Making of "Second Born Problems"

Been falling behind on these "making of" posts, sorry!  

I've had this idea on my books for a while but I was stuck on the punchline.  I wanted the 2nd panel to have Joel, saying "His head's fallen off!" and Fran, unconcerned, replying "He'll grow a new one!"  Joel would be holding Cooper's headless body in one hand and his alive and slightly confused head in the other.  I still think it's a better gag, but it crossed some lines I wasn't comfortable with, problem was I found it so funny I couldn't think of another way to do it! 

During October I bend the Litterverse rules to include weirder things (think Treehouse of Horror) so I wondered if I could make a beheaded Cooper work, but it still felt a bit iffy!  Luckily the Comictober prompt list came to the rescue and after crossing this idea with a few of the prompts I came up with demonic possession!  That was crazy enough, but without decapitating any kittens! 

I was going to have both babies in their cribs at first to make The Exorcist parody more obvious, but as Vincent was crying at the time, it felt cold of them to leave him there, so I put him in Joel's arms.  Later I realized it would be funnier if Vincent wasn't crying, which now I'm thinking about it, would have meant I COULD have had them in their cribs, but oh well, that ship has sailed! 😅

Something I realized drawing this is, it's really hard to draw the heads backwards on characters with tails!  I had to make his thumbs VERY obvious to make it clear that WAS a tail and not something else! 

I'd planned on making Cooper's face all weathered like in The Exorcist, but it didn't look right.  In an effort to make him more impressive I added some demonic text around him, like he's chanting.  I tried a few options but in the end used text from this generator and rearranged it to fit.

One last Easter Egg that I don't think anyone spotted, was that I answered the question from this comic! 😆