FaD strip: sucking it up

chipped away at this one over the span of a while and finished it some-odd days ago. i said i wasn't going to work on folie a dupe strips much and then ended up dealing with my wife being sick for multiple weeks cuz my doctor is incompetent and being sick myself. i keep getting antsy working on these to (pretty futilely) blow off steam about being bored/unproductive.
there was SO much resizing involved in this one... definitely a comic i would want to do a start to finish markup about. the desire to do this was mainly driven by the expression sequences.

when i smoked i was pretty picky about the brand i got, which were a type of unfiltered cigarettes. my first year of smoking i played with brands a lot and let me tell you, all of them taste disgusting, especially unfiltered... so by the time i committed the crime of brand loyalty i was pretty stubborn about it. many places that do sell cigarettes like your average grocery store never really had this brand, so i would go way out of my way for them, and frequently that places that did carry it would get comments asking if i was sure or that no one ever really got those ones.

there's also already a continuity error i know is there with dupe's jacket -- open in one panel near the beginning, closed at the end, i'm just going to close it when relining everything because drawing the jacket open and drooping in that sequence is going to muddy up the shapes a lot.

one thing that got removed from this is... the ending sequence was originally supposed to have gray telling dupe they've started to notice more and more that dupe will step in front of somebody when they want their attention, and gray was curious what happens if you don't stop and just keep walking when dupe does this, to which they were going to respond that they'd move, obviously, because "disbelief is death" -- referring to suspension of disbelief in media.
the motion of stepping backwards during that sequence in the middle of the page was sort of obviated by the bust shots, and, combined with the fact that "did it work?" "it's going to have to!" was already a pretty solid lead-out, it's why i cut it.
"this is me keeping you in check" is a reference to another blow-out conversation that offered some finality/closure to the suicide issue which i'll probably draw eventually, but... novel expressions are a strong motivator for me i guess.

EDIT: coloring is finished now, this one's palette was challenging but i was satisfied with it. i wanted something sort of sallow and reminiscent of how my mouth tasted after smoking.
i still think about "it's going to HAVE TO work" because i can't even succinctly describe what it's communicating besides passive-aggression.