This page was added for a whole bunch of reasons. I wanted to give more time for Ruth and Mookie's friendship to develop so that their later conflicts would have a bit more weight to them. I also wanted to establish more of Ruth's backstory, the fact that she was married, and her no good gambling husband cut town, but left her saddled with the debt.
A big part of the shift that came post re-writes, is that I realized I had to confront the fact that shit escalates in this story, fairly quickly, into a life and death situation. A normal person would walk the fuck away if they saw people dying, or came to understand that magic was real, but inherently evil. That meant that I had to reevaluate how desperate/curious my main characters were.
Hazel, Harvey, and Margaret were easy in that regard, but not Ruth and Mookie. In about ten pages they witness a man getting his head blown off, and I had to ask myself, if they would continue investigating after seeing that. Ultimately I decided that Ruth needed the money pretty bad, but even that wasn't enough for her to continue, so she results to blackmailing Mookie in Issue 3.
Lastly I wanted to set up the fact that Ruth has a silver ring. She's always wearing it, even in issue 1, but I decided I needed to call direct attention to it, so that later events don't seem too deus ex machina...
You can read all of "Ithaqa" Issue 1 here on steemit!
https://steemit.com/art/@drwatson/full-issue-1-of-ithaqa-comic
If you have any friends or family who might be interested in a Lovecraftian horror comic, please send them to our website to sign up for some free pages! https://www.ithaqacomic.com/contact-us/
Additionally, If you're new to this comic I strongly recommend you check out our instagram, as I'm currently uploading pages every day.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ithaqacomic/
Theresa Chiechi's (The Artist 
Lucas Gattoni's (The Letterer/Logo Designer) website is here: http://bit.ly/LG_Lettering
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