Commentary follows immediately after the place where you jump to the rest of the article.

Huh.  Lookit that.  Webster seems to have made it.  Will wonders never cease?

Luis still strikes a nice balance between a graphic approach for the character renderings and more detailed backgrounds to anchor them (well, most of the time).  Funny how I'm so caught up in writing and producing the damn thing that I miss out on a lot of the little details that he put in.  The framing of that second panel is perfect, with Collins off-center enough and an expression that utterly captures the anxiety of having to step out into the dark unarmed with...something out there waiting for you to make a mistake.

I'm wondering how many rules I broke with placing dialogue balloons over panel borders and using them to link panels.  Granted, it's not as clumsy as actually drawing arrows in to lead the reader over a confusing layout, but it's probably not the best way to handle things.  Well, it was that or shrink it down so it was really teeny, tiny and not in the way of that second-to-last panel.  Really one day I'll learn to script so that I can squeeze all the dialogue into the panels that I call for.

I dunno, though.  I kinda like it, but I imagine that it's a stylistic tic that drives a lot of people nuts.  Though really, I did letter things too big, so it's a problem of my own creation.

And again, this is a page heavy on atmosphere.  Lots of sizzle, but not a lot of steak yet.  This is an issue I'm still trying to deal with as well.  I read a lot of horror comics, but very very few are scary at all.  There's plenty of horror comics that are just, you know, zombies and brains and guts and stuff.  NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT.  Put the cleavers down.  But there's more to it than that.  Is anything in STRANGEWAYS scary?  Should I even be calling it horror?  The answer is "likely not, but it's really a convenient label that's not entirely inaccurate."  You start calling things dark fantasy and people imagine black unicorns in sunglasses.  So horror it is.  Even if it's not particularly scary.

On that note, is Webster okay?  Is he gonna make it through the night?  Only the werewolf knows.

See you all on Friday, after which we take a break because nobody's going to be reading any of these and instead will be chasing down every scrap of info on BLACKEST NIGHT.  Yeah, I'm jealous.  I wish I had a tenth of Geoff Johns' readers.  But at least I'll admit it.