Page Commentary No. 318

Gunwild: I'm surprised they didn't make Skarf get out of his robotic walking-around suit for his mugshot. Maybe the height chart shot is separate.

Psu: I'm just realizing that if they handcuffed Skarf's "body" then Skarf could just eject and then escape. Anyway, BIG THING WE REVEALED. Or did we do a good enough job implying the connection between headhunter and the regency black ops before this point?

Gunwild: Well, it came up when that creepy base full of soldier-mercs took orders from Headhunter. So. Guess it remains to be seen why he would work for a government and show apparent loyalty to it, as this page and the next implied.

Psu: The next page shows more about the extent of their relationship, such that it is. But this page ya know, just meant to remind the reader that we're a comic that has bad guys too! We spend most of our time writing about nice people on beach vacations.

Gunwild: Honestly these days I wish we had revealed more of their plans here, but that just means I can do even more revealy-stuff mow I suppose. Hey, nice job keeping the "this is an encrypted, unencrypted, re-encrypted feed" static consistent in all the Headhunter views. Even hearkens back to the last time we saw him when he was paranoid about Penny tracking him.

Psu: Oh hey, I probably talked about this before but it's been years so it's okay to bring it back up again. When making a "sci fi" holographic display for the audience, it can be good to make it look like the character is being projected into the room somehow and is not actually in the room. In reality, or uh... theoretical space future reality... the holo displays will be static free and stuff and should aim to look like the person is actually in the room. But when you're trying to translate that story into a comic book or a movie or whatever, you need to put in that artifacting so that the reader knows what they're looking at. If you want them to know it's a hologram, that is.

Gunwild: Indeed. Honestly, if digitally captured movies can get film grain filters to make them look "right" to the audience, it hardly seems implausible that we'd prefer holograms to look like holograms sometimes.

Psu: It'll be like people who say that analog music sounds warmer. We got off track. Hey we revealed a big conspiracy! We should speak to that a bit more.

Gunwild: This comic takes the position (controversial with some) that deniable military operations which violate the law often adopt an ends-justify-the-means approach.... and also pretty much never have to justify the ends, either.

Psu: We've had a LONG time to think about this position over the course of ten or so years.

Gunwild: Yeah, and pretty much nothing in that time cured us of our distaste for war, I find.

Psu: When possible, it's better to avoid it than say... hire creepy shadow mercenaries to do black ops work for you. That seems to have backfired for a bunch of people. I wonder if that'll be the same in this story too...

Gunwild: It'll probably be fine, let's do more beach episodes instead!

Psu: To the beach!