Comic Report #62.1 - Stuck Indoors (Patreon)

Hello again!  This week I have something different planned for my work report.  I'd been battling the cabin fever of not leaving my apartment for so long, and so I didn't get quite as much work done as I'd like to.  I'm at a point where I can say "I'll have this page finished and posted before the weekend is over", though, which is in line with previous half-finished updates.  I don't feel like I have as much to talk about, and I don't want to post a Friday work report without giving you something meaty to chew on, so for this week I thought I'd do something a little different.

Thursday night I got to thinking, "what am I going to write about tomorrow?"  I had skipped over the big exterior establishing shot in the first panel because that was a thing I figured I could get to later, but then I realized, oh!  I can talk a little bit more about how those establishing shots work!  I've talked a bit in the past about how I have this big town plan image I use to keep my backgrounds as consistent as I can, but this week I thought I'd take some time and do an archive-dive and kinda give a visual tour of Tombstone and how all the little locations are interconnected, and how they fit into the backgrounds of different scenes.  I do put a lot of work into maintaining this specific location as a character of its own so it's fun for me to talk about it, and I don't believe I've done an actual visual breakdown before, so this week we'll have a guided tour, starting with this numbered reference shot:

Starting from where Tombstone was introduced and moving counter-clockwise...

1)  Gate B

This is the eastern entrance to Tombstone, where Deon, Donna and their family keep a safe watch.  Gate B sorta set the aesthetic of Tombstone as a makeshift walled safespot full of survivors after years and hundreds of pages of Dead Winter mostly being able a solitary group moving throughout an inhospitable city.  The idea of a fleet of buses and sandbags serving as an uncrossable barricade led into the necessity of including the next section:

2) The Dirt Lot

A fenced-in vacant lot next to the newspaper building.  Growing up I always thought it was neat how this entire fleet of buses that ferried us to school all lived in this same one big lot, and since this is New England if the buses are iced over and won't start quickly we got a school delay.  If there were enough buses in Tombstone to create a wall that means there must have been a dirt lot full of them somewhere, and next to a big brick industrial building like a newspaper printer seemed like a fair fit.  The dirt lot fits into Tombstone lore in that it's where all the working cars are parked, in particular Pat's Charger.  The car in the top panel of that intro with three headlights- two on the left and one on the right- is a little cameo for Johnny Cash's One Piece At A Time.  He, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf show up elsewhere in town.  The dirt lot being a place to park things is going to be important very shortly, by the way, so keep an eye out for that.

3)  Liberty Avenue

Further down past the dirt road and the newspaper building is Liberty Avenue, the place the crew were looking for in the first place, where Lizzie's dad had told her to meet him.  This is sort of the "main street" of the town where all the commercial properties can be converted into useful buildings.  I haven't done anything explicitly with this section of road yet in the story itself but it ties a bunch of other significant locations together as a sort of backbone.  On the left you can see a little barbershop- that's where all the bluesman cameos hang out.  Behind that is what I call The Big Building, this big box with an arched pattern that serves as a kind of landmark in a bunch of shots, and then to the right is The Pizza Building.  PIZZA sign shows up a few times, it's just a building back from the right turn onto the nice part of town Sheriff Tanner lived in.  To the left of that intersection is...

4) Yummy Mart

This street is sort of a residential block, and it's where Lizzie, Alice and Stacy all live above the convenience store, where a lot of their scenes take place.  The building next to theirs has a Bail Bonds sign up and then two buildings down in the other direction is The Big Building.  One of the flood lights wired up around town is right across the street from their building so the front area is always lit, and I can draw the lights coming in their windows during living room scenes.  This street heads south towards the big river, but if you go straight through the intersection at Liberty Avenue you'll arrive at...

5) Gate A

Slightly less on-the-ball compared to the rastafari crew to the east, Gate A suffers from a 20-minute security lapse where second-shift goes home on time, sick of waiting for third-shift to oversleep and show up late again.  This is where Lizzie snuck outside the bus wall to hunt for clues, and recently battled the Poncho raiding team.  Alice and Stacy were perched up on a building just west of their own home, just below the big (5) in the diagram image above.  Imagine me squinting at those tiny little building drawings trying to map out this scene and you can imagine what I did to try to make this scene fit within the town, despite being outside of it.  The end result was a success, however, and so the story moves on to our current moment.

