Page Commentary No. 269 (Patreon)

Gunwild: Yes, to distract from all these emotiony games, I filled the first panel with sci-fi references and other such nonsense.

Psu: Heh. It's a very feelsy page and I absolutely love panel 2. It's one of those special images that is unique to our comic. What I mean by that is that... Zeke has a pretty cool looking head. It's very sci fi but you don't see that imagery mixed with a bed of flowers and stuff. So I thought that was a nice way to evoke a strange, surreal feeling as he's waking up from a long nap.

Gunwild: I'm sure this whole prank was your idea originally, because I was probably trying to take everything entirely too seriously. But also your idea was sneaking one of Cassiopeia's holo-tech devices into her hand there.

Psu: I definitely pushed for this page. Partially as a way of softening the blow of what's a pretty dramatic moment overall. Like I think we could have done something where Zeke is waking up and it's straight forward familiar images. But I figured on doing something a little unique, a little silly, and to make it work. It gets a little laugh out of Zeke.

Gunwild: Yep yep, good choice. I also still owe you thanks for sneaking in my silly homemade rune-inspired alphabet, which hopefully I will get to use in other projects.

Psu: We can probably turn that into a font, with a little bit of work someday. Could be fun. Anyway, a couple things like... I know we pushed back and forth on this story quite a bit. But one thing I know I try to do, which probably irks a lot of other writers, is I don't really want to have cliffhangers for the sake of a cliffhanger. Like, I think we could easily have made it where the last panel is just "old and sad Cassiopeia." But then I ask myself, okay that wouldn't actually be fooling our audience. Our audience is surprisingly clever and knows she's got holograms up the wazoo. A cliffhanger with no actual possible scary outcome, for the story, is kinda toothless. Instead, I was happy to use this page as just showing Cassiopeia and Zeke are that couple that can joke with each other even when things can be really sad.

Gunwild: Zeke's so nice he got a blue ribbon while comatose too. What an honor!

Psu: Heh, I think our audience caught on that Beebot must've been busy. I'm not sure who thought of having Beebot bring him little cute things in bed. But it was really sweet and made this page work.

Gunwild: "Do you wish to continue? (y/n)" is sort of Hamlet-esque. Or I think so, anyway.

Psu: It also goes into the deep fundamental question of Absurdist Philosophy which I think is a bit too heavy a subject to talk about. I think we'd rather joke about butts, and we want to continue so we can keep joking about butts.

Gunwild: (y)