#issue 52

[dailydccomics]

you can practically see the smoke coming out of his ears

[thanksjro]

More Than Meets the Eye #52 — The DJD Once Again Prove to Be an HR Nightmare

Ratchet and Drift, looking fresh as hell in their matching paint jobs, stand on the cliff they made their cool entrance on last issue, as they snipe at each other over whether or not Drift personally knows the DJD. Considering how Tarn and Friends had a space-cocaine induced freakout over seeing Drift on the quantum duplicate Lost Light, they may want to talk a little quieter, especially with the face Helex is making.

You better watch out, Ratchet— this man's going to do Sakamoto-got-all-the-way-to-pencils shit to you!

The Pet takes the opportunity presented by our recently returned newlyweds being too busy flirting to pay attention to the fight at hand, leaping to chew on Ratchet's head. Luckily, Ten is an ally, even when he’s been beat to shit, and punches the shitty little Pomeranian into the air. Kaon, card-carrying freak and dog dad, takes this abject display of animal abuse about as well as he can.

Ratchet, having his gun eaten by the mouth pervert, is beginning to worry that he, his rich boytoy, and a mostly out of commission Ten might be sliiiiiiiiightly outnumbered against a dozen Decepticons, two of whom belong to the Super Murder Death Squad. Drift, after a bit of needling, heelies a dude’s face off, jumps into the air, does a bunch of sick flips, blocks a laser with a sword in such a way that it looks like he got shot in the dick, and then lands, like, 70 feet away to scoop up the Pet and threaten to chop its head off if Helex doesn’t stop trying to vore his boyfriend.

Kaon, #1 dog dad, orders everyone to fall back. Helex, who has Ratchet like 70% inside his smelting chamber by this point, can’t believe that Kaon’s ruining the fun. Helex releases Ratchet, letting him crowd onto Drama Point with Drift and most of Ten, as the Decepticons circle them. Drift, unfortunately, didn’t think past doing sweet flips to show off after his sabbatical from the comic run, and they’re back in the same situation they arrived to, but now one of them is holding a crusty little dog.

Then a platform descends from the sky, and we see what Ravage has been up to.

Grand theft auto!

Yes, it turns out that this cat can drive, and well enough to get the boys up and out of danger, though Ten’s size means that the lovebirds have to dangle off of his remaining arm. Drift still hasn’t put down the Pet. Sure hope that thing’s been socialized to cats.

Oh, who am I kidding? Kaon wouldn’t have bothered.

Speaking of Kaon, he looks like he’s about to cry, because someone’s kidnapped his princess baby angel, and Helex doesn’t even CARE, the heartless bastard, as he orders the other Decepticons to fire on the shuttle. They, of course, hit it, as there’s at least ten of these guys firing, and they’re all decently tall. The shuttle begins to lose altitude, and Ravage, who does not have traditional hands and is currently using his tail to man the control stick, attempts to crash as close to the “fortress” as possible.

Meanwhile, over at Megatron’s plinth, we get back to that whole thing where he surrendered himself to Tarn. Tarn, feeling an excuse to monologue coming on, says that he’s well aware of Megatron’s new schtick, and he’s not a huge fan of it. Megatron clarifies that he wishes to give himself up so that the rest of the Lost Light crew stranded on this planet might live, because this is his fault to begin with. Tarn agrees, reminding him that he paid for Tarn’s plastic surgery. Megatron states that he only brought Tarn to his side to hurt “someone”.

Three guesses who Megatron could have possibly hurting by bringing Tarn over to the Decepticons, and the first two don’t count.

Megatron thinks that by bumming around space on a borderline vacation, he’s returned to who he used to be (maybe he got his teaching license, who knows) and that the war was a waste of time. Tarn gets kind of intense here, because if Megatron wasted his life, what does that make Tarn? Tarn, who has decorated his home with nothing but Decepticon symbols? Tarn, who has had corpses nailed to his wall for the last couple million years? Tarn, who wears a fuckoff stupid mask every single day of his life, even while eating and trying to kill himself with space meth cut with time travel and gas station dick pills? Also, what about all the other guys who died trying to realize Megatron's ideals? What about the little guys, the cogs that made the machine run? What about Steve from accounting, whose husband left him, because he was too busy trying to balance the budget on Megatron's body remodels and Optimus Prime punching bags that also doubled as body pillows to come home? What about Steve, huh?

