Comic Report #63 - On The Threshold (Patreon)

Hello!  This week's update is a comic page.  I started the week working on gamedev stuff but I have some mental gears I need to turn to get into that workflow- I'm ready to begin animating human enemies and I need to develop a plan for doing that, since until now I'd been making undead enemies who could be floppy and kinda loose in their animations.  For human enemies I need them to have personalities and move like upright, living people, so my approach is going to have to change a bit and jumping into that cold is fairly difficult, so instead of struggling with that and coming up with nothing at the end of the week I started work on page 599.  

This is the last page before the big 600 so I've got a lot of nervous energy building up to it.  Once this page is done I'm going to be on the hook for another big animated 100th page, which have always been a lot of work to complete.  The stage before that, though is the X99 page- because the 100-mark pages are animated they don't really work as pages with text, so they depend on their X99 preceding page to establish the context of what the animation is doing, so this week's task is doing just that.

The last few pages of the comic have been a wind-down from the big action sequence at the end of last year, leading up to the lull point pictured above.  In planning how to time my pages to land on a significant moment for the 600th page my idea was to close out the previous day and let the 600th page start the next day with a major event, that way I could just bring it in naturally without cramming up the pacing of the preceding pages.  And since bedding down for the night to mark day cycles has been a "thing" throughout the comic that ended up being my plan for 599.

The previous page brought Monday and Lou back into the narrative loop, but the setup for this page is planned around Lizzie's internal monologue boxes.  Throughout the comic she is the only one to have that kind of meta-dialogue power, intended to be exclusive to her so it's always clear who is speaking when you see the rectangular boxes, but the page itself is meant to cover everybody in the core gang.  The panels are few and large to allow space for monologue so when I hit the end of the page, 600 is primed and ready to go.

Design-wise I wanted this page to be as cozy as possible.  For a post-civilization action story I always want to create moments where the characters are safe and comfortable- there were moments in the story where they weren't, like the night bedding down in the parking garage, but right now they all have homes so regardless of what is going on outside they can be comfortable and safe in their own spaces.  They have and could continue to rough it in streets and parking lots or other unpleasant places but they don't need to.   Since this page highlights all the characters' cozy home spaces I figured I could use that opportunity to reflect their own individual personalities in how I draw them sleeping.
- Lou is very content in his top bunk.  He has a fun job he enjoys in Tombstone and he's got all these new friends, and his old buddy Monday to tell about them.  He's probably the member of the crew to have the fewest worries throughout the ordeal and he's just sleeping like a happy baby.
- Monday is doing a belly-down posture, arms slung over and behind his pillow.  Lou had been chatting his ear off all night and Monday doesn't really yell at or shout at people, so with his posture I wanted to convey that sort of silent tolerance of his roommate.  He has his fair share of problems and he's the bottle-up type, so he'll toss a bit to get to sleep.
- Stacy has been a long-time room-taker in the comic, going back to the apartment at Chantelle's place she asserted that the bedroom was hers and Lizzie & Alice could sleep on the fold-out couch.  When the pair arrived at their apartment in Tombstone Stacy was already there asserting her control over the good bedroom.  She has built a habit of this but we've never actually seen inside her room before, so her big secret is she has a super-cushy bed with tons of pillows and a mountain of covers, like something you can just sink into and disappear.  Stacy is unshakeable and she is very, very content in her fluffy soft bed.
- Lizzie and Alice have been bedmates going all the way back to Chantelle's.  They started out of a sort of necessity, but also at Alice's request since she didn't want to be alone during uncertain times, so Lizzie is something of a protective presence for her.  Over time and across the bed-down sequences they've gotten more comfortable with each other, so as a capstone for these two I wanted to convey them as being very cozy and very safe together.  They both keep each other going so I wanted to convey that, how Lizzie is bandaged up by Alice and Alice is safe on Lizzie's shoulder.  I think it conveys their evolution together well.

The last panel is the big break from the quiet lull, the big setup for the 600th page.  Morning comes and -something- makes a very loud noise that wakes everyone up from the very cozy shots they've been established in above.  The whole bottom row is a line of jarred-awake expressions that kind of reflect how they were sleeping, like Lou was so happy and he's jolted awake by the surprise, Monday has that irate look in his eye like he'd just finally stopped enduring a different noise, Stacy doesn't care at all, Alice is on high alert again like every other time someone has knocked on their door, and Lizzie has genuinely been jarred awake by some obnoxious event or another every single morning throughout the comic so her eyes are just like.....  again......

I won't spoil what the loud noise is yet, but this is my setup for the next huge feat of my comic, the 600th page animation.  That one's going to be a doozy to document on Patreon but we'll get through that when we get there, for now I'll keep hacking away at what's currently on my plate.  

Thank you for reading!  Stay safe out there.