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...