- This is going to be a quickie 2 page scene before we move into a longer scene with Nathan slowly losing it in his new home. The idea is to lighten things up a little with some back and forth banter between Casey and Freddy. I realize this book is loaded with reflective moodiness but I’m trying to keep it from being a total downer. I’ve always liked stuff that was dark but not relentlessly heavy or depressing so hopefully I’m nailing the tone that I’m actually going for.

- When you’re working on a big story like this on a protracted basis, it’s weird to come back to a location (the diner) and characters (Freddy and even recently Casey) that you haven’t drawn in almost a year. I’ve made a lot of progress since I was last in Freddy’s Place yet I think I’m still making a lot of the same lighting and perspective mistakes.

- On a technical note, this is the first page that I’ve inked with my new Pentel Brush Pen. For those of you that don’t know, it’s a cartridge ink pen that has a synthetic hair brush for a tip. Up to this point I’ve been inking with a combination of tools but mostly with a #2 round brush. One of the goals of this book has been to teach myself how to ink like a real comic book artist and I’ve certainly learned a lot so far (though I’m far from being good at it) but I think can learn just as much with the brush pen and I swear I probably finished inking this page in about half the time. Efficiency and timeliness as you all know is something I need to get better at too so maybe this will help.

- On another technical note, I took this blog posting by Bryan Lee O’Malley to heart and tried keeping my word balloons as anchored to the top of the panels as possible. I usually fit them in where I think it makes compositional storyflow sense but his point might make even more sense.

- Oh, hey, this is page 50! That should be considered a milestone right? There’s still a long way to go but back when I started, 50 pages seemed like quite a long ways away.