Week 164! (Patreon)

And here's page 398, going up... tomorrow, October 10th. I guess a day early is the new normal for these.

Am curious as to what the reaction will be from readers. I fear that people will be disappointed since it really is kind of abrupt that the whole Campy/Joey thing is sort of waved off suddenly and they just leave, but maybe that's just my own sentiment that I expressed in an earlier update about wishing I had done more with it in planning. Hopefully it's more just speculation and fear and maybe mild confusion as to what happened. I guess no matter what this page wasn't going to top the LEAVE panel, anyway.

Also had a bit of a debate on how to do the black fade-in bit up at the top. Originally I had the blackness actually within the borders as the first panel, fading into the close-up of Kale's eyes. But thinking about it, I deliberately put the black fade-out at the end of the previous page specifically to have this forced segue between the pages/situations in a meta outside-the-comic sense. If you look at 397, you can see the LEAVE panel actually doesn't fit inside the usual black borders, the ink acts as its border instead, so it's like it 'broke' outside of the normal boundaries of the comic for a moment. So, having that white bar with the comic title and date between those two sections of blackness invoked by Joey felt 'off', so I decided to instead have the blackness section in this page fade into the comic title/date bar instead! It doesn't have quite the same impact as a fade-into Kale's close-up directly, but it feels better for what I was going for.

Creation-wise, this ended up being one of those pages where the text balloon layout turned out to be pretty messy. Not the worst that FH has ever had, but not exactly pretty. Oh well.