MI Stuff- Interlude 2 and other notes

WELL

Here's an assortment of stuff related to Interlude 2, some of it is from early 2014! So weird to think that was almost 2 years ago. And some of it is from late 2015, like, 2 days before I needed to draw it in the comic lol. Some stuff:

• Mike's room: I was surprised by how much readers picked up on, to be honest. Not just the stuff that was there, but the stuff that wasn't there. You can see my notes in the pic, I suppose... I left this drawing until about the day before I needed it because I'd had it in my head for a while, and knew it was "rectangle room" "bed" "chair" and not that much else. The layout is somewhat based on my last apartment/ room, which was similarly tiny. For the sake of trivia, the only piece of decoration in the room is the little item on his desk on Panel 5 of this page, which is a piece of twinned pyrite.
  
• Toby: Short for October Murillo. This pic is from 2014 when I had no idea how much she was going to be in the comic, if at all (I decided to let her into the Interlude though I'm not sure how I'll feel about once the entire story is done... might feel too "as an aside"/ tacked on. We'll see). And clearly didn't know what she was going to look like yet either. But here is the backstory for you, since I doubt she'll be back in the comic except as a mention: Toby and Mike met in highschool while taking an advanced math class, which they had to take the bus to the junior college to attend. Since they were the only highschoolers in the class, they kept getting grouped together. She actually developed a crush on Mike first because *~highschool girls~*, but then it dropped off when she/ her parents realized he was more scary-weird than kooky-weird. But Mike got a lot better after highschool, having finally found a medication that worked well for him. They dated through 2 years of community college and then after transferring to a nicer state university together. Unfortunately it ended sort of poorly, and they broke up right after graduation~
• Sketches: I wanted to give the sense of him hiding in his clothes, slouching and skulking around... kind of unpleasant to be around (sort of like the adult version, but replace clothes with muscles).
• Whatever: The next interlude is probably not Mike-related, so no need to avoid posting this stuff I guess. But a grad-school Mike, probably on his first round. He dropped out the first attempt, for reasons, then succeeded on the second try for his PhD. In general he is more comfortable with tasks and problem-solving than he is dealing with humans... Thankfully there are gonna be a lot of problems to solve in MI from here on out, and not necessarily a lot of humans.