CCCXXXIV: Reach
Writing this page was an exercise in “less is more.” I originally had massive amounts of dialogue, mostly a back-and-forth argument between Noah and Morty that hit basically the same beats as the final page, but did so laboriously and with very forced segues and “light bulb” flashes of insight. Knowing I couldn’t fit it all in one page, and that a lot of the dialogue was terrible, I deleted the entire thing and switched to writing visually.
I sketched the page as if I was going to convey the whole sequence without dialogue. It looked very close to what you see here. Then I wrote dialogue appropriate for the beats, only as much as necessary. The final two panels with the hands reaching for each other came to me as I was sketching the page and never would have evolved into the visual that it is if I had stuck to the original dialogue-heavy script.
