Yes, I understand that the “Bastard” word balloon is confusingly placed. Just trust me that the pejorative is being used by the blurry shadow in the extreme foreground of panel 1, and not the goofy red-headed kid. I’ll try to avoid such confusion in the future.
On the other hand, I like the way the kid’s arm crosses the panel border in the last panel. I didn’t originally intend that, but I think it looks cool. Ross Andru used to do that all the time in Spider-man in the 70’s, and it made for very dynamic action scenes, like the characters’ blows were literally too powerful to be contained on the page.
MMMM Bacon……