I’d liked to have one more row of panels showing Vehemence slumping to the ground, reverting back to his original size, his armored arm clanking off in strips, showing a regular arm underneath, but yes, the fight is finally over. It feels slightly anti-climactic to me in some ways, but really, the only viable options at this point given their resources were to kill him or talk him down.

I’ll have to do a port mortem on the fight, sit down and reread the whole thing and see where I could have edited it. I certainly didn’t intend for it to last 86 pages. (Actually 107 pages if you count all the double sized pages.) I probably should have cut the Death Toll stuff as it didn’t add anything to the fight that didn’t happen again on a larger scale with Vehemence, and there’s probably a few more things I could have taken out or saved for later to lower the page count, but besides it running longer than I would have liked, I think it went mostly ok, especially seeing how it was my first fight. (And will probably be the only one for a while.) I’ll be glad to get back to the slice of life stuff though, which is really what the bulk of the comic is supposed to be about.

Edit: To clarify:  I didn’t mean to imply that I was going to go in and cut pages out of the comic, just that I’d be a little more critical about future pages and make sure they really contribute something, especially if a scene is taking a while to get through. The Death Toll pages did add stuff, mostly humor and as some have pointed out, it showed the team that Sydney’s genre savvy has some value to the team.

This is probably the last double page I do for a while (watch me make a liar out of myself in the next 10 pages :P ) Originally the double pages were intended to let me blow the panels up so I could to better looking action, but mostly what happened was the double pages wound up having 12-18 panels which meant I was really doing 3 pages a week and just posting two of them at once. Sure I like getting more comic out there for everyone, the problem is when I do 3 pages a week, it’s 12-13 hours a day, 7 days a week of drawing, and that leaves me time for little else. I’m sure many of you have noticed the vote incentive has gotten a bit stale for instance, or that my “What I’m Reading” widget has been on the same book for the last 2 months. I’d like to get back to doing more peripheral stuff like the vote incentives, cause they let me expand the world outside of just linear story telling, and the occasional piece of fan art or guest comic would be nice as well. I’ll also need some time to run back through and got to my big list of fixes, mostly art stuff like Maxima’s sudden change in rank, before I can put the book together and set up a kickstarter for that.

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.