CCCXXXIII: Three Thirty-Three
Normally, when you see a character in a plain shirt in this comic, it’s because I wasn’t inspired enough to come up with a unique style for them. More and more often, I’ve been pushing myself to give characters more interesting apparel. In Katsuko’s case, her plain, loud-colored shirt was actually chosen intentionally so that this moment could happen. Knowing this, though, didn’t make it any more pleasant to have to paint that gaudy color on her throughout this chapter.
The number 333 is a long-running in-joke for me in real life. It started when I played the Game Cube game “Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem,” where “3:33” is the answer to an early in-game puzzle (and shamelessly spoonfed to you by a creepy whispering voice if you take too long to figure it out). Ever since then, I’ve seen that number pop up in significant places or at significant times. It was even my street address at one point. So I couldn’t resist the urge to pepper the page with little references to the number. Lawrence’s shoulder patch is the symbol that appears on the cover of the game’s MacGuffin, the Tome of Eternal Darkness.
