"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week." - General George Patton

This is my most dialogue-heavy page so far, so it was definitely a shift in gears for me creatively. The writing took longer than usual, and I don't think it was just because of the higher word count! I hopefully have shown the contrasting philosophies of Steamroller Man, who barrels ahead, come what may, and Paige, the scientist who is used to analyzing a problem, testing theories and planning careful action. I came across that Patton quote as a teenager and have always been fond of it. It was at the top of my mind when writing Steamroller Man's dialogue here. My first thought was to actually have him use the quote, but it didn't seem quite right that he would be familiar with it.

I used a slightly different creative approach here, finalizing the dialogue at the thumbnail page, rather than at the pencil stage as I usually do. The reason for this was to make sure I was composing the panels in such a way as to account for the amount of words in each word balloon. Another example of how drawing comics is not the same as illustrating prose - the words themselves are a visual element in comics, and how they look on the page has to always be taken into consideration.

I actually felt a bit out of practice drawing Steamroller Man and Paige here! It took a couple of tries to get warmed up. At times like these, I'm so glad I work digitally, otherwise there would be quite a lot of eraser shavings to sweep up!

In panel five, I was originally going to have an empty balloon above Paige's head, to represent the fact that she has a moment of kenshō as a result of Steamroller Man's comment, but I think a wordless panel is actually more effective in this case, since it contrasts nicely with the verbosity of every other panel on the page.

What do you think?

I'm already thirteen pages in to this chapter/issue, which means if this was a standard, printed comic book I'd be past the halfway point! There is still a whole lot of story to tell, so I don't think we're halfway through this chapter yet!