As for the drawing itself . . . I normally don't use pen for anything other than outline work, but I felt that a serious piece like this needed a stark black-and-white look that only ink would achieve. So considering my lack of experience with the medium, I think I was able to pull it off pretty well; it achieves the look I wanted better than I thought it would, and he genuinely looks sad here, something that can be really hard to portray in artwork. The background is of course a photo of the World Trade Center rubble I scanned out of a magazine and then heavily altered, and the white shadow-like effect around the actual drawing was added to make it stand out from the background and give it a little more of a doujinshi flair. But doing this drawing was so depressing; after a few days, I was about ready to lose it just because I couldn't stand doing something so sad, so I'm really surprised that I was able to keep it together and finish the piece. I still wanted to do this regardless of the real-life events; if the attacks had never happened, this would've just ended up looking very different from what you see here. But there's an interesting line in one of the GX episodes midway through the series that relates well to this: "However, the word 'if' doesn't make sense when applied to history."

For those of you who are familiar with the GX storyline, I'm sure you can easily figure out the symbolism within this piece. Though America has been scarred by these horrific attacks, we aren't losing hope, and now we're fighting to make sure that another tragedy like this never happens again. Sound familiar?