“Service Selection”
After the downer of the previous two episodes, I went with something totally bonkers. Maybe I’d turned a corner, personally – stopped pretending to fit some kind of USNA mold and started my journey to becoming The Real Me. (It’s been a looooong journey.)
This ended up being what is still one of my favorite Darior stories, with some of my favorite art.
Oddly enough, I only now (Feb 2025) considered that maybe the whole Angel/Devil confrontation was reflecting my own internal struggle between “expectations” and “The Real Me.”
Tech Note: On both of these episodes, the printer treated the art as if it were “grayscale” (like a photo) instead of solid black-and-white – the whole point of using my line-shading technique. It ended up looking a little washed-out in The Log: not as bad as the previous style could look, just not what I wanted. I was getting frustrated.