Here’s a secret you might not have noticed about an element of text on certain comic pages but not others… I’m talking about those little captions at the very beginning that say things like “Soon”, “Meanwhile”, “Earlier”, and my personal favorite, “And so”. These little doodads are useful for things like scene changes, but especially when a scene change happens in the middle of the page. It’s like a period at the end of a sentence that tells the reader to stop for a beat before beginning the next thread of thought. It keeps the two “sentences”, or in this case scenes, from running together.

So why is there one of these captions at the very beginning of this page? It’s not breaking up two scenes, is it? Actually it is, and it’s because of printing! When the book containing this chapter is eventually printed into its physical form, this comic will be combined with the one immediately before it (Well Groomed 11). Each one will take up half a page, so combined they make up one full printed page. Because of that, we do have a scene change. We’re transitioning from June’s apartment to Chris’. Often that won’t be the case. The two pages before this one, for example, take place in the same scene, and they flow together relatively well. In this case though, there are two distinct scenes, and that little caption helps break the two apart.