Nice start. It is a lot of work, isn't it?
Thanks for both of your suggestions. In a couple of cases, the mouths are supposed to be open and the detail gets lost, so they look closed. In one case the character isn't supposed to be speaking aloud, but I forgot to put a box instead of an oval (will be fixed in the end-of-chapter revisions). But I'll look through the images and see what can be done to make it more clear that the mouths are open.
I have mixed feelings about the backgrounds. Cross-hatching is probably out, because it looks so bad at 72dpi (though I'm quite tempted by some of the screentone patterns I have). As I mentioned, I was looking through the pages over the weekend, and it did seem to me that a bit more variety in backgrounds was needed, but I don't want to go overboard and get too cluttered. You're right, grayscale or a gradient might be a good compromise. Also, I meant to put a setting behind the group scene on page 7 and simply forgot to do that when I was putting the page together. I think adding that in will help.
Thanks again for the input!
