I’ve had this page in my head practically since I started the comic. Its tough to sit on them for that long, but it just made more sense to have it happen on the second day at the earliest. Granted, Sydney had to play along a little. I don’t mean she immediately understands what Maxima’s doing and rolls with it, I mean she specifically had to not get it in order for the gag to work, so I sort of poke fun at that with the “going to keep staring this direction” word bubble.

Normally Maxima doesn’t make a habit of pointing her gun at recruits, and obviously Sydney will be taught never to point a gun at anyone unless there’s a pretty good chance she’ll need to shoot them, but I thought I’d say that Max gets away with it because besides outranking everyone, her finger isn’t on the trigger naturally, and more importantly, her pistol is single shot break action and she doesn’t keep it loaded. With her speed, she can load it faster than most people can cock a hammer. She can even do it one handed, just let go of the gun in mid air and pop a bullet in the chamber before it has a chance to fall more than a centimeter.

There was no way to make this a single page comic. If I really had to I maybe could have cut 3 of the panels and maybe even combined the first two, but it would have lost something and still wouldn’t have fit on a single page, so it had to be a double. Unfortunately it put me two days behind and I’m not caught up yet because of A-kon, though fortunately I didn’t fall any further behind. I still have my buffer but I will probably never actually use up my buffer. That’s for like if I break my hand or something. Not that I have enough of a buffer to ride that out, I just don’t want to use it up if for no other reason than it would take me about 4 weeks to get an extra page ahead again. That’s why I haven’t updated the vote incentive yet this month. I do have two pieces that are half finished I could use but I’d like to have them a little further along before I post them.

I’m mostly pleased with the art on this page, (I could nitpick nearly all of it of course because artists are hyper self critical like that) so maybe it’s dumb, but my favorite panel is the one with the ballistics gel dummy. It just really looks like ballistics gel to me, especially with the old bullets and the spawled trails behind them.

The firing range BTW is in the basement, one level above the garage where the machine shop and the few ground vehicles the team uses are kept. Regular parking is in a proper parking garage next to the building

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.