Comic Report #65 - The Gang's All Here (Patreon)

So I gotta say, since around late April/early May I've been more or less nonstop working on animation, either for comics, games or a part-time side job I've been doing (top secret), it's been nonstop making components to moving pictures.  With 600 in the tank, I'm relieved to actually be able to sit down and draw just plain old static art again, and that's what today's update is going to be about!

One of the things I wanted to allow space for following page 600's update is a reunion between the main crew and the Omnimart friends.  Everyone's here, so I wanted the theme of page 601 to be reunion and celebration.  Lizzie was kinda the one who set it up so she sorta knew they were coming, just maybe not quite so soon after passing along to Maria that they were out there.  To everyone else it's a genuine surprise to see Amy, Clark, Melody and Dale again, and I wanted to get everyone else in the shot for at least a frame, so they're sort of framed together along with their counterparts they mainly interacted with during the Omnimart arc.  

So like to go down the panel list it opens with an establishing shot of the truck parking outside the parking lot, and then Amy waves to Lizzie and Alice.  In the Omnimart Amy was the one who found Alice rooting around in the pharmacy, and asked her for help with her friend Jill.

Dale is genuinely probably the only other person in the comic Monday actually likes and gets along with, as they're both Mets fans, so they needed to be paired off.  I wanted to keep their mutual grumpiness and just give them a wordless, powerful handshake together.  They shook hands the first time but I want this shot to be even better.

Lou had encounters with both Melody and Clark, but I wanted to focus on linking him up with Clark specifically- back at the Omnimart Clark took an interest in Lou's handy constructiveness, building the solar-panel battery powering harness he has worn in the comic ever since.

I wanted to leave Melody a bit of a free-agent in this page setup because I had a special connection for her that I'd been planning for a while.  I mentioned it in a previous page but one of the characters who were in the crowd on page 600 was Dr. Parker, the town's more-competent medical professional who is also Alice's boss. 

While everyone's having a nice reunion with their friends, I wanted to set up Melody and Dr. Parker to have a reunion of their own, since they are mother and daughter.  Lizzie couldn't have known it when she was relaying the Omnimart story to Deputy Mayor Martinez but in a roundabout way bringing her friends in from the Omnimart reunited family members who had been separated during the events of the comic, and I thought that'd be a nice note to end the page on.

When I was setting up this page part of me wanted to give everyone a speaking moment, to let all the Omnimart characters stretch out their speaking voices again after so many years in the archive.  When I was planning it out, though, I had a hard time finding a way to fit introductions all into one page without it stretching out across multiple pages, and thus multiple weeks.  I want to fit the intros onto one page so I can move on with expanding on the story, so my solution to any case where I need to compress time and fit events on a page is to shift into monologue mode.  On page 599, prior to the big introduction, we were in monologue mode as well, so I felt like coming out the other side of the 600 animation I could bookend monologues and then let us exit Lizzie's narrative rectangles.  I'm planning the beginning of the page to come in with Lizzie narration, so I can set up the reunions and establish the mood I want, but towards the end I want to taper out of it into spoken dialogue so I can let Melody and Dr. Parker have their own moment together, and let that be the important note the page ends on.  Whenever I write a page I always make sure it ends on a significant note, and in this case their family time is the page's key moment.

This week I'll be continuing work on the page.  Coming off of all that animation I'm not sure if I'll be tired or wired enough to power through a task that is relatively 1000x simpler than what I'd been working on prior, but either way I'll have more to share with you next week.  Thanks for reading!