Annotated 49-8
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.
Was “the accident” Carol referred to a couple of pages back a real occurrence?
HR did not originally mean for the Five to stay embedded in Arkerra, so yes.
Considering Carol’s recent nightmares, she must have suspected the truth on some level.
Also, the colors, lights and shadows on the first two panels are amazing
I don’t remember and I even think I never realized that Taro’s doom was being a bound prisoner forsaken in the face of danger…kinda sad. While rereading I often daydreamed about how his life would be living under Harky.
Moving it was definitely the better choice. I can’t even imagine what it would’ve looked like with all them bubbles in one panel. There wouldn’t be room for an image! The dialog itself is clear enough in both character tone and inference that misunderstanding who was saying what was something I’d never even considered.
I think an elegant solution would be to draw bubble tails coming from off-screen in the directions of Xan and Shanna. It would help indicate that the lines are coming from two separate people (since everyone in Sepia world, to my observation, uses the same font and no bubble coloration) and also happily coincides with their relative positions to our view of Carol.
You’ve got better comic reading skills than me then. Due to them being borderlessly connected I always thought they were the same speaker and Xan was uncharacteristically upset (which is appropriate for this moment).
I’m in the same boat. I had no idea it was supposed to be two different speakers without the annotations.
The “reactor core” thing about to explode … I’m not sure the spirits are not happily feeding on it. It might not actually be helping against them (other than distract them for a bit)