fresh meat, page 93

this page is a little longer than usual because it kind of crushed up 3 longer necessary plot points stuck in an ambiguous time territory in the story: kim needed to change outfits, be told that she was being discharged at night, and then kept waiting until the lights went out, where she was told to go to bed and wait until tomorrow.
a lot of beats are cushioned by thematic relevance and a touch of realism to feed them without making them too obvious, but these three form their own scene by crashing directly into each other like a pile up on the highway. ultimately, i put them together this way because they all worked better by continuously pushing the reader to stay in a mindset where there were large leaps of time.
there's still a little narrative fat in these, like how kim disposes of her scrubs on-screen, and attends therapy to direct attention away from said scrubs, causing her to stay there until the time necessary for the second "beat." it definitely has a different feel from a more purposeful scene that takes it slower, can't say it's necessarily better or worse.

there were a lot of ways i could have delivered this due to the ambiguous flow of time, but it ended up being a series of (dare i say subtle) callbacks -- kim leaving the shower in the same setting and time of day as tabitha declaring they would let her go soon and then entering the shower, kim throwing away her scrubs in the same room, same time of day, same shot as when she threw away her therapy worksheets, just before being pulled out for her first evaluation by the same nurse who first performed her intake process, and now would perform her discharge process, followed by sitting in the same room at the same time of day as whittacker the night she was discharged, only to be sent to bed instead of waiting to be sent home in the dark.

i threw in the shaggy reference because it was a more oblique call to the infamous "are you legit sad" post, but also because it immediately removes some of the tension in a moment i would consider a big challenge to the reader's suspension of disbelief. kim feels as much disbelief as the reader, and also distracts them with a truly bizarre expression of this disbelief.

the last set of panels mimics what would be in an animation a  protagonist staying relatively still in the center of the frame, as  multiple scenes they exist within rush past them on fast forward, rarely  interacting with them.
kim would be far from the camera, not only to give more space for the  other characters to exist, but to make her small, a little more  helpless, waiting for the camera to move, the situation to change, and  it never does.
around her, i wanted an abstract portrayal of ward  members trickling in and out of the day room in the last sliver of their  day during one last send-off to the audience, as they maintain the  realism of a populated ward where one would seek out entertainment in  the lull before lights out.
a prominent character missing, sugar, gets a  longer good-bye in the narrative directly preceding kim's discharge  sequence.  it's a relatively simple shot to explain -- a really long hold with  characters popping in and out of the foreground around kim -- that i  wanted to have a lot more depth in the accumulated context of the comic.
(ironically, kerris doesn't show up again, solely because i don't believe she would really hang out in the day room. :P)

all in all, i was hoping to create this bittersweet feeling in this page, which would be amplified with the next scene, and the ending of the comic. the reader would be given the news they've been waiting for, but the delivery is stalled, and not as glamorous or satisfying as initially imagined.
even if i had made the ending less bittersweet and more plain "sweet," i would have kept this moment in. it felt very realistic to me because this is based on a stay where i had to wait an extra day after being told i could leave.
i was so upset knowing the only thing standing in between me and the pavement outside of the ward was no longer high security doors, but a few mysterious documents. i had so much time to think about this discomfort and anger going through the process i'd envied other patients for enduring before i did. "one last 'fuck you,' huh?"