Comic Report #41 - Bright and Early (Patreon)

Hello again!  I'm going to be away from my workspace this weekend so I wanted to get my week's post finished beforehand. This week I started work on the next comic page, which is an exciting return to action sequences!  I love to draw action more than anything else, so as you can see I fully fleshed out a very detailed sketch phase in about half a week, a true expression of my excitement.  A cool bonus is that I get to type up patreon posts about why I made artistic decisions about action sequences, instead of quieter narrative scenes!  

Firstly, though, I'll talk about what I see as the "pulse" of an action comic. As much as I'd like to draw action all the time, the action needs context for it to be meaningful.  A storyline it like a heartbeat monitor pulse, it needs low points between spikes of activity to give the heart of the story a healthy rhythm.  I'll write down-beat periods where the focus is on character interaction and character development, where my goal is to flesh out the world and advance the plot; and then I'll build towards an up-beat stretch where characters run around and things happen, and these are my favorite pages of all to draw.  I get nervous laying my groundwork in the latter days of this comic- in the early days when I could put out two pages a week it was no big deal to just hammer out the pages I need but these days between everything else I'm juggling I've been getting about one page done a month which means I'm on really slow time. Writing a down-beat stretch can feel like I'm spending much longer "not doing anything" when in a full read of the comic it's a fair number of pages.  Fortunately I'm a patient person so I can wait until I get where I need to be to pull the trigger on an action sequence.

The theme of this action sequence is snooping around where the old lady said she saw someone sneak out of one of the wall buses looking for clues, so my goal is to set the stage for future interactions.  I need to make sure that the placement of the buses is clear enough that it gives me room to actually move the characters around in my later pages.  I also need to make sure the buses are all facing the correct way- some of them point one way and some point the other but the important buses in the wall, like the one that's the gate, need to have their doors facing inward so gatekeepers can access them.  I also need to make sure the bus in question that a suspect was seen emerging from has its door facing inward as well, so that the person could have plausably emerged from it in the first place.  That's one of the reasons the backgrounds in this page are more precisely penciled than in other pages, is I need my environmental details to be spot-on or else I'll get to a page and I'll have already screwed myself.

For this particular page I needed a way to get Lizzie over the wall of buses that I can use later.  There's barbed wire on top and sandbags around the base, so I just drew the barbed wire curls parting to imply that they're less of an obstacle than they seem.  I didn't have this scene in mind when I first designed the bus wall so that's a case of having to work with an established detail. Just drawing a rope would be kind of boring, so I tried to tie it to the strap of an old boot, and to give it more weight and heft I sketched in a bunch of rocks.  I also haven't ever actually drawn this part of town before, let alone from the outside of the gate, so I've been heavily referencing my big town image for the proper building placements.

One of the hard things about drawing Lizzie doing action things is her mop is such a cumbersome weapon, it doesn't really have a sheath so she's just always carrying it somehow. In game development this created a bunch of interesting challenges to work around, so on this page where I need her climbing down the rope I just tucked the mop under her belt.  For a while she had a shoulder bag that I could just tuck the mop under but it was torn off a few days prior, so you gotta make due with what you have.  And speaking of game details, for game-Alice I wanted to give her carbine a bit more personalization to make it more "hers" than just an ordinary rifle, so I tied some cloth bits around it.  In the comic she gave Lizzie a new bandana to wear, so now in this page we can see what happened to the old Union Jack bandana: Alice has it tied to the front of her gunstock.  Just a little detail unifying the two projects I've been working on.

I'm gonna be gone all this weekend so I'll probably spend the next week prepping the next game animation, and then I'll be all-in finishing up this comic page until it's ready to post!  Thank you for your patience with my work.