Joyce and Walky!

My panels are a lot more complex in these Fans crossover strips!  Lots more stuff is crammed into each strip than usual, so each panel is more likely to have multiple layers of action.  Check out Rikk and Joyce conversing in the far background of the main action in panel two, for example.

The universe’s calendars being out of sync reflects tiny orbital variations… and the fact that It’s Walky more or less acknowledged real calendar dates (doing Halloween and Christmas strips on Halloween and Christmas, for example), whereas Fans took its sweet time because I didn’t want the characters to age out of college too fast. I had plans for Katherine (Shanna’s aforementioned friend) to be joining law school at the start of the second semester, and I hadn’t written that story, so it couldn’t be the second semester for the Fans yet.

“That… can’t be what it LOOKS like, can it?” David does a great job selling the body language between Rikk and Joyce as something Alisin might worry about. Alisin was once the sort of person who might’ve taken a complete stranger into the cargo bay to join the Mile High Club, and Joyce and Rikk are… not, so there’s some projection going on here. But there’s a subtler sense in which her fears aren’t totally unfounded. You’ll see.