Comic Report #39.2 - A Glint In The Darkness (Patreon)

Hello!  Here is the finished, textless comic art for the next page.  This is also going to be my Friday update for the week, but I also want to get back in and letter and post it tonight before I go to bed, so forgive me if this is a shorter post than usual.  

I'm pretty happy with how this page came out.  I used the map I created of the whole town to assign the correct background buildings in the right places [which you can see above].  It's been a while since I posted a page with animation, but when I got to the end of this page I felt like it might benefit from a simple splash of light in the penultimate panel.  The original idea for that panel was to have the dark-but-starry sky cast as a low-contrast backdrop to a black silhouette behind Lizzie and Alice, so there's a clear shape there but it isn't obvious to see until you notice it's there.  What I attempted to do was give it four frames of light sweeping behind or above it from left to right, so if you don't immediately notice it the glint can catch your eye for a split-second.  I didn't want to get into modeling the whole silhouette, I still want it to be a dark shape, but I started giving the top of the head some definition, which might actually be too much now that I think about it.  But the purpose is simply to catch the eye.

Whenever I implement animation in a comic, I always try to make sure I have a clear purpose for it.  My personal rule for animation is it needs to be unnecessary; the animation serves as an underscore or supplement to the natural flow of the comic, it cannot replace the mechanical function of a comic panel itself.  I feel that if too much weight is placed on an animated panel then you lose the things that make a comic a comic, and it becomes a cartoon.  In the past all my incidental one-frame animations have served to underscore or highlight a visual element that can be printed in a book and still function as a page.  The animation is there but it needs to be unimportant enough that a comic page can function without it.  The glint in this page draws the eye to a silhouette but I can still achieve that in print with just one frame of the animation, so it serves as an extra in this instance.  

I'll be getting back to lettering and posting the comic now.  This next coming week I'm going to tackle some gamedev items, we're on a very exciting threshold with that build and I want to round out some things before we have something to share.  Thanks for sticking with us!