This scene was very difficult for me to draw. I wanted to include something like this early on to give people an idea of what they were in for. I didn’t really want people to get invested, only to get disappointed when it suddenly went into darker waters. Putting aside the fact that it’s emotionally taxing to draw stuff like this, on a more practical level, it’s a bit of a struggle to figure out how to do scenes like this without it seeming gratuitous or exploitative. If I could redo the scene, I’d probably leave out the middle panel. Otherwise, hopefully I’ve done an okay job with it.