Electric Team

Page 275 is here! Review it so that the details are fresh in your mind, then read the notes below. 

1. This is Kaylah’s first full page of comics, as opposed to last time’s page, which had the big title at the top.  I enjoy how she interprets the characters with her expressive style, and her Dr. February looks great.

2. Lots of exposition here, but it’s been a couple of years since we last saw these guys, so I thought it was important to refresh the readers’ memories and make it crystal clear what’s going on with Jaxula and February.

3. In retrospect, what’s going on with the second panel would be clearer if panel 1 and 3 were laid out the same way, with the characters in the same position. That way you would get more of a sense that, for a moment, the characters disappeared, replaced by the swirl–which is the impression you’re supposed to get. That’s on me, since I came up with the breakdowns for the panels when I wrote the script. Still, given the script, Kaylah did a good job executing it.

4. For panel 2, the script just said there should be some kind of abstract swirls. I was curious to see what Kaylah would draw. I like what she did, spreading the cloud-like blobs throughout the page. And I love the way she colored them.

5. Dr. February calls Jaxula a “do-gooder” for the same reason she previously called the Electric Team “looters.” All she believes in is making money, and she assumes other people are the same. She genuinely does not believe that others are capable of having altruistic motivations, so when they say they are acting for the greater good, they must be lying to cover up something. When the Electric Team shows up and says that her machine is destroying reality, then they must be angling for a cut of the profits.

6. I leave it to the reader to decide if Dr. February is similar to any people in the real world.

7. Despite her deeply-ingrained selfishness and lack of compassion, Dr. February is not a total sociopath. She genuinely loves her husband. This is something Abi and I talked about long ago, when we were writing the Dr. February/Larzipan story. It would be easy enough to say, “They’re evil, they don’t actually love anyone, they just work together out of convenience.” But it seemed much more interesting to imagine them as an actual married couple, with a relationship that, while not perfect, is still based on mutual love.

8. Years ago when we were writing the February story, I had the idea that while February finds Larzipan attractive, Larzipan loves February for her mind, in spite of her hideous mammalian appearance. This was a nice twist on the old pulp science-fiction trope that aliens and monsters and whatever other creatures were always attracted to beautiful human women. I kept this detail in my head as some background knowledge about the characters, even though I didn’t expect to work it into the comic.

Then, when I was writing the script for this page, I thought, “Hey, why not?” It shows Februrary in a slightly different light.

9. I really like that bright red dress. It pops off the page.

10. I’ll be honest, there’s going to be some more exposition on the next page, but only a little, and then things are going to starting happening! Big action coming soon!