Comic Report #128.2 - Onward (Patreon)

Hello! Been spinning my gears up this week getting back into the flow, I've got some good progress on the next page to share with you today. It's taken me a bit of time to shake the rocks out of my head and get back into painting- shipping a game really, really takes a toll on you, and my body definitely needed to recover- but I've got some good momentum now so I think I can carry forward into a real productive week this week. I'm gonna try to get the next couple pages finished quicker than normal now that I have one whole project off my plate, so here's hoping I can pull that off! For now, though, here's what I worked on this week.

Before I got to inking this page I actually did end up redrawing the whole bottom half of it. I wanted to feature Clark queueing up a song on his headphones and I wanted that to be a central feature of the page, so I bumped the big line-up shot down a panel and put it in the penultimate frame. I'm really happy with how the line-up of characters between Clark and Lizzie turned out, they all fit really neatly in that space and they're all immediately identifiable, or they will be when I have them all painted in. With nice clean front lighting I think all four silhouettes will pop real sharply, I think it's a bit hard to describe it in words- it'll be dark in the back, light up front, you'll definitely see it sooner than later. One thing I'll say for certain, with regards to lighting, it's gonna be nice to step out of the candlelit room scene. I'd gotten a bit tired of referencing whose lighting was hitting them from where and I get to invent new lighting again; it's always a bit more of a pain to reference things established in previous pages because I'm no longer free-wheeling and creating new stuff from scratch, now if I want consistency I need to do things in very exact ways, and I tend to get fatigued by that if it goes on for too long.

I wanted to keep my Crew Lineup shot, but for the final panel I flipped it around to have them walking away from the camera. It felt better that way, like they're all going somewhere. I think I could still make the shot work- and it might end up working better- if I move that row of figures down a bit more so the camera cuts off at about waist height rather than somewhere under their legs. I'm kinda cutting it tight for text boxes with that shot, and I think dropping everyone down might end up serving the composition better by allowing me to actually put my dialogue boxes where they need to be. Yeah, now that I type it out I'll probably have a look at how that looks after this post goes up.

A small detail that has been in the background radiation of the comic has been the very specific layout of Tombstone, and the location of a big building that has a FISH sign on top that you can see from all over the place. The FISH building has popped up a lot, and this is actually where I figured the Gravekeepers' hangout spot is. There's a scene a few pages back, near the start of this chapter on page 630, where the Mayor is radioing Snake-Eye about dealing with Monday, and the shot cutting to Snake-Eye has a bunch of fish painted up on the walls of the warehouse they're in. That's the FISH building! I'm gonna have to draw a lot of that interior very shortly, but I'd been planning it for a while. I'm excited to finally get to draw it.

And that's where I'm at today. I'm gonna keep up my momentum and see how quick I can knock this page out, and then I'll be on to the next one sooner than later. Thanks for sticking with me through the down times, let's ramp back up to the up times and see where that takes us. Until next time, have a nice week!