anel 3: Ah, behold the tough part of using text messages in a work of fiction—deciding how to depict the “dialogue” of the actual texts. TBH, I don’t think it’s all that likely that Yukiko would’ve switched to ALL CAPS as shown, but I wanted some extra degree of emphasis for what she was conveying. BTW, hope you folks appreciate the upper & lower-case fonts in this scene, as I found then very challenging indeed to hand-letter—in pencil, no less! 

Note that, when I drew this page a decade ago, emoji had been in use for a while on iOS, but I was in no rush to jump aboard that train with my lettering. Besides, imagine trying to draw the tiny, crappy, often indecipherable Apple emoji by hand! (In fact, roughly a decade later Carla Speed McNeil would do exactly that in a key scene from the 2019 miniseries Empowered and Sistah Spooky’s High School Hell.)

On an emoji tip, gotta say that I’ve always liked Microsoft’s bold-outlined emoji, which err on the side of clarity, readability and, well, “designiness” to a surprisingly higher degree than Apple’s offerings in the modern era. 

Panel 4: Only now occurred to me that, even with the iPhone’s volume turned all the way down, the vibrating of Yukiko’s text message notifications could’ve alerted Ninjette to her presence. Perhaps the Ayakami rock a special, extra-stealthy phone mode with superior noise discipline?

Today’s Patreon update: We’re continuing serialization of the unpublished Dirty Pair story Quick & Dirty, a 2003 48-pager written and drawn in a proto-Empowered pencil-page format.

-Adam Warren