Comic Report #35 - One More Thing... (Patreon)

Hello! I wanted to post this yesterday but I honestly didn't have the time to crunch it out before my update time, and I opted not to overdo it staying up all night drawing things in time, so I'm giving it to you today. I've been doing a lot of gamedev work and I want to make sure comic-only patrons aren't left wanting.  

Starting the first page of a new chapter is always sort of tough for me. I don't have the momentum of prior pages, I'm making the initial push for the rest of the chapter to roll afterwards, so all that energy just has to come straight out of this one page. I also have a bad habit of wanting to dilly-dally on contextual details and in-between moments, and I always have to make sure to edit those out of my work so the point of the story stays focused, so for this page I just continued where the last page of the last chapter ended off- "it's time to go to work".

The theme of this page is Lizzie zipping around doing normal waitress things in the background, eavesdropping on townsfolk in the diner.  I wanted to play on the idea of service workers being somewhat invisible to people; they're hard workers who we tend to take for granted (you should always tip them, by the way!), so if there's gossip to be heard they'd be the ones to hear it ghosting around in plain sight. I started writing this comic while working a service job myself, so I draw a lot of that from my own experiences over the years.  

When I draw a comic storyline I usually have a dozen or so characters "loaded" into my immediate memory, I can just churn them out really quickly off the top of my head without much sketchwork needed.  This page is a bunch of random townspeople, though, so I have to make them all from scratch.  Compared to other sketch pages I've posted on here, this page's sketches are a lot tighter and cleaner- I need that to be able to ink these people cleanly and efficiently, so I put in the extra time to make them sharp.  What I see in the people of Tombstone is an extension of most every other character in the comic, either dressing in what they had on at the time or wearing whatever they think makes them look cool, in light of the fact that there's really no society left to tell them they can't. Writing post-apocalyptic fiction, I always try to lean more towards humans as goofy and weird than focusing on them being cold or savage. These are people in a more primal, post-society situation, but they're still people. They're still bumbling, silly, over-ambitious, curious, selfish meatballs who trip over their own shoelaces and bump their foreheads into doors, and I think that's one of the more charming aspects of us as living creatures, so that's the sort of brush I want to focus on painting these people with.

I'll be working on this page straight through to its completion, so it shouldn't be too long before it's finished. There aren't many panels, but there's a high volume of unique characters per-panel, so it might take me a bit, but I'm going to do my best to get this out as quick as I can.  Thanks for being patient with me.