Hey, there's a panel from tomorrow's page up as a voting incentive at TWC. It's very cute and related to this page. Also, some cross-eyed-ness but that's fine. First things first, I put up a shop! There are a few designs for Pride Month, mostly because I needed a tshirt to wear to the parade at the end of the month. (Chicago celebrates pride on the 25th, everyone else was last weekend...IDK why though.) Also, some botanical drawings that I'm going to keep making more of because it's a nice break from the comic. Plus! Some artwork from HTBAW :). There are a lot of print-on-demand places, so I'll likely upload stuff to other places as well that offer different merchandise. I'd run my own shop, but it's nice to have another company handle things because I'm already overloaded. Next week's pages will start with the outfits from the fashion contest! This week's pages are mostly to solidify Malaya's anxiety about this excursion, plus making it clear that she's basically an alien. Introducing a grown woman to the mall is really fun to write, because it's such a weird scenario. It's like she's Amish on Rumspringa or something. (Side note, my mother's mother's family is Pennsylvania Dutch, which is actually German Mennonites but okay, and the Mennonites in their community have really specific accents that are aaaamaaaazing. Mennonites are like...the liberated Amish.) Anyway, the outside of malls always smells weird. When our mall had an Abercrombie still open, you could smell the perfume from across the mall parking lot. That smell then mixed with the orange chicken smell from Panda Express, and...it wasn't great. I was kind of happy when Abercrombie closed, because just orange chicken exhaust was fine by itself. I worked with a girl who used to manage the Abercrombie for awhile, and she said they were required to spray their signature perfume like...once an hour or something. That combined with the pounding dance music would make that a terrible work environment. I asked the employees there if they ever got headaches and they laughed it off, but it honestly sounds like an issue to me. Regardless, they have jeans that fit tiny people really well without too much elastic in the denim, which is a hard combination to find. (More than 1% elastane in the fabric and your jeans are just going to stretch to hell.) Okay, I gotta go fight with tomorrow's page. I still have to color the backgrounds, because of course it ended up being 8 fucking panels, and of COURSE I made all the backgrounds elaborate even though I swore to myself that the most mall interior I was going to draw were a couple store fronts. Nope! Just...gonna look at soooo many things.