Comic Report #43 - A Grand Entrance (Patreon)

Hello again!  This week I started work on the next comic page, and I think this one shouldn't be too long to actually finish up.  This page is also a fun change of pace from my usual method, which I'll just jump in and explain the details to right away!

Normally when I construct a scene in a page I take a great deal of care to keep my camera movement fluid and cinematic, I believe I've mentioned a few times in past updates.  I always draw backgrounds because that gives a point of reference for the camera's position in space so when I move it from shot to shot the reader can get a sense of the shots turning of moving.  For this page I wanted to emphasize a lot of action in a specific place, so I set up a static camera watching the window where everything happens for the first 2/3rds of the page.  By keeping the camera static I can emphasize the movement of what goes on in each frame, starting outside, moving up and into the window and then crashing down on the floor.  The camera movement doesn't complicate the shot so it's just a clear line of action.

A lot of the first rows of panels I need to communicate with sound effects, since there's a lot of outside action I need to imply.  The idea in my head is that she's beating up the one zombie with her mop and then he goes THUMP against the bus and slides down to the ground to use as a boost for her to reach the window latches.  I need to emphasize it a bit more but in the second panel, I want the angle of the bus inside the panel frame to tilt a bit, like the impact of the hit was so great the whole bus shook, and I need the two panels on either side to be static to convey this difference.

I try to avoid copy-pasting my art whenever I can.  There are cases like this page where I need to essentially draw the same exact thing multiple times, but I will try not to make every panel the same pasted background.  When I see this in comics my brain always tries to pick out details that are identical between the shots- usually a specific brush stroke or the specific variation in a line wobble- and it takes me out of the comic.  Drawing the same shot separately multiple times lets the natural variations in your hand give each shot a unique quality where, while being structurally the same as the panels around it, does not look like the scene is frozen in time.  Variation in line quality gives stillness life and warmth, which a copy-pasted shot does not, since there is no variation, no warbling, no subtle shifts in line or detail; that is sterile, lifeless, trapped in amber.  When these situations come up in my comic, I have a compromise method I use to try to convey lively stillness without burning all my energy, as my comic tends to be very labor-intensive.  What I'll do in these cases is I'll copy my sketch layer to multiple panels, and if its a foreground character I'll ink the same sketch separately in each instance, to keep the inking lines distinct.  If it's a background detail, like here, I'll copy the sketch and usually copy the rough block-in where I have the light and shadow plotted out, but I'll paint the last 1/3rd of panel details separately in each panel.  In the past I'd skewed or squashed or erased and redrawn some clusters of details in copied background to prevent the thing I do, that picking out identical brush strokes, from being prominent in my work.

As I draw characters over and over little details about them evolve over time, and I'm noticing a little detail crop up in how I've been drawing Lizzie lately.  Way back when I used to draw her hair as being parted in the middle I had a scene in the Omni-Mart arc where she got a haircut that sweeps more to one side.  Over time and after sleeping in a garage the nice brushed version of her haircut kinda fell apart, which is where her side-sweepy little spikes came from.  Lately I've started drawing it more with the third little hair swoosh brushing to one side, since that was part of her old haircut and it'd kinda blended with that half of her hair, but I also felt like it framed her face nicely.  I'm pointing this out now since I realized I was doing it myself, I've also been conscious of how I draw the cowlicks on the top of her head.  The spiky bits sticking up weren't always there, but they do help give Lizzie's hair a unique silhouette; however, I started drawing them a bit more exaggerated over time than I probably need to, so I'm consciously trying to keep them from becoming weird rabbit ears when I draw them.  I gotta try to reel that detail in a bit.

This next week I'm going to try to cap off one last gamedev detail before I finish up this page, but it shouldn't be long to finish for reasons mentioned above.  Thank you as always for your support of our work!