Comic Report #42 - Tactical Espionage Action (Patreon)

This week I did some pencil work on the next comic page, and boy am I excited to get these finished and painted!  Probably the next ten or so pages are going to be action shots and I'm so extremely excited to be drawing them; action is the thing I love to draw the most and a big part of why I started making comics.  It's not that I don't like drawing the social moments, but I'm just really energized by the work I have planned ahead for this scene.  

When I write dialogue scenes my goal is to have some meaningful resolution by the end of each page to make sure each page is carrying significant weight in the story.  When it's time to write action scenes my internal timeline becomes a bit more chronological.  I want to hit certain moments and achieve certain feats by the end of that page, thinking of it a bit like resolving a turn in a tabletop RPG.  This is probably why I have the most fun drawing action sequences, because I'm fitting time into a page rather than dialogue. My goals are different in a way that is really appealing to how my brain optimally works.

For this page I had thought about taking the approach of "no one is watching set so you could just scoot right over to the end point of the comic, but that would be visually boring.  On the last page I spent all that effort establishing landmarks in the opening panel, so this page I'm going to use them to give the scene absolute positions and create a sense of movement- I did the work, I'm going to reap the rewards for it.  Plus, since this is a sneaking mission, slinking around beneath the spotlights makes a nice stealthy moment.

The key to the whole scene is investigating the bus that the witness told Pat she saw someone exiting late at night, which means I need to determine which bus in the scenes I've drawn is the one that best facilitates this.  The gate at either end of the street, as established when the characters first arrived in Tombstone, is about three and two-thirds buses wide, meaning there's one central mobile bus that can be moved back and forth to act as the gate, two parked buses on either side packed with sandbags to act as the gateway, and then the partial bus ends that go behind buildings to seal off the ends of the streets.  The gateway bus is out because a driver has to sit in there to operate it, so one of the two side buses is ideal.  I tried to design them with the doors facing inward, so it was either the one with the door immediately next to the gate or the one with the door on the farther end of the bus, so I determined that the best place to send Lizzie would be the farther bus, since that door best opens up to the space the old lady would be able to see without being so close to the gate itself that it risks danger of being seen.

Once I establish which bus I want to set up as the important one I needed to do two things: a) write a fun way to sneak in from the outside, and b) write out the easy way to sneak in from the outside.  Part A was easy, but part B took a bit of noodling about.  In panels two you can see Lizzie pick out the easy way in, the back door, but in panel three she finds its been welded shut.  I think this makes sense in the narrative since you want to make sure the big wall you build doesn't just have an easy door for invaders to walk through, so of course they'd have welded it shut, plus the pool ladders on the Gate A and B buses indicates how the gatekeepers themselves get over the walls, so it isn't needed for Tombstone personnel to access.  That's getting rid of the easy route, the interesting route is hinted at in a few of the bus shots on the last page and this one- the windows.  When I was little I recall school bus windows having these kinds of annoying latch clasps at the tops that you had to push in and pull down on to open the windows, so some of the bus windows are still open a crack.  Lizzie has been in tight space before breaking into the Omni-Mart, so climbing in the bus window is not entirely outside her capabilities.  Her being short enough to do so does make it hard for her to actually reach the top latches to open the window, though, which makes the feat more interesting.  Fortunately an old familiar face emerges to help offer her that extra bit of boost.

It's been a while since I've actually drawn zombies in the comic, so it's fun to reintroduce them to the story.  In the very beginning Lizzie was absolutely terrified by them, falling over and scrambling to get away.  Over ten or so years of working on this comic the characters have all grown, and I feel like now is a chance to really contrast how far they've come with how they started. They're a lot tougher and a lot more confident, having acclimated to the new norm of their world, so seeing the zombie enter the panel isn't an "oh no!" moment, it's an "a ha!", and I think that really helps capstone the development the characters have made throughout the story.

I'm really itching to get this page done so I can work on the next one, but this week I do want to try to finish up a game animation for Alice so I can get her exported and up to par in the game build we're working on.  I'm gonna try to get that all done in one shot so I can get right back to comics, though, but whether or not I make it there, I'll be finishing this comic up on my next work cycle after that.  Thanks for your patient support of our work!