As with the previous page, I’m not thrilled with Decade-Ago Me’s choice to go with mostly close-ups for this heavily dialogue-driven sequence. Keeping one’s camera distance varied is a handy-dandy rule of thumb for lying out comics pages, though even such attempts at variation can sometimes become monotonous as well.

Panel 1: It’s definitely time to sound the Overdialoguing Alert, folks! *VWOOP VWOOP VWOOP* In fairness, this text barrage would’ve come off even worse if two of Rivet’s sentences weren’t broken up, and instead we saw two gigantic, uninterrupted, dialogue-swollen balloons on either side; as a comics reader, few things say “go screw” to me more than a writer cramming 30- to 40-word text barrages into single word balloons. (Or “speech bubbles,” if you must insist on being a pointlessly bumptious poltroon. “Word balloons” was the accepted nomenclature of the highly skilled professional comics letterers I worked with back in the bygone era of hand lettering, and the term still preferred by full-time letterers today, as well as yrs trly.)

Panel 5: An early hint, here, from Spooky that the Empverse isn’t all rainbows and puppies and fun-filled superheroic frivolity. (Er, besides the horrific Wily Pete story earlier in the volume, that is.)

-Adam Warren