New artistic achievement unlocked: the picture is too complicated for me to actually draw. But it's also, in a sense, the greatest number of panels I've had in a picture yet --- eight, if you count each of the ones in front of the purple background as three pictures each --- and if you're wondering how much I'm cursing myself for doing a comic that requires drawing a lot of fingers, and a lot of French fries, and a lot of fingers holding French fries? I'm curing myself even more than you imagine. I did so much redrawing and re-designing things that I know the Hydra's hands don't actually ever look the same twice and I don't care anymore. They look like hands holding fries, more or less, and that's what you're going to take.

So this page follows on from https://www.furaffinity.net/view/61659620/ with Spunky apparently having delivered the pair's order. And some brand-new character seeing this and wondering about what the heck's going on. Why an alligator? Because doing some sketches on paper revealed to me how much fun and relatively easy Albert Alligator is to draw. It's a good design which probably shows why Walt Kelly used the basic plan repeatedly. But I didn't want this to be Albert Alligator fan art mostly because I didn't want to write this to Albert's character.

(The colors look different because the previous page was done with a CMYK palette and this is RGB and I don't know why the same blue, for example, is different on-screen there. I ask typography people to not explain to me because it's been quite hot a long while here.)

Also, Albert and the Hydra are the same green (literally; my basic color palette is sampled from some Pogo Sunday strips) and the two characters together would be too much bright green. Color choice was already awful for this. I didn't need to make it even harder to read and compose the scene.

At one point I wanted the Otter to offer the Interrogator a (diet) Moxie but the page was already way too busy. Also in the earliest sketches the Hydra was eating with their right hand and I swapped because I thought it make the scene composition better, foregrounding the fries, but there's so much going on here I should have gone with what I was drawing better. Well, I can't get better without practicing the stuff I'm weak on.

The badge the Hydra's pinned to their shirt says 'YES - I'll answer questions from strangers'. I realized the Hydra probably gets a lot of people asking the same questions over and over and having some permission badge, like some cons have to say whether you can hug someone or start an unsolicited conversation with them, would probably be a stress-reducer in their life.

Mayo is good on fries. I get someone not liking it (I don't like ketchup myself) but thinking it's weird someone else likes it? Very weird.