Megatron basically regrets everything he’s ever done, not that Tarn cares. Megatron then reveals that whole thing where Rewind tried to retroactively kill him as an infant, and how he sort of wished it had worked.

Tarn starts beating the shit out of Megatron before the guy can start going on about how his parents are Brainstorm and Whirl, though Tarn promises that this is just a healthy dose of tough love, as surely the wimp before him isn’t actually who Megatron is. Megatron doesn’t fight back, instead just staring sadly at the Autobot badge Tarn slapped off of him. This is really starting to piss Tarn off, as he was really hoping to beat some of the fire back into his former mentor and idol. This is when he starts trying to choke Megatron, even though their species doesn’t breathe. Still, I’m sure Tarn’s stiletto nails hurt something fierce.

Megatron then recalls his conversation with Velocity, and states that if the fool’s energon DID alter his personality, it was probably for the best, and he wouldn’t want to go back. Tarn, who has based his entire selfhood on the thing that Megatron threw away to live out his probation on a cruise ship, takes this statement with all the tact and level-headedness we’ve come to know him for.

Tarn is just one more double fusion cannon blast to the chest away from smiting Megatron utterly, and he’s fully committed to doing so. However, he gets distracted by the sound of Elton John’s “The Bitch is Back” coming from across the field.

WHO LET THIS MOTHERFUCKER OUT OF HELL

Anyway, it looks like Ravage can, in fact, drive pretty well, as the shuttle did crash pretty close to the “fortress”. Swerve, who still really wants to make up for his shitty boss behaviors and also accidentally dragging Ten into a microcosm of hell, lets Ten know that they saw his floor graffiti, and that it might actually work. Magnus, who still has his arm off, does his best to not kick Swerve across the room as he scurries underfoot, as he drags Ten inside the building.

Skids intercepts Ratchet to welcome him back, and also ask how the hell he knew to come to Necroworld. Apparently he and Drift had received a call from the handy dandy phone that he had given First Aid, who First Aid had then regifted to Velocity, just in case some bullshit happened. Velocity’s introduction to Ratchet is rough, as she manages to call him grumpy, old, and stubborn as a mule in the span of about fifteen seconds. Ratchet is mostly concerned with the fact that the Lost Light replaced him so soon after his return. Nobody tell him about Velocity’s track record with the medical exams, he might just shoot off into space to beat First Aid to a pulp for leaving her by herself.

Over in what might be a closet, Rodimus runs across Drift sitting in the dark and sharpening one of his swords. Drift seems to have used his exile to remember that he does, in fact, have some semblance of self-respect, as he doesn’t immediately forgive Rodimus for throwing him off the ship that he paid for, only to have given himself up as the real culprit behind the Overlordening, like, a week later, thus negating Drift’s sacrifice, and then never coming to find him, despite the fact that they’re supposedly friends, and, again, the ship is in Drift’s name, as was the crew’s allowance money. How the Lost Light has survived financially without Drift is unknown.

Rodimus knows that he sucks and is the worst, but he was really worried that Drift wouldn’t like him anymore, so he’d sort of been kicking the issue of “finding my ex-TIC to tell him he got publicly humiliated for nothing” down the road, to the point where Ratchet had gotten sick of it and went to solve the problem himself.

Of course, the meta reason for Drift not being found was so that Shane McCarthy could have his OC back, as well as Ratchet, for the miniseries Transformers: Drift— Empire of Stone, well known for being sort of silly and introducing the phrase “be shoosh” to Drift’s lexicon. In it, Ratchet found Drift traipsing around the edge of the galaxy being a neutral (in terms of war) hero to organic species affected by Decepticon aggressions, before crashing on a planet where Drift, back when he was “Deadlock”, had found a mystical stone army, one that Gigatron (a dude who totally isn’t anime Megatron) wanted to harness the power of, so that the Decepticons might claim victory over their enemies. Hellbat, Gigatron’s second in command, had gone mad doing nothing but killing over millions of years, and had been modifying the stone army in secret to do his bidding so he could "kill everything". Then the stone army woke up, Hellbat died, Gigatron died, and Ratchet went to take Drift to get detailed, because he looked like he'd been ridden hard and put away wet.

