Comic Report #56 - A Real "Quick Draw" (Patreon)

So on Wednesday night I put up the most recent comic page.  Usually my schedule is I work all week and take Thursdays off as my resting day, and then type up what I did on the Friday after, so after I put up the textless version of the last page I was like, man, what am I gonna do for my Friday work report?  I don't like not having something for you on Fridays, I take this Patreon very seriously so yesterday I sat down and in some kind of fugue state knocked out the pencils to the next page right away. I still had my rest day, don't worry!  But this Friday update you can preview the next page in the comic!

The reason this page ended up getting sketched so fast is partly because of my planning the scene and partly because it's a lot of easy tight close-up shots.  Some weeks I only get pencils done and it's usually because I spend a lot of time trying to pace the page out and get my camera angles right, but for this page I know exactly what my angles are and they're mostly easy eyeball shots so I was able to get it drawn up super quick.  Speaking of thumbnails, I'm far enough along in this scene that I can share a bit of my thumbnailing process to show you the super-detailed way I plan my comics.

Here are my thumbnail plans for the scene between recovering the book from the bus and dealing with raiders around the escape boot.  When I plot a page I usually hack in what I think are the most important visual details and then when I actually draw the comic I'll fit the other details around that.  I never actually write entire dialogue down, I always do that at the very end. I prefer to plot the visual character acting with a theme or outcome in mind and then fit the specific dialogue around the characters. I've got a pretty good vocabulary so if something doesn't fit the space I left for it right I can think of another way to word it that will. I have the rest of this scene planned, but of course I can't share that with you yet!  At the rate I'm going, though, it won't be long until I get through to the end.

Now, about this specific page.  The big "final boss" encounter I wanted to have for this action scene was a spaghetti western pistol duel between Marv and Lizzie. To sell the aesthetic I wanted to devote a page to a tense standoff, cutting between shots of the characters' eyes and hands, panels narrowing as the cuts shift more quickly, like a Sergio Leone film climax.  I tend to cram a lot of content into a single page but for the moment I'm drawing now I want to let it breathe to really get the effect I'm looking for, and since there's a lot more still pages I want to keep up my comic-drawing focus to get them out as quick as possible to maintain the momentum between these pages. I can probably have this page finished by next week, and I'm setting a goal for myself to do so.

When I was planning this page I wanted to convey the characters' personalities a bit in the body language of how they square up for a showdown.  Marv is, as he stated, really into the western thing, so he's all hunched down with his hand hovering above his pistol. He's in the classic western gunslinger pose he's seen hundreds of times in movies, his shoulders squared up, his feet in a wide stance. As the tension builds he slowly brings his left hand across, ready to fan the hammer on his wheelgun and fire off a shot as quick as he can- whether he's actually practiced firing from the hip at a human target is not known, but he's definitely feeling himself and he's in-character for the moment.  Lizzie, in contrast, doesn't actually want to be doing this at all. She's been shot at so many times over the course of the comic, though, that she has the nerve to stand tall and face Marv down- if she didn't play along there was nothing really stopping him from just shooting anyways. Her posture is meant to invoke a more civil attitude while still carrying a degree of confidence in her plan for this encounter. She's seen a few of the movies too, enough to know the rules- someone's gonna touch their gun first, and that's when you pull.  She's a spectacularly poor shot, though, and Alice knows this, so in addition to making sure no third parties run up and take a bite out of Lizzie Alice is watching to make sure her companion makes it out of the encounter intact.  Marv may have a notch or two on his belt when it comes to practicing his cowboy pistol twirls, but Lizzie and Alice both have a notch in their ear for people pointing guns at them with malicious intent.  The actual outcome of the next split-second is going to have to wait for the next page.

As mentioned, I'm gonna be working on getting this page drawn up as quick as I can, but this weekend we should be making more progress on gamedev mechanics- there's one or two core combat mechanics we're aiming to implement to get us closer to having a playable Patreon demo by the year's end.  Thanks for sticking with us, I'm excited for all the things we have in the works just over the horizon!