And, there you go. The trainyard boss meant “from the safety manual.” Whoops, a little overzealous there, Patch.

I think I said it on Monday, while working on this page, I realized that I needed to pace it out a couple more pages so that page 46 is the last page of the comic instead of 44. It was going to be one of those 4 strip pages instead of 3: the strip from Monday, then the 2nd strip would be 2 panels of Patch beating up Mal with this punchline in the 3rd panel, and then the next page’s strips would fit in two smaller strips. Instead, I wanted the next strips to fill out a page so, to give Patch’s attack on Mal a little more dramatic weight I figured I should give this a full page too.

These strips don’t have to make perfect sense, not everything has to be explained – the goal is to have every strip end on a joke or action beat while moving the story along quickly – but in order for it to make sense as a page, and story, some things do need to be expanded a bit, so that the next parts make sense or have that weight and make the payoff better.

These were drawn on one page, as I was trying to map out the four strip page. Mal getting beat up takes up almost half the page as a result.