Dealings With A Devil

An odd little strip, this one. It's yet another plot point that wouldn't comfortably fit into one part and ended up being split into two. It's quite odd in that although I had seven panels, none of which were repeats, I only had to draw three 'real' images for it -- the two of Jack Palomino (who has, in his based-on-Brando way, gotten fatter since we last saw him) and the one of Kali making him an offer he can't refuse. The other images were all slightly oddball ones -- statuary, silhouette, close-up and vehicle. And despite that, it didn't feel like an artistic cop-out - partly because I put a hell of a lot of effort into all of the panels (okay, possibly not the silhouette one) and also partly because the script wasn't written to make it easy on me -- it was just happy accident that I had a somewhat easier ride than some of the past strips where I've had eight or nine full images to draw.
The dialogue was pretty much spot on, as well -- with most scripts I have to cut bits out or add huge chunks on to make them fit with what I come up with for the art, but with this one, the dialogue Mary and I wrote fit perfectly, with a minimal of moving around. The only thing I had to add were two captions: the 'Jack Palomino' one, and also the last caption in the first panel, both of which I'd thought of before I started work on the art, but hadn't been able to phrase properly.
(I knew there needed to be something to explain that it was Jack Palomino, as we haven't seen him in a while, and he's changed a bit since then. My problem is, I was insisting that we put in a huge chunk of exposition, with Kali's thoughts on meeting him for the first time. Mary resisted, and quite rightly. I think I found a happy medium, in the end.)