Comic Report #54 - The Turnaround (Patreon)

This week is more comics as we draw this action sequence towards its resolution.  This is another big multi-panel layout with mostly walled backgrounds or bursty action backgrounds to paint so I expect like the previous page once I get through the inking phase the painting should go by rather quickly.  There's a lot going on in this page so I've got a lot to post about, so I'll get right to it!

One of the recurring elements of the comic has been the recurring pain in Lizzie's left side from her car crash at the start of the story.  It is a fairly significant injury so whenever I'm drawing action sequences, like the Omni-Mart sneaking mission or the escape to find Pat's car she's often seen popping a painkiller to deal with her injured rib and press forward.  In action shots I try to time the rib being an issue in a way where she can still do cool heroic things but still tough through the pain- it doesn't prevent her from being successful in her action but rather forces her to adjust and adapt to her own limitations.  Over the past few pages she's been doing a lot of jumping, sliding and scooting around, so she's earned herself a pang of pain in her left side, just enough to keep her from dodging around when Mall Katana re-emerges for an encore.

When Mall Katana got squashed with a zombie a couple pages ago she was laid out off-camera, so it looked like she was dealt with but there was no overt confirmation of her being out of the game.  Now her second form, Ｂｌｏｏｄ　Ｇｏｇｇｌｅｓ, has emerged at the worst possible moment to get the upper hand on Lizzie while she has her guard down.  Her main weapon is gone so I imagined her second form would just be the crudest most basic form of combat, rolling around swinging fists.  

I'm reminded of a line from the film 13 Assassins, where a swordsman remarks "if you don't have a sword, find a rock. If you don't have a rock, use your bare hands".  In fantasy combat can seem elegant in its own sort of way- dodging, parrying and riposting like a Three Musketeer- but when things break down we gravitate towards the primal, rolling and tumbling in the dirt.  I wanted Blood Goggles to be kind of a dumb regression to just a tantrum of fists, since this isn't a Monday Fight where participants are trained killers, this is a waitress and a bunch of makeshift field agents fighting with whatever they have, so I wanted it to resolve in a much more basic kind of way. 

It's not secret that I love to come up with fun panel solutions to my comic problems, and on this page I cooked up a doozy.  For the "paragraph" where Blood Goggles is pummeling Lizzie I wanted to resolve the shot in six moments, but I can at most fit three or four panels comfortably in a row, so I needed a solution where I can lead the reader's eye in an unbroken string of events without line breaking to another row.  I needed the precise sequence to be clear so I didn't want to stack top/bottom panels in a row, so I decided to employ the rare right-to-left method on this page to snake a row of six panels around in a ↄ shape.  The reader's eye always starts at the top left, so if I can lead it down and to the left at the end of a top row I can deposit it back at the top left of the next paragraph down.  This way I can fit six panels in a "row" and reset the reader's eye back to the normal flow of a page!  Going backwards from right to left in the middle of a left>right page is a delicate operation, but there's a few tricks I employed here to try and make it work, and boy howdy am I excited to tell you all about them!

The first and most obvious trick is the bends in the panel borders.  Since the comic is always displayed on an all-black background on my website the panel borders connect directly to that and the page can blend in well.  To start off this paragraph I made an indentation on the left side, with that little arrow nudging in from the left side.  My hope is that by indenting it I can set the eye's motion rightward with a bit more momentum than normal.  All the panel borders after that are > arrows in the same shape, a very gentle bend so they still read as panel borders and the panels are still mostly squares but they imply a carried motion to the right.  Then, at the rightmost part of the top row, I have a little indented curve in the top right corner, leading the panel downward.  The bottom line is another arrow leading the eye downward to the right side of the next row- my hope is that conditioning the eye with the bends in the first few panel borders will help it pick up on the cue to move down instead of to the top left of the next row, since we've learned that the > borders have meaning. A reflected corner curve on the bottom right panel implies you should turn and head left, and the the bottom of the leftmost panel has one last V shape depositing the eye back in the normal flow of the comic.  It's like a river ride, or an undulating snake, guiding the reader's eye through this sequence.  

