Long John

There is an argument to make that Long John is about telling stories. From the stories you tell about yourself or are told about you, to how a story is told (and who is telling it), it’s an idea that’s woven throughout the series. This page, however, is explicitly a callback to Chapter 3 as Bishop was trying to get Juan John to come out from the cabin of his own volition. Similar to then, he’s playing with his prey a bit, using the power of language to create the power dynamic between them.

The callback Bishop is making from Chapter 3.

But this page also speaks to the narrative power of page design when it comes to comics, specifically. It’s a narrative choice whether to have 8 panels on a page versus two or three. Or, in this case, one. Due to the poster-like nature of the page, we give the power to Bishop that he alleges to have since he dominates the composition and there are no other panels on the page to distract from his power play. In the book, this is an even-numbered page, meaning that it’s the first thing you see when you turn the page.

As a creator, you do have control of the narrative, no matter how much we want to give that power to abstract and nebulous things like “the muse” or “inspiration.”

With that, Long John, Chapter 6 will be taking a slight hiatus until 2026, starting up again on Wednesday, January 7. In the meantime I’ll be putting in the orders for the Volume 6 books (thank you everybody for preordering!) and getting those shipped out with their associated goodies in January. There’s still over 30 pages to go, so we’ve got a lot more Long John before this whole thing comes to a close. I hope everybody has a happy holidays and a great start to the new year! See you all in 2026!

Thumbnail drawing for this page. Click for larger version.