fresh meat, page 49

this page is... late. i'm hoping to be in bed by 5 AM, so this has no color at all yet. color after i sleep. i think it looks pretty okay as just lines. obviously incomplete, but not ugly. kind of like an old print comic.
i bought a mattress on monday. i made a short folie a dupe comic which featured that, which i also posted today, knowing the page would be late. the event of buying and building the frame for the mattress took all day and left me pretty tired, though. so this page's size, density of dialogue (balloons take longer than you would think), plus that, meant this page's deadline was very much doomed.

anyway, no sketch for this one, not much changed.
the only interesting changes i made were reframing, and i changed kerris's intro dialogue to say "i'm here because of suicidal ideation" instead of "i'm here for suicidal ideation" -- while the wording is definitely MEANT to evoke imprisonment, i felt like kerris would probably conceptualize her being there as an inherent consequence of having suicidal thoughts. it places more self-blame.
as a side note, i didn't have a name for her until i was forced to pick one for this page. i was just looking for a certain sound. it means love, but it isn't symbolically relevant -- i like to mix up names that are meaningful to a story and names that aren't.
in fact, i mix extraneous narrative information and relevant information together very frequently... mainly, it makes stories more interesting to me.
superfluous information adds "realism" to a narrative, which is also a benefit, but trying to differentiate intrinsically interesting information from narrative points of interest makes a story feel more interactive by making it more like a game. this also allows stories to be somewhat open to interpretation while still having a strong direction and sense of purpose in themselves.
you just have to make sure to be careful; i try to make superfluous information very easy to gloss over, entertaining, or tangentially meaningful to themes and deeper understandings of the text.

this comic is also almost 2 times as long as usual... i knew i could have split it into two, but i really wanted this scene to be over. a lot of this is... i won't say entirely superfluous, but secondary. the most important part of the rest of this scene was that kim's introduction shows, at the end, that her mood had slightly elevated upon coming to the new wing.
whether she's saying this because she's genuinely happier or wants to leave that much more is irrelevant -- they're one and the same for her purposes.
the other reason i made this decision was because if i didn't, i'd have to have the extra page include a few extra panels informing the audience who kim's new roommate is. that was fine with me, but i realized it might be better to fit carmilla pitching (and therefore more explicitly expositing) her blood thing in the hallway as they're all dismissed. being able to place that earlier than expected also allows me to bring back a detail i had originally chopped from the story with more meaningful continuity, which i will explain or point out when we get to it.

the other thing i wanted to point out here is that... although the nurse implied it was possible one of the characters had been disingenuous about their mood reports, none of them lied -- at least as far as the audience is informed. i'm assuming by this point in the story it shouldn't be too narratively confusing because the audience has generally learned that the staff is generally antagonistic.