Oops! These are not the weapons they were expecting!

In order to set up for this reveal, I felt I really had to establish the lighter weapons Roka and crew were expecting the rustlers to have. So they comment on the light rancher weapons while spying on them at the border patrol, and Roka brings it up again on the previous page. It’s one of those tricky things where you’re trying to give information to readers without making it look really obvious that you’re giving them info that’s going to play out later. The idea is always to make it sound as natural as possible, since the more natural it sounds, the less attention it calls to itself.

Hopefully, it wasn’t too obvious that this was going to happen. In general, I don’t like withholding information in the artwork in order to reveal it completely as a surprise later. I think it’s much more fun to include that info in a very subtle way ahead of time, so that readers can come back later and discover that it was there the whole time. Back at the lockbox, when the rustlers pick up their supplies, I actually drew one of them holding one of these heavy guns. The idea was to obscure it visually with snow as much as possible so that it just looks like something random. But it’s there.

See you in issue #3!