Also, if you think about it, having two former high-ranking Decepticons turning to the Autobot side being on the Lost Light’s high command might have been too many redundancies to make Megatron’s arc stand out. Perhaps, had Megatron not been added to MTMTE’s roster so late in the game, Rodimus WOULD have gone looking for Drift, finding him just in time for the DJD to catch wind that they hadn’t actually super nightmare death murdered Deadlock after all.

Drift, who can’t say no to Rodimus's puppydog face, lets Rodimus sit with him on the floor, as he apologizes for the fact that by coming here, Drift and Ratchet have unwittingly signed up for Tarn’s Political Theory and Dismemberment Slam Poetry Night, but he mega-promises that they’ll come up with something together to get through this. Drift appreciates the sentiment, but knows that Rodimus is just saying this to make him feel better.

Back at the worst fan club meetup in the galaxy, Tarn elbows Overlord in the throat and tells him to fuck off. Overlord tells him that he knows Tarn never finished his degree and only acts like an academic for the aesthetic. Tarn transforms to shoot him while reminding Overlord that at least Megatron’s spoken to him in the last few thousand years. The two duke it out with their tank modes, Overlord KRUMPing all over Tarn, before the theatre kid kicks him off and questions why exactly Overlord is even alive, given that he chainsawed his head off last year. No word on if he’s bothered to ask this same question about 75% of the people he’s here to super murder.

Overlord simply states that someone found him floating out in space and fixed him up, because it turns out that they both wanted to go after Megatron and kill his ass dead, because Overlord is sort of sick of not getting the attention he so obviously deserves. When Tarn, ever the opportunist, attempts to make a team up deal, Overlord tells him to shut up.

And then they realize they lost the old man they were fighting over.

Great work, fellas.

Over with the Autobots (and Cyclonus), Rewind’s outside, looking at that memorial to the disappeared and trying to figure out why the Necrobot laid out the names in the way that he did. He’s currently near the top, where you can see most of Roller’s name, someone whose name ends in “gator”, and Dreamwave Production’s smoldering corpse, which makes me wonder if Alex Milne ever did get all the money he was owed from his work with them. Rewind, who last dealt with the DJD not even a year ago, is trying really, really hard to not think about how many needles they’re going to jam into Chromedome’s eyes this go around.

Of course, Nautica, who has come out to find Rewind, doesn’t give a shit about Rewind’s PTSD. She wants relationship advice! She’d ask Chromedome, but apparently he’s taking a nap, still worn out from stabbing Tailgate in the brain after he rainbow-exploded all over the ship. Which happened months ago.

You know, at the rate he’s been going, Chromedome probably wouldn’t have lived too far past sunset anyhow.

Anyway, Nautica wants to know if, on Cybertron, you have to be besties before you can get hitched, because that’s how it works on some of the other colonies. She specifies that this ISN'T how it works on Caminus, which is good, given how problematic that would be, considering you need to be best friends with someone by the time you're five weeks old, and there's no telling if they're cool with platonic polyamory. Rewind informs her that it’s either one or the other on Cybertron, no double-dipping, and god help you if it’s a situationship. Nautica is asking this because she’s realized that she can’t waffle about on committing anymore, seeing as she’s probably going to die in the next hour or so, and she’d rather use that time to enter a queer-platonic partnership than get her face fixed.

Back at the Peaceful Tyranny, Tarn has, in fact, managed to bring Overlord to reason, much to Deathsaurus’s confusion and derision, if his squiggle face is anything to go by. Overlord, smug as fuck, informs Deathsaurus that in exchange for his compliance, Tarn has agreed to let him personally murder Megatron while everyone watches, because surely Tarn couldn’t actually kill his idealogical idol, because he’s a pussy. Tarn is being very brave about this, only letting the spot blacking on his linework show on his face, as his fists shake with rage.

Then Kaon shows up, begging they pull back their forces until the Pet has been returned, and the spot blacking gets a little heavier.

