Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 Cover Time for chapter three! This is a fun cover. "Cops Can't Read" is the name of a song by the Salt Lake band Fists in the Wind. The fancy R is the symbol of the resistance, and it's based on 🜇, the alchemical symbol for aqua regia, an acid mixture that dissolves gold.

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #1 Isabelle's reaction here might be my favorite single panel of everything I've done so far

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #2 Of course Pandora wants a collar and of course Isabelle already had one. Such is the wardrobe of a recently out trans woman

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #3 Having a tail would be awesome but there would be so many logistical problems

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #4 O, Fortuna is based on a real building in downtown Salt Lake, the former Hotel Plandome on the corner of 400 S and State. In the time that I've lived here, it's been host to a number of unsuccessful businesses. It's currently a taco place, let's wish them luck.

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #5 A few people really seized upon the idea of Zero secretly being a cavefish. I had a brief obsession with cavefish when I was like 9, so I'm sure my younger self would have been delighted

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #6 Early on I did toy with the idea of Pandora as a dancer, but once I actually started writing her character, it didn't feel right, my objections being pretty much the same as Isabelle's here. She doesn't quite feel emotionally mature enough.

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #7 It's Lyra! She's straight, but she's not in-your-face about it

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #8 Find me a cooler word than "courtesanerie", I'll wait

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #9 Some of the art on this page is rough. I was having a really hard time keeping Miss Fortuna on-model at the time.

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #10 More new characters! These two ended being pretty popular

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #11 Isabelle finds Natalya very charming but I get the feeling that actually dating her would require a great deal of emotional bandwidth

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #12 I enjoy when Pandora reacts to things in a very non-human way. Also, yeah, what does Isabelle do for the resistance?

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #13 A resistance movement is going to attract people with very different politics. I see Zero as libertarian-ish, but even among more mainstream resistance types I think the plight of Helpers is something most people haven't given a lot of thought to.

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #14 While being queer can be considered playing life on hard mode, there are certain challenges you get to sidestep entirely

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #15 Yeah, these guys. This is the first time we've seen Pandora get angry. Also Lyra doing actual ally stuff

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #16 This is like the aliens from Sailor Moon season 2 who were blatantly horny for each other while pretending to be siblings, but if they were also clearly different species

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #17 Several layers of quotes around "income bracket"... I get into it more in the next part but one of the themes of this particular story is the ways in which trans women are discouraged from ever expressing anger

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #19 When I was first releasing these pages there was some speculation about how Pandora would react to Isabelle stripping for an audience, and I'm proud to say that nobody expected it to be "Ooh, neat."

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #20 With the creeping militarization of the police, "a cop but more menacing than today's cops" is an increasingly difficult thing to communicate visually

Pandora's Tale Chapter 3 #21 And that's the end of this chapter! Unexpected cop cliffhanger! Hope people are enjoying these posts 💖

I am greatly enjoying these posts!