This is a page with two callbacks, which may be the most callbacks done on a single page. It’s not a huge number, but more than I normally do. To that end, I was faced with a choice to make. Knowing that, ultimately, all six of these chapters were meant to be read as a single book, I figured the memory of what came before would be fairly easy to hold on to. Furthermore, reading through the archives on the website, too, would make the distance between previous moments and this page are now much closer than the actual time that has passed between chapters.
So, I struggled for a moment over whether to include editorial captions like you see in mainstream comic books, where continuity stretches over sixty years in some cases. When they call back to a previous moment, usually a small caption appears in that panel that states “as occurred in issue #274” or whatever. I wondered if people would remember that Bishop was shot through the right forearm in chapter 3 or that Rich Jack said he couldn’t swim at the beginning of this very chapter. I knew I wouldn’t put them in the book, but I wondered if I should do it for the page posted on the website.
Yeah, Bishop got messed up in Chapter 3.
As you can see, I ultimately voted against it because I think, to do it now, I would have to go back through the entire archive and make sure to add captions when appropriate, which seemed more work than was necessary. But, in case you were wondering, Bishop’s injuries from Chapter 3 is what is being referred to in the first panel.
Thumbnail drawing for this page. Click for a larger version.
