And that's a wrap on pages in 2024, great place to leave things, no? ;)
Thank you to all the ladies who made this month's bonus page possible <3 Here's the completed pages (so far) that you can look forward to next year! 
I've managed to make a total of 55 pages this year, which is a lot less than last year's 121, but I'm still feeling really good about my progress. Especially considering I've spent the majority of the year physically unable to get out of bed due to still-ongoing health stuff.
I've also been trying to let myself take breaks and have fun with other projects outside of LB. Managed to crank out 80k words between different stories I may or may not finish, but I've really been having fun doing them. Helps to have other creative places to expend energy when I hit walls with LB. Anywho, thank you all for being along for the ride this year, hope you've all had a safe and restful holiday season, and I'll see ya in 2025. I can't wait to share more of LB with you all <333
Want to see another bonus page in January? Click here!
…oh Riley, we’re really in it now girl. I feel for her so bad. When you’re a kind person in a situation like this who is also confused and isn’t sure what is actually right and doesn’t want anyone to get upset and your girlfriend feels SO strongly about this issue that you just aren’t sure about…….
I don’t blame her for trying to stall and stall and stall because what else can she do!!!! What’s about to happen is gonna be hard for her, but I don’t think she can delay it this time.
……. but also if I’m honest I’m really excited for this shit to kick off. Just…I don’t know how it will go down, but. I will enjoy seeing a gendie missionary outnumbered by lesbians&bi women who aren’t buying that shit. It will be cathartic after, um. My college experience of the inverse. 💀
So afraid to see what will go down but happy that Riley may put her foot down after all she has dealt with. Happy New Years! Thank you for all the work you put into this wishing the best for you always❤️
Blaire really is committed to Spreading The Good News, even if it means putting a customer service worker in a rough position. Yikes. Not that I’m worried about Violet – she stands up for her beliefs and her daughter so well, and she’s surrounded by normal women.
But Blaire… I really hope we get a backstory reveal for Blaire at some point. What kills me about her is that she seems to need to be needed. I really don’t know how else she can “evangelize” without being scared of backlash, endure Tiffany Kai’s open hostility, search for the best traits in Timothy Babygirl, or do everything she does so generously. Imagine if she had turned that kind of devotion towards any worthy cause, whether that’s counseling at a women’s shelter or just being a consistently decent girlfriend to Riley. This bottomless care could suit an actual hero.
So, naturally, she directed her care to the gendies. (Olympic medalists in the Needing Things And Being Difficult To Please competition.) She chose to unquestioningly follow them, throw out her self-respect, and let down the one person who is supposed to feel safest with her. You know, villain decisions. (Yes, Riley’s the one who decided she owes Blaire unchallenged woo beliefs and Blaire never asked for that. But Blaire has made clear that she won’t hear out challenges on this unless Riley sticks her neck out and forces the issue. And even then, I suspect Blaire’s going to add more vitriol to the convo than your average breakup.)
Blaire is an antagonist, but she’s tragic in her awfulness, and I love that about her. I want to know what makes someone act like this. Never hearing pushback, ever? Having all of your actions scrutinized unless you’re ~doing it for someone who needs and deserves help~? Only being able to ~earn love~ by dedication to a cause/religion? If we do get a Blaire Backstory Reveal, my money is on her having a liberal Christian upbringing – where her parents abandoned Christianity’s most restrictive tenets, but still impressed a “good deeds are social currency” mindset onto their daughter. Calling it now.
What a rollercoaster! The aboslute hilarity of Ari just straight up dropping Jaden to the ground and Riley’s “little?” followed by that last panel…
I love the effect with the speech in the background of that last panel, with Jaden’s words against Blaire’s and all in front of the background of TERF TERF TERF. (And the “Do you not trust me?” TT.TT) It really conveys her panic, but I think it’s also very striking that at no point do any of her own opinions come in. I really sympathize with this, having grown up deeply conflict avoidant myself. For a long time it didn’t even occur to me to form opinions on whatever the source of any given conflict might have been, because that just means you’re picking a side and “making it worse” instead of playing the neutral mediator or the buffer solution or whatever else the situation seems to require.
Taking a stand seemed unimportant, counterproductive, and also just really hard. But when you act like that you make it impossible to actually resolve any conflict — avoiding them and resolving them are two mutually exclusive goals, in my experience.
Of course I still feel for her deeply in this kind of situation, where the strong opinions of everybody else involved mean that there is very little chance of any actual resolution. And yet I still so so look forward to the moment where she voices her own opinions and finally knows the deep relief of there being a possible end to the conflict (even though it will quite obviously cost her her relationship) instead of the endless anxiety of trying to keep things from boiling over.
I also really love the way the characters are drawn in these types of reaction shots (like at the end of the first page here). They’re so adorable, and they convey so much emotion somehow by being less detailed, which seems very counterintuitive to me, a person who knows next to nothing about art
Noooo Blaire it was going so good! Also I’m just now realizing due to the light blue color you use… Violet is holding her sweater opening-sides…. NOT giving constant thumbs ups…. Silly me 😅
Now how are you gonna weasel her out of this one, Rusty? I know for damn sure you’re not breaking them up just yet so I gotta see where you’re going with this trainwreck 🪑🍿
Incoming Violet vs. Blaire Street Fighter Style
I really had to squint it see the words in the last panel. It’s too bad that Blaire can’t let things go or, heaven forbid, let a mom raise a gnc kid her way.
Ari’s lack of subtlety is painfully relatable. 😅
At first I thought the lines Riley is thinking about came from Tumblr, and she’d been looking into both sides of the argument in secret and internalizing them all; that’s how believable the dialogue is.
Thank you to all the ladies who donated so we could get both pages at once and end the year wondering if 2025 will be the year Riley peaks, and thank you, Rusty, for all your hard work bringing us this comic. ❤
oh dear, poor riley ;-; anyways, thank you for another awesome year of leasebound!! 😀 excited to see what comes next <3
“Poor Faith”
Blaire, please, let a girl have girl crushes and be a tomboy! Not everything has to be about gender issues! Violet told you she’s fine, listen to her mom! You’re acting like those tifs claiming that “a kid having a gay crush is predatory” ;o;
And hooray for you, Rusty! What a cliffhanger you gave to us! See you next year.
Eeeeeeeerrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhh… the dialogue just reminds me of how gross and entitled the Gendie nonsense is. “TERFs refuse to date transwomen because” with ‘refusal to date’ being portrayed as evil and bigoted rather than the incredibly personal choice that it is…
And Blaire’s lack of self-awareness and overbearing nature strikes again. God… as Blais perfectly put it before, it’s so sad seeing how selfless and kind (Though I imagine she’d still be a bit overbearing) Blaire could be IF she had a better goal than Gendie crap… sigh.
Isn’t it weird that a lot of (trans exclusionary) radical feminists are so fixated on MTF transitions and how invalidating and gross they are… but they NEVER talk about FTM transitions (besides brushing them off as women affected by societal misogyny)? Seems like they aren’t really concerned about trans culture as a whole at all – they’re just fixated on biological males and what they do to their own bodies.
Pretty ironic for a feminist movement.