Comic Report #50 - A Sneaky Surprise Attack (Patreon)

The other week I said I wanted to try to do more comics more quickly now that the bulk of my gamedev obligations are more or less fulfilled moving towards our next milestone so this week that's precisely what I did.  I want to keep up momentum moving into an action sequence so I'm gonna try to do the best I can to keep things moving; since the comic hasn't had a proper action scene in a while today I get to talk about a bunch of fun details so today's post will be all about that!

When I lead into this scene I wanted to establish the scale of the action before I began making it happen, in this case that would be three adversaries and a surrounding horde of the undead with one main combatant and support from a nearby rooftop.  My target is to resolve a fight in fiveish pages so it doesn't drag on, so I've got a plan for three major encounters and one finale with the chaotic threat element persisting throughout.  This fight scene is also meant to be a moment to see how much the characters have grown since the beginning of the comic, being more seasoned veterans of the world they now inhabit they'd be more confident and coordinated.  Lizzie is a lot tougher than she was at the outset but she's still just one person, so I can't have her fighting all three opponents at once, which is why on this first page I wanted to have a way to temporarily neutralize two of the three opponents so I could draw a good one-on-one on the next page.

One of the things I tried to do in drawing art for the game was to give each character their own fighting style aesthetic.  Since Lizzie used to play soccer I try to incorporate some athletic moves in her actions, so for the whole setup of "knock two guys down and fight the third" I wanted to give her a slide tackle like in a soccer move.  I like to think of the mop itself as like a polearm, like a kind of halberd with a cloth flag on the end, so to incapacitate the first guy I tried using it as a thrown javelin.  The sequence of mop throw > guy falls backwards > slide tackle middle guy > middle guy goes overtop > scoop up mop feels dynamic and cool, and that occupies the bulk of this page.

Since I'm letting action do most of the talking on this page I don't need a lot of room for words.  I have some space in the top two panels to let the yellow poncho crew underestimate Lizzie but after that I can fill the whole panels with just action drawings.  When I don't have to write dialogue I can have some more fun with panel layouts, like between panels four and five I'm conveying the slide tackle, and when I originally drew it having Lizzie's boot in panel five stop behind the panel border felt like it lacked the momentum I needed, so I drew it reaching over the border like she's slide tackling forward into the viewer plane.  In the bottom two panels I wanted to establish the setup for the next combat moment, where I wanted the remaining poncho person to take a swipe at Lizzie with her sword- I didn't want Lizzie to immediately turn and engage her because she's still kind of a goofball waitress.  When I was drawing the sword swipe I was initially trying to figure out how to fit it in that one panel, I thought, "what if I break the panel border again?"  I didn't want the sword arc to just overlap the vertical border again, since I just did that with the foot a panel or so ago, but I was like, what if she was cutting the panel itself?  If I put an angled cut in the top half of the panel and pivot it to the side slightly it could look like the attack was cutting the panel itself and that might help sell the effect better.  I don't think I've actually damaged the comic panels themselves in the comic before so I'm pretty proud of that one.

This week I'm going to keep working on the comic, so I should have another update for you this time next week. Thanks for sticking with us, I'm excited to start inking and painting this page for you!