Comic Report #59 - Icing on the Cake (Patreon)

Hello again! I'm real excited to post about this page so this week's work report is a big of fun for me, so I'm gonna just jump right into it!

Here's a quick recap of events up to this point: the page previous to this one was the conclusion of a bigger fight scene, which came as the surprise end of a stealth mission, which itself began because Lizzie was given a job by deputy mayor Martinez to find out who killed Sheriff Tanner.  Eavesdropping  on her customers in the Jade Garden, Lizzie wasn't able to find any sort of a reliable lead until her old friend Pat showed up. Pat is the guy the crew rescued from a building before the driving scene set to Kickstart My Heart, who ended up being their ticket into the island of human civilization that is Tombstone.  The mayor of Tombstone, who owned the local newspaper, was grateful for Pat to have successfully run an errand for him, so in return he ran with the story that Pat saved Lizzie and Alice, since he was in the driver's seat when they arrived at Tombstone.  So the idea is that Pat is a local hero and people trust him in that specific way to keep their town safe.  All of that builds up to this page in particular, where our big fight scene concludes.

At the start of the stealth mission, on page 576, Stacy says they have a twenty minute window to sneak outside the walls of Tombstone to search for clues in a bus one of the old ladies told Pat she saw someone coming out of at night. The twenty minute window is specifically because third shift gate patrol oversleeps and second shift doesn't bother waiting for them, so to wrap up the scene that took place in that timeframe I want to highlight the third shift guards running to their post. I hadn't originally planned -who- the third shift was- there is a family of rastafari who work at gate B and they're very on the ball on their job, so I didn't want to draw from them. I thought about pulling one of the random background extras I drew elsewhere in the comic, and settled on the soldier helmet guy and his friend on page 570 who described seeing "a beast" out in the wild- a little side note, they're actually talking about Frank.  

But anyways, these guys are pretty distinct-looking and it'd make sense that they saw Frank howling at night because they watch outside the gates during the third shift, so it all fits together and that's some easy backwards continuity to make the town feel more whole and not just be a stream of one-off faces.  He's running to the gate ahead of his companion with a piece of toast in his mouth, which I thought is a fun and universally-understood way to convey "I'm late".  He climbs up the little pool ladder they have to get over the bus gate and right there in the floodlights covering the front of the gate, why, there's a pile of yellow poncho dudes!  There's a boot full of rocks on top of them, with a note on a stick coming out of it.  The note's specific wording is a gentle way of being like, hey you left a security gap here but I got it covered for you, like, maybe gently encouraging them to show up on time for their shifts without scolding or belittling them.  Signed, Pat!  That's the icing on the cake I've been excited to get to for a while, because all of everything I've touched on in this write-up leading up to this page all ties into doing this big heroic thing and then passing the credit off on Pat, who has become kind of a scapegoat for heroism.  Lizzie is smart enough to know that she doesn't need the unwanted attention of being The Hero, and she can work in plain sight as the waitress of the town eatery if that's all people assume she is.  She had that crisis of identity when Marcus Malloy stuck her with a waitress job and she kinda turns lemons into lemonade, and flips the whole Pat The Hero dynamic to work to her advantage.  She tends to write in her notebook in cursive so to hide that fact the note on the Ponchos is written in all straight lines and square letters, like it's impossible to trace who wrote it.  All the threads tie together on this page, and as silly as it seems I'm really glad to reach this point because of that.  It feels like the whole plan and all the little details are falling into place.

The big 600th page is coming up soon. On past pages this has usually fallen on an action sequence but I just concluded one of those on the last page, so I've got a bit of time to set up the planned 600 animation. That's the next big milestone to get to but I want to make sure I don't rush things, I gotta set everything up to hit the payoffs.  But for now, I'm gonna keep working on this comic page to get it finished and ready to post.  Thank you for sticking with us, I'm excited for the pages still to come!