Now that Arianna has gotten past her “knife hucking reaction phase,” she’s had time to stew in the staff saferoom and really concentrate on freaking out over how really super close she came to losing all of her skin and muscle and bones to a jerk with fire powers. Dr. Frost may have a new patient.

I’m enamored with the idea that Goon Squad comes from a large family of siblings and they all have weird variations on duplication powers. I already joked that he had a brother named Brute Squad who can make far fewer dupes than Goon, but they’re much bigger and stronger. Maybe there’s a sister named… I dunno, Fruit Squad? Or Fruit Ninja. They don’t all have to be Squads necessarily.

You may notice this page has slightly simpler coloring than usual. I mean, maybe some of you wouldn’t right away, I personally can get pretty engrossed when reading and can miss dramatic shifts in art style sometimes. Anyway, I’m out of town for a few days because I’m going to go see Rammstein in concert. The wife got tickets for a 2020 show, but as you might guess, it got pushed back, twice. Normally taking a few days off wouldn’t affect the comic because I do have a tiny buffer, but at the last minute, I decided the page that I’d originally intended to go here would be better if I put it off for a few pages, because otherwise it’d look like Maxima’s trip home took like 6 hours or something, which it definitely didn’t. So I find myself in the odd position of “finishing” a page then almost immediately posting it. I’d like to say I’ll come back to this page and finish the coloring work, but I kind of don’t hate the way it looks? Hiro’s block of a head is a little plain looking, but maybe a quick highlight pass would help. Doing the shading like this took like, and hour? For this page and the next one. And some of that time was trying to keep myself from going in with the blur tool and really smoothing out those hard cell shade lines. Normally it takes all day to do all the foreground coloring. I don’t want to make a bunch of sudden changes to how I do the art though, because that’s jarring to read. Although, if I started a new storyline and signified that with a chapter splash page then I could justify experimenting with the art a little easier. It’s still be jarring, but it would be encapsulated.

The September Vote Incentive is up!

Thank you guys so much for your patience. I hope it was worth it. It took a lot of research online to find just the right references for this piece. Toil toil. :D

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.