Iss 10 P 1 & 2 "Burbank memories"

With this sequence, I wanted to show little Ronni, left to her own devices and with no adult supervision, getting into a fight with some bullies and losing. Koen has two children, and he is often drawing images for their school functions and such, so he really has a good feeling for drawing kids.

Originally page 3 was going to be the opening page of the comic, but I got a crazy idea about a flashback and decided that after the cliffhanger of Ronni getting her brains bashed in we'd detour to our oh-so-confusing string of variant covers (which, for the record, we still have one more of those at the end of the issue). And then cut to Lil Ronni... so first Koen designed her.

 

 Ain't she adorable?

The glasses, the overbite, the band-aid on the knee. Yet you can still see those distinctive forelocks and the mountain of hair are already there. Plus she looks like she is wearing Punky Brewster's hand-me-downs. When we talked about coloring it we went back to one of my favorites, where only Ronni is colored, due to her red outfit to make her stand out. I would have loved to do the entire book this way, but then we would be missing out on all of the cool effects Koen does with color.

The Crystal Pepsi and New Coke aren't quite accurate for the time period- old billboards for 95- but we did get to sneak in the Burger Baron as well as Colonel Kentucky's Fried Chicken Emporium. You may find it odd that I am so excited by fast food restaurant cameos, but wait and it'll become clearer in... well, a few issues.

To my mind this is something formative for the character. We see her spot trouble, intercede on behalf of a victim, only to become a victim herself and lose to superior force. I figure there are moments like this in people's lives that shape who they are and who they will be. And in this case, trying to be a hero gets Ronni trounced... not unlike the modern day. And another piece of the puzzle fits into place. Well, hopefully.

Hope you enjoyed the Lil Ronni flashback. And here is the page in its original form...

Iss 9 P 42 "...uncle..."

This was a darker turn for the storyline, to be certain. In the initial script draft pages 39 through 42 were all one page. Yes, I know that the density of dialogue that I spread over those pages would not have worked. But if I had followed the original script there was considerably less dialogue going on, and iit all would have flowed together as one comics page of action... which would include page 3 of issue 10, which was also on that page.

I'll show you when we get there so as not to spoil anything.

But long and short is that once I saw the density of the art, I knew this had to get broken up, which changed the pacing quite a bit. And since by the time we got here we were up to 42 pages already, I also knew it was time to break the issue in half, otherwise we were going to end up with another Issue 4 scenario, where full pages were still being published and we still ran nearly 70 pages as I recall.

So what you end up with here is one panel- yep, this is just one panel of what Koen designed as one page- where I realized it offered me a rare opportunity to really take that dramatic license and go to town. So we explore Ronni's thoughts and ruminations on life and death and how she sees herself 'going out' someday as a crazy lunatic beats her to death.

Not the shiny happy goofy fun comic we usually put forth, with our wisecracking heroine triumphing with little or no effort, to be certain.

Some have expressed concern, which is good. That means that folks are invested in the character, which is great and it means we have done our jobs and that we have fans who really are rooting for our favorite girl. Some have expressed reservations because it seems as though the book is taking a turn to the darker side, which... well, have a little faith and see what happens is all I will say. And so far no one has guessed where the book is headed, but if we had an onsite forum then I suspect we would see much more of that debate in action.

So this was my turn at setting the stage, leaving a cliffhanger and giving the book a bit of a darker edge. I hope that you enjoyed it, and stick with us for things to come...

Iss 9 P 41 "Pay attention! I'm tallkin to you!"

And here's where the crazy really starts peeking out properly for Prom Queen. She certainly does know a great number of names for a woman of ill repute doesn't she? And it seems she has made up her mind about Ronni's virtue, to be certain.

This page is a little awful, as Ronni is getting her head punched in by Prom Queen. Blood is flowing, and hopefully we managed to get across a bit of wincing violence here without getting too explicit. I love how MAD magazine crazy she loos- that third panel looks like an old Wally Wood closeup. And that whack with the scepter in the last panel- ow.

Koen is getting the hang of this nighttime thing. The field is lit up due to the big football lights, but it is still dark, and he works with that. We're getting the heavy shadows starting to fill in, and you ain't seen nothin yet....

Since she is middle America, I thought that making her a rather judgmental conservative would work pretty well. Nothing against conservatives, I just took this one to the extreme, and any philosophy taken too far usually goes off the rails pretty quickly. Plus she's being influenced by an alien weapon, of course.

That's all I got on this page. Except that this is the first time Ronni has really taken a beating in the series so far, and this isn't over yet...

Iss 9 P 40 "Gym class gut punch"

Woohooo!

