Comic #996: Reality Bites: Part Five (Patreon)

Panel 2 was a happy accident. My initial plan was to just draw the corpse's feet coming in from out of frame and have Miji standing right next to it (I was going to be lazy). But I decided it would look a lot better if I drew the corpse's face. So I drew the corpse's upper body, and tried placing Miji next to it poking it with his sword. However, his sword reached too far across the frame, and I couldn't really fit them both in very well. So I tried placing miji behind him instead, but he was too short, it then occurred to me I could put Miji on-top of him, and it instantly looked better, and funnier.

I ended up changing the tooltip on the phone at the last minute. The tooltip is just supposed to be a throwaway joke, but the original tooltip read,

"Use: Stare at the screen intently, traveling several hours into the future but accomplishing nothing of value."

If you place this tooltip in panel 3, I felt that it would really lead the reader to think it was part of the premise, and that hours would pass between panel 3 and 4.

When I write the script for the comic, I'm usually not thinking about character placement and blocking. So sometimes when I start drawing the comic I discover new issues. For example in the last panel, I originally pictured that the police officer would just be standing there right next to Miji. However, if I did that, his entire upper body would probably be out of frame. So I ended up deciding to draw the officer over the shoulder. I think it ends up looking a lot better this way anyway.