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On schedule, the douchebag hour begins. In hindsight I’m glad I never got around to showing much of Eve’s life upstate, or the dissolution of her friend group. Letting it be pieced together in conversation, or played out theatrically through battle, got the message across. I dig a good flashback story, but I could’ve easily fallen into indulgent world-building. There were already… so many pages. |
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In every relationship fallout, someone inevitably slips away (or is pushed out) from the group of mutual friends. I'm glad Eve reached out to Greg; though their conversation probably wasn't what she wanted, Greg can talk about their friendship and past in a mature, introspective manner, unlike Park.
The truth of the last panel hurts. It really feels easy when you're not caught up in that situation anymore.
Greg's alright. I think of all the OP cast I see the most of myself in him, so it was nice to see him turn out to be a real mensch.
I missed that Eve had called up Greg for A Specific Reason and thought she was just catching up with friends who had fallen by the wayside. It adds a lot more weight to the 7th and 8th panels.
Not gonna lie: Took me a bit to realize that the lightbeams bouncing around starting panel 5 & 6 were not some hallucinization or vision of Eve’s emotional state.
That's what sells this strip for me – what a wonderful and creative choice! It feels like really using the medium to capture the swirling emotions – but at the same time acts as a sort of foreground visual distraction, along with all the other creative choices, to pull us away from the characters and reinforce Greg's claim of emotional distance. My visual repetoire is still comparatively limited – before seeing this, to accomplish a similar effect I would have probably chosen a wide shot and placed some dancing extras in the foreground. But it would have taken us too far away from the character's faces, and the expression is as important as the gesture in these panels, nor given as intense a sense of place.