fresh meat, page 3

OKAY. i had the really foolish idea that i should add 4 panels at 10 PM. those would be panels 6-10. then, while rushing to try to do this, i ended up merging the dialog layer over my working image layer when i needed to move some bubbles, so i had to erase those and redraw the panel underneath by hand.
anyway, that's why this page is 10 minutes late, despite being technically done early, without those 4 panels. i need to go back and touch them up as well, but i'm tired, hungry, and my hand hurts. i'll do it in a bit and add some actual meaningful content about the writing then.

EDIT: well, that's fine enough. (warning: long textwalls ahead.)

anyway, i was waiting for this page before i talked a bit about the staff and their characterizations.

first of all, this page was originally going to be just one, but the short conversation kim and this supervisor have turned out to need more pacing panels than i had anticipated, due to the fact that they're moving in between settings, so panels specifically for giving a sense of space are necessary frequently.
the panels i added tonight were originally cut from the script (for the sake of pacing as well), but they were not off-the-cuff ideas.
the supervising nurse wasn't in the original script for the opening, though, as mentioned -- she was added in the first revision. she isn't one of the recurring nurses, so she doesn't even have a name, yet she's probably one of my least favorite staff members out of the script. i don't designate which characters i'll hate the most before writing them; she was just one of the characters i ended up thinking "wow, i'd really hate her if i knew her in real life."

i'll get back to some things about her in a minute, but i wanted to talk about the purpose of the opening scene first, and what i'm getting from it now that it's illustrated. when i opened up this script about a month ago and said i was going to start it and finish it, the opening was a bit challenging to decide... i could jump straight into kim's ward stay, i could start at her intake, i could start at the point she attempted, etc.
i decided to start after her attempt, in the emergency room, shortly before she was actually in the ward. it's hard for me to see how the story looks to someone who isn't familiar with wards, but it is written with a protagonist who isn't, so it's inherently framed to carry the experience of inexperience here. i felt that if i started the story with staff members of the psychiatric unit only, that said demographic would assume that the behavior is inherent to psychiatry or specific animosity toward the mentally ill, which isn't very true.
so to familiarize an audience who isn't savvy with ambiguously hostile medical professionals naturally, i needed to try to present at least a couple of general medicine practitioners who were undeniably antagonistic, but believably so.
my first instinct was to focus on the nurses instead of the actual doctor(s), because nurses are the medical staff in hospitals who are routinely overworked. nurses are also the main staffing of psychiatric wards themselves, and i guessed that many people still view nurses as helpers more than knowledged professionals themselves, so it emphasized the irrational power dynamic between a patient and a medical staff member.
i also included a very common misogynist trend for intake patients: pregnancy testing. kim was asked directly or indirectly 3 separate times if she was pregnant, and was still tested without being informed just to make sure she wasn't lying. i wanted to establish, on some level, that the antagonism from the doctors in the story was not solely "sanism" but the simple ability to abuse an unwarranted amount of control over a patient for any reason or no reason at all.

back to this supervisor: i added her for a multitude of reasons, obviously, but she was put in to primarily 1) display antagonism between the staff members themselves based on who had power over whom in the same pecking order; 2) pin one staff member with both the most (allegedly) sympathetic and antagonistic motivations toward kim; and 3) show a character who is more overtly aware of the power dynamics in the job and how they are "supposed" to be utilized.
you can tell she's very good at her job, not just because she's The Boss Nurse, but through the calculated continuity of her actions, as brief as they are on-screen. this is the nurse that encouraged kim to sleep, but she's also the one who woke her up (evidently shortly) after that. it isn't another mistake due to juggling too many patients between orders, because she is also the nurse who requested a commitment order before sending kim to bed. why would she do that?
i'm glad that i got to keep the dialog that was almost cut here, because it very directly shows the same tactic in short sequence. although she said she was just kidding, you can probably readily assume she wasn't joking around; she's aware that you can coerce someone into doing what you want them to, and she's also aware of how to invoke the coercive fear without the liability attached. the next page makes her thought process a little more obvious and generally applicable, instead of being able to be assumed a personal inclination to sadism.

as for the meta parts of this page... i've noticed that even though i try to write this with a reader who isn't coming from a place of empathy in mind, the entire opening is probably much more enjoyable to someone who has actually been institutionalized, in a cathartic way.
i imagine to someone without the experience, this read is probably frustrating and confusing, even though the writing is doing its job. for kim, she isn't quite aware that she's being committed yet, but a reader is, if for no other reason, just from the context of the site. she's not reacting too emotionally, but the consistent antagonism from the doctors, i assume, builds an immediate sense of dread for a reader.
this part was intentional, although seeing it on the page, it's much more intense than it was in text. i was originally aiming for more ambiguous, confusing possible passive-aggression. the antagonism becomes more passive or desensitized for a bit after the opening scene (also intentionally), so i'm wondering how that sense of suspense or tension established in this scene will play out during the lull.

the page itself originally had the 3 vertically stacked panels side-by-side, but i ended up trying to get more experimental, because i felt like the plain display wasn't effectively building up a sense of dissociative haze. the reason i went with this angle at all is to see if i can portray some deliberate manipulations of kim's lucidity in the later part of this scene that i thought would be lost if i just implied it with body language and dialog.
here you can see that the panel borders are a dark grey, when they're usually white for "awake" and black for "asleep" or "unconscious." it'll be interesting to figure out how to squeeze a satisfying result out of the setup.