Our heroine, caught off-guard because she shifted her attention to wisecracking instead of watching her opponent, is now suffering through a named maneuver. Due to the fantasy that this could be made into a video game (Kaiju Island Chronicles, the video game we saw Kumiko playing at the con in issue 7) I give them special signature moves, and they name them thus establishing it as a part of the character's fighting repertoire. Thus supers in the theoretical GG fighting game.

Thus the Gym Class Gut Punch.

I genuinely love the panic panel. No matter what, Ronni might sweat a little bit, but she's never panicked before. She wasn't expecting what she got, and now she's paying for it. No air means no focus which means no powers. Which means she's mortal- none of her density or growth tricks. She is now at the mercy of the schoolyard bully. I might just throw in a flashback page- oooh...

But I love tha panic panel. Hopefully that's a visual gag I got from Howard Chaykin that I can embrace, and hopefully it works for the reader.

And she ain't kiddin in that last panel. Nossir.

Iss 9 P 39 "Fat shaming"

For a change I thought I could set Ronni out there to make some fat jokes, and show off some of the repertoire she has picked up over the years from having such insults hurled at her constantly. Now, prom Queen is very skinny and lanky, so it's not like any of this is valid. It's just Ronni trying to rile her up to get her charging back at her. After all, she is pretty confident in her abilities, and they are outside where she has plenty of room to grow.

Now if only she hadn't gotten distracted...

Initially I was going to have her break the fourth wall here, but decided to give the line to Stanley instead, with him calling her out for fat shaming. Which still gave me the chance to use one of my favorite lines, "Don't judge me".

Cartoony and fun, this is the last light joke fir a while, so enjoy it folks... I'ma warn you, we're going into bad country here. These were initially the first few panels of the oage, and this page gets dark...

ss 9 P 38 "Belle Chere's dress and a bullhorn accessory"

So once again, this was the previous page's second half, the lower half of the page.

I love Ronni's bitching about her updo and flinging bobby pins as she undoes the pudo that she worked so hard on. It may have seemed as though she was just in it for the duty, but she really did her best to try to give her contest winner a good time. She wore a fantastic dress, she got all dolled up with her hair and makeup, she shaved her legs and showed up in a fantastic classic car that could seat about 20.

And she got Jose for a prom date, and got in a fight with some hick with superpowers.

I honestly wish I had asked Koen to put her in a scrunchie for the rest of the fight.

I wrote the Belle Chere gag in there because a lot of people I now have worn the Jessica Rabbit costume, but Belle Chere IS Jessica Rabbit in real life. Well, physically. She's actually one of the sweetest girls I know, and genuinely incredibly nice. Unlike Jessica Rabbit, who is bad AND drawn that way.

The bit about not being bored on a Saturday night is a hint, but it's a loooong hint that won't make sense for a very long time in the plot, but it isn't just random dialogue. For the detail obsessed who keep an eye out for this sort of thing.

I love the tiny typed muttering t herself. I don't know if the joke is funny or not, but I sure liked it. Then comes the insults and we're off to the races again. Koen is getting better and better with the underlighting, and I really like the way Ronni looks

. Originally there was a third panel in that dress ripping sequence, but it got axed as you can see above.Just didn't go with the other two well, y'know? This was the second redraw of that panel and we both agreed to axe it instead of keep ai it. Sometimes you have to just let go.

Iss 9 P 37 "Great granny's griddlecakes!"

So to start off with, this is half a page. I carved the bottom half off for another page which you'll see on Friday, and I think you will agree that those pages would have made one really good page, but you wouldn't be ble to see half of the art without a microscope, and there's no room for me to be wordy. So I am pretty happy with the compromise we're arriving at. It also gives us a larger buffer, which will be more important when we go 5 days a week (a patreon goal.Koen likes our three times a week, and when we revved it up to five times a week we just burned through pages faster. but someday, right?

Meanwhile, Prom Queen continues to use slurs on Ronni, and I have to say I adore her expression in that second panel. That is hilariousI had planned kind of a different exit for her than this, but once Koen drew it I knew I had to use this. Though Wendie did completely have to reverse panel 3 to make it work.

Panel 4, I had all this room, I got expansive with the bickering sibling dialogue and gave Queenie some lines that actually come back around on later pages, coming soon.

You like the subtleties of our clues? We do too. How Ronni sees the world. "Look! A clue!"

That's about it for this one. Once again, a bunch of gamma correction made the colors darker and more vibrant, and I am loving our 'nightime' look in the strip Koed continues to work with the lighting, and the return of the 'THOOM' sound effect from back in issue 4.