Pots: The Person the Witch Failed to Notice

Pots: The Person the Witch Failed to Notice Sinbad has a crew with a strongman, an agile knife thrower, a spear fighter, a sorceress, and a green, clawed man whose wounds heal unnaturally quickly. Pots brings cookware. That sounds like the beginning of a joke, and the early comics certainly make room for jokes at his expense. Sinbad does not want him cooking on the next voyage. Pots is small, speaks in brief answers, and does not receive the grand entrance given to the more obviously dangerous members of the crew. By issue five, he has helped save Samelia from Alorana with a frying pan. The rescue works because the comic has given him things to do before that moment. While the crew waits in the palace, Shon'du quietly asks him to watch the hall. Later, Pots overhears enough to recognize that the queen's hospitality is a threat. When guards discover him, he hits one with a pan and runs. A woman in the city helps hide him from the search. He is vulnerable throughout that sequence. He can be caught. He needs help. The story does not give him invisibility or establish that he can stroll unnoticed through any guarded building. His success is a chain of particular opportunities, including another person's decision to protect him. That makes the eventual return more interesting. Pots does not respond to danger by disappearing from the story. He comes back where Samelia needs him. Alorana has beaten and bound her captive and is telling her that her friends have abandoned her. Pots interrupts that claim as decisively as possible. The pan connects, the queen falls, and the person she was tormenting is no longer alone. There is ordinary physics underneath the slapstick. A swung object carries momentum, and the contact transfers force over a short interval. Its mass, speed, shape, and the way it strikes all matter. Nothing in these panels gives us enough measurements to calculate a credible impact energy, and a blow to the head is genuinely dangerous rather than a reliably harmless way to put someone to sleep. The fictional result is straightforward: the blow incapacitates Alorana long enough for Pots and Samelia to act. That is the feat. It does not require declaring Pots stronger than everyone who struggled against her magic. The circumstances are different. Samelia faces an attentive enemy in a direct fight. Pots gets an opening that she does not. I like that the story lets Samelia participate in what follows. She asks how they can keep the queen from calling her guards when she wakes, and Pots points out the chest. They solve the next problem together. Rescue has restored Samelia's ability to make decisions; it has not simply replaced one person directing her life with another. She also asks whether Sinbad told him to stay and watch over her. His answer is yes. The captain's promise to come back for her has a quieter companion: someone has remained close enough to help before the ship returns. Pots makes the crew feel like a crew. Some of its members draw everyone's attention. Others remember an assignment, survive a bad situation, and show up at the moment a friend needs them. The small man with the pan earns his place through what he does while the spectacular people are occupied elsewhere.