Why yes, I did type out an entire article for a gag. I really phoned it in on the bonus panel article though. But oh well. No one reads those anyway. This is another appearance of a long running world building gag where the newspaper in Ninja and Pirate is called ‘The Lorem Ipsom’ which is usually a placeholder for text you can see in productions where only the headline is important or there’s a lot of text on screen because at a glance it looks like real words. Just a dumb gag that makes me chuckle each time I get to put it in my dumb comic. And who is that Grand Pincer he’s talking about in the first panel? Wonder what THAT is all about?
This comic was an absolute monster to make because Clip Studio isn’t meant to handle a buttload of text for one, and for two I went through like three different versions of panels 3 and 4 trying to balance the right combination of tension, dramatic story building, and comedy. It wasn’t easy but a huge major thanks to my wife and my drink and draw buddies for being an amazing sounding board for my comics. And if you’re a weirdo and wondering where the red alarm light went to, it’s because it was a brief timed alarm that activated as lockdown occurred. Not because it was an absolute pain to try to recreate every panel. Nope. I definitely thought of a real world reason for it to not be in this comic. It wasn’t just laziness.