#(or even 'aloud' in Noé's internal monologue)

[neversetyoufree]

Guess who noticed a really interesting tiny detail again?

Beloved mutual torterrachampion recently pointed out to me that the special thanks page in each vnc volume always has a nice crisp lineart version of the frame from its cover, and there's some really interesting details hidden in there. A bunch of the thanks pages even show extra details that aren't there on the actual color covers themselves!

In particular, volume 2's frame has this whole bottom bones/flowers arrangement that's totally left out/hidden on the actual cover:

And right off the bat, there's a couple things about that bottom arrangement that really catch my eye.

First of all, the position of the hands there strikes me as pretty important, since uh

reaching out and down toward Vanitas is a pretty major recurring image for Noé. It makes a lot of cool symbolic sense that this shape of reaching hand would show up in his frame, since it seems to be so important to his story.

Even more interesting than that, though, is what's going on with the left eye of that bottum skull. It looks like the skull's been partially shattered there around the eye, and while Mochijun does generally seem to enjoy a bit of cracked bone imagery, this one stands out to me because:

Something happened to Noé's eye when he was a kid, but he's never once acknowledged it, and we've never gotten a single hint at what it was beyond it happening with the traffickers. And now the one skull featured on his cover's frame has a huge crack around its eye.

This doesn't actually give us any new information beyond just drawing yet more attention to the eye mystery, but. DAMN.

The rest of the imagery in this frame (the book and pen, the mourning lilies, the reaching hands) is all pretty central to who/what Noé is as a character. So while the cracked skull is/could be just a clever little nod to the existence of the eye mystery, its surroundings make me wonder just how relevant that injury is going to be.