Comic Report #67.1 - Work The Crowd (Patreon)

Hello again!  This week I made progress on the next page, inking, flatting and making my 80% detail pass on the first half of the comic.  I expect I'll be able to have this page finished by the end of this weekend so please look forward to that!

For a lot of the comic living characters have generally been significant people who are explicitly designed for their purpose in the story.  By contrast, Tombstone is full of incidental background people who give character to the town, they're not really individually important so I can have a lot of fun designing them whenever I need them.  When I have to fill out a scene like, say, a diner scene or this crowd shot I'll generally go back through the comic and try to pick out incidental characters I'd already drawn so there's some identity to them popping up again, but I'll also make a bunch of new ones too.  Everyone popping up in these scenes you can probably expect to see again.

The survivor aesthetic in Dead Winter is a hodgepodge of different things.  The heart of these characters is that they're ordinary people, tradespeople and craftspersons and workers of all stripes for whom the yoke of their grind has been lifted and they sort of build their own community together with what is available to them.  They dress in what is comfortable or familiar to them- most of the main crew are still dressed in their work clothes- or they dress how they've always wanted to, but never did out of fear of social criticism.  Everyone is dressed for their own individual comfort, which I think is an important consideration given the circumstances. 

A couple people find comfort in dressing for combat, like the pair in the last two panels above.  At least two characters are just outright dressed like spaghetti westerns- I think they add a dash of flavor to the main broth of working folks who make up this world.  It's an eclectic mix but the importance of it is everyone looks like they all belong together.  

When coming up with a random background character I also think about what kind of weapon they would be carrying.  From the start I always imagined writing Dead Winter as sort of a tabletop RPG that I run by myself, so it makes sense that it would be tracked towards becoming a proper video game in the long run.  A lot of characters carry firearms but the real flavor of the armament is the ones who carry melee weapons.  When I started writing Dead Winter I was working as a mechanic and I'd draw pages on a laptop in the workshop office, so the idea of a lot of tools becoming proper weapons started from there.  Lizzie's mop, Alice's frying pan, Lou's wrench, they're all simple bludgeons that have some primary utility connected to their past or their journey.  There was a pruning saw among the Yellow Poncho fight and a few people managed to find swords somewhere on their journey through the city.  Everyone's carrying something on them, which a month or so prior would never have been the case in this world, but it sort of becomes a pat of each character's journey into the present moment.  They all follow the same aesthetic rules as the main crew so they all fit in together.

I'll be getting back to work now to wrap up this page for the end of the weekend.  Thanks as always for supporting the comic, I'm excited to push forward and get to a couple scenes planned for the future!  I'll have another update for you by the end of the weekend, so I'll see you again!