Comic Report #38 - Fun With Borders (Patreon)

This week's task was the first phase of the next comic strip.  The rate at which I can finish comic pages makes it harder to maintain the correct timescale for story beats, as I have to make sure that I'm giving scenes the correct number of pages to unpack without rushing them out the door. Because a handful of pages are drawn in so many months it can feel like I'm dawdling, but an archive read gives the story the correct pace, so I have to remind myself of this and be patient. I plot out my story beats in sheets of thumbnails so I have a macro sense of the flow of time, but in the micro scale of creating pages this can be very nerve-racking.  

The overarching story beat I'm working on at the moment is establishing the beginning of the thread of uncovering who killed Sheriff Tanner. The last few pages have been meant to set up the frustration of searching for a lead and the reappearance of Patrick, an old friend of the crew.  In this page we get our first lead on the mystery, where Pat relays a piece of information he'd received by way of his new reputation as a hero. This lets me start pulling on the thread that unravels the whole sweater of the story, so it's important to pace the start of it just right.

Since this is a bit of a talking-heads page I tried out some visual tricks to make it more interesting than if I just drew two characters talking to each other.  Dialogue is important and talking pages are an inevitability in making comics, but whenever I write them I always try to establish some sort of secondary action to coincide with the dialogue.  Characters walking, fidgeting their hands, playing with their food, or doing anything else rather than just sit and look at each other is vital to make a talking page lively and engaging. I've had a couple pages like that before, so for this page I thought it would be cool to visualize the things Pat is talking about, rather than just have him mope over his soup and relay them verbally.

I wanted to convey that the images in the designated panels were not part of the normal timeline, that they are an illustration of dialogue, so I tried giving them an altered panel border.  I made the outer borders wavier like a dream bubble, and gave the interior panel lines a bit of a wobble to distinguish them as interior to the bubble.  The topmost line is not wavy because that is a paragraph line, that separates the top row from the row below it.  At least, this is the theory behind the weird bubble borders. I'm not entirely sold on committing to this, and I've absolutely tried this kind of panel border before- on page 547, where the Sheriff is attacked, I originally had the panel borders drawn as an EKG heartbeat pulse, but that broke up the interior frames too much so I switched it to straight line borders and gave them increasingly shaky scratch lines around the perimeter, leading up to a break.  What I'm probably going to do for this page is give it straight panel lines again and think of an alternate way to convey the otherness of the middle panels.  It was a nice experiment but if it doesn't work it doesn't work.

For the last panel I wanted to have two shots, or two beats, to wrap up the page with, but I only had the two panels left to work with. Instead of drawing the characters side by side two times and cram words around that, I decided to make one shot into two beats by introducing a panel divider down the middle. This way it's one scene but two shots, one focusing on Lizzie's reaction to Pat's story, and then a second one where Pat closes out the moment.  Since they're in a corner booth they're not directly adjacent to each other, so I put Lizzie's hand overtop of the panel divide, so it gives the shot both a sense of depth and time. I like how these panels came out so I will keep them how they are, but I'm definitely gonna give the middle set a second pass before I get down to painting.

I'm going to focus on getting work done on the comic for next week. I might try to knock out one or two gamedev items as well but my focus is going to be mainly on the comic.  Next Wednesday is my birthday so I won't be working on anything that day, so if I don't get as much done as I'd have liked that's the reason.  Thanks for supporting our work!