I’ve wanted to draw this page for a year.

I’ve got this whole bible of Kitt Frost and its world mechanics, like some PhD thesis. This story sat in the bible for a long time. I’d come back to it every few months, look at it, write a paragraph next to it, then close the file. Some pages you draw the moment they’re in your head. Some pages you wait on, not because you don’t know what they are, but because you know exactly what they are and the price of looking at them straight is real.

This is Tomas Frost’s funeral. Kitt is 10. His mother Elen is beside him. Dravok is in the honor guard, although you can’t see his face in the wide shot, his shadow is clearly present on the right side of the page. His moment in this story comes later, in his apartment. A moment, alone, with a glass of bourbon and a photograph and a letter he cannot bear to open. Today he is just standing in formation. The man who would have kept him on the right road is now in the box.

When I was a boy, my father died of cancer. My mother had been gone for a long time by then, but she came back for the funeral. She always came back when she needed something. Maybe this was paying respects, maybe this was inheritance; only she knew. What I knew was, regardless of what everyone saw when she held my shoulder in the line, that she would leave again as soon as the dirt was on the box. She did. The hand on my shoulder was only a performance. I knew it then. I still know it now.

So I went through the motions. I did everything I needed to whenever someone told me to. I cried because I couldn’t stop; it hurt so much. I watched the casket go down. I felt completely and utterly powerless, and I understood, in a way no child should have to understand, that the universe had decided this was happening and there was no version of me that was going to talk it out of the decision. I was utterly devastated.

That’s the feeling on Kitt’s face in the middle panel. Not just sadness. The specific kind of grief that is also the first time you understand what powerlessness is.

I built the page around the three things a military funeral does to a child.

The wide shot is the staging. Everything is composed for the adults. The honor guard. The portrait on the easel, Tomas in dress whites, the cap, the medals, the face that this Republic wants remembered. The casket on the rails over the open hole. Elen’s hand on Kitt’s shoulder, steadying him through the salute he is doing because somebody told him to. Kitt is the smallest figure in this panel because today he is the smallest figure in his own life.

The middle row is the cost. Elen crying. Kitt being held against her. The halftone behind them is heavier than anywhere else on the page, I wanted the shadow itself to feel like weight, like the air around the two of them had thickened. They are the only two people on this page who have actually lost the man in the box. Everyone else has lost a colleague, or an officer, or a national hero. These two have lost their lives as they knew it.

The bottom panel is the ritual. Five rifles, the BDZZZZ of the volley, the Republic triangle clean on every uniform. The ritual is for the adults. The ritual does not actually help the child. The ritual happens anyway. You stand through it.

In this universe, Tomas Frost had to die.

I’m not being callous about it. The whole machinery of the series needs this funeral. The universe needs to write Tomas out of the picture to motivate Dravok onto the path that ends the Republic. It needs the Republic to fall so it can put events back on the track that the time-travelers from the future bent. The compensation field is doing math, and Tomas Frost is one of the numbers it is willing to spend. Inevitable, in the cosmological sense.

I know what inevitable feels like from the inside. My father’s cancer was also inevitable, in the small local sense, it developed, it took him, I was powerless to help. It does not matter that one is fictional cosmology and the other is biology. The shape of the experience is the same shape. The hole in the ground is the same hole. It awaits for us all.

That is why I waited to draw this page. I needed to be ready to draw it with the right hand. I too have a future-cancer inside me. It isn’t cancerous now, but it awaits for its time to show its ugly head. In my pancreas awaits a demon, dormant for now.

Now, this isn’t analogous to my own life at all, I only draw on the pain, and want to give the reader the emotion of how it feels to be that little kid, so small, dealing with a big event. And the difference is between my life and Kitt’s, is that Elen stays.

That is the part of Kitt’s life I did not have. His mother is there for the funeral, and she is there after. She is there for the next year. She is there for the year after that. She is the reason he survives.

But she is also, by the time the reader meets her in the present tense of the series, dying.

Every page I draw of Kitt and Elen, even the warm ones, is shaded by the thing the reader already knows is coming. He is going to lose her too. And on some level he knows it too. So he hangs on. He never lets a hello be a quick hello. He never lets an I love you be an offhand one. Because when do you find out it was the last one? You don’t, until later. So you make every one of them count.

That is the relationship I am writing. Not a happy one. Not a sad one. The relationship of someone who has lost a parent once and is being asked, by the universe, to do it again; and knows it, and stays anyway, and shows up for every hello.

I am proud of this page. It took me a long time to be ready to draw it. I am grateful to anyone who reads it carefully enough to feel what it is doing.

– Loren