I consider this page to be rather a moment of dark humor in all of this – I hope that I’m not in any way diminishing the experience by admitting that.  This was one of those pages that come along once in a while that seem like an insurmountable chore to me, but then snap into place, as it were all at once, at the last possible second.  Lots of cryptic but nevertheless revelatory dialogue needed to go here, and not spill over onto later pages, so I was faced with a page where I needed lots of open space for dialogue, but in such a way that the layout became very difficult.  Anyway, I think it came together pretty all right.

So I’m really bound to say that everyone’s responses and all the discussion last week was really encouraging to me, at a moment when I needed it badly.  I’m in the midst of a very long, tedious, but incredibly important set of tasks at work – the checking of drawings provided by subcontractors – that takes up an enormous amount of mental energy and just plain old time in the office – I’ve been feeling just utterly exhausted at the end of the day, and have been accomplishing less and less comic-wise during the workweek as a result.  That’s to say nothing of the bureaucratic mockery that my life has become as a result of my attempts to get permission to take my licensing exams.  Man you haven’t had a run-around until you’ve tried to get a professional license.

So with all that, getting such words of encouragement from everyone even as I began to take the comic in a weird but unavoidable direction, well, it was really great.  So thanks, everyone.  Really and truly.

Anyhow, speaking of being exhausted, I am right now.  So I’m going to turn in.  So, until next week, everyone!