The second trick I used for this panel is a way to make sure the eye doesn't jump from the right side of the top row to the left side of the bottom one.  When I lay out my panels I try to keep the panel borders a uniform thickness, and will often make interior panels within a paragraph thinner than the horizontal lines that divide paragraphs from one another.  In this six-panel sequence I made the horizontal divider much thicker than normal to act as a bumper for the eye, where if someone overlooks the > borders and tries to scan back to the top left of the next row there's a big wall of black ink in the way to bump them back on course.  The thick border narrows to the standard thin-border width on the border between panels 3 and 4 of the sequence, implying that this is the entry point into the next row.  It supplements the primary mechanic of the sequence to ensure it's read correctly.

The third and final trick to get the backwards flow to work is to plan the action to move with the reader's eye.  In this shot the camera is in a fixed position, looking on at Blood Goggles from the top of Lizzie's head.  Lizzie wears her pistol on her right thigh, so from our perspective her right side is on the right side of the panel.  In the top row Blood Goggles is pummeling away and Lizzie's hand reaches for her gun, withdrawing it from her holster as a rightward motion.  In the second row she fires it next to Blood Goggles' ear, putting the focus of action in the top right corner, a mirror of the top-left corner the reader's eye would naturally move to!  It's a bright flash of white with implied movement going to the left, with both the soundwave blasting through Blood Goggles' ear and her hair blowing to the left.  This way on the start of the reverse row I've guided the eye down and pinned an anchor for it to fix on, and then implied a new leftward direction with all the action.  All the bottom-row details move left- Blood Goggles reels to the left as Lizzie draws her gun back and then Lizzie swings from right to left to knock her gun across Blood Goggles' face, knocking her out.  All the action is plotted to move in the direction the eye is moving so the odd reverse-direction of the bottom row has a consistent flow to it.  It's a lot of tricks to fight against a natural instinct in order to achieve the goal of fitting a long sequence into a short horizontal space, but I think all my systems working together achieves what I want.

The very bottom of this page introduces an element that has been hidden throughout the fight scene: Marv makes his grand entrance!  With Saw and Blood Goggles dispatched Marv represents the big final challenge of the scene.  He's the one Lizzie actually knows, so there's some kind of connection between them to make him more significant than the others.  People have been pointing guns at Lizzie for a long time now so she's not really phased by it, but this time she doesn't have her mop on hand to defend herself with.  That was part of what I wanted Blood Goggles to achieve, by tackling Lizzie and pinning her down for a bit she's separated from the weapon she's most comfortable with and now she's stuck in an encounter outside her comfort zone.  At the start of the encounter Lizzie called him "cowboy breakfast", since she has a habit of associating people with their preferred orders, and now Marv seems to be carrying a cowboy-looking revolver... I'll leave details about that implication for the next page, which I'm also really excited to draw!

While I've been drawing the fight scene I've deliberately avoided pointing the camera on an angle that looks back at the bus wall, this is because that's where I had Marv scurry off to while Saw and Katana fought with Lizzie.  Because of Alice's vantage point on the roof inside Tombstone there's a triangular blind spot immediately in front of the bus wall, Marv knows he's safe from Alice if he stays there.  As for how Lizzie might have overlooked him, I figure it'd be a combination of her dealing with two raiders and a bunch of zombies, but a funnier element is the fact that the school bus is yellow and Marv is wearing yellow, so in the dark he may have blended in standing right against the bus.  Either way, the fighting resolves with Marv in a safe position and Lizzie at a disadvantage, separated from her beloved mop.  As a side-note, her mop's name is Rusty, as coined on page 467, but I'm not sure if I actually need her to say that out loud on this page to imply she wants to pick it up again.

I'll be working to get this page inked and at least partially painted by this time next week.  I do have to move apartments soon so I'll have to make time for that headache but I want to keep the rhythm of the comic pages going as best I can until I see this scene through to its conclusion.  Thank you, as always, for letting me continue to do my work.  I'm happy you're here to share the journey with me.