Comic Report #60 - No Place Like Home (Patreon)

Hello again!  This week I've got pencils done for the next page to share with you.  There's a lot of little details I'm having fun with on this page so I'm gonna jump right into posting about it without any further delay.

Coming off of a big action scene I wanted the next short little scene to be a wind-down, to kinda let the tension settle and nerves un-fray, so the camera cuts back to the gang's apartment above the candy store.  A lot of the comic pre-Tombstone have seen the group displaced or kinda rootless, like beginning with the house Lizzie woke up to meet Alice at to the building Chantelle had to throw them out of, to a parking garage and so on, so now that they're in Tombstone I'd like to let the crew have a safe space and settle into their environment.  There's no power to the unit so at night there's a lot of soft candlelight, which is a fun lightning environment to create.  The world outside is cold and unforgiving so in contrast I want this apartment to be cozy, and I want scenes that take place here to be restful.

Lizzie's scars have been a thing throughout the comic.  When I originally started the comic I wasn't planning for her to end up with all the marks but at one point I wrote her getting T-boned in the intersection and that sort of ended up like, well she's gonna have scars from that, so I maintained them throughout the artwork.  Alice has been sort of her auto mechanic for most of the comic as well, running maintenance and keeping her on her feet, so on this page they're doing a bit of post-battle repair work.  I've drawn Lizzie's nasty busted rib before, on page 417, and when I was planning this page I was wondering if it was worth posting an update on the status of that injury:

I would be more or less recreating a panel I already drew so I decided to just cut to the bandage phase, like, it still looks like that so you get the idea.  The whole scar-covered pacifist motif sorta developed on its own in the comic, but I used to watch a lot of Trigun as a kid so maybe Lizzie subconsciously channels a bit of Vash in her reckless approach to fighting without taking a life.  Alice is more than happy to maintain her practice, and in that last panel- I'm gonna have to try and make that clear in the finalizing phases- but Alice is spritzing Lizzie's neck wound from the pruning saw with an alcohol-based disinfectant, so Lizzie is enjoying the sting in that last shot before its Suture Time.

Story-wise this page is meant to pick up on the story beat from page 581, just before the poncho fight, which is Lizzie sneaking into the bus and finding a book hidden under a seat.

The book is the first major clue in the Who Shot The Sheriff mystery, it's got a bookplate saying it belongs to an "Ethel Mulgrave", a name that no one recognizes and has not been mentioned at all prior to finding this clue.  I don't want to post a ton of spoilers in here but since Lizzie and Alice are living with Stacy, and she's dialed into the central leadership of the community now that she's the new sheriff, she can help point them in the right direction to figure out who Ethel Mulgrave might be, and what connection they might have with their killer.

Speaking of, I made a note in my thumbnails about Stacy demanding Lizzie and Alice help her celebrate her new sheriff promotion by sharing a 30-rack she'd requisitioned on page 575- it is a minor detail but I wanted to maintain the continuity so I tried real hard not to forget about that point. Lizzie is holding Alice's beer while she's patching her up, and hands it back to her to pick up her own can.  All the beer in Dead Winter is the Kilgör Brew brand, which is kind of the world's made-up Duff equivalent.  A fun fact: in the Dead Winter arcade game character select screen everyone is drinking some other kind of alcoholic beverage:

So there is other kinds of alcohol out there, but for cheap ubiquitous stuff the label is always gonna be Kilgör.

I've got this page and three others to go before I hit the big 600 mark. I do have a planned end for Dead Winter's story, and without saying too much 600 will probably be the last giant fully-animated page I'll do.  I think I can have the story wrapped up before hitting 700 pages, but we'll see.  I'm definitely not spinning my wheels going on forever, though, I can say that much.  For now, though, I'll be working on inking and painting this page to get it ready to post.  Thank you as always for supporting work on this project, I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoy making it!