Making friends quickly, isn’t she?

Story Notes: Not much to say here.  This page is pretty self-explanatory.  Shadow appears to be reasonably safe in here, but she is, of course, trapped.  I’ll leave translating the inscriptions as an exercise for the reader.

Art Notes: I wish every panel could turn out like panel 2.  All-in-all, though, the page turned out pretty well.  Had to redraw panel 5 a few times.  All of the blur effects on this page made my machines SLLLLOOOOWW.

Jumping the wall was perhaps not Shadow’s brightest plan.

Title Reference: It’s a horrible punnish allusion to The Prisoner for no good reason.

Story Notes: Shadow’s Tell wasn’t really meant to be much of a surprise to anyone except Shadow (certainly not to most of my current readers, as many are aware of the origins of this motif).

The implication is that she only wears a glove on that arm because on some subconscious level she has always been aware of her nature, she just hadn’t understood it.   That’s why she took Tyron more or less at face value when she met him (after the initial shock), and why she put up only a token resistance to what he was saying.

This doesn’t mean she necessarily embraces this stuff, however.

Art Notes: I’m not overly happy with panels 1 and 4, but the rest of it works pretty well, I think.  Especially the coloring on panels 2 and 3.

It’s hard to see, but in panel 1, Shadow is holding the pepperspray I mentioned last page.

Oh, and if you wondered why there’s sometimes no rain, and sometimes lots, the storm varies its intensity every so often throughout this whole scene.  There probably shouldn’t also be mist at the same time, but hey, artistic license.  It makes the backgrounds less flat.

In Shadow’s town, you can’t throw a rock without even odds of hitting a cemetery gate.

Title Reference: Nothing in particular

Story Notes: Once Shadow has retrieved her purse, she can clean off her face a little.  Soggy Shadow is probably showing a bit more bravado than wisdom here, but climbing the wall isn’t too big of a stretch; she isn’t a complete stranger to entering cemeteries at night, and she’s feeling extremely put upon at the moment.  (She also carries a can of pepperspray in her purse.)

Art Notes: So, this is the page that caused the hiatus of the last several months.   I have effectively redrawn it from scratch, and made some dialogue and pacing modifications in the process, but this is essentially what I intended to draw back in March.

The original plan was to return to full color with this strip, but that may have been what broke my brain.  After the Broken Dolls storyline, the switch back may have simply been too abrupt (color is a lot of work, and though I love doing it, it doesn’t flow as naturally for me in illustration as in painting).

When I started up again, I drew this as you see it here, but experimented with altering it to use a monochrome or two-tone scheme, but I never could settle on one that I liked (all the variations I tried caused some sort of issue).  The next page will return to at least minimal color usage assuming no major snags.