Panel 2: Here’s one of my favorite “abstract emotive backgrounds,” seen as billowing strands and clouds of graphite darkness, which is loosely adapted from a similar background riff used in manga to represent sudden anger and/or emotional intensity. (I’ve been using this borrowed concept off on and on since my long-ago days drawing The Dirty Pair.)

Crossword Mook’s head is outta proportion to Emp, due to the fact that—not surprisingly—I didn’t draw out his full figure to compare their relative sizes. This really is the sort of thing an artist needs to “eyeball” with a seat-of-the-pants approximation, though disproportionality could have been avoided here by directly comparing the scales of their respective heads. Oh, well.

-Adam Warren