Page Commentary No. 328

Gunwild: I dunno kid, you should be careful about trusting old people. They know all the tricks.

Psu: I dunno, sometimes old people know the best stuff. Like which restaurants serve the really good authentic stuff that you used to like and what to order on the secret menu. Did we name the Great Aunt? She seems important.

Gunwild: We may reveal that later but in the context of Wrenn writing in her journal it was a bit more exposition-focused. The real question is how believable Maddy will find this story.

Psu: We also knew that this was gonna be just a big aside, taking the reader with us through a new character explaining herself to everyone. It's a bit of a stretch! But we've been doing this comic a long time and it's okay to do different things, I think. And we get to tie it back to one of our fancy mysteries.

Gunwild: It's good utility and I even enjoyed working out the format with you - this is just an aside about me as a creator, but I wish I knew if Japanese-style illustrated light novels ever get written and published in English, because the format is interesting. I also wonder if Tiny Wrenn does things like when I was a kid and puts a lot of sugar in that tea.

Psu: I think she might be the type of kid that follows directions too much. This sorta thing can lead to a lot of existential angst which she likes to put down on paper. And seemingly it's fancy tea stained parchment paper too. She probably just has a word processor that has an old parchment paper filter on it. I know I did.

Gunwild: I don't know how it is for others, but I do think part of the charm of writing physically is that it feels much less ephemeral, even though paper is still cheap and disposable. I still have journals from when I was fifteen, after all,  but not the hard drive of the computer I owned back then.

Psu: I bought a nice little paper planner. It's been pretty good to me. It totally feels better to write down a check mark next to a task than to tick off a box in an app. But I guess Wrenn is a type of person that like... looks for meaning in stuff. And finds it in little things. But also sometimes big things like the fate of her species lands in her lap and she doesn't quite know how to feel about that.

Gunwild: Journal about it!

Psu: I want to add, I think this is a really lovely page. And I completely forgot about the medical bracelet thing until I saw it again.

Psu: Oh, also I just spotted a nice little curve I must've added in the background, where you can follow the curve from panel 3 to panel 5 in a swooping motion. There were a lot of curves in this page, given the Art Nouveau influence in classic Xerran stuff. Anyway, good work past me.

Gunwild: Whoa!