Early Page 386 EDITED (Patreon)

A bit of a change to this one, all in the 4th panel! For one, the least controversial change would be changing Tamberlane's hands to not be two left hands. Whoops! Sometimes when drawing signs I have a hard time turning hands around in my head. It happens to the best of us.

The main change I want to talk about is to Jonas's dialogue. Here's what it was before:

Quite reasonably, some folks interpreted Jonas's comment here as about Tamberlane's signing instead of her apologies. That was an interpretation we hadn't accounted for.

Now, the question of reader interaction and interpretation is a thorny one. I'm always a proponent of letting the work speak for itself (even when it drives me a little crazy to do so), and I don't mind when peoples' interpretations are wrong. That's part of the process of absorbing a creative work.

However, there rise cases like this where the wrong interpretation can wildly affect the reading experience in a way we as the authors never intended. In that case, we often do edits like this one. The cost of the wrong interpretation here is the risk of completely tearing down Jonas's impression as a character in a readers' mind, as well as an assumption of Tamberlane's experience in Treehollow as a whole that can cascade through the rest of the story if not checked.

That's not to say making a change like this is easy. We always have to determine whether the wording we originally chose has elevated importance, and needs to stay in the story somehow. Sometimes it's a balancing act between what we intend and what the reasonable interpretations might be, and we might need to instead introduce another moment later in the comic to balance it ou