Death Happens

Another bit artsy scriptless bugger here. I bothered to sketch it out this time, though, whole clusters of little thumbnails with writing scrawled around them like some kind of mental hospital patient's book about the end times.

Okay, this one's a bit 'out there', so I figure I'll try to anticipate any 'what the fuck was that?' questions by going into the thought process behind it here.
The original idea for this was that it would be a pictoral representation of the archetypal 'life flashing before ones eyes' scene people (supposedly) see when crossing death's threshold. That proved a little messy and unstructured, so I ended up tearing Halifax's life apart into rough lumps and working out who would be at each station. These are, in many ways, the formative people in his life, some of whom we've heard about and seen in person before, others we haven't. We're each of us very much like a lump of rock when we get born into this world, and at each stage of our life we hand people hammers and chisels and let them start knocking little bits off us, defining who we are and giving us a bit more of an idea who we are. It's not until death that we see the finished sculpture, though, the product of many craftsmen over time, some intentionally working on making us beautiful and perfect and others, deliberately or otherwise, knocking huge lumps off us that have to be fixed by subsequent craftsmen.
The final Holly panel also has a rushed version of the process I use to draw Shit Happens: rough pencils, inked lines, block colours, shading and highlights. (In addition to the final Holly panel being a chronological procession of her interaction with him, from the first time they met.)
This is, if you're on DSL and haven't realised, a big strip in filesize terms. The fact that there's only two speech balloons is what's keeping it under 200k; the more text you put into a comic page, the bigger the filesize is. This is why the comic is always huge, even if it's two people staring at each other and talking.

Also, it's a good thing the Head Death called off the strike, or else there would have been no-one there to come for Halifax. (For those of you going 'huh?' I'm referring to recent events in Irregular Webcomic.)