Comic Report #61 - Loose Ends (Patreon)

Hello!  This week was all comic work as we get closer to page 600.  When I get within about ten pages of a 100-mark I try to plan my pacing to land the narrative right where I want it to be so an animation-friendly, important moment lands on the hundredth page.  For page 600's lead-up I have a bit of breathing room to let characters do non-action social things, so on this page I want to resolve a story beat from earlier!  Specifically on page 513, Stacy was like oh HEY you're NIGEL COOPER's kid, by the way he's fine and I'll tell you about it later.  I've kinda had "what happened to Nigel and Laura Cooper" on the backburner for the 500-stretch of pages, so this next page we actually get to find out.

This page is a lot of fun to draw just for how many characters show up in it.  What's kinda nice is they're all sort of established residents of Tombstone, so they're not fresh filler, everyone is someone the reader has seen before.  That of course means I'm pulling up a bunch of old pages to get my references right, but I am sure the end result will look real cool in the context of the comic's archive.

Starting the page off I wanted to carry over a visual gag from the previous page.  Last page started with the crew talking about this romance novel Lizzie found on the bus, and Stacy has it open in her lap, so on this page it starts out and she's like legitimately reading it, so Lizzie has to actually take it away from her to get her question answered.  Then at the end of the page Alice ends up with the book, like it's this weirdly enthralling artifact everyone keeps falling into but Lizzie, who as a writer has enough weird-story experience to build up a resistance to the object's power.  I dunno, I thought it would be a cute detail to add.

As for the actual story, there was a time after Stacy was kicked out of Chantelle's apartment when the gang was out doing everything else in the comic, so this page is like, what happened in the meantime.  It was established on a much, much earlier page- I don't remember which- that Lizzie's dad worked in real estate, and that was a big reason why her family moved from Old England to New England.  The core of this comic has always been about peoples' job skills being reapplied to an adventurous situation, so I figured Nigel Cooper's major skills to contribute to a place like Tombstone is the ability to offer people safe housing.  It seems like a minor thing, but being able to guarantee safety, privacy and dignity is a big deal in a situation like the end of days, and people are super grateful for it, that's why when Lizzie and her crew show up to town people think fondly of her parents, they did them a great service.

Since I set up that Stacy knows Lizzie's parents I wanted to include a shot describing that, which is where I have them buying her dinner on her first day into town.  This is the same thing Stacy did for Lizzie and Alice on their first day, so it sets it up as paying it forward rather than just being an isolated act of good will.  I want her to tell stories about her former roommates, particularly their arm-wrestling relationship- Nigel thinks it's funny, Laura wants to learn the secrets herself.

The last little detail about the page to tie off is -why- Lizzie's parents are no longer in Tombstone.  I don't want to spoil too much in these write-ups that isn't immediately obvious from the art but I did want to establish that they went back out into no-man's land for a reason, and they were prepared enough that their fate is pretty positively-implied.  I also wanted to end the flashback with one more shot of Lizzie's mom fighting with a broom, since she was doing it on page 364 I thought maintaining that would be a cute parallel to Lizzie's own mop fighting, like it runs in the family.

I'm gonna keep working on the comic this week and have something closer to finished by this time next week.  The pace I've been hitting recently has been to get like 70-80% done on my ink and painting in the week after a sketch post and then wrap it up over the weekend so I kinda expect to hit that stride, although it may take me a bit longer due to how many different specific characters there are on this page.  I'll do my best, either way!  Thank you for supporting my work, I always want to do the best I can for you.