Week 85! (Patreon)

This panel is from 023 - Victory by Default, from the second arc where Lupin is a huge dickbag to Kale because we were still basically retreading old ground from the Old Canon. This was suggested by nobody, I picked it.

I picked this particular panel to redraw because it was the moment that Lupin talks about later in the tenth arc in 184 - Warning, where it sort of tied in the whole deal with Kale's mind shenanigans and latent asshole-fox-version-of-himself with the earlier arcs of the comic. It also both enabled Bruce to get the start of a hint at these things going on, which will lead to things in due time maybe probably maybe not who knows, and is what I halfway refer to as to why Lupin calms down later, he was spooked into being less incredibly violent and fight-happy.

As for this specific event in the panel and the arc surrounding it, I dunno. Like I said, it's sort of a retreading of Old Canon ground where Lupin was still just a generic overly-aggressive scary bully character that wanted to antagonize the lowly main character, although I did make him 'edgier' by making him swear and actually punch Kale so hard he bled (which he did a lot more in the original version, it was excessive). It was intentional too that Kale's big hero speech didn't immediately solve the problem and only got him a fist in the nose, and it took obvious conviction in what he said without losing composure that actually got him to "win". Avoids that cliché of the speech solving everything instead of actually showing that you mean it.