Interupted page 13 thumbs iteration

Being an artist is, in my opinion, a lot about moderating the force of perfectionism. It drives you to make better work, improve, create art at all, but unchecked it spirals into endless iteration and you never finish anything. At some point it has to be 'good enough', and part of the skill of art seems to me to be about placing 'good enough' at a reasonable point.

All that to say I made like four ish alternate versions of page 13 of Interupted. As I came to do the sketch pass, I suddenly realised that Wells and Brooke just jump to straight-up anal sex w this poor innocent adventurous gal, and it suddenly didn't seem right to me. Anal sex being simple and easy is of course a well-established fantasy trope in the smutty fiction space, and I can to some extent lean on the in-fiction notion that Wells (being a goo guy) self-lubricates, since adequate lubing is lots of the challenge of butt stuff. But narratively I wanted to show them being a bit more caring for this girl (than perhaps they were w Brooke's first anal).

It was a hUge challenge though. The compositions of page 12 and 13 were already really tight, they had all the beats paneled out. I really wanted to squeeze in 1-3 new panels, but there was just no room, and it wasn't enough to make a whole new page (the last image in this post is my attempt at making a page 12.5 which didn't pan out, it just disrupted the pacing).

I made a few versions of p13 where I tried to squeeze in just 1 extra panel, workshopping it with one of my friends, and eventually settled on '13 new 3a'. I think it's just enough to satisfy my narrative wants, and my friend thinks it seems sexier and like they're taking it a little slower. What do you think? Comics are hard you folks.