Neither Al or I are satisfied with the way this scene turned out. We know that the comic hasn’t been very action-packed so far, so when we have some action, we want it to be good, but this scene really highlights some of our shortcomings.

First, I need to do a better job of monitoring page counts. The whole White House sequence could probably use a few more pages to make a few things clearer, and this fight between Hartmann and Mark would be great if it were about two pages longer. But I realized too late that we were approaching the length that we’ve settled on for our chapter books, so I had to squeeze things a bit. The previous scene with Max and Mark ended up going a bit longer than I’d anticipated, and now I wish I could tighten it up a bit and use those pages here.

Second, Al feels that he could find ways to make the action more streamlined and compact. For instance, the two panels that show Hightower knocking the Secret Service agent’s gun aside could probably be one panel. And the last three panels could probably be two.

Now, I’m not saying it’s terrible, and I’m not fishing for compliments. But some of our readers like to read about our process, so here’s an example of where our process needs some work.