Comic Report #69 - Nice (Patreon)

Hello!  Today is a special update day!  In addition to this post I'll have another comics post to write up right after, so stay tuned for that!  For now, though, I wanted to get the next page sketched up and posted for you.  But for now, let's dig into the next page write-up!

The past few pages from page 599 to today's page 605 have been about bringing back and re-establishing the Omni-mart crew, with a bunch of narrative threads tying into that event.  It's sort of like a big knot, and this page represents the end of that knot where the threads carry on out the other side, or something.  I think that's how knots work.  But anyways, this big "meeting the new guys" crowd scene concludes on this page, so I wanted to wrap up some details and prepare for the next scene.

The top paragraph of the page is set up as Lizzie's sneaky side-eye observing from the previous pages, but from her perspective.  She imagines herself as watching carefully, taking in details about the crowd.  Monday cuts across, on his way to sit down at the diner- Lizzie is watching him, but in the second panel he turns his head and watches back.  These are definitely internal monologue panels, I'll figure out something snappy for her to be thinking when the time comes.

The next paragraph is Lizzie shifting her eyes back from Monday to the center of the crowd.  Marcus Malloy- the town's jobs coordinator- had been hanging out in the crowd shot on page 600, so here he's stepping forward to gather up the Omni-mart crew.  We the readers are already familiar with how he operates so I don't need to go over that, but this shot sorta shows the O-Mart gang gathering together for their orientation, to mark the end of this scene.  They're gonna be busy for a bit, off-camera, so I can move off to the next scene.

To help close up the scene, Alice breaks Lizzie's monologue with a hand on her shoulder.  Everyone had run out the door to see what the big sound was on page 600- Lizzie brought her mop, but she left her gun belt at home.  Fortunately Alice had the foresight to grab it, so here she's like, oh hey!  Before I run off to work, you left your flashlight at home.  I know I want to word it that way since it would show Alice respecting Lizzie's feelings about guns, how she doesn't like them despite wearing one, and having that item help her out of a black-eye jam the night before, so she calls it her Flashlight.

The very last panel is a shot I kinda wanted to include since the start of the whole Omnimart Returns scene- way back early in the comic, Lizzie tricked Clark into giving her his gun.

He's definitely still bitter about this.  He tried to take it back from Lizzie once already and it didn't work out the way he thought it would:

So there's a bit of history and resentment about the gun on Lizzie's hip.  So in the last panel, when Alice is giving her her flashlight, Clark is looking on from the background.  He sees the gun belt and he definitely knows, and that's sorta the punchline of the moment.  Lizzie has put Clark's gun to pretty good use over the past 300ish pages and it does have a fun flashlight on it so she's not likely to give it up, and he knows this, so I wanted to end the page on a zoom-in on this look of mounting realization and frustration.

This page doesn't have as much dense crowdshot as the previous page so I think I can make good headway on it for next week.  If you've read this far, stick around for the second cool update today, I am sure it will be a real treat!  Thanks, as always, for your kind support.  Be well out there.