Comic Report #31 - Plans In Motion (Patreon)

Here is the sketch phase of the next comic page.  Narratively this page is meant to cement the turn of events from the previous page and set the stage for the rest of the comic to come.  The little rectangle in the lower left of the page is a placeholder for the chapter-end tag- it's been a while but I think this is a good place to close out the chapter and start fresh on the next one.  Due to the pace of the comic in recent years it's actually been a pretty long time since I actually drew intermission pages; they used to give me a breather when I was updating twice a week and basically doing nothing but working on the comic 14ish hours a day, but the story still need structure and the archival reading still needs break points, so as a formality I need to keep the comic consistent.  "Now I'm a secret private eye working for the deputy mayor to solve the mystery of who in a town full of survivors killed the sheriff" is, in my view, a pretty good beat to leave off on.  And since the intermission pages don't take me nearly as long to draw I'll get to pick up on that story beat again pretty soon, probably before the end of the year.

One of the details I had a bit of a hard time planning with this page was the passage of time between the deputy mayor leaving the scene and shifting to more active hours. I'd drawn a couple versions of panel 3 where Lizzie was standing close to the camera, with the empty part of the diner on one side of her and a full part on the other, but I a) wanted to keep that shot for the final panel and b) felt like it wouldn't read as easily how I intended and not just look like the diner was half-full. Rotating the camera around from back-to-forward to front-to-back I think conveys the shift in time more clearly than the other idea.  Speaking of that perspective, I'm expecting it to be a big pain in the neck to actually paint it with a room full of people.  There's a ton of props and now a bunch of bodies so I can't just cheat my way out of it, I'll have to use some other tricks to make the painting more efficient.  I just don't know if I'll quite be able to get this page painted in a clean one-week mark like the last two pages have been, but I'm going to do my best.

This week I'll be shifting back to do some gamedev work, and then I'll swing back to push this page towards completion.  Thank you for your patience and your kind support of our work.