The changing of the guard! These kinds of pages are always fun for me to see come together just because of the variety of poses and expressions from the characters. Rachel’s background in animation (which she’s demonstrated fairly recently with her animation of Ashtor in the prior chapter) really pulls out the best poses for each panel, I think.

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With comics, you’re not just showing off a snapshot of time and drawing it – you’re consolidating several moments in time across multiple characters and finding the best way to portray that. Several small details will come together in a single panel, like expressions on multiple characters coinciding at just the right moment, for example. When a character delivers a line of dialog in a panel and you see another character reacting to it at the same time, that consolidation of time into a single tableau can be challenging. It’s one of the unique things about the comics medium that I’ve had fun analyzing over the last year+ with Beyond the Western Deep.