Annotated 24-21
Panel 1: “Timeline issues? WHAT timeline issues?”
Pardo’s still charmingly clueless and Syr’Nj is deftly manipulating him, but there’s a big issue with the page that makes it hard for me to enjoy any of that. In panel 4, Syr’Nj looks like she knows exactly what’s happening outside and is just being coy about it, which doesn’t line up with yesterday’s page or tomorrow’s.
Funnily enough, it does line up with a page we ended up not using, in which Frigg let Syr’Nj in on her plans for the protest. It was a neat idea for their evolving friendship, but it read a little too evolved. It had Frigg accommodating Syr’Nj so much that, f-bombs aside, she didn’t quite sound like herself.
Maybe there was an echo of that scene in the script, maybe there was a miscommunication, or maybe the script basically asked the impossible (panel description just said “doing something cute with her hair”). If you have one frame to show Syr’Nj being coy about her plans and also starting to hear something, she’s going to look like she’s being coy about what she’s starting to hear. Phil tried to fix it by adjusting the dialogue, but… (sigh) let’s just move on.
Interestingly, looking at the comments on the original run, nobody seems to have noticed that this page and the next don’t play together super-well. Which, you’re right, they don’t, but that is apparently less obvious when reading the pages 5 days apart.
I would assume most folks were willing to accept that, since time had obviously passed, Syr’Nj had been brought up to speed in the interim. Doesn’t seem like that big a leap to me.
“Can you hear the people sing?”
“No. It sounds more like angry shouting.”
+10 for Hark! A Vagrant! If you haven’t read this yet, do yourself a favor and grab it. Kate Beaton’s writing is HILARIOUS.