Far Out There

So… I feel compelled to explain myself on this one. For one thing, why the heck are we still stalling and not actually going out to FIX stuff? Well, honestly? It was too hot. No, seriously. Layla getting an outfit that will keep her from asphyxiating was only supposed to be a little detain of our intrepid party FINALLY setting out… but the first genuinely hot week of the year REALLY kicked my butt, to the point that I just didn’t have it in me to pound out a really important page like that (Heck, look how long it took to get THIS online) So, yeah. Instead I just drew some silliness and called it a day. Don’t worry, things’ll ACTUALLY start happening soon.

…but then there’s the OTHER thing, which someone else will probably mention if I don’t, so I’ll just get it over with. Yes, I’ve taken our female lead and shoved her into a skin-tight catsuit. No, inviting the internet to ogle a shapely teenager isn’t my usual plan of operations. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how this happened. As I said before, I started drawing this page without much of a plan, and honestly didn’t know what Layla’s suit was going to look like. And then I started listening to SF Debris’ Evangelion reviews as background noise, and the next thing I knew I’d gone and turned it into a plugsuit. Uh… Oops?

Honestly, though? Fanservice aside, I like how this thing turned out. I didn’t want Layla’s suit to look like that one Ichabod wore that one time, since it’s not intended for outer space, and I needed that clear bowl helmet thing so that we could see her face. But there’s a strong pulp Sci-Fi vibe that pretty much happened by accident but totally works for me. And despite my hand-wringing over the whole fanservice aspect, I really do like the visual contrast between her elegant curves and the bulky, awkward gear on her extremities. Apparently in the future, all boots and gloves are designed to fit Mega Man.

Finally, New Voting Incentive! …which I don’t need to write several paragraphs on to establish I’m not being a perv.

(Historical Notes: Okay, you know how I kept saying on the past few pages that I was skipping over stuff I otherwise would have tried to re-edit?  Well, it’s because I knew THIS age was coming.  I fiddles with SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much here, basically chainsawing the entire page apart and putting the pieces back together like new.  It’s still not perfect, I can only move those side panels around so much to fix a problem that was caused by them not being drawn tall enough, but the MOST egregious errors have been fixed.  I closed up SOME of the wasted empty space, especially with that awkward caption text, and fixed up the more egregious continuity errors with the containment suit.  In case the old commentary wasn’t enough of a clue, it took me SEVERAL more pages before I finally had the design down, so there were some fairly glaring errors in this first page.)