatever dreams Vanye had of "family."

The scene depicted here is after Vanye's return to RaMorij.  His father is dead, Erij is now the Myya, an embittered, crippled, old-before-his-time man.  A man as in need of family as Vanye, and thanks to his breeding and rearing, more torn apart inside by the loss of that family than Vanye will ever be.

For those curious about such things...the little note "reduce" on the center/right panel is a reminder to make the sequence a zoom in from the center/left panel to the bottom/center panel.  This is to create an increasing sense of intimacy...until Erij forces Vanye to look at him.  Then, in the final panel, at the last moment, Vanye pulls back, hence, the sudden withdrawal of the intimate camera to the impersonal distant viewpoint. 

In these initial layouts, I'm working for pacing and to sketch out my gut feelings for the scene's movement.  Once the page begins to take shape, the conscious editorial process tries to recognize and enhance what the instincts recommended.

And post-Erij, there's Roh.

One of the aspects of drawing the graphic I was most looking forward to was the challenge of the Roh/Vanye lookalike contest.  When I was growing up, the over-riding complaint of comics was that all a given artist's heroes looked alike.  Well, here I was handed the challenge on a platter: make them look alike...but different.

Roh is Vanye's Chya cousin, lord of his people and confident in his life as Vanye has never been.  They're also dead ringers for one another.  Well, at least enough do that the Chya folk are quite taken aback when they first see Vanye, a reaction Morgaine and Vanye only figure out when Roh finally arrives on the scene.

As the unreadable captions point out, Roh looks far more like him than his Myya half-brothers do, and Vanye doesn't know whether to resent the similarities...or attach to them.  As the books go on, more elements are added to differentiate changes going on in Roh's head...among other things, that over-riding confidence  of Roh's gets shaken.  At the same time, Vanye's self-confidence grows. 

Just trying to capture the story would have been challenge enough.  This aspect, to someone whose primary interest in drawing people in the first place was to capture subtleties of expression and body language, was indeed the fine chocolates in the mix.

Beyond the hair that never musses and the boots that never sag (the lust of Vanye's life) Roh radiates confidence to the point of arrogance while Vanye is characterized by grim determination and a touch of need.  All that must come out in expression and body language