The page above holds the dubious honor of ‘Most Revisions Ever’ in SCAPULA history, as I shall explain.

In the original penciled version the traitor and Jemini’s secret lover was Hypnausea.  This makes sense, seeing how Hypnausea has more than once stabbed Scapula in the back and is also a dirty man-whore who would sleep with anyone.  In fact it made TOO much sense and was therefore predictable and a bit boring.  In an effort to shake things up I replaced Hypnausea with Toxsick, a result which is pretty damned odd yet somehow, on some weird level, actually kind of worked (of course, if I had REALLY wanted to be brave or shocking Jemini’s lover would have been Babirus…but that may have been too terrifying of a sight to subject to readers).

The other problem, one which ended up creating more revisions than I ever though I’d need, was hair.  Toxsick, whose true identity had already been revealed, originally had pale blonde hair.  The problem was that he somehow looked too much like Inspector Farley and I didn’t want anyone to think, “Hey! So Toxsick was really that fat cop guy?! What the hell?! I’m going to punch someone!”.  I steadily changed the color of Toxsick’s hair (about two or three times), and added some stupid little soulpatch-thing, until he no longer looked like Farley.  Now he just looks like a sulky old fat guy (perfect!).

The other hairy annoyance was our new villain in the last panel (whose identity shall remain a complete and utter mystery except her name is Mira Mira and she’s a Japanese scientist who is evil).  I redid the last panel five or six times, each time giving her a different “J-Pop” hairstyle, anal-retentively redrawing and recoloring the entire artwork because I couldn’t find something that clicked.  And you know what worked in the end?  The first draft version, which I made in my sketchbook! Aaaaaarrrgh!

Okay…that’s enough of that.  The drawing of Bali also took forever.

So that brings us to the close of our biggest tale ever.  After the thirty week monster that was SINISTER MONSTER DOOM LEGION, preceded by the nineteen week GANGWAY, we’re going to take a bit of a break and do a short story (Mira Mira’s tale will come afterward, another big one).