Comic Report #58.1 - Light At The End Of The Tunnel (Patreon)

Here is this week's progress report on the next comic page.  I didn't quite get it all the way finished this week but I am close enough to the end that I can safely say the page will be ready by the end of this weekend. I'll try to make this update quick and get back to the drawing board.

For whatever reason inking this page took longer than I thought it would, despite the page layout being a few close-up cropped face shots.  I think it was just the really specific angles I wanted to render that took extra time, both Lizzie kicking and Marv being kicked, and also the both of them crashing back into the ground.  I think the hard thing with inking action like that is it's really easy for ink lines to feel stiff, so you need to focus extra hard to keep the drawing feeling loose and energetic, like pencils are rough and chaotic so they always feel energetic, but the finality of inking can feel really constrained and exact, like the uncertainty or the brokenness is gone, and an inked drawing can feel more stiff than its pencil phase.  My inks for this comic tend to just exist so I can paint inside them, which is where the real heavy lifting of my art takes place,   I think I got the contortion I needed just right, though, so it's worth the effort to try to land on the mark.

The first two panels of this page are the ones I'm most proud of.  The top half of this page is like Lizzie and Marv suspended in this moment of impact from the previous page, so I wanted to capture that sense of stillness within the action, like they're both engulfed in this column of energy.  By using an intensely bright background and a strong shadow as the base for the characters I chose to model them with edge lighting around their contours to give them a sort of intensity I'm looking to capture. 

The third panel with Alice observing Marv's launch kinda speaks for itself, it's like a shot outside the intense pillar of energy as a contrast to the previous shots, like stepping outside of a concert venue to hear the band playing as a dull bass sound through the brick wall as opposed to the electric thrash of hearing them from the pit.  If I was directing a film I would not have much fanfare in that shot, like Marv drifts above the edge of the buses and then he dips back down, and Alice is just there in the foreground like ????.  Like, due to her angle on the roof and Marv keeping his back to the buses Alice hadn't seen him there at all, she could hear him talking but that's probably the first she's actually seeing of him in the entire action sequence.  In practical terms Lizzie probably couldn't IRL launch someone that high up in the air with a kick, but I think it's a more interesting shot if I exaggerate the impact of the kick that much, so on this page she can.  Everyone's become very strong in this world, it's likely something in the water.  

The middle two panels are where I left off for this update. I want to capture both Lizzie and Marv crashing into the ground, but Marv hitting the ground way harder than Lizzie, which I think I talked about in the previous update.  In execution I feel like I didn't leave myself a lot of room for sound effects, and I don't like overlapping character art with words when I can avoid it, so I tried to incorporate the lettering into the ground they're landing on.  Lizzie's KTHUDD has kind of a radial effect, with all the vertical lines of the lettering pointing inward at her point of impact, where in contrast I put the KRSSH of Marv hitting the ground on its broken pieces, mostly because I worried trying to put the lettering overtop of the ground would hide the ground breaking up effect. I might need to go in and increase the contrast on the ground lettering to make it stand out a bit more, but I think it mostly achieves what I want it to.

I'm real excited to get this page finished, not just because it's the capstone on the action sequence, but also because the page after this one is kind of an epilogue sort of ribbon wrapping up the whole thing and I'm eager to see the whole thing in a completed form.  Drawing action shots while maintaining a dark outdoor scene has been an interesting challenge, I'm ready to paint some new lighting and new atmosphere in the next scene.  Thanks for carrying on with us, we're almost to the end of the action tunnel!