The hardest thing about horror in comics is that the reader’s eye can see the scares coming. They can see the kick before they actually read the kick, and so therefore, the kick is more of a push. Rahsan and I spent a lot of time discussing how to combat this. How do we create a thriller where you can literally see the twists and turns coming. This page is the first example of how we combat that. You get a big shocking reveal that is hidden by how the page is weighted. What that means is that the bigger, more visually interesting moment on the page is the mundane moment, obscuring the shock of the words in the last few panels.
It’s also a bit of cheating in that what’s shocking isn’t the action but the words spoken, so that you aren’t seeing, y’know, blood and guts, but rather a sentence that is the twisty bit.