Tarn, who has had a very long day of tactical meetings, phone calls, facing his fallen idol, having a very unsatisfying beatdown with said idol, and dealing with known freak Overlord, handles Kaon’s inability to be a big boy about misplacing his shitty little dog with all of the tact and decorum we’ve come to know him for— he gives Kaon a big, beefy hug, acknowledges just how much Kaon loves that shitty little dog, and then makes sure that Kaon never has to worry about a thing ever again.

That’s a series wrap on Kaon! Let’s give him a hand, folks!

Tarn, who has had just about enough of Overlord in the last half hour, smashes Kaon’s head onto Overlord’s tits, covering him in viscera, as he demands he be treated with respect, because this is HIS house, where HE’S paying the bills and calling the shots, so help him god. Nickel is very displeased that Tarn’s killed one of the Twinksome Twosome. No word on how Deathsaurus feels about this, considering that a big reason he’s working with Tarn is because he refused to kill the rest of the DJD when demanded to do so, thus showing his dedication to his men. Also no word on how the rest of the DJD are going to handle Tarn decapitating their weed man.

Tarn tells everyone to pony up, as they’re about to go over and handle all the silly little bastards hiding out in the Necrobot’s “fortress”.

Speaking of which, it looks like Megatron made it home, despite Tarn blowing his tits clean off with that cannon blast. Rodimus and Ratchet carry him inside, as Magnus is probably too busy not getting his arm put back on to help, and Megatron is using the last of his energy to hold the Autobot badge Tarn slapped off his chest earlier.

Sure hope Ratchet didn’t forget to tell Drift about his old boss being co-captain of the ship, or else this is going to be a very nasty surprise for both of them— we've already seen that Drift loves to freak out and kill sick people.

[measuringbliss]

Look, I really wonder how many people thought Peter Parker and Norman Osborn were in a secret relationship, because in the public eye, they seem constantly tangled up

(I absolutely ship this)

[archiesoniconline]

Sonic Universe Online #52 is now live!

Sonic Universe Online #52 is now live! How can Bunnie bust out of prison, and will it involve any busting of heads? Take a read to find out!

[borrelia]

friendly reminder: knuckles can do this

[happywebdesign]

Kinfolk

[imofftoneverneverland]

"Hoy! Cluracan. You want a girl sent to your room?"

"No, Your Grace."

"A boy, then?"

"No thank you, Your Grace."

"Suit yourself."

[thegoldenreport]

BLACK SEDAN

It simply appears. No matter the time of day or place. Could be outside your home. Or down in the city streets. It draws upon the curious and the careless. You step inside and close the door.  It will take you so far off from where you want to go. Bound within the shade of it’s darkly tinted windows.

It does not have a driver, at least not one you can see. It will gather you. Then deliver you. Then gather you again. It is said to be a shuttle to parallel dimensions, other worlds. And perhaps they’re right. May our dimensions align some sunny day…if that is the case.

Yet we have another disturbing ripple within our time and space. A reminder to take your mentis blockers. And a journal we’ve intercepted from one of it’s passengers. 

…

I don’t know what I should’ve done. I don’t know if I could’ve avoided it. It was a long day at work. My car was in shop. And too short of a walk home to bother anyone for a ride. Tunnel Lake was a relatively safe town anyway. I’d done it multiple times before this. Though never had I been drawn like a magnet to the back seat of a pitch black sedan, lurking outside the road to my neighborhood. Did I think it was a rideshare?

No. I wasn’t thinking at all.

Something came over me. Like it was suddenly very wrong to be outside. My hand found the door handle without me telling it too. Ears throbbing. Shapes moving in my peripheral vision. Mere seconds and I was seated, buckled in. The car began to pull out from it’s spot. I didn’t check the driver’s seat.

The first stop was Riley’s Chili Dogs, an forsaken restaurant complete with barred windows and cracked paint. The sight confused me, as Riley’s closed four years back and was replaced by a flower boutique. But here it stood with the neon OPEN sign flickering as it always had been. I felt that it was okay to step out if I wanted to. Someone or something had allowed it. 

The door opened. I was released. I stepped outside. Stretched my legs. And panic spread like a fungus inside my mind. It wasn’t just the…resurrected Riley’s. The street names. The advertisements. Letters would blur and scramble if I focused on them. And then there was the tendril…in the wastebin…with the eye…

I wrenched open the car door and leapt in my seat like some sad, scared animal. Where was I? What was happening to me? 

