Well THIS is embarrassing. After cranking out a TON of other stuff yesterday, I really needed to take a quick nap before getting to work on this page, and… well, I’m posting a half-finished page at 2pm, so I think you can guess how THAT turned out. I guess my schedule for this entire month just caught up with me all at once or something. Obviously, I’ll replace this with a finished, colored in version before tomorrow’s page goes up. Sorry, gang!

Anyway, a few things: first, you may recall me mentioning in the comments of Marika’s debut pages that she’d trained with Ichabod under a pair of married Nitpickers, but now it’s canon! Also, those of you with good memories (or at least a habit of browsing the archives) will realize that we’ve actually seen these two in Christmas pages before, we just didn’t have any idea who they were yet.

Also, with all of Layla’s “old man” cracks, I feel the need to point out again that, really, Ichabod ain’t that old. He’s, like, in his mid-forties at the absolute MOST. But then, it’s been established that Layla’s parents married ridiculously young (I’m pretty sure they’d already had Layla when they were whatever age she is now) so her definition of “old person” is kind of warped.

(Historical Notes: I say this over and over again, but I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to have some flashback adventures about Ichabod and Mariska on their Nitpicker training with The Rumstads.  Because, you know, we don’t have enough things I really want to do one day.)