Minor fail on this page: what I wanted to convey, through the writing, was that Harvey went down there with a clear plan: gas the corridor, knock all the soldiers out, and stroll on in. The “Problematic.” panel was the soldiers all gas-masked up and therefore much more difficult to take out with, well, gas. So the situation is going to be much more difficult than Harvey thought.

A few problems with this:

First, I’ve clearly called for the soldiers in the previous page to get shot in panel 1 of this page, so obviously Harvey doesn’t really give a wet slap about loss of human life. Which is its own problem — detailed later — but this doesn’t really address why Harvey suddenly wants to go for the less violent option. Probably because it’s less risky, but then one wonders why he didn’t just use gas the whole way.

Second, I totally omitted to mention any of this in the script, and somehow thought that the writer/artist bond that Roy and I shared had grown to such dizzying psychic heights that he’d just intuit all of it. Durr.

Third, I’m experiencing what I call “Matrix Guilt Syndrome,” which is basically sympathy for those poor soldiers standing in the corridor getting massacred. I felt like this when I watched the Matrix and Neo and Trinity cut bloody swaths through dozens of security guards in that bank-type building. Granted, they are in the way, but even though they have “virtual bodies,” it’s still real people, connected to tubes out there in the Real, that they’re killing. Given godlike powers and l33t ninja skillz, they still just blast the crap out of ‘em. That strikes me funny.

I suspect, and this doesn’t speak especially well of me, that I was stressed out a bit about trying to wrap this up, and was looking at clear paths to goal rather than the details of said paths. “Blast your way to the bunker” was a very straightforward way for me, as a writer, to deal with the situation, but I’m finding it hard years later to accept that John, the humanist, would just green-light Harvey to “try not to kill anyone” and then kind of shrug off a bloodbath in which what are essentially innocent career soldiers get mowed down.

My stress maps onto their stress: as I get anxious to wrap thing up in a semi-coherent way, they start cutting corners too.