Comic Report #57 - Double Header (Patreon)

Hello and happy holidays! This week's work report is something special, I think I'd mentioned earlier that the next update I wanted to do something I've never done before and today I'm happy to reveal that that special something is "work on two pages at the same time".  I think I can get both pages finished either by the new year or first thing in the next year, but today I'll post a bit about why I want to do two pages all of a sudden and how I'm planning to handle presenting them.

When I wanted to write a quick-draw encounter and stick Lizzie in it instead of Monday what I ultimately wanted to do was play out a solution to a shootout that doesn't involve killing the other person with a gun. That's always been a core element of Lizzie's personality, but over the course of the comic she's developed a sort of fighting style of her own, and I figured that would be how she ends up resolving this encounter.  With her mop out of the picture the other established details about her are a) she's an old soccer player and therefore she's a kicker and not a puncher, b) she's nimble and kinda reckless so she can be flippy in a half-complete kind of way, c) she's a fast runner, and has run directly at Arlen's gun when he had it pointed at Alice, and d) she is very very bad at shooting her gun accurately, but she likes that it has a flashlight on it, which gets more use in the comic than the bullets do.

In an actual quickdraw Lizzie couldn't actually win, even if she drew first her aiming is so poor the other person could take a moment to just aim and that'd be that.  So what she does instead is duck low and run forward, and instead of aiming the tiny narrow little bullet in the dark she can just point the much larger cone of light in Marv's eyes and make her approach that way.  I think this has the advantage of also being an unexpected outcome, like Marv actually has a chance to live out his spaghetti western dreams but instead he finds out that he's actually in Dead Winter where things turn out this way.

Also, as a quick sidenote, when I originally planned the Omni-Mart arc and I drew up Clark and Melody's 1911s I just thought that Mercy sounded like a fun word to engrave on a zombie gun, but when Lizzie ended up taking it it kinda fit her better than I planned.  Her whole thing is keeping living people alive so she ends up carrying a gun called Mercy that she won't use to take a life, I dunno, I think it ended up pretty neat.

Now, the reason I wanted to do two pages for this update is for the big resolution shot on the second page.  One factor is that I don't want to cram the final climactic big hit into a narrow panel at the bottom of the page, and I need room in the top half of a page to play out the actual quickdraw events.  The other factor is me realizing I haven't done a full-page splash page image in a very long time, and those are actually perfectly useful things to include in a narrative comic.  Way back when I first started I stuck to a Tuesday/Friday update cycle very religiously, and sometimes in the early part of the comic I added a one-panel splash page to buy myself time to get a page ready for the next update.  I ended up hurting myself a lot trying to keep up with that pace so I'm not too torn up about my comics posting slower than they used to, but one result of that is the new lack of urgency hitting update deadlines means I've neglected the narrative tool of the big splash page.

Since this is the capstone on the whole fight scene interrupting the stealth mission outside the walls of Tombstone I wanted the last big hit to be impactful, and part of that is how I handle the live presentation of the comic page.  In an archive read there's no delay between pages but for people who are following the live updates as they are posted I don't want to draw the first page with the cliffhanger and then two weeks later drop the second page which is now just this one hit hanging in the air.  To sell the impact of the shot during the live updates I need to update one page on one day, and then post the next page on the next day.  I'd put a lot of thought into this and I considered posting both pages on the same day, but I worry that people who follow along would see two updates at once- which I'd never done before and they have no reason to expect- and skip over the first update and be like, wait, why did it jump straight from the standoff to this big kick panel?  I need a day in between for people to actually pick up and find the first comic update before I drop the second one on them, so that's my plan.  Draw them both at once, have them both ready, then post one on that day and post the next one a day later.  It's kind of an ambitious plan for me but I'm gonna do my best to deliver a good action sequence and then continue on with the comic as normal.

We're close to some new gamedev things being ready but this week I'm going to focus on getting these pages done so I can reach the conclusion of this scene.  Thanks for reading, and have a happy new year!