When I visited Italy a few years ago I saw a lot of paintings of this Catholic saint that was martyred by being shot full of arrows. Can’t remember his name, but I had him in mind when I drew that guy in the second panel.
With that joyous thought, Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Americans – eat a lot of turkey, and do try not to get trampled on Black Friday 
Why do I have this vexing feeling it’s not Yellow Turban who is responsible?.. Forget it, it’s probably nothing.
Saint Sebastian is probablly the one you are thinking of.
@KazeKoichi: What? Of course it’s the Yellow Turbans… who else could it be? *Totally fake over-the-top outrage
@Tony: Yes Saint Sebastian, that’s the dude
Here’s the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastien:
http://www.knowledgerush.com/wiki_image/1/1a/Sebastia.jpg
The persecution of Christians by the Roman emperor Diocletian in the third century…
According to his apocryphal Acts, attributed to St Ambrose of Milan, he was a soldier who enlisted in the Roman army around 283. Diocletian, unaware that he was a Christian, appointed him as a captain of the Praetorian Guard. When he treated Christian prisoners due for martyrdom kindly, Diocletian reproached him for his supposed ingratitude and ordered him executed by arrows.
This method of execution made Sebastian a favourite for paintings. Sebastian is usually depicted in art as a somewhat effete youth tied to a stake and transfixed by several arrows. Sebastian was formerly one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers until that cult was suppressed in the reform of the Roman Catholic liturgy in 1969. Sebastian’s own feast day is January 20.
Oddly, seem that Queers have made him their patron saint…
Someone from the Praetorian guard, of all people!
http://queeringthechurch.wordpress.com/files/2009/12/sebastian-female-erwin.jpg
Ironically, St. Sabastian is the patron saint of archers. Strong art (again, but I try not to take it for granted), especially the first panel isolating the key elements in the story. And yes, I think poor Liu Bei is about to get a sharp lesson.
@Ming Who knows, maybe there were gays serving in the military in Roman times, even in the Praetorian guard…
We would consider the average Roman to be gay, given their bizarre personal habits, like carrying their coins in their mouth and french kissing each others and passing the coins back and forth as a form of greeting.
But in fact, Romans where frantically homophobes going so far as using false witnesses to bankrupt and enslave anyone they judged “precious” or “soft” in their standard of behaving.
That custom they had of beating and torturing their slaves in public was a way of showing how tough they where and avoiding any semblance of “weakness”…
That attitude came from their early struggles with the Celtic Gauls, who, with their suicidally maniacal way of fighting, used to beat the Romans regularly.
The Celt’s warrior class was homosexual in a spectacular flaming way,
going out of their way with sexual display in the public places, just to upset the
vanquished Romans…
Vae Victis was that the “Vae” of the victims was to have to look upon
public homo orgies…a bit like what’s going on in the street of San Francisco…
Patron saint of archers? Now that really is odd. I have no comment on Liu Bei getting a lesson
I always thought the Romans were pretty casual about sexual preferences… though of course most of my concepts about ancient Roman culture come from watching the HBO series. I’ve been to San Francisco several times, but never saw any orgies. I must be going to the wrong parts of town…
“What animal would do such a thing?”
People don’t realize that just a few hundred years ago, no animal
would ever do that, but it was habitual for humans.
In sacked cities, they had actual rivers of blood, defeat meant getting chased and hacked to pieces, usually slowly, putting De Sade to shame.
Civil wars where the worst, where it was not invading aliens getting butchered,
but countrymen with the same religion and accents, often family and friends.
For an inkling of things past, google the feats of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Fighters for Jesus(whose leaders are actually Muslims, by the way),
they raped, tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands, using
kidnapped children!
Remember seeing here the ten thousand newfangled crossbow of Sun Pin
at the clearing called Maling…killed 25,000 Wei men, must have been
piled up ten thick…another river of blood!
all this talk of arrows puts me in mind of a scene in “Hero”, where Jet Li’s character was executed by an archery squad. actually, the screenshot immediately after Jet died: picture him standing in front of a gate, thoushands of arrows flying, the gate is covered with arrows, and you see a human shaped gap in the arrows where Jet stood….much like a carton where a character runs through a wall and makes a hole shaped like the character.
i really don’t know why folks think that San Franciscans are just bonking each other on the streets and byways… i’ve been here for years and the most exciting thing i’ve seen on the streets was a frat boy from the mid west peeing himself while falling down drunk…
anyhow… i guess i just need to look a lot harder…
Koad, really like the new look to the site!
@Ming: Yeah wars are always nasty things. I remember one particular part in our high school history text book where it says the First Emperor of Qin (the very same king that was the target of Jet Li’s assassination attempt in the movie Heroes) had 400,000 captured enemy soldiers buried alive. And that’s it. Always seemed a bit disconcerting to me that 400,000 lives were only worth one line in the book, even if it did happen a long time ago.
@xcal: When I saw that scene in the movie my first thought was “Looney Tunes”… apparently I’m not the only one
@Vonbek: Because I have no faith in my brain-to-mouth filter at this time of the night (or brain-to-hand filter, but you get the gist) I will resist this enormous urge to make a bunch of lame jokes about bonking and peeing, and just say I’m glad you like the updated site