A quiet moment with Stu and Jess, about halfway between the Chapter 14 flashback and the present day.
I…don’t actually remember why I drew this. Doesn’t seem like it was for a prompt, or a contest, or anything like that.
Maybe I just heard the joke, and imagined the scene, and knew there was no way I’d be able to squeeze it into the main body of BICP. So, a random bonus it is.
(The original punchline is “A ham can be cured.”)
Aaaaand now we have Patrick spiraling, poor guy.
On the one hand, he had a psychic line directly into Cohen’s desires, so he can make a lot of deeply insightful statements with perfect accuracy! On the other…he’s not capable of separating “Cohen didn’t want to be my Master” with “I was a failure as a Being.” Which is throwing a huge wrench into a major subset of his deductions.
Which brings us to the end of the chapter! And instead of taking a short inter-chapter break, to start regular posting again right at Peak Vacation Time, I’m going to do the whole end-of-year break here.
Check in Mondays & Thursdays for bonuses/omake, then come back in 2023 for Annotated Chapter 15!
Bringing this meme back. Unfortunately, Patrick is not context-savvy enough to get that Bianca meant “don’t upset yourself by talking about your previous Master, except to infer what basic information we would probably want to know, and tell us that.”
Miranda is shown next to the Fifth Pentacle of the Sun (the teleporting one), while Cohen is with the Fourth Pentacle of Mercury (the knowledge one).
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Up until this point, readers had turned over plenty of theories about “maybe the Contract wasn’t fully severed, maybe Cohen still has an in, or Patrick’s loyalty will turn out to be split in a way Beings aren’t built for, or…”
Nope. Cohen’s name is off the Contract, as surely as if he had died.
Walker, decorating her office with a statue of a kneeling/bowing angel: I am a well-adjusted human being and definitely not a megalomaniac.
I don’t actually know why she mandated that Blake and Patrick be shirtless during a battle, but it sure looks like she’s having fun.
This isn’t everything Patrick knows about Walker — not by a long shot. Beings are still not robots, and he’s context-savvy enough to get that Bianca was asking “give me a brief summary of relevant details” and not “tell me literally all the information you know.”
Everyone can have a little plot advancement, as a treat.
This shot of Walker and Cohen is basically the mental image Sparrow/Bianca have of them, which is why Cohen’s Being is still cast in dramatic shadow. Although he has Patrick-green eyes, because, come on, we know what the deal is by now.
And here we have the flip side of Emma: a character I designed with a deliberate amount of thought and backstory, only to have her appear, like, twice in the whole comic.
Sometimes writing be like that, folks.
Is this the second time I’ve used “character makes Profound Statements about what it means to be human, unwittingly referring to a non-human character” in as many chapters? Going a little overboard on the dramatic irony, there.
That said, props to Shamila for being all “so you’ve had hundreds of relationships? Gosh, that’s unusual, but as long as it was happy and fulfilling for both you and your partners, well done.”
Back to the present, and back to Emma — originally introduced as a one-off background character, now upgraded to Canon Love Interest (and Officially Not A Being, Don’t Worry).
For her clothes, I went really hard on “stuff I wear all the time, but rarely, if ever, see in character designs.” Starting with the comfy winter knit cap. Casual hats are almost always baseball caps — seems like characters only get drawn wearing these if they’re outdoors and it’s literally snowing. Meanwhile, I live in these things as soon as the weather gets cold enough. More everyday knit hat representation!
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That is a nice use of deliberate shadowing to create depth and focus from the foreground to the background. Good job, past-me.
Some readers tried to puzzle out who the non-color-coded kid was. Just a random long-forgotten childhood friend, that’s all.
I mean, I know the “Miranda” and “cancer” parts aren’t exactly reveals, just officially connecting the flashback dots we already had. But surely that’s enough drama for one page?
Walker has her Being use the “take the shape of a little kid, to throw the other people in the room off-balance” strategy.
Bennett has a Being who decides, on her own, “read your subconscious feelings, and take the shape of a little kid that reminds you of your own non-present human child, throwing you off-balance.”
Cohen tries to get the one, and lands smack-dab in the middle of the other. Whoops.
