oh fleeps I forgot that there are two extra pages with kumquat that I MEANT to draw and add in somewhere before this point. so I will definitely have to do that and amend the page numbering accordingly. OR show it later as a flash-back scene but i never established that flashbacks exist in this story except briefly and narrated by a character and this part isn’t that. I could NEVER make this comic strip as a profession.

another bit to mention, when rendering this page, the first order of business was to check the previous page these gnomes appeared on, 3-49, so i could be sure of what lines from the script they had already said, and i found their dialog quite hard to read. i recall being concerned about its legibility before but i am surprised now that I then allowed it to be that bad if i was concerned about it. and it got WORSE across just the eight frames on 3-49. Thus I spent some time fiddling with that and it SHOULD be improved now, but i initially drew that page AFTER cleaning up text on older pages than that, at LENGTH, for printing. how could i still produce such unreadable letters and leave them that way?
in editing that text i have forgotten whatever distinctions i originally intended for the two gnomes’ letter styles, but legibility is probably more important than that. As long as the speech container baubles are distinctly colored and or clearly identify which figure is meant to be emitting them it isn’t necessary for the letters to look different in each.

ANYWAY

ironically elpse could probably join this club since biv also hates dumb little critters yet loves clobbering [th]em, but alas is cursed by looking sort of like them, and by occasionally getting followed by the worst of them
i identified “rootkit and pipkin” a few pages ago without having a plan for what they looked like or what they were going to do, though the essence of this scene has been around a while. i have also an old idea of an antagonistic duo that are always referred to as a pair despite one of them only ever standing around and doing nothing, maybe not even speaking, but I am not sure if this is the place to use that, if anywhere there is. that is the real reason the last frame is vague; I am not 100% certain of what figure is being shrouded there. i HAVE sketched the next page with one in mind and this shape presently correlates with that, sort of, but I might change it!