Panel
1: In the background, behold the visual tragedy of using those highly
stylized and artificial “window reflection lines” to convey glass. As
this old-school, frankly lazy riff is normally seen at 45-degree angles
when facing the glass directly (as seen on an earlier page), I wound up
having to draw ’em at different angles for perpendicular panes of glass.
I would’ve been much better off just discarding these goofy-ass
cartoonist clichés entirely; such are the wages of reusing another
artist’s shortcuts, as I’m pretty sure I first borrowed these back in my
Kubert School days from Rumiko Takahashi (Maison Ikkoku, Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2). Whatever Takahashi’s many virtues as an artist, her approach to backgrounds isn’t one of her strong suits, whether drawn by herself or an assistant.
Panel 6: Definite Overdialoguing Alert on this panel, but forgivable because the flurry of word balloons does serve well to convey the tenor of Emp’s incessant wheedling.
-Adam Warren