6) Randy's Gun Shop

This is the subject of my current painting objectives.  Located along the south strip, Lou and Monday live just around the corner from Lizzie and Alice.  I've always been partial for the aesthetic of "apartment above a commercial business" which is why that's where a lot of people end up living in this comic, it's nice and compact.  In the partial page at the top of this article you can see the pencil arrow pointing down to an oddly-shaped building to the right of the frame, that is Randy's place.  When shifting the scene from Lizzie and Alice to Lou and Monday I wanted to pull the camera back from Yummy Mart  and pan a bit over to Randy's Guns, to kinda visually carry from the one location to the next. A lot of the buildings to the south of this street I only drew the back of so far, so shots of characters walking down this route I'll need to be conscious of what the fronts look like, but when I drew the rooftops I added some features to kinda stitch it together and make it look more lived-in, like you can see planks connecting some of the roofs together for people to move across, assuming at the time the street level was still inhospitable, and explain a bit about where all the brass casings on the ground everywhere came from.  

7) The Riverside

When Pat explained how to get to Tombstone he mentioned just finding the river and following it.  Throughout history human civilizations have been connected to rivers and waterways, so I wanted Tombstone to reflect that a bit.  The river provides a natural barricade against the particular threat currently being dealt with, and while the water itself might not be safe to swim in the concrete elevation keeps anything from shambling out of it.  The riverside is a stretch of benches and lamps with an ambiguous city skyline visible across the water, it's a peaceful place and a decent view to help the townsfolk have something to look at other than brick and metal.  One of the important features of Tombstone's river is in the future development of hydroelectric power, which leads us rather conveniently to our next location.

8) The Power Station

The big crane cuts an interesting shape in the skyline, and indicates the location of the largest warehouse space in Tombstone.  All the wires strung up about town provide power to key locations, and it was this rare resource of electricity that drew the attention of the Poncho raiding party.  The current idea, which I haven't had a moment to actually explain, is that Tombstone is powered by a big steam electric generator.  I actually did research on how steam generators worked so all the pipes and cylinders should be roughly correct, but this contraption is on an elevated platform where water from the river is boiled overtop of a furnace fire maintained by wrapping head-off zombies in cloth sheets as fuel to generate the heat needed to create steam and drive the turbines needed to create enough electricity for a few places.  Zombies are kind of a plentiful resource in this world so instead of just hiding from them I figure they would be kind of a grim fuel source for electric power, though a water wheel built into the river can provide more supplemental power that isn't quite as dangerous to maintain.

9) Jade Garden

One of the only buildings to actually be wired for power, the Leung family's restaurant is the central cafe-slash-saloon food and drink hangout spot in town, with a few arcade cabinets and a pool table clumsily dragged in to provide people entertainment.  The Jade Garden is located on the eastern strip, just north of the power station and just around the corner from Gate B and the newspaper building.  If Liberty Avenue is the backbone of Tombstone this intersection is the ribcage, where all the important functioning businesses are located.  The Sheriff's office is around here too, though I don't think I've officially designated one of the buildings as such.  The residentials are to the west side, the infrastructure is on the east.  You can see old billboards here and there, I like to have them featuring Brian Lee's old comic The Adventures of Left & Right, which I kinda treat as an actual popular TV series in this universe.

10) The Inner Loop

As our tour has taken us on a big circuit around Tombstone, it's important for me to remember that there is an inside space in the middle of all these roads I need to plan out.  Behind the Jade Garden is a parking lot space which can serve as a kind of concrete commons, if someone who is soccer-inclined were to want to organize soccer games for the town's kids this would be the place for it.  There is an inner loop of buildings to the west end of this interior that serves as more residential areas, but the parking lot in particular was where the Gravekeepers- the Mayor's crew of jerks who have clearance to go outside the gates, maintain the zombie element and bring fuel back to the power station- were caught bullying Randy into making more toys for them before Monday and Lou intervened.  Since this location is directly behind the Jade Garden this is where Molly came outside to shoo all the noisy jerks away.

And that is the end of the visual tour of Tombstone!  Organizing these snippets was kinda fun for me, since a lot of the backgrounds in some shots did actually link up with other locations and kinda tie the whole thing together, which is the point of all the planning work I did on the place to begin with.  In the early half of the comic a lot of the exterior building shots were disposable anonymous rectangles so when I set up Tombstone I wanted to make it someplace real and defined and absolute.

I will have the next page finished by the end of this weekend.  I'll probably save the initial building shot for last, but now you can see firsthand what my process is for painting those shots, and why which building goes where.  Thank you for sticking with us, we'll have more to share with you in a little bit!  Take care and be well.