Phil was not initially thrilled about the scripts for these pages when he saw them. “You don’t put visual humor in scripts by saying ‘Here’s some pages, make them funny.’ You put them in scripts by WRITING VISUAL JOKES!”

In my defense, I did have some visual jokes in the script like the kobold running into Scipio’s blade and Frigg’s “ha-ha-this-doesn’t-bother-me-at-ALLLL” smile barely disguising her meltdown in the next panel, but it was pretty simple by our then-usual standard. John normally prefers firm direction, and that’s fine by me (preferable, in fact). But I’m a firm believer in experimenting, and that includes changing up the working method.

I think the results worked, and Phil came around eventually. But I think he was correct in a larger sense: a lot of what’s funny about these pages is the novelty of the shift in storytelling and its appropriateness to Frigg and Scipio’s blunt personalities and the nature of their conflict. If we had done more pages along these lines in later chapters or on other subjects, I suspect the style would’ve worn thin quickly.