Benefiting from Rachel’s background in animation and storyboarding, the beat-by-beat panels of action sequences like this really spring to life for me. The key actions can tend to string together into a single cohesive, dare I say “animated” scene in one’s head, helping it to pop off the page.

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While not every action scene we’ve done uses this technique, certain sequences (like the Quinlan vs. Crim fight in Chapter 1) lend themselves to more “key” movements than others. This is a life-or-death struggle that in full takes maybe a few seconds of actual time to transpire, so in adapting our ideas to the page we need to choose what actions to omit or decide how we’ll slow the action down to fill out a page with interesting action.

In this case, the lightning-fast back and forth battle of oneupmanship between Quin and his Ermehn adversary lends itself to many key movements as they each gain and lose then regain the upper hand — until of course the sequence comes to its end at the conclusion of this week’s page.

This week, I want to share a heartwarming piece of guest art that Veigue put together over Valentine’s Day featuring a lil’ baby Dakkan and his two loving parents:

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It’s possible that noises closely related to “D’AAAW” escaped from me when I saw it. Is it a thing for a picture to be too cute? Maybe! Just maybe. If so, this one comes close! Thank you so much for the wonderful artwork, Veigue, and I hope all our readers had a wonderful Valentine’s Day last week!