Annotated 39-13
So here’s a way this page is now dated that I did not expect. “Cats don’t care” was a T-shirt design developed by Flo’s and my friend-in-comics, Ross Nover– Flo worked the gag into my script as a nod to Ross, which I was happy to do. But Ross has stepped away from comics in the intervening years and closed down the store, so I had to trawl the Internet Archive just to find a copy of this image. The line works fine if you don’t know what it’s a nod to, of course. It’s the kind of succinct observation that makes a good T-shirt, just because you don’t need any more context. But still, coming back and finding it not online makes me a bit wistful.
Panel 2: the first time in her adult life that Shanna has ever been told she “seems nice.”
“I don’t have the capacity to take things like this on faith. That’s why I developed a character who did, and then I put what little faith I had into the idea that Hurricane wouldn’t just randomly delete her, and then they did. So you see my problem.”
I like the pacing of this page, and I really like the way those clowning-around faces in panel 4 draw the eye before we start focusing on Shanna and the realization slowly expanding in the pit of her stomach.
I can’t imagine how horrible Daniel and Chrissie felt when they realized what had spooked kitty to the point that it knocked over the laptop… ‘Oh, fuck, we joked around about Kaye’s getting murdered…’
May I request official-author-confirmation, that, although not confirmed onscreen, the cat was totally okay after these events and lived a long and happy life in a lovin home?
It’s pretty likely, actually! I mean, I expect the cat will always be a little jumpy, but a story like the one it’ll have tends to attract good owners.
Honestly this is the most personally traumatizing page for me in the whole dang series because of the cat.
See, T was going on about stalkers and death-foreshadowing and all those other creepy horror tropes, but, so anti-climatic, it was just the cat! No horror tropes here at all!