Alien Romance, the daily comic strip

[gs_silva]

There was a scene a while ago, where Christine the pre-med student was volunteering at the hospital so that she could put it on her med school application. Jon accompanied her for moral support, and while he was waiting for her in the lobby, the volunteer coordinator recognized him. She'd been on his care team when he was in the ICU after his crash. She asked him if he'd like to volunteer to be on the outreach team, to talk to new patients with injuries similar to his own. There hasn't been such a patient yet, but now he's gotten the call. He definitely should have gotten the training in the downtime before an actual patient showed up, but you know how these things go. Inertia and all that. It doesn't seem urgent until it is.

Karen gives Jon the quickie version of the training: there are five stages of grief, patients with catastrophic injuries need someone with real-life experience to talk to, etc. Jon never received this support himself, and when he was advised to talk to a therapist, he went to Christine instead; they talked about hard topics, fooled around, and called it good.

Christine doesn't have a malicious bone in her body, but she does have really bad judgment sometimes, and she's going to be a doctor.

This is a hard story arc to write, not least because it's so wordy! The characters talk entirely too much. Meanwhile I'm also redoing a difficult scene in the graphic novel, where Cathy joins an art commune in a converted factory outside Lyon, and things happen. I didn't like the way I drew the setting the first time, so I'm drawing the entire scene from scratch. There was also far too much dialogue in this scene, and it was all in French, so I plan to trim it down to the absolute bare minimum.