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.

Iss 9 P 36 "Screw fair!"

This was an earlier version of the page with the flat colors that somehow  persisted despite the correct page being available. In case you like a peek into the creative process, as it were.

Once again, this is an established patter, She gets into trouble, she shrinks. Then she pops up out of nowhere with the giant rising uppercut. At least in this case she follows it up with the growing piledriver, a new attack in the combo chain. She's picking up on how to do this, but slowly. While the size-changing comes naturally to her Ronni is really not such a great fighter.

I like the deep shadow for the ominous and moody pre-piledriver shot, I wanted Frank Miller silhouettes but we compromised with a lot of gamma correction.

Wendie was inordinately proud of that 'SMOT!' it was her pride and joy for lie two days. And Koen really knocked it out of the park with the piledriver. The flailing legs, the splintering wood- it really gives the feeling that there is an impact in action.

The curfew joke was all I could come up with. There was a funnier line but it eluded me.

That's about all I got for this page. Hope the right version publishes...

EDIT: She went to Jared.

Iss 9 P 35 "Later for this!"

And lo, Veronica Kane shall do as she has always done, and she shall try to reason with the unreasonable.

And when in the natural course of events this has not produced a desirable result, then shall she become injured, which shall give her cause to retreat.

Upon which time she shall shrink to a remarkably small size and hide, as she is wont to do.

So let's discuss jjst why Prom Queen is so intractable, shall we?

I've gone to great lengths to illustrate that Ronni is trying various logical tactics on Prom Queen that aren't working. Eventually she quits trying and scampers off. But our young Miss Kerr is quite antagonistic. Let's look at why.

First there's the red dress. This is a senior prom, not a hooker convention. That sparkly red dress showin alla them dirty pillows is just plain in bad taste, and it advertises just what sort of woman would wear such a thing. Plus that whole 'red flag in front of a mad cow' thing.

Then there's the fact that her date just won prom queen over Ayesha. Her boy date. Prom Queen really is very angry about that on a number of levels. After all, that boy is an abomination that's going to hell, as she'll explain later.

Then there's the fact that she is first and foremost a schoolyard bully. How did that go again?

Because that's how one communicates in her world, apparently. Wonder what the past few years have been like for old Bobbie. Yikes.

 Note cameo on the wall of Major Thompson, who we foreshadow here. And of course his pic is on the wall, he's grandpa. And he was a hero. I actually have  guide to all of the photos on the wall back there in that page. Apparently because I am a crazy person.

I liked the three panel shot and complimented Koen on it- who promptly said "You put dat in de script. I just drew what you asked." Explained why I liked it so much, but I still like the way Koen drew it far more than what I had envisioned.

Willie Nelson joke was born out of me wanting to have PQ distracted so Ronni could do her thing and actually have it work. After all, the hick is a little dumb, should use it against her. And the shrinking sequence is really pretty keen here. Koen makes the beginning and end forms solid and everything in between is a bit transparent- so far this is our favorite version of this tactic of hers. The process boys sigh at us a lot.

Okay, there's this page in review. Hopefully no spoilers, but a behind the scenes of today's comic. Thank you and good night!
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