Out of the Frame

Within a single meeting, Sue's support group for the comic's forgotten background characters produces an angry mob, some very unwelcome sparkles, and a seat for her at Lucy's lunch table. Not bad for what she herself admits was a bad idea.

Out of the Frame
(Intermission)
Chapter	"36.1" of 127 (list of chapters)
Published	May 14, 2007 (2007-05-14)
Page count	4
Major characters	Sue, Alec McCain, Katie, Lucy
Minor characters	Stacy, Three Weird Girls, David, John, Lily, Yashy, Daisy, Tess, Abbey, Augustus
Locations	Roseville High School
Collected in	Volume One, Omnibus 1
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Synopsis

Sue bangs a gavel and declares open "the first meeting of Roseville High's Neglected Club!", a support group for characters who tend to stay in the background or get forgotten entirely. Katie, Stacy, John and the Three Weird Girls fill out the attendance. Katie objects almost immediately that she's the most popular girl in their grade, and that she only joined because she thought the club was about getting more attention. Then Sue notices David at the table. He's basically a regular, so she boots him from the room with a literal kick, and he retreats down the hall threatening to report her for racial discrimination.

McCain raises a more fundamental objection. He doesn't see the point of a club formed to protest a more popular group, and suggests the members simply try asking that group instead. Stacy and Katie jeer him back into his seat. The panel then refuses to move on from the deflated McCain, who eventually has to ask, ".. Why hasn't the focus left me yet?" Sue seizes on it as a teaching moment, since this is a club that embraces the spotlight, and McCain gets a round of confetti and cheering that leaves him blushing at the table. Katie decides the whole thing is stupid after all, crediting "the bear" for the insight ("I'm a dog," McCain corrects her). She and Stacy grin their way to a better plan: an angry mob.

McCain gets his moment in the spotlight, like it or not.

The mob rallies and marches out over Sue's protests. Out in the corridor, the panel's focus abandons the marchers for a passing Lily, who smugly informs them that they're "the side characters nobody cares about", which only makes everyone madder. Left behind, Sue admits the club was a bad idea born of her own jealousy, and McCain commiserates about a school full of idiots. She's mid-vent about her sensible advice always being ignored when she calls him "Alec". He realizes she's just used his first name. Both of them freeze up, blushing, while sparkles fill the panel. McCain grumbles that the sparkles are giving him a headache, and a flustered Sue excuses herself.

Meanwhile, Lucy is strolling outside with Yashy in her arms when the mob swarms her, all demanding her friendship at once. "SHE'S NOT FOR SALE, ASSHOLES!!" snarls Yashy.

Sue catches up out of breath and confesses everything. She was jealous of Lucy's group at lunchtime, built a whole club to vent about it, and watched the thing spiral out of hand. Lucy can't believe that was ever a problem: "Is that ALL? Geez, nobody cares if you wanna sit at our table." Thrilled, Sue spins around, throws a victory sign at her former clubmates, and abandons them on the spot, to the Three Weird Girls' open-mouthed horror. The final panel has her sipping a juice box at the lunch table while Daisy and Tess mope, Abbey frowns, Augustus grins from the background, and the word "DRAMA" fills every inch of air around her.

Character dynamics

• Sue and Alec McCain: The two barely know each other going in. McCain debuted only four chapters earlier as the group's resident deadpan pedant, the one everyone tells to shut up. Sue is the one person at the meeting who defends his right to be heard, and when she absentmindedly calls him "Alec", the pair of them dissolve into mutual blushing. It's the first on-panel use of his first name, and it becomes Sue's habit alone from here on. Veronica's commentary confirms she remains the only person who calls him that.
• Sue and Lucy: Sue has been quietly jealous of Lucy's lunchtime crowd, enough to found an entire club about it. One panting apology later, Lucy waves the whole crisis off and tells her nobody cares if she wants to sit with them. Sue had hovered near the group before, but this chapter is the story of how she became a fixture of their table.
• Sue and the Neglected Club: Sue opens the meeting as founder and leader, loses the room to Katie's mob halfway through, and ditches the membership entirely the moment Lucy gives her what she wanted.

Trivia & observations

• Fourth-wall gags are the engine of the whole chapter. Characters treat panel focus, series-regular status and "the spotlight" as everyday school concepts, and the camera itself misbehaves twice, first refusing to leave McCain and later wandering off after Lily.
• The current version is a substantial remaster. Veronica's commentary explains that the original chapter highlighted fan characters from her DeviantArt days, and the redraw replaced them with Katie, Stacy and the Three Weird Girls. She kept the chapter for the Sue and McCain development, and reckoned the original was "a little more mean-spirited" than she cared to preserve. The 2007 publication date belongs to that original version.
• Aqua, the tearful cat who delivers a single line on page 2, never turns up in the main comic again. Veronica has confirmed on Tumblr that she's a mock version of Lucy from an old, never-published anime-style side comic, and Oliver's advice on the matter was simply "don't read it".
• Stacy's "Shut it, McCain!" continues a gag that began on McCain's very first page in Follow Me. That said, Veronica's commentary notes the remaster plays her line as genuine annoyance, since the running gag wasn't yet established at this point in the timeline.
• Yashy's out-of-nowhere observation that Lucy's milkshake brings all the boys to the yard quotes Kelis's 2003 song "Milkshake".

Related chapters

• Follow Me: McCain made his debut in this chapter, and the "Shut it, McCain" gag started on his very first page there. It's also where the lunch-table drama Sue envies gets properly underway, with Augustus isolating Daisy and threatening Tess.
• Show and Tell: The "insecure Khao Manees or oblivious Korats" Sue promises won't steal anyone's spotlight are Lucy and Mike, who claimed those breeds for themselves in this early chapter.
• A Different Side: The following chapter picks up with Sue already embedded in the group at lunch, gym and the pep rally, and Paulo carries the "Shut it, McCain" gag forward.
• Feline Filibuster: The Sue and McCain spark planted here pays off after Sue's student council defeat. McCain sits with her, hand on her shoulder, and she answers him with an affectionate "Sh.. Shut it, McCain".
• Rising Temperature: Katie's "loser among the losers, hon" edge is a warm-up for this chapter, where she picks Daisy apart over her looks while Abbey watches.