THE WRATH OF ENIGMA, PAGE 13 --- THUNDERBIRD REVEALED
I had originally intended to post this page along with page 14...but I've been so busy that I haven't made page 14 yet, so I'm just going to post it by itself.
The mysterious thunderbird turns out to have been Cascadia in special transforming armor. This twist would be obvious if you knew about the Thunderbird and Whale legend, but if you don't, the indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest have a story about their ancestors being caught in the middle of a great battle between the spirits Thunderbird and Whale. The details differ depending on the source but they all describe the earth shaking and the waters rising. Ethnologists traced these oral histories back to around 300 years ago, but it wasn't until geologists found direct evidence of earthquakes that it became clear it described a real event. From Japanese records of a tsunami, we know that the Cascadia subduction zone had its last major earthquake in the year 1700.
Cascadia describes having fought Enigma in the Cretaceous, but if you do a basic Google search it will say the Cascadia subduction zone is only 50 million years old. This is because originally, the subduction zone in the area was more to the east, called the Cordilleran Subduction Zone. This was where the Farallon Plate subducted under the North American Plate from the Jurassic onwards. However an island called Siletzia clogged up the Cordilleran Subduction Zone, and forced subduction to skip to the west, in the location of the current Cascadia subduction zone. I interpret Cordilleran and Cascadia as the same character, since they form a boundary between the same two plates*. Basically he got too cocky/hungry and bit off more than he could chew, knocking himself out of commission for a while lol.
Cascadia looks very kaiju-esque** but like all the other fault avatars he's made out of rocks, not covered in scales. In his close up shot on the second panel I tried to hint towards this by showing the curves on his body are actually chiseled in and angular up close, as well as some andesite-style speckling and graining on the underside of his neck.
In a story I wrote with San Andreas in it (that of course still isn't finished) the seams between Cascadia's muscles are described as glowing red. This didn't look good when I drew it on all his muscles, but keeping it to his Volcanic Abs (TM) looked pretty ominous. It also helps that I imagine the equivalent of his "stomach" is where the tectonic plates he has swallowed get melted down, so presumably there's just a lot of magma sloshing around in his belly and making his abs glow slightly.
I learned from watching a few geology lectures that there's actually many different subducted slabs crammed under North America. The dude's bowels actually go pretty deep lol.
...Yet he couldn't fit Siletzia in there. Had to have been an embarrassing failure for his career as General of the North American Cordillera.
*-the Juan de Fuca Plate is considered one of the last remaining fragments of the ancient Faralllon Plate.
**-the reptilian appearance was inspired partly by a very old National Geographic article from when the hazards of the Cascadia Subduction Zone were first being dissemminated to the public where an emergency response official was quoted as saying the Pacific Northwest was built "atop a sleeping Godzilla". Well that and because having a volcanic arc as back spines is super cool
