Comic Report #53 - The Turning Point (Patreon)

I've got to take a trip out of town this weekend so I wanted to get this week's workshop update posted before I head out the door.  This week I worked on the next comic page and it's been a doozy to piece together, so I've got a lot to type up about it!

This page is the part of the arc where the fighting comes to a climax, so I need to fit a lot of action into the one page.  When I started the fight scene I had basically an entire page devoted to one attack, the slide tackle mop approach.  My intention was to ramp up the fighting from that point until I hit the peak, which is here, so I need to fit a lot of micro-actions on the page to end it where I need to without extending it into additional pages.  To stem the momentum and let the scene wind down afterwards I needed to land a significant hit on Lizzie so she can't keep bouncing around after this, and I also needed to give her one last big combo to knock the pruning saw guy out of commission.

When I plot out comic panels I tend to think in terms of rows.  Horizontal panel borders are the first things I lay out, so everything happening in that row is like a "paragraph" of sorts.  The top paragraph on this page is Lizzie and Saw clash, Saw lands a hit.  This page has a -lot- of action going on so I know I need to be really efficient with how I use my space.  The very first panel is meant to be a summary of "Lizzie and Saw are having a battle after Katana gets squashed by The Meat Sledgehammer.  I start that panel out with a high clash, Lizzie's mop in the front and the saw teeth pointing down at her to kinda convey like she is on the defensive.  Since I have Lizzie written in my head as being light and nimble a lot of her fighting style has been dodging around, so for the second panel I wanted to have her dodge inward after a pommel strike.  The panel border between 1 and 2 is angled like / to emphasize the direction Lizzie is dodging in.  Saw's pommel arcing around is a stylistic choice but I also wanted to make sure the saw blades behind him are emphasized; he has his eyes on Lizzie dodging around the less-dangerous end of the weapon for a reason.  There's a very narrow sliver of panel 3 angling counter to the 1-2 panel angle, this is meant to highlight the big hit of this paragraph.  He's been on the ground watching Lizzie dodge around vs. Katana so he knows, okay, this girl moves a lot.  Bait her into dodging with the pommel of his pruning saw and then pull the weapon back around behind him to tag her with the saw teeth!  So the panel 3/4 angle is meant to cut against the momentum of panels 1 and 2 to really emphasize him raking the saw against Lizzie's neck.  She's been outmaneuvered!

I think I mentioned on a previous page, but I want to be conscious of what kind of injuries I inflict in fights since characters in this comic tend to wear their scars permanently.  I've also done a lot of art for the game we're working on as well, so in this action scene I want to find a way to land a blow on Lizzie that wouldn't invalidate all the game sprites I've already drawn.  Like, I don't want to ruin her outfit to a point where it's not usable anymore and I don't want to carve a line across her face like her Fight alter-ego.  One detail I have drawn in the game art is she has a bandage around her neck, and she already has a cut on her neck from Frank back in the beginning of the comic.  So I figured, if I can land a blow across her neck then Alice can patch her up and there's a comic-related reason why she's drawn with that bandaging. It'll also slow her down enough that she's not going to keep dodging around anymore, so I can mark that as the climax of the action sequence.

Paragraph two of this page is recoil & taunting.  Lizzie gets tagged from the saw and reels back, holding her neck.  The panels are a bit small so I wanted to give the injury room to be noticeable and let her be stopped for a moment.  Rather than press the action onward, though, I let Saw try to taunt Lizzie a bit.  When Marv was talking about knowing Lizzie a few pages back I specifically didn't call it Frank's, its like hey you know that place downtown?  Saw knows the place after all, and it's not a great place so he's got to rub salt in the wound.  The thing is, however, he strikes a nerve.  I try to write Lizzie as being even-headed but there's a few points where she gets set off, like being told by everyone she doesn't have a choice and remembering Monday stiffed her on a meal and making him pay the bill.  Saw didn't tip her because he didn't like the food he ordered, which sets up the next paragraph, the last big combo.

An important thing to know about food service is American waitstaff is paid remarkably lower than minimum wage, like $3/hr.  The idea as far as I understand it is the restaurant doesn't need to pay as much for their servers so they can turn a profit and the servers' wages are subsidized by customer gratuity.  This is why you always want to tip your waitstaff, because they depend on tips to make a living wage.  Waitstaff don't cook or prepare the food, they take your order and bring you your meal, so withholding a tip because you didn't like the food is punishing them for something that isn't even under their control, and it can really hurt because of the above-mentioned hourly wage threshold.  So when Saw confesses that he stiffed her on a tip because the food sucked, that is the background for this being a moment that pushes Lizzie out of her level-headed baseline.  I tried to use two cloud rings in the background of panel 9 to emphasize the explosive burst of speed with which Lizzie is approaching Saw- I'll probably end up inking this panel with really jagged inkwork to emphasize the suddenness of the action, but for now I think its reflected in the pencil work.

The next paragraph below this is The Big Combo.  I wanted to land four hits that all kinda set up into the next blow, and I wanted to end in a big downward swing.  I thought about ending with an upward swing, but I'm saving the big upward swing for later so I don't want to use it too early.  Panel borders can be useful but they do take up a degree of space, and since space in this paragraph in particular is at a premium  I need to create "panels" without using panel borders.  To do that I used big block letters to break the panel up into little compartments where each major action can be put in its own space, and I can blend the edges of each space into adjacent spaces.  Like, Saw in the second IS NOT part overlaps Lizzie's leg in THE SERVER'S section, and that Saw overlaps Lizzie in the FAULT section.  Panel borders would be too thick and take up too much space to be useful here so I opted to just not use them.  Also, since this is an aggressive succession of blows I wanted to capture the feeling of the sustained pressure of the attack, and the way I came up with for that was to slowly crack and break down the big block text the further into the sequence you go.  

The final shot of this page is kind of the tipping point over the peak of the action.  One of the challenges I've faced writing a zombie-related comic over the years is how to handle rendering the violence.  In the early years I've kinda tried out doing it the gross bloody way and the goofy cartoony way, and I find I like it somewhere in the middle, leaning a bit away from the gross end.  I feel like zombie work can get a bad rap as being just gratuitous gorenography and I want to distinguish myself and not be more of that same thing.  I also feel like not drawing the action too gross or too literally means it's easier to convey action without the outcome of that action repulsing people or making them uncomfortable.  Violence is a brutal unpleasant thing but in our media we like to ride that impulse a bit, so by taking the edge off the outcome a bit you can make following the action itself more fun.  It's like appreciating the explosive spectacle of fireworks without being so close that your ears pop or you get burned by the powder, you're there to see the bright lights and feel the boom in your chest, and tap into something primal inside of us that likes to feel the blast.  Hitching the actual unpleasantness of the outcome of that action can make the whole experience less enjoyable, so that's why I tend to draw my comic about man-eating human husks a bit cartoonier.  I think drawing X__X eyes for a dead zombie is funnier and I can draw @__@ eyes on Saw to show that he's out but he's not deceased, and I can sell the impact of the page's action scene without introducing something upsetting to the reader.

This page has been a bit of a nightmare to plot out and pace it to fit everything I need to, but the hardest part is done now.  Inking this page is going to be a challenge, but once I get over that hill the painting part is going to be a breeze specifically because of how much small space and dynamic action-background I'm using.  I probably won't have this page entirely done by next week but the week after it, sometime after the weekend I definitely should.  Thank you, as always, for supporting our work.  I'll be back next Friday with more to share with you!