The car was safe. 

The second stop took us further. In the real world, it featured a large central fountain with park benches and botanical gardens and shady trees. Ursary Park. A ten minute drive from my house. A 17 minute drive from Riley’s. A several hour drive for us. 

I didn’t get out of the car for this one. Only stole glances out the window at the vacant spot where the fountain should be. No trees or benches. Just a wide concrete disk in the middle of dust and sand. Which stretched out for miles. Familiar landmarks I knew either didn’t exist anymore or were warped beyond comprehension. They could not be trusted. 

Stop three, four, and five taught me that it was (sometimes) good and (sometimes) necessary to get out of the car. Think about those lengthy road trips you took with your parents. You gotta get out and loosen up the muscles. It’s like that. And then you get back in when you see the man with no face cross the parking lot while reading a newspaper.

Though I couldn’t stray too far or too long. There were boundaries. Cross one and I’d find myself waking up in the car again, halfway out to our new destination. Six, seven, eight, nine…

I can’t remember when I had eaten last. And that was starting to take up a piece of my worry rattled brain. The car deposited me in front of a quaint, two story, family home. Home. A house. The first house in a long line of strange and even stranger locations.

It felt safe. And weirdly, it felt normal. The old normal.

I knocked on the door. The mom was there to greet me, a bit too excitedly. She was a small woman in a button down, jogger sweats and a blue apron. The dad flashed a smile from the kitchen. He spooned noodles and vegetables on a ceramic plate and handed it to some unseen figure out the bay window. Like a drive through…

They asked me what I was doing here. Where I came from. Could they serve me a bowl of ramen. All that good stuff. I sat at their table with a loss for words. Not just the first house, this was also the first human contact. 

I tried to explain the black car I was inexplicably tied to. And how I didn’t know if I’d been riding for days or years. And how I couldn’t seem to get back home. I broke down. The mom stroked my arm. The dad had sad eyes.

They told me their daughter had also disappeared in a black car several years ago. They kept waiting to see if she’d make her way back. They’d heard stories from the Silver Report about alternate dimensions, doppelgangers, psychic attacks…

They hoped for impossible things. And still did even now.

After the bowl, I did feel better. At least a little bit. They offered me a room downstairs for the night. Stark white walls. No furniture but a couple of wooden chairs laid out awkwardly in the middle. And then the bedroom. The bedroom was blue. And the sheets were crisp and smelled like soap. 

I was warm.

I was safe.

I closed my eyes.

I think I woke up in the black car again after that…but honestly, I’m not sure.

Does it matter?

[ericahbrillina]

redraw of a batman comic with our fav babygirl ✨

[litta-jpg]

they were his colors

[kurawastaken]

2024 vs 2015!!

[dailydccomics]

lol she's so nonchalant like yeah whatever its me

[puppetwoman17]

Honestly, I don’t know what I want the relationship with Cap and Billy to be.

Because I get why some people want them to be wholly separate beings. It just makes sense that Marvel is completely nonhuman. That he’s just magic given form.

But I don’t entirely like that conclusion. To me, it takes away the fact that billy is responsible for all those lives saved. That he is the one sacrificing his time and putting his life on the line. That he is the one getting all this trauma. Making them separate takes that all away for me.

But there’s also the issue that new52 dc doesn’t do that right either. When Cap and Billy ARE the same, Cap acts like a stupid kid, an overgrown child. I mean that’s not it completely. I have an entire separate issue with how New52 handles Billy’s personality and lore, but we can’t get into that rn or this rant will go on forever.

And the thing is DC DOES know how to handle Cap and Billy being the same(or not the same, but like Cap is Billy with…more. He’s Billy, but he’s also magic itself. Like a fusion of sorts. He has memories and some of his personality, but he doesn’t act like an idiot).

I mean, look at JL Unlimited. Despite Cap still acting somewhat childish, it never goes overboard. He’s even admired by his fellow Leaguers. Hell, BATMAN says the League needs him because of how sunny he is! And sure, while there’s some childishness in the YJ cartoon, it’s not cringy(at least to me, because when you see what they did to him in JL:Throne of Atlantis…)

There’s that one other movie with Superman and Batman that I can’t remember the name of, where some heroes are going after Superman for a reason I ALSO can’t remember. Cap is one of them, and he never once acts like a stupid kid. He, like those other heroes, doesn’t have the whole picture, and that’s why he’s attacking Supes.

