If you look in the second panel you'll see the background I cheated you guys out of back on Page 40. The sense of place provided by a good background, or even a lousy one, is of course vital to sequential art (or "comics," as they say in the Low Countries.) The best sense of place I've seen in an online comic yet is in Dirk Tiede's Paradigm Shift -- a mystery/crime drama set in my new hometown of Chicago, bringing it alive through details as mundane as cracked pavement and the positioning of elevated railway tracks. It also features many grisly murders! Joe Bob says check it out.

Letters, we get letters: Kaesa Auralia commented very kindly on the new color artwork and mentioned that "it's nice to know that even in a future time when they have police to protect us from Mad Science they're still selling tacky Father's Day gifts." Naturally, Kaesa -- threats to mankind's existence may come and go, but tackiness is and always will be the true essence of humanity.

As far as the rest of it goes, I haven't done a lot of color comic work in the past -- mostly just short experimental pieces, not any genuinely serious projects. Obviously, when I decided to start doing MoS in color I had to find somebody to copy off of, so in this case I've gone with Georges Rémi a.k.a. Hergé, artist and writer of the Tintin books (favorites of mine since I was a child.) Hergé tends towards the use of bright colors, simple character designs and exactly the right amount of detail -- no more, no less. If I can follow in his footsteps I figure I'm doin' fine.