fresh meat, page 57

if i had anything to say about this page, it's mostly gone now; i've been up since about 6 AM, and i'm very tired. my sleep schedule has been out of whack as i've stressed about the usual things, but more immediately, that my dog needs to be vaccinated for rabies on monday and i might sleep in past the appointment time if i don't wake up early.

i guess i will say that in this scene, sugar was much more OVERTLY hostile to the staff because she was tired and is generally pretty upset to be forced onto her feet early. now that i've received P L E N T Y of feedback on sugar's character, she was adjusted to be more obliviously tired to compensate.
while i try to cull the violence explicitly shown aimed at the main characters, it felt important to include some more unsavory moments involving sugar to round out the continuity of her character in drop-out -- especially because she focused a lot on being unwilling and unable to tolerate any more treatment for her problems from professionals, sometimes explicitly out of the fear of being hospitalized. even then, i'm hoping to keep it brief. sometimes what i decide is relatively mild or brief can be received with rather profound empathy, which i can't complain about, but it does catch me off-guard.

this page is 3 panels shorter than usual. the pacing as i saw it was either going to require an extra ~7 at least for another clean cutting off point and i didn't have it in me to go OVER the usual this time. webcomic pacing is very tricky, i try to not cut the pages off at strange beats or cliffhangers but you're really battling the clock there.

this is also the first page with lupe. she was originally going to say something while karen walked away like "and what about me?" but i decided it drew too much attention to her prematurely in addition to crowding the panel. in retrospect, i think i should have had karen say that she needed a red bracelet as a subtle indicator that she is new, but by the time i noticed i was wrapping up and too tired to rewrite the sentence by hand, draw a new bubble, then reline and recolor everything underneath that was previously hidden by the other bubble's shape.