Joyce and Walky!

This strip was some High Concept shit I’m not sure I was able to pull off!  The idea was that, y’know, Meighan hasn’t seen Head Alien yet, and as she’s blindfolded and he’s talking to her, she imagines what he looks like based on the tone he takes.  First he’s businessmanlike, then he’s soldierlike, and then he’s paternal.  What I… probably needed to do, in order to sell the idea better, was to somehow accomplish more of a Ben Affleck Daredevil effect, where you can see shapes formed out of sonics, like figures cut out of the rain.  Instead I, uh, kind of just sharpied my usual lineart and threw in some green mist, I dunno.  Neat idea not communicated well at all.

At the exact same moment Shanna’s hitting MM with “YOU WILL GET NOTHING,” Head Alien is finding Meighan a lot easier to deal with. As fun as it was to write HA’s foibles, it wouldn’t do justice to his character if he didn’t have a flash of ruthless effectiveness, right after his fumbling had lulled you off guard.

Fans began as a series about underdogs (can these seemingly normal nerds win a fight against a vampire?) but of course, underdogs get less underdog the more battles they win. Shanna was the underdoggest for a while: laughably bad at hand-to-hand combat and dealing with intellectual blind spots. But then she got good at shooting things and the blind spots faded away in that transformation I described yesterday.

So to serve as the new underdog, Meighan joined the fold. No better at hand-to-hand than Shanna, not particularly strong-willed or brave, terrible at marksmanship, guilt-ridden after sleeping with Alisin, unpopular with most of the others for the same reason, and focused on a business degree that rarely translates to the Fans’ adventures, she’s so underdog that I sometimes felt guilty for involving her. Still not completely useless– she was the one who figured out why the Fans had jumped dimensions. remember– but she struggled like no other cast member

Here we establish her desire to prove herself not a traitor… to prove that betraying Rikk’s trust was not an illustration of who she is. This will be important later.