Far Out There

So, this was a deceptively difficult page to draw, mostly because I went and drastically changed it on the fly. In the rough draft, Ichabod and Tabitha were going to be the ones in the foreground, with Layla and Alphonse just being a Humorous Background Event. But then I realized, regardless of who’s actually talking for most of this, that cute stuff was the truly entertaining bit. And it’s hardly the first time Alphonse helped keep us distracted from boring exposition. (Also, there’s the little bit about me realizing that the original blocking would have been REALLY hard to pull off, especially with one of the speakers being “inside” a big computer screen). Also, I had to go and come down with a cold, and amazingly enough, I don’t work well or fast when my head’s overflowing with mucus.

Now, I’m SURE there’s a lot of questions left about what the heck Alphonse is actually doing here, or how. To save us all some time, I’ll just go ahead and say that there WILL be more explanations next Tuesday. I’m not gonna say much about the details until I’ve had a chance to finish up those upcoming pages (Nobody wants to read a page where I just repeat what I already said in the previous page’s comments, right?)

Also, there’s a new Killer Station of Deadly Doom in which THINGS HAPPEN!

(Historical Notes: Part of me really wanted to move the frames of this page around about a bit, because I really did the whole “straight column of panels with empty space on either side” a few too many times around this point.  But considering the amount of time I knew I was about to spend re-editing some later pages, that just didn’t seem like a defensible use of my time.)