Thwre is a way to have Cap and Billy be the same entity, have the same memories, but also be somewhat different. There is a way to make sure that Billy is shown to be responsible for the lives he saves. There is a way to give Cap respect in this universe because it has been done before. New52 needs to work on that or we’ll have this issue forever🙄.

It almost makes me glad we don’t have a Shazam/Captain Marvel tv show because gods know what they might do to him. I’m telling you, we have had the “child gets given tremendous responsibility and fucks up” schtik over and over and over for the past century and probably more. It’s been done. So many times.

Cap was a beloved hero in the 1940s and pre-52 BECAUSE he didn’t adhere to that. Because the writers made sure we knew he was capable of being responsible and a hard worker, and not an idiot, all while being like 10. And in recent years it has STILL been done.

It is possible. Just do it right!

[shoot-i-messed-up]

Hal and Sinestro: *actually having a really intense intellectual debate over each other's actions and the right to do the things that they did*

the Yellow Lanterns: oh my god they're breaking up

[archiesoniconline]

Sonic Universe Online #52 Behind The Scenes!

Hello, everyone!  Boy, it’s been a while since we’ve done one of these, huh?  But considering we finally managed to release this issue after its nightmarish production cycle, we decided that it was a good time to bring the “behind the scenes” posts back.  There’s a lot to talk about with this one, so get ready for a real doozy!

As usual, let’s start with the cover.  We wanted to have Bunnie and Scarlett as the focus, and RocketPOW! went through several drafts of what that would look like.  In the end, we settled on having them playing cards in the bar from Sonic Mania’s Mirage Saloon Zone to fit with the desert theme.  It’s also worth noting that we had Jack on the cover at one point but ultimately decided against it, since the story focuses more on his lackeys than himself.

Before we start on the actual story, I guess we should begin with the elephant in the room: Bunnie’s redesign.  Even though we technically first saw her new look in issue 51, we might as well go over it now.  Picking up from where the official comic left off, we knew that Bunnie had a redesign after being legionized, but the reboot happened before we ever got to see it.  And with the redesign of such an important character, obviously there was a lot of pressure to do her justice.  There was some old concept art by Tracy Yardley of legionnaire Bunnie, but we didn’t want to just take that and call it a day.  We had quite a field day with many of our talented artists coming up with their own interpretations of her redesign, including @miitoons, @riggo-draws, @drawloverlala, @fritzymagpies, Tim Campbell, CrimDa, DoNotDelete, and more that I sadly can’t remember anymore.  From the shape and function of her cybernetics, her overall color scheme, her clothing, her hairstyle, her weapons, etc., every last detail was meticulously gone over until we arrived at the final design taking what we liked most from each of them.

At first, we had gotten Tale to draw out the first several pages, and even though they were finished, he unfortunately had to step out of the issue and we had Gilgalad take over, better known as Thomas Rothlisberger, who we were lucky to have on the team before he moved on to the IDW Sonic comics.  For the sake of consistency (lol), we unfortunately had to scrap Tale’s pages so he could redo those as well.

Holly’s sickness isn’t elaborated on in the actual story, but the gist is that she’s a snow leapord who was roboticized during the First Robotnik War.  But after the Bem deroboticized her while she was in the desert, her body became sick due to being stuck in the inhospitable environment, which is an example of how misplaced many of the former Robians were being sent far out of their natural habitats, and losing the protection of their robot bodies was actually a detriment.

A Sonic fan with a good eye for detail may notice that the guard who takes over watching Bunnie after Scarlett is actually one of the unnamed members of Infinite’s Jackal Squad from the Sonic Forces prequel comic.  Since this cameo may or may not go anywhere in regards to Infinite in ASO, we opted against using Infinite himself since he’s too important of a character to pass off as a mere cameo.  If you want this plot thread to be expanded upon, let us know!

