When Andrew and I write the script for the comic, we do our best to describe to Mike what we’re imagining, and then he does his best to imagine it himself and draw it.

And then we exchange a whole lot of emails with Mike in which he asks for more details and clarifications, and we provide them. And then he sends us sketches, and we give feedback, and he sends us new sketches, until we end up with something we’re all happy with.

When we got to this scene, we discovered that one of the hardest things to describe to Mike is the way that the characters move in hand-to-hand combat (or, in the case of the first panel of this page, foot-to-hand combat).

Andrew and I are both longtime martial artists. Mike isn’t. So there’s a whole shared shorthand vocabulary, knowledge base, and set of assumptions and experiences Andrew and I are working with when we’re brainstorming combat scenes, that all turn out to be kind of hard to translate into coherent instructions to Mike.

In the end, for that kick to Max’s gun arm in the first panel, I visited Andrew’s home and we acted out the kick and some other exciting combat moments, with Andrew standing in for Max and me standing in for Agent Sojac, while Andrew’s wife photographed us. Then we sent Mike the photos.

If this was someone less badass than Max, that kick might’ve disarmed him. At the very least, someone only slightly less badass than Max would’ve accidentally fired the pistol into the rooftop. But Max is quite the badass. Fortunately, as we’ve seen in our story so far, so is Agent Sojac.

See you next Wednesday,

Nick