Comic Report #66.1 - Juiced Up (Patreon)

Hello again!  This week I've made a good bit of progress on the next page.  I expect to have this page finished by the end of the weekend, or Monday at the latest, so keep an eye out for that.  But for now I'll talk about what I've been doing on this page so far, so let's jump right into that.

This scene I've set up for myself has had just a tremendous amount of characters all in one spot. It's a bit of work to keep track of them all so I'm just focusing on foreground, important characters first, and then I can add the others into the background.  The top-half panels feel a bit more sparse right now but on my final detail pass the crowds should fill out to their intended scale.

I've been using this scene as sort of a nexus for story threads coming up in the next 100 pages.  In addition to introducing the Omni-mart crew as a part of Tombstone I want to establish that Dr. Parker, the good doctor, is taking the day off from being in the medical ward to be with her family, which means Dr. Pheiffer, the less-good doctor, will be performing the day's medical procedures, and you can see in Alice's eyes that she knows this, having been old coworkers at a previous hospital.  That context might not be super important on its face, but if you're an avid reader you may recall that these guys...

... haven't just disappeared from the story.  How these things are related we'll have to wait and see, but the seed of Lizzie telling the Deputy Mayor about the Omni-mart crew they'd met out in the wild has sprouted into an event where the town's doctor is pulled away from the ward the morning after a small heap of raiders have been picked up by gate watch just outside the city walls, during Alice's next shift.

Further down the page, I got to inking up the Gravekeepers.  When I got to working on this page I realized that I'd used my batch of pre-made character pieces to create a character who looked fairly similar to Clark, being a dude with a baseball cap.  On a previous page they'd been pressuring Lou and Monday's roommate Randy into making them some cooler weapons, so on this page I thought I'd tackle a few issues at once and juice up their designs.  I don't think I'd properly introduced them yet except framing them in other isolated moments, but this page sets up a proper intro on the next page, so I thought now would be a great time to give them an update.  I'm looking forward to finishing up this page so I can jump into that one, there's a lot of threads tied together in this moment and I'm real eager to draw all of them.  

As I mentioned earlier, I expect to be able to finish this page by the end of the weekend, or Monday at the latest.  Thank you for your kind patience, I'll have another update for you shortly.  Take care and be well.