Since this is where we introduce Holly and her relationship with Scarlett, it’s as good a time as any to discuss the process of their creation.  With Scarlett, we wanted to introduce a character who would serve as a foil to Bunnie, another person struggling due to their bedridden lover, but with diametrically-opposed views regarding cybernetics.  Her design was actually taken from a random Sand Blaster who appeared in a single panel of StH #218, who we decided to turn into a full-fledged character.  Although her species was unknown during her single appearance, we decided to make her a fennec fox.  On the other hand, Holly was an entirely new design that we came up with for the story.  The LGBT aspect of their relationship was actually the idea of my editor for the issue, The Shadow Imperator.  I stated in the interview after the issue that I was the one who came up with their names, but that’s not the whole truth.  There was a whole team effort dedicated to naming the two of them, before I suggested Scarlett since there was an abandoned plot point about how Bunnie’s true name was at one point planned to be Scarlett O’Hare.  Our Scarlett’s full name is Scarlett O’Fenn, with ShadImp being the one to suggest adding the last name as well.  But since her last name didn’t come up in the story, I apologize for forgetting to mention it.  Holly was also one of several names I came up with, which was agreed on due to the sort of “snowy” feel it has to it.

In my initial draft for Scarlett and Holly’s conversation, I wrote Holly as being more openly pessimistic about her condition, outright stating that Scarlett would be better off if she was gone.  But since that seemed rather inconsiderate to Scarlett’s feelings, ShadImp suggested that I tone it down a little and have her only mention feeling like a burden.  He was also the one to suggest that I make sure their romantic relationship is mentioned as explicitly as possible, so there would be no room for ambiguity that might lessen the impact of their sexual orientation.

Scarlett taking off her hat here wasn’t actually in the script I wrote, but it was a smart move by Gilgalad, showing her letting her guard down around the one person she can afford to do so with.  To put it simply, Scarlett offers Holly physical support while Holly offers Scarlett emotional support, so neither one is one-sidedly supporting the other.  This scene also demonstrates that even though Scarlett is easily the most level-headed and compassionate Sand Blaster we’ve seen so far, some of the old bigotries and prejudice against cyborgs and robots that Jack instilled into her still remain.

Gilgalad had actually already penciled out the next couple pages, but since he wasn’t able to stick around for the full story, we decided that that the end of Scarlett and Holly’s scene was a good cutoff point for the drastic shift in art style.  Red Rabbit is an amazing artist with a style very similar to Patrick Spaziante, but it is still a jarring shift compared to most other artists on the project.  I had also originally written Bunnie mentioning not being very good at undercover missions, but when ShadImp brought up her successful operation tricking Battle Lord Kukku I changed the script to have her mention that instead.

At first, I was planning for the poker scene to have the characters holding cards that reflected their position in the conversation, such as holding a winning hand when they have the upper hand in the argument.  But since I have absolutely no knowledge or experience with poker, that idea ultimately didn’t come through in the final story.  This scene also serves to flesh out the Sand Blasters and show that none of them are blindly loyal to Jack.  Tex obviously has his own agenda, Avery just goes along with whatever’s the least troublesome, Shift wants to get his hands on new technology, and Jolt does genuinely want the city to open up to the rest of the world.

You may have noticed that instead of rocket feet like her old design, Bunnie now flies with a removable jet pack on her back.  If you’re wondering how that wouldn’t burn her tail off, it was specifically designed so that the fire trails would shoot aiming away from her tail.

Originally, during the car chase sequence Bunnie’s jet pack was just written to malfunction for no real reason.  But eventually, I decided to give it a more interesting explanation by adding in hints that Shift may have intentionally sabotaged it to trip up Bunnie, only to reveal that he was actually trying to fix it and he didn’t betray her after all.  This was also the portion of the story where Ink Pants took over for pencils, and then Lav after him.  Even though they’re all fine artists in their own right, hopefully this will be the last time that we need to include so many drastic changes in art style to illustrate a single story.

We almost had one more shift in art style, with @gendeerfluid​ penciling the last page.  In the end, Lav managed to finish that one as well, giving us a massive cliffhanger both figuratively and literally in the form of Jun Kun, the Iron King.

That’s about it for this one, folks!  Thanks for sticking with us all this time, and look forward to the conclusion of this story next issue.  Until then, keep on juicin’!

[kryptonuts]

these two deserve to be in a toxic codependent relationship l