Episode 7 - Revenge of the Waitress
So you might ask, "who is this waitress and what's up with her?" She was a minor character from episode 1 - a waitress, as you might expect, and certainly not a Sith Lord - who worked at the Street Meet Cafe. The Word Smith kind of trashed the cafe a bit and now she's out for revenge, more-or-less. I don't recall why I decided to bring her back, I suppose I wanted to tie back to the first episode at some point. Some may also recall the waitress from an interlude during episode 6.
I did a number of design sketches when working out the title page:
If you ever asked yourself "where exactly does The Word Smith take place?" this episode should make it fairly ambiguous. Page 1 starts off with an exterior shot of the PAC at the University of Waterloo, page 3 shows an interior shot (technically the fencing scenes are also interior shots though I wasn't working from any specific reference photos for those) and Waterloo Town Square forms the backdrop for pages 5 and onward (minus the flashback page.)
In this episode we also finally get to see The Pen in action for a fencing match, even though she was first implied to be a fencer way back at the start of episode 2 (some fencing periphenalia is also visible in her room in episode 4).
On pages 1 and 3 we can see what I referred to as "the cheering squad." They're basically a few friends of The Pen who, at this point, don't have actual names. I did a couple of design sketches for them:
Page 2 is the first of two flashbacks, this one showing some of the events of episode 1 from the perspective of the waitress. Once again we see a pair of hitodama floating above the waitress in the final panel - these are things one sees periodically in anime and manga. The "memory cam" thing is meant to indicate that we're seeing things from the waitress' point of view and that the recollections might not be 100% accurate.
On the first panel of page 5 we see the business woman and her daughter who have shown up periodically through the comic (we haven't seen them for a few episodes).
Random trivia: the combination of the waitress' "Prepare to be served!" on the first panel of page 6 and her Tray Volley attack makes me think she might play volley ball.
And speaking of page 6, one might notice that I drew in the whites of the waitress' eyes on that page which isn't something I've typically done (at least not since episode 3 probably, I think...) I decided to not bother with that on subsequent pages. The only one who routinely gets the whites of his eyes coloured is The Word Smith, and even then only when he's wearing his mask.
Page 8 is the second flashback shown partly from the point of view of a shadowy figure who has been seen before. The sequence in the middle tier was meant to be similar to that at the end of episode 3. Dun, dun dun. Things might be afoot.
The cheque that The Word Smith is writing at the bottom of the page is presumably to cover (at least some of) the damage he caused. This is meant to (hopefully) make him seem a bit less of an ass, especially since insisting that The Pen leave her tournament (as he did in this episode) is rather jerky. I think he's a well meaning individual, he just gets rather hyper-focused on language related issues at times. I had a bird fly off with the cheque because, well, it amused me.
And that brings us to the final page! Nothing too much to say here as it's just wrapping things up for the episode. The waitress realizes she didn't really care about that lousy job after all and she and The Pen call a truce while The Word Smith continues to do his own thing.
Anywho, that's all for this episode's unfaq. As mentioned previously, episode 8 will mostly like start sometime in January so in the mean time,
Freak Out,
-TFitC
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