Oh geeze this page took entirely too long. I had it all written at the beginning of LAST week. And then I drew the first panel. Did a nice drawing of the Mattie, Reb, and Andrei clustered around the visualization of the spread of the Sunrisers’ work.

And I knew it was wrong. But I’d spent enough time on it that I was reluctant to do the right thing and abandon it. I took most of a week to decide to do that.

Of course, I also spent this week running around frantically trying to get a passport together, and when it became clear that was going to fail a mere few days too late for the impromptu European trip a friend had proposed, also going and being a stage kitten at a burlesque show. (A “stage kitten”, also known as a “pickup artist”, is the person who puts out props before an act… and comes out to pick up what’s been strewn about the stage afterwards. If she does her job right this involves showing a lot of ass now and then.) After that I spent a whole day doing nothing but lying around a quiet apartment reading.

And I ditched that panel, scaled the Earth up, and made it hopefully a bit clearer what’s going on. Because this is an Important Bit Of The Story.

Then I went to the comic shop and picked up a few things – the latest issue of Prophet (bizarre as always), the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (underwhelming), the latest issue of Atomic Robo (fun), and… a hardbound reprint of the entirety of Moebius and Jodorowsky’s Incal.

Which might explain how wide the other three panels in this page are; I’d been thinking for a few weeks that I need to start pulling my camera back and showing more of the world, and a big dose of Moebius’ drawings really made me excited about doing that. We’ll see how this affects future pages; I’ve been feeling like the stark style I draw this in makes it hard to really pull back sometimes.

Oh, and here’s that abandoned version of that first panel.