On this page, Grace is referencing secret bases from Pokémon. I don't recall ever actually playing around with the mechanic, but it makes me think of people having a bunch of furniture and plushies in caves, so here we are.
Six? No. Four.
I originally wrote six panels for this page, which basically left no room for really showing them in the, well, room, and ALSO wouldn't have left room for Hope's trivia about transformative pocket dimensions.
Granted, we don't NEED that bit of trivia right now, but I wanted it out there.
The two panels that didn't get included very naturally work at the start of the next page rather than the end of this one, and the decision to make that change came about from this line of thinking (previously written on socials):
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A rule of thumb I'm considering is "find the note to end on".
I often write pages that have multiple points that could be notes to end the comic / page on, but I keep adding panels because, hey, there could be more panels.
But what if fewer panels, better visuals, and getting to bed on time?
This is a bit different to the "panel accountant".
The panel accountant is concerned with having the same amount of story progression in fewer panels.
This rule of thumb is for determining where the potential end points for a page or strip are, and favoring the earliest satisfactory end point.
Though I suppose the panel accountant could start keeping track of this, too. She's very smart, and oh no I'm anthropomorphizing again
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The irony about the "in bed on time" part being that this page wound up being posted late, but hey, that can happen when you make a change like that and end up rewriting parts because of it.
Still, it's a good rule of thumb, and should help in the future.