That’s it for Blair, who was probably my favorite one-chapter character. I’m of two minds about her expression in panel 1, which closely follows the script: “Despite her physical defeat, she looks confident, even contemptuous. One of the problems with being a trickster is the temptation to believe that no one can see through your bullshit. Blair has succumbed to this.”

Part of me feels that she should have seemed more believably helpless; after all, that’s how she looked to E-Merl just before she sniped him. Phil did point out, though, that this might have made Scipio’s action read more like cruelty than prudence. And it doesn’t seem too out of line for her to get a little overconfident after E-Merl turned out to be such an easy mark.

(It’s kind of like that story about the scorpion and the frog, only in this version the frog knows the scorpion’s nature too well to trust it even a little. And ironically, Scipio here is the frog, not the scorpion.)