Comic Report #55 - Enter Marv (Patreon)

This week I've got the ink phase of the next comic page to share with you.  After a few dense action pages this one is a bit of breathing space before the tail end of this action sequence, which is just fine by me.  I always try to be conscious of the pace or density of a given comic arc so it doesn't become overwhelming to slog through, and I think giving the story a moment to breathe before moving into the final boss encounter is a good thing.

While Lizzie is in the thick of the action on the ground I've wanted to maintain Alice's presence throughout, covering her from undead intruders while the fighting takes place.  In the last stretch, though, Alice doesn't have a good angle to help Lizzie deal with Marv directly, so she's somewhat on her own for the last bit.  Stacy offers a solution to indirectly deal with Marv, but Alice vetoes the motion.

I forget if I mentioned this in a previous update but one of the reasons I wanted to put Lizzie in this action scene is because it's an opportunity to put her out of her element a bit.  Monday has always been the dirty-work character in the cast and in his action scenes he tends to be very direct and final with his fighting.  By contrast Lizzie will not kill people so putting her in the hot seat can lead to more interesting outcomes, and this final conclusion is intended to be a big highlight of that part of her character.

Marv hasn't really been a long-time character in the comic but he kinda represents a long-time concept.  I've always wanted to try to maintain Lizzie's roots as a waitress and not just have that be a thing she did in the first 20 pages and have it never come up again, she's still a waitress and fate still has a thread tied between her and that job.  Marv represents the idea of oddball regulars she would have had over the years, someone you kinda come to know a bit about who isn't exactly a friend but someone you're cordial with.  As an almost pointless secret ability Lizzie is really good at predicting what kind of order people would want to place before they place it, writing it down on her checks ahead of time; she recognized Marv as "cowboy breakfast", which is what they called his usual order of black coffee and grits.  That's sort of the background I wanted to frame Marv with as the leader of the trio of raiders.

Lizzie doesn't have access to her mop at the moment and "cowboy breakfast" has told her to holster her pistol and stand up.  Without spoiling too much I wanted to imply what kind of opportunity Marv saw that he's trying to seize, and how putting Lizzie with her set of quirks and morals in that specific scenario might be a more interesting problem to solve than if Monday was put in that situation.  Also, the end of this page gives me a good chance to try to draw a specific kind of Sergio Leone-esque cowboy squint on Marv's face.

This page shouldn't take me too long to finish, I can probably get it done by next Friday's update.  We've returned to more actual depth-of-field background painting which takes me a bit of time but fortunately we have a lot of strategic big-walls in the background, so once I get through the Alice and Stacy panels the rest should be a breeze.  As always, thank you for supporting our work and I should have something more complete to share with you by next Friday!