soft-pedaled, page 2

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this page was sort of a doozy due to the panel count... the dissociation sequence was not originally in the thumbnail, but even then, i'd broken the soft limit of 5 rows of panels.
i will admit that the main reason i added it was because of the idea i had for drawing later for the overview after this comic is finished; i'm hoping to be able to experiment a bit with one concept i originally had for "alter chatter" which is to use the white margins of a comic as the place where they happen, or what's happening in realtime during inner world interactions.
at first, after noticing how small my borders generally are, i thought this sounded better on paper than it played out in practice... but i realized that i frequently use very large margins and borders to denote dissociative elements in the pacing or perception of protagonists already, so there would be more room for alter interactions the harder felix is dissociating, which may or may not end up working perfectly, in terms of accurate portrayal.

relatedly, dissociation has been tricky to portray, in part because it's a broad term that refers to a lot of different mental phenomena. i've been playing with various effects for various contexts, and this certain one reminds me of a similar panel sequence in drawing a blank.
it's difficult to tell when i'm being too subtle or not subtle enough -- outis's small blip wasn't so well-received, and i can admit that these expression sequences are very unsubtle, but sometimes that is not a bad thing.
it's something i'll have to stew for a while in my head, but for now i will just say: please don't take these sorts of expressive close-up sequences as the definitive indicator of dissociation! i do know that it isn't always so obvious, but very abrupt and strong "blips" like this CAN be that visibly unsubtle, and felix isn't a very understated person in general.