fresh meat, page 86 (finished)

tried to put a little more thought into this page's shot choices -- the first set of panels would be far away from kim to put emotional distance between the viewer and her.
the dialogue introducing the evaluation would become larger in text size over three bubbles, and then the camera would zoom in.
the camera would become uncomfortable and closed-in -- the space between the door and the carpet to introduce the evaluation room one last time, an emphasis on kim that would slowly zoom out and snap back to a fairly close shot.
the owl would mirror this shot once, and the change in kim's expression would end the page to set the tone of the evaluation.

interestingly, a lot went into this page's sense of "believability." was it necessary to show kim waking up, having breakfast, coming back from lunch? couldn't the first panel have been kim being informed that she was to have an evaluation soon, and the second panel be the beginning of the evaluation?
if the aim was the most economically sound execution, then, yes, that would have been the best choice... it would have felt very forced to me, though. the concept of feeling "not believable" or "forced" itself is very subjective, and not necessary for the technical elements of the plot to do what they need to do, and that interests me. i don't even think there is a quick or easy answer to how to best conceptualize and deal with suspension of disbelief and preserving it while making a story, maybe because personal taste based on comfort level and sense of trust is so integral to what someone finds believable.
i tend to go off of my own taste mixed with what i think will make a story less difficult to read. on top of that, generally, people enjoy things that they actively participate in more than things that may be technically easier to consume because of a lack of participation, so it can't be too easy to read. it always feels better to believe you've created a conclusion given the information in a book instead of being fed what to think. on a personal level, i also feel like this is a good way to kind of look over your shoulder as a writer to make sure everyone is still following, and not just aiming for a more enjoyable or compelling experience.
i feel like pacing, omission, and execution are the main ways believability is built by making the reader wait, deduce, and interpret, respectively.

a lot of the small touches that went into believability for me are how kim is never framed exactly in the panel, how characters who aren't the protagonist are given more active, interesting poses than her, how the nurse will call her by kimberley instead of kim, etc. i'm very sensitive to "protagonist syndrome" in writing, and there are a few different ways to deal with this -- drop-out dealt with it by just splitting the attention between 2 characters so that one protagonist was never clear. fresh meat works better with one protagonist whose sense of importance and control is challenged throughout the narrative.
definitely something i'll have to keep in mind while fine-tuning the perspective of catharsis; i haven't decided how many scenes i should have which include information that felix just doesn't have at all.

anyway, that was kind of more ramble-y than i was hoping for. the other thing i wanted to mention is that the ability to pull off more unorthodox shots like this requires a lot of prior knowledge in the narrative: the reader needs to be able to recognize the evaluation room, to know why tabitha is missing in the second panel and why the characters are holding out their arms, etc.
in a movie, i feel like exposition is handled so gracefully and quickly. characters talk fast and move fast. in a comic, the same thing can take like 3 pages. bubbles can only hold a sentence at a time, and you can have, at most, 3 in one panel before it gets cramped. really makes me aware of the limitations of observing only film as models for storytelling.

EDIT: i noticed another little quirk of the meta in this comic: the border separating the panels where kim is taken to her evaluation is thicker than the one separating, for example, the one separating her time at breakfast and coming back to the wing.
back in the day, i used to view some of these elements of comics much more technically -- borders represent the passage of time between panels; therefore, a thicker border represents a longer passage of time.
as i drew more comics, i noticed that applying this in a technical way was... unpleasant, visually, in some cases, even if it worked out most of the time. as i thought more about this, there were some logical loopholes with viewing comics this way. why could comics present massive skips in time without needing to draw huge blocks of border between panels? why could you draw a huge block of border in between very temporally close moments to build tension? what makes up the "sense" of when to ignore this technicality for borders and when to enforce it, if it still is a rule? these were questions i had to ask myself.
i don't want to get into it too much, mainly because whenever i talk about how a panel looks "strange" if the borders feel off by a pixel or two to me i get told they look indistinguishable to others, but i do try to play more loosely with it now, and i consider the thickness of borders is more about wasting a reader's time (even fractionally) for a specific sense of pacing.
i'm not ready to give up on the idea that intentional differences in border sizes is a personal fabrication, because i know that film will also use windowboxing, and certain tones are set when these blocks of blank space are applied to them, on purpose or accidentally. but i don't have a lot of cohesive thoughts to put forth immediately about it. i thought it was worth pointing that out.