Comic Report #47 - Back To Business (Patreon)

This week I managed to actually sit down and start work on the next comic page.  Sorry again for the big gamedev derail, I'll be working exclusively on the comic page until it's finished.  When I switch gears between animation and painting it usually takes me a bit of time to get my brain in the right frame of mind for the job at hand- when I'm animating everything is in a fixed camera position and I can be a little loose since I'm drawing an action across multiple frames of time, and when I'm drawing for painting I need to be a lot more precise and condense a span of moments into a single drawing, so it's sort of expanding or condensing an action and it takes me about a day of trying to get myself in the right mode.  

On this page I'm bringing new characters into the scene, so I want to take a moment to give them some definition and personality.  They are huddled tight against the wall of buses, examining the way back over the wall Lizzie had set up on her way into the previous scene.  I wanted to imply that the yellow poncho faction had been looking for a way into Tombstone for a while, to kind of set them as a rival civilization to the main cast's new home.  They've been a recurring element in the comic, investigating the scene of Lizzie and Frank's first fight as well as being responsible for damage to the Omni-Mart, so they're already one of the most aggressive and organized factions in the story, but they've never directly engaged with the main characters yet.  It's the third act of the comic, though, so I think it's time to bring them into contact.

One of the fun things about writing in post-apocalyptic fiction settings is coming up with what kind of weapons characters use, and I think this trio of characters covers my favorite design points well.  The first and most prominent is using improvised weapons, like frying pans, wrenches and mops.  When I started writing this comic I worked as a bowling alley mechanic, and I spent a lot of time sitting in the back mechanic's office, which was essentially like a big workshop.  I'd think about like, the weight of a tool on the wall or how a mop felt when I'm cleaning the floors, and how would an ordinary person swing that around in their hands?  Most people don't have any kind of specific self-defense training so the way they fight would be very rudimentary, figuring out on the fly how to take the business end of A and stick it into threat object B.  I always try to capture this makeshift amateur aesthetic when I draw action sequences, because it fits an ordinary person aspiring to do something heroic.  The person with the pruning saw definitely fits this archetype- it's a cool-looking sharp thing on a long arm so that's what I'll use to venture out into the shambling wastelands.

The other aesthetic style I like to draw is "ordinary person using an actual weapon wrong".  People have pointed it out to me as an actual error but when Lizzie is using her pistol she always has her finger in the trigger guard.  She's been established throughout the comic as being someone who detests guns so she'd have no reason to know anything about trigger discipline, so when she's holding the gun I try to capture that lack of experience.  Whenever she shoots at something her accuracy is always very poor, and she ends up hitting all around her target- I don't want her to just pick up a gun for the first time and know what she's doing with it, that doesn't fit who she is at all.  Giving a character an actual weapon rather than a makeshift one carries the question of, do they really know how to use this thing?  The yellow poncho with the katana is an example of this style- she probably just found this sword out in the wild.  It could be a mall katana made of brittle steel, she wouldn't really know the correct form for how to cut with it.  She might even use the scabbard as an offhand weapon.  She has an object with a specific purpose and her fighting style would be whatever success she had figuring out how to make it work up until this point.  Readers who are more knowledgeable in these things may see a character use their weapon the wrong way, but that's often a deliberate choice I'm trying to convey in my art.  I get to incorporate a lot more of this into my game animation too, which is fun!

When I ink and paint a comic I can usually gauge how long it will take by a few common factors.  Number of characters on a page is a big one- this page has a few instances of characters so it may end up taking me a little bit of time.  Whether the characters have visible legs is another- for whatever reason having to draw legs adds a lot more time to painting a character, probably because legs standing on the ground is an absolute position you need to render lighting on correctly, whereas a waist-up shot can kinda trail down below the frame and you don't have to worry about it.  Background complexity is the third- if the camera is pointing mostly at a wall then backgrounds are a breeze, but if there's a lot of complex depth of field shots then I need to make sure my perspective and my lighting is on point and the scene is rendered correctly.  When I posted the previous page I actually went back to an earlier page where I'd painted a shot down the line of buses moving towards the river- basically where the camera on this page is pointing- and I retconned a big building back there.  I'm glad I did this, because that big building not only frames the scene of action but it also makes painting background much, much easier.  My current estimate for this page is I'll have about 3/5ths painted by this time next week, then Sunday or Monday I'll have the textless page posted and the morning after that the finished page will be up online, so I'm looking at the Tuesday after next.  

As I mentioned before, I'll be working exclusively on this comic page until it's done.  I feel a bit guilty at how much gamedev stuff I pushed through in the past few week but it's out of my system, and while I got big plans for the next game elements to work on they can all wait until the comic gets its turn.  Thank you for your patient support of our work!