There’s no real connection between this page and the last one besides the use of solid blacks and whites, but Flo’s managing the story’s emotion in interesting ways. The specter of death was hanging over Syr’Nj and Frigg on page 3, just before Byron and Gravedust turned up to rekindle their happiness and hope. Then we switched over to the Sepia Five, who had an honest-to-goodness adventure…but that adventure ended even more grimly, through the eyes of their defeated enemy. Now we’re bouncing back to something lighter: some new threat might be trying to kill our heroes, but this feels charmingly all-in-a-day’s-work for our guys, without any ominous overtones.

Helping that feeling along is the fact that this is the first really random encounter that Flo’s rolled up in quite a while, maybe since the single-digit chapters.

FB: “When you can make people voluntarily stare at a field of white for more than five seconds before they scroll down and realize that yes, the comic HAS loaded after all… that’s when you know you’ve made it.”