Comic Report #49 - Pre-Fight Banter (Patreon)

This week I started work on a fairly complicated comic page.  Normally when I have pages with lots of panels that page is meant to focus on action, and when I have a lot of dialogue on a page I try to keep the panel count smaller so I have room for more word balloons.  On this page I want to have a bit of back-and-forth dialogue between Lizzie and the Ponchos that needs a bunch of camera turns and moment shifts to capture correctly.  I guess the best way to describe what I'm trying to do with this page is, I could probably split it into two pages but each of those would be about 2/3rds of a page worth of content, so I put them together and I have to fit an extra 1/3rd of a page into this page to keep the pace I need.

Since I've been juggling gamedev and comic work my updates have not been as fast as I'd like- I could probably get 2 pages out a month if I had no game work to do, or 3 a month if I had no other obligations whatsoever.  I do, though, so my pace is about one page a month; fortunately I'm very patient and I have a very strong attention span so I try to keep track of my pacing across all that time.  I also take a lot of notes and do a lot of planning in thumbnails to make sure my pages pace well in the long term. The next page is 585, which would put me at 15 pages until I need to draw another fully-animated 100-page landmark moment again, and I want to make sure the narrative flow of the comic lands on something interesting for that.  I'd like to pace this fight scene to be at most five pages long, with a buffer page before and after to lead into the action and trail out of it, which would give me eight pages to set up my animated page.  So by my notes I want the action to begin on the next page after this one, which means this page needs to end on a primer shot.  Whenever I build towards an action sequence that's how I break down the page timing in my head.

One of the major themes of this page I wanted to hit was one of the Ponchos being an acquaintance of Lizzie's.  Being a waitress she'd have a bunch of regular customers from the diner she'd have a good rapport with, so on this page the leader of the trio happens to be one of her old customers.  They knew each other before the collapse and they've both changed over the course of the comic, so here they are meeting again under dangerous circumstances.  Lizzie remembering people by their food orders is also a fun detail that crops up in a few older pages that I like to work into the story wherever I can, so here she identifies Marv by his diner order.  The Lizzie that Marv remembers is Page 1 Lizzie, who was a different character from Page 584 Lizzie, so I want to draw that connection in Marv's assessment of Lizzie as a stubborn pacifist which he might have gleaned from talking to her every morning over a long time.  She's been through a crucible over the course of the comic, so that's clearly no longer the case; she's also learned about the Ponchos' policy on showing mercy from the Omni-Mart crew during the middle of the comic, so I don't need to re-establish those stakes too heavily.  It's sort of a matching of old relationships against new information after the collapse and re-building of society, which I thought would be a fun way to lead into the fight scene.

Normally when I post my preliminary sketches for a page they don't have dialogue yet.  I know what I want a page to say but the specifics of how I word it wait until the end of the page, so I can fit the words around the main subjects without covering them up.  Since this page is nine panels long and there's quite a few characters in each panel I need to make sure I'm leaving enough room to fit everything I want to say, and that it flows well into the end of the page.  To be absolutely sure I can fit my dialogue on this page I'm probably going to end up typing it up first and then paint the backgrounds behind it, so the textless version of this page may end up looking a bit raw.  When I plot dialogue pacing and tone this is how I do it, with short little word snippets in the space I want words to be in.  One specific detail I wanted to be sure to include was a fight/flight reference, ending on a "fight" quote.  Since this page is really tying back to the beginning of the comic I wanted to allude to Lizzie's dream sequences, where she found harmony with her id and superego- she emerged from those sequences with a better understanding of what she has to do in the current state of the world to survive and continue to pursue her goals with her morality intact.  So on the threshold of a big fight scene I wanted her to give ol' Marv a chance to take flight, and when he refuses, well.... fight it is then.

This next week coming up I want to take time and finish up one big important detail for our game.  We're working on getting a combat build ready to share as a Patreon exclusive and I've got one last enemy I need to finish drawing, and that will probably be the last huge piece of animation I need to do for a little bit.  After this work week I'll be back on comic duties, and with much of my animation tasks largely completed for our upcoming build plans I can focus a lot more on drawing the comic and try to get more fight scene pages out faster than just one a month.  Thank you for your patient support of our work, we'll see you again next Friday with more stuff to share!