*sigh* I’m annoyed by this page. It SHOULDN’T have been very hard to draw, even with the all the Almost-Time Lord robes, but nooooooooo. I had to go and draw it at the end of a loooong day of pounding out pages, well after the point where I should have called it a night and got some rest. The end result was WAY too sloppy, and honestly should have been re-drawn, but I tossed it in the Done pile anyway. By the time I got to this page again and realized how messy it was, taking time to redraw wasn’t an option, so all I could do was edit and edit and clean up what I could wah wah wah artist problems.

Speaking of complaining, Rumiko’s another of those recurring Christmas characters I really WANT to work into the main comic but just can’t find a place. I mean, there’s plenty of music related things she could do. Heck, part of the reason I had Disonar’s concert billed as a “charity event” was so we could see Rumiko leading a children’s choir in some terrible “We Are The World” style benefit song. Unfortunately, once I got down to business writing actual pages, I realized the concert was just a background event: Disonar wasn’t really paying attention, and Skye’s band was too far on the outskirts to interact with any of the “real” performers. So, once again, she’s a Christmas-only character. Maybe next year?

And for those of you wondering what Avatar’s singing, here you go!

(Historical Notes: Again, it took longer than I’d hoped, but I EVENTUALLY managed to start working in a few references to Rumiko outside of these holiday appearances.  I’m more focused on the REALLY terrible artistic choice Past Me made in the bottom panel.  The middle panel made good use of the blurry background/sharp foreground effect, so I just did it over again at the bottom, but it was the exact wrong thing to do.  That panel needed to be the OPPOSITE, with Tabitha the one in focus and AVATAR the one blurry.  Alas, that’s not something I could have fixed without re-doing at least the bottom third of the page entirely from scratch, and that wasn’t happening.)