CCCXXXVI: Doing Good With the Neighborhood
A few pages ago, I made a big deal about the obnoxious green color of Katsuko’s shirt. Yet, on this page, Katsuko’s new jacket is a similarly obnoxious color. Why? The color was only a part of the “problem.” The green shirt was extremely plain. July and Katsuko picked out this jacket for its style and because it came in bright orange. This way, Katsuko can avoid being mistaken for a wild bear by anyone she comes across.
The foreground-to-background perspective in the bottom-left panel makes no sense. I acknowledge that.
One of my strict rules for UTC is that every main character is required to appear in some capacity in every chapter. This story almost broke that rule, on purpose, with Cass and Flint. They only showed up as dream versions of themselves, but I originally wanted to keep them out completely. When I got into writing Noah’s dream, though, it really didn’t make sense for them to not be part of it.
There were two reasons for excluding Cass and Flint from this story. First, it drove home how much of an impact their disappearances had on the plot and the other characters. A scene revealing where they were during all of this would have lessened the weight of that.
Second, this story already had a lot to do in just 20 pages. There were three plotlines (a rarity for a UTC chapter), giving focus to six characters. (A-Plot: Morty, Ash and Demetrius; B-Plot: Katsuko and Jen; C-Plot: Noah) Adding Cass and Flint, and possibly even Thirteen, would have made things even more crowded.
I was so committed to establishing the shift in character focus right at the start of the chapter that I redesigned the website’s main banner to remove Cass and Flint, and add most of the secondary characters, who had never been shown in the banner before.
