Page Commentary No. 268 (Patreon)

Psu: What a good page.

Gunwild: Orbiting debris is dangerous, Zeke! Well... it is now. Maybe in the future there will be navigation-assisting shields and tougher hulls.

Psu: I think we both just appreciated the idea that it's like a falling star.

Gunwild: Well, yeah. Plus throwing away your badge dramatically is like... the main utility of a badge in an action story.

Psu: Well that and opening doors from time to time. But I think there's quite no other way of showing how you left something behind. We don't really see all of Zeke's past, even this flashback only shows a glimpse of it but I think the way he's written (good job by the way) sells how heavy that star is. Just how much of his past he's willing to let go. And I like to think we got a bit of Cassiopeia's past too. Her play-fullness then a genuine "sorry." It works. It speaks a lot without needing to say a lot and I think that's our comic at it's best.

Gunwild: I think we need to go for a three-fer of Cassiopeia always being able to read Zeke's expression, despite the lack of face.

Psu: That's a worthy running gag. Or maybe it's just one of those things couples do.

Gunwild: Most couples both have faces, but who knows? Anyway I've talked about this before, but yeah I think Space Westerns will work as a genre for a long time to come. Frontier living and eking out an existence will probably look very different when it actually happens on other planets, but story-wise, it works for a lot of the same reasons that Westerns always have.

Psu: The notion of Space Westerns supposed the idea of the Space Easterns, or Space Samurai stuff if you will. But I digress. We don't have any Space Samurai in our comic... Yet. Anyway, like... on the art side of this page I realized you could do a lot to suggest motion just by moving some light in the background. The way the ship lifts up out of the atmosphere and you're exposed to nothing but stars, is really cool. I hope the reader feels that sense of motion and light moving the way I intended it to. And I think I need to commend you again on the writing of this page. I'm pretty sure you wrote this one on your own, and it successfully closed the loop on this little arc.

Gunwild: Well, I'd say I don't do any of them on my own, because I'm sure we both knew what the beat had to be as we went along. We had a consensus about it. But thank you, I think I'd been nervous about giving these two a concrete backstory together and even I'm satisfied reading this page, so it's a minor miracle.

Psu: That's what being partners is about.