Panel 2: I only now remembered the humor lurking in this particular bit of Daisy's off-panel dialogue—that is, she must've had to yell the word "PSST" from a good hundred feet above Emp.

Panel 4: Behold one of the problems inherent to using solid black gutters between panels, folks! Yeahp, you often have to add white lines (or something simiiar) to separate a dark background from the black gutters, lest everything merge together into a visually confusing muddle.

Later on in the series (or possibly later on in this volume?) I borrowed a gutter riff used by the artist Brian Denham in our high contrast, visually "tech noir" 2005 miniseries Iron Man: Hypervelocity, in which he'd render otherwise thick black gutters with a narrow but quite prominent white line down the middle; that worked quite nicely to separate the books' shadow-heavy panels while maintaining  the bold and striking black-gutter approach.

Side note: Black-filled gutters are commonly used in manga to visually indicate that a flashback scene is underway.

Today’s Patreon update: Open slot in the weekly schedule today! Pretty sure I’ll be posting something for the semi-recurrent Design Tuesdays feature.

-Adam Warren