Comic Report #39 - Throwing Gas On The Fire (Patreon)

Hello!  I'm really far ahead on my game asset creation so I'm gonna focus on knocking out some more comic pages this month and the next, with a couple art commissions in between here and there. I'm excited to be in this part of the story, so today's post is about accelerating the momentum of the comic.

One of my worst habits as a writer is wanted to dwell in scenes and flesh out the links between plot points to give the world some meat, but if that meat is not relevant to the story then it just gets in the way.  For this page I wanted to quickly transition out of the diner scene and move onto the next point in time, so I used the first panel as both a time and space movement device.  With Lizzie in the middle I can put shading down her center so the left-side lighting can reflect the diner interior during the daytime, and the right-side lighting can describe the new setting, which is sitting on the roof with Alice at night. I've already established the day/night cycle of the town so I can trust that readers would be able to pick up on that without needing to blend the scenes in a more drawn-out way, as much as my brain likes to do those sorts of things. Basically, we used the diner scene to establish a goal, fishing for information and then getting a lead from Pat, so I don't need to dwell on that anymore, I can move to the next stage.

I spent a lot of time putting together a map of Tombstone with major building landmarks at different corners of the town so any scene can be identified at any place just by what's visible in the background. I had thought about doing a panned-out shot to show that Lizzie and Alice are on the roof of their own apartment specifically, but that would probably have taken up panel space I could use for anything else.  My attempt to establish location in this page will be mostly in panel two, where I have the one tall building with the | ∩ ∩ ∩ ∩ | markings on it two roofs down from where the scene is happening.  This is another case where I just have to trust the contextual details I set up in previous pages for the sake of expedience.

When I set up the plot hook of "solve a murder" I tried to express the gravity of the situation by giving Lizzie the idea that she had to keep it a secret.  I tried to wait a few pages before letting her break that promise, but with about a page a month that feels like an eternity, so now she's roping Alice into the plot as well.  I think the story would not be well-served if Lizzie was completely isolated from her friends, and Alice is the most important other person to her right now, so of course she's gonna share with Alice, who as a medical professional has some evidence of her own to tie into the case.  Since these two share a home with the town's new sheriff, it only made sense that their nosy third-wheel roommate would butt into the plot as well, however her being the new head of law enforcement in the town is a useful tool to help cover their tracks.  

I haven't drawn a proper action scene in a while and the comic is due for one, so the theme of this page is accelerating the burn of the plot to tie known information together and get to the point where the characters can climb and jump and do physical stuff.  Throughout the comic's history there have been downbeats where I establish context that lead into upbeats where people's heads get knocked around, which lead back to downbeats so the comic isn't always running on full throttle; I hate that the slow pace I have to work at stretches the downbeats out as far as it does but I'm ramping back up to an upbeat phase again, and I want to get there and get my hands dirty, so that's what this page and this comic report title is about.  It's time to do what I think this comic is best at doing!

Since I'm up to speed on gamedev work I'll be working on this comic straight through to the end this week.  Thanks for sticking with us and helping us get where we need to be!