Book 1, Page 126

I absolutely love Barry's dialogue here! It's so snappy and smooth, you'd never know that some of the lines were written a month apart. We knew that in this page, Lillian notices Ruth's discomfort at the anti-Semitic tirade, breaks out of "impartial reporter mode," and insults the protester to her face. But it took ages to decide on a line for panel 7. When Barry first drafted the page, I commented "something snappier here?"

He patiently kept sending me possible one-liners, while I kept saying "sorry I don't have a helpful alternative, but...I don't think this fits; that one seems too crude; I...sorry, I just hate that one." I'd like to think if we were a TV writer's room and there were eight of us stuck in a room with snacks for 10 hours, it would have gone quicker with a similar amount of effort. But we're two people with other jobs, so...

Finally it was time to finish up the page. Barry and I were on Gchat from our respective workspaces, talking about musicals and small changes to my line-art. I started reading the Wikipedia entry on Father Coughlin. I noticed that he was taken off the air in the years leading up to 1941 for, among other things, being too anti-interventionalist. When Barry suggested "Now that Father Coughlin's off the air, is it like being disconnected from your brain?" I laughed out loud. It felt so good to get it right, and it led perfectly into the next two lines!

Off the subject, it's too small to really see in the comic, but Lillian is definitely using this mechanical pencil from the '30s:

I was trying to decide "pen or pencil?" and got into a research hole that included this:

and this:

I'm going out of town next week, so the next page update will be sometime after that. But we're still aiming to have Issue 5 done in time for VanCAF! (Sorry, Toronto--We decided that 2 Canadian conventions a week apart would be too much, so we'll try for TCAF next year.)

As always, thank you for supporting SuperButch!