Comic Report #43.2 - Actions Speaking Loudly (Patreon)

Okay so I have a confession: last night as I was finishing this page I felt a surge of fatigue right when I was in the home stretch, right around when I would normally post the textless page to Patreon, and I made the decision to just power through the rest of the page, get it posted and go to bed.  I only had enough batteries for one of the two things I normally do and I chose to finish the page and post it.  I apologize, but now that I'm awake I wanted to get the finished, textless page up for you guys.  

There actually wasn't a lot of text on this page to begin with, I wanted it to be a quiet page where the action spoke what needed speaking. I realized a while ago that I hadn't really been doing sound effects as much like I used to, so the top half of this page became all about ambient sounds.  One of the tricks about lettering- both for text balloons but especially for sound effects- is you aren't "writing" words, you're "drawing" them.  The letters become shapes that happen to communicate language, so when I'm drawing in sound effects I try to render them in ways that imply motion or direction.  Like the top three panels, panel one I wanted the fighting to be outside and distant, so I fit it all in one little window pane.  Panel two I wanted to imply the zombie was slapping firmly against the side of the bus, so I drew the THUMP in the same perspective as the wall of the bus, to try and sell it as being parallel to the plane into which the zombie was thrown.  Panel three I wanted to evoke a very specific sound, like dragging your fingers down a smooth whiteboard surface, so I drew the letters in very tall and narrow, implying the direction I wanted the zombie to slide off the bus.  It's a minor thing but I think tying it to specific motions helps sell a sound effect better than just having the word be there in bubble letters.

One of the other things I wanted to do for this page was imply impact in two panels.  Panels two and seven felt like they weren't impactful enough in the painting phase, so I gave them some screenshake lines in the final touchup phase.  This also had the side effect of breaking up an otherwise large block of panels with the same background shot with some white frames, which I think looks a bit better than a monolith of darker values.  

This week I am going to catch up on some commissions but I'm going to try to finish Monday's last victory animation pose for gamedev work before working on anything else.  Thank you for your kind support.