So long, Taro…though a part of you will be with us for a while longer yet.

I appreciate the humorous understatement of “Um, he’s…kept tabs,” which is pretty much the only ray of brightness on this page (the literal brightness in panels 1 and 2 don’t count). Arkerra has its grim moments and Sepia World has its heroic ones, but only in a world like our own does it feel “correct” that Shanna is too late to save the Five, and that she always was, even before her investigation began.

Flo rewrote the dialogue here during the lettering process, a fairly common practice for her at this point. I don’t usually mind it, but I do think it’s regrettable that the some of panel 4’s dialogue got pushed to panel 5, obscuring who said what. (The first balloon in panel 5 is Xan’s, the strangled “God…damn it!” is Shanna’s.)

Something else was lightening things up when this page originally ran: we were offering our final Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals, and that’s where we were putting our FB promotion, too.