Comic Report #44 - The Little Pages (Patreon)

Here's the sketchup of the next comic page.  I didn't get a page done in December, but I was also putting a ton of time into getting some gamedev work done, and then it was a holiday, so I'm fixing to get another page up ASAP in January.  In the eleven or so years I've been making comics this sort of time pressure has come up often, but ever since my old tuesday-friday and then my later once-a-week update schedule suffered breakdown I haven't really taken advantage of the solution to getting a page of complicated artwork done under a tight deadline: make a Little Page.

There's a few examples of Little Pages in the early half of the comic, but the later half is much less so.  Basically when I needed to draw something to keep the comic momentum going I would make a big one-panel page or a page with a few smaller panels and then one large panel, since a lot of the complexity of making a page of Dead Winter is painting the backgrounds over and over across multiple panels, so fewer panels is less work, which goes quicker and lets me hit time constraints more easily.  

Little Pages aren't just time-savers, they have practical uses to the long-term narrative of a comic as well.  A comic with lots of small panels can become very dense, but making sure there's pages with few big panels can give the story some breathing room when you're actually reading it as a whole.  A hard part about making webcomics, especially on this one-a-month cycle I'm stuck on, is maintaining both the day to day rhythm of the comic and also the long-term flow of the archive.  I feel sometimes you need to choose one or the other, but because my comic updates are somewhat infrequent these days I've been making my pages very dense.  The last 100 pages or so I don't think I have very many Little Pages where the story can breathe a moment, and I've been thinking about this a lot as a problem.  I have tremendous anxiety about readers dropping off if I don't maintain some kind of level of content with my updates so I've been putting a lot into each page, but I think strictly doing this might not be great for the archive read or the ultimate finished product.  So this next update I'm giving the comic some room to stretch, and just expanding on a small moment before jumping into the rest of the narrative.

The idea of this page is before Lizzie turns on her flashlight she wants to make sure the nosy old lady who tipped off Pat in the first place isn't watching, since a glowing school bus would absolutely catch her eye.  I arranged the shots in the early panels so I could draw her peeking out the window in a silly kind of way- in the first panel I have reflections of the buildings inside Tombstone on all of the windows except the one Lizzie is peeking out of, so you can get both the shot of what she's looking out at as well as the shot of her looking out at it in the same panel, without having to draw the whole depth-of-field of looking down the street.  That, however, is exactly what I'm doing in panels 2 and 3, where I can draw the silhouette of the old lady kinda looking down the road like she's snooping around before going home.  It's like the second threat encounter of the sneaking mission, and I wanted to stuff it into either the end of the last page or the beginning of the next, but I think letting it be its own page lets it breathe a bit.

Lizzie's relationship with guns has been a point I've tried to maintain throughout the comic.  Since it's a story set in post-civilization times its very easy for an action story protagonist to slide down the Rambo slope, which is why I wanted to make my story about someone who at least tries to maintain some sort of ideal of non-violence.  She's done a lot of mop-swinging and has come to terms with balancing her survival with her ideals, but I absolutely never want her to become a guns-blazing fountain of bullets- that's Monday's job.  She does keep a gun on her person, and she's needed to use it in the past, and she's a remarkably bad shot with it, but one of the things that sort of softens the necessity of it is the flashlight attached to it.  She'd stolen it from a gun nerd who of course he would put a tactical light on a 1911 specifically chosen with the accessory rail for it, but to her its just a flashlight like any camping gear would include, just a purely utilitarian source of light.  So the "moment" in this page is, she had to leave her mop outside when she crawled in the bus and pulled her gun out, but its just to click the light on and snoop around with.  The final panel is going to be extremely fun to paint because it's a dark single-lightsource shot and I love, love love to paint those.

I'm going to work on this page this week and try to get it done ASAP.  Sorry to my comic friends on here for December being mostly game-centric work, I'm always trying to balance comics and games and keep both things going.  Thank you for your patience, and happy new year to you!