Kudos for finishing this so quickly! I know it can be hard to resist the urge to spend ages on something and make things perfect, so congrats on cutting your work time in half, that’s very impressive.

First of all, I LOVE the cover page! It’s very stylish, and although I usually don’t like recap blurbs, this was just short and sweet enough to work imo. You’re also clearly getting more comfortable with this quicker, looser inking style. Characters felt much more expressive and subtle, and gestures felt more organic. I particularly liked when Raven held the knife up to Miller’s neck. The first panel on the last page was great too, I loved the red of the flames reflecting off Raven’s hair on one side with the blue shadows on the other.

Visually, the biggest issue imo were confusing shots in the latter half of the comic. Characters switch sides, the entire bar disappears sometimes in panels where it is actually needed (as opposed to times when backgrounds can be ommitted for closeups). For example, on page 5, when looking at Raven from behind in panel 1, the bar is on her left. So from the front, it should be on her right, but it isn’t. It’s on her left again, as if she’s looking away from Miller in panel 3. The bar also serves as a backdrop for the pair, but it disappears in the second panel, showing instead a table in the background with various cameos, so it feels jarring to suddenly switch back to Raven leaning on the counter with a glass of wine. In later pages, Raven has totally switched sides from being on the left of Miller to the right. Remy and Kubo are also initially behind Miller on page 5, but are behind Raven in the next panel. It seems strange that Kubo would continue to walk after being tapped on the shoulder all the way past Raven before confronting Remy. It’s even stranger because later on, Remy throws the knife from behind Raven... but because she’s switched sides, that means he walked past them and then walked back? It’s very confusing, and like Arts said, the action was pretty out of the blue too.

Speaking of, Arts hit the nail on the head with your writing tbh. I wasn’t really gripped by this. The only information we’re really given in this comic has already been summed up quite neatly at the beginning as well as in Homeward Bound I, and any connection the characters make is moot because their memories will be wiped. Raven and Miller state things far too plainly for the conversation to feel genuine most of the time. Their dialogue also tells us things we already know, such as their abilities and features of the Sandbox, the only new snippet being that damage can’t be taken. I find myself asking, what’s the point of all this?

I feel like there’s also a lot of wasted potential here. For one, the Sandbox can be anything, right? Anything can happen there, but you depict it as a rather generic-looking bar surrounded by empty space, and the characters just.. have a pretty uneventful conversation.* And like Arts said, neither of them bring the emotions they were feeling from previous events to the table, so on a whole this just kind of feels... like filler, I guess? Nothing that happened to them before is impacting them here, and nothing that happens here will impact them afterwards.

*I mean, I personally would rather not see anything set in the Sandbox because to me it’s not very satisfying for characters to forget things and effectively reset after each encounter, but if you’re going to go for it, why not take the opportunity to just go hog? Off the wall bonkers, if the character knows there will be zero negative consequences for anything that happens in there and they won’t remember it. It’s like a dream in that regard.