With that first panel, I went back and forth as to whether or not there should be a visual showing what kind of arrows our killer Cupid is shooting. I like how the panel looks without it, and in general I want to do away with as much clutter as I can, but at the same time I did feel like you may need an explanation as to why Ozzy's eyeballs explode when he gets skewered.
I felt like this would be a good spot to explain the process behind how I ended up putting this whole super long sequence together. I've sort of explained it in bits and pieces in previous author's notes, but now that it's wrapping up, I can give you the full skinny.
This scene has taken up an absurd 43 pages of the comic, and still runs on for a few more, coming in at a whopping 49 pages total. A big part of that is because it's sort of several scenes slapped together into one. As I was working on the earlier pages of this section, I came to the sad realization that I was going to have to write Ozzy out of the story, because his side story would have added A LOT of pages to the overall running length of this comic. But I still wanted to squeeze in a lot of what I had written for him, if nothing else to at least justify having him make an appearance at all to begin with. So I first had to go back and rewrite a lot of the dialogue for the pages I'd already illustrated to fit the new storyline, and then I had to tack on more pages to introduce the conflict between Rana and the High Council – which was itself going to be fleshed out in separate scenes – and then last I've added this 24 page sequence involving Zurena and severed heads and Ozzy's untimely demise.
Zurena wasn't even in the original script. I knew I couldn't just have Jetta kill Ozzy outright, because Ozzy was too likable of a character to have him killed that way, and besides that Jetta despite her killer reputation wouldn't just casually snuff somebody out like that, even if he were a total dirtbag. So I had to create a scenario where (A) Ozzy burns through all of his “cool points” and becomes a completely unlikable douche, and (B) Ozzy puts Jetta in a situation where she has to kill him. To that end at least, I think this has worked out fairly well.
A better option would have been to have Ozzy killed by Rana in a later scene. I could have avoided turning him into a murderous sociopath, and it would have boosted Rana's “bad guy” points… and it would have kept this already overlong scene from running even longer. But at the time, I decided against it because I wanted to avoid having to build yet another additional set. Looking back, I probably made the wrong decision there, but at this stage, what's done is done!
So, this will definitely go down as one of my biggest misses as a writer, but it was at least a learning experience for me. I've made a commitment with the upcoming chapter to aim for writing shorter scenes with a better sense of tempo to them. And if I find myself in a situation where I need to write a very long sequence, it may help to cut away to something else from time to time in order to break it up and keep it from feeling bogged down.
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