Dead Winter Minicomics Batch #2 (Patreon)

Hello again!  This week I have a pretty content-heavy update to share with you.  Over the weekend I'd initially thought about just doing a weekend run of minicomics and then shifting over to the main comic, but like how I have alternated between comic weeks and gamedev weeks I decided to spend this whole week making minicomics and I'll resume the big comic afterwards.  I want to build a buffer of about 20 strips before I start posting them publicly so there's minimal stress on me to maintain this part of my work cycle, and also I wanted to see how many strips I could comfortably produce in a week. 

It turns out the answer is nine strips, which I'm going to share with you today! I'm planning to always post my buffer of strips on here, so you'll have these fun bonus strips to read every week with commentary and also be about two-and-a-half months ahead of the curve, on a tuesday/friday update cycle.  So anyways, this week was a substantial buffer-building week, so let's jump right into it.

#005: My notes for this strip were "Alice & Dr. Parker doing surgery on a guy, find something funny inside", thinking like that board game Operation or similar. The stuff ended up being the loot table of a generic video game enemy.  The background on this page is the same as the operating room on page 564 where Sheriff Tanner ended up, with the rack of hand tools behind the slab table.  A lot of scenes in these will be tied to some specific place from the main comic for a fun token of continuity.  You can tell if a pen belongs to Lizzie if the cap is all chewed up and the little stem sticks out on an angle because of it.

#006: One of the things I wanted to do with this idea of "comic about a game about a comic" is mix and match the different character pairings that might not pop up naturally in the comic too much and give everyone some spotlight.  The backpack on Lou's contraption is both a partial seat and storage capacity, which is the full utility of his invention.  Lizzie is the most nimble character in the game so she is doing a Ranma Saotome on the fence.

#007: I wanted to evenly distribute comic focus across the main cast because it's very easy to end up with a ton of Lizzie & Alice comics, since they work together better than almost any other pairing, so on this page the focus is entirely on secondary characters in the comic.  Stacy does show up in the game itself so she's like a secondary-and-a-half character.  But anyways, I had this stupid idea to take a four-panel comic and burn half the panels bookending a joke with these mid-20th century cartoon title cards.  This one was written in my notes as "stacy adventures" and nothing else.  The "PIZZA" building that shows up in the backgrounds down the main strip of Tombstone makes a cameo appearance.

#008: Monday being an assassin among a community of colorful themed assassins has been on low focus in the recent arc of the comic but it is still a part of Dead Winter lore so I wanted to give Monday a page where he is Black Monday Blues again.  The idea of "Eddie the Axe Man" introducing himself in the same panel where a name tag cut-in also appears right below his word bubble made me laugh.  The big setup in the third panel into the fourth, combined with the comic title, helps complete a hidden background joke:  "Eddie's Aerial Descent; Good Bye Eddie".

#009: A reprisal of the Kickstart My Heart arc.  I like the idea that in the city somewhere there's a surviving pizzeria that is like neutral territory for the various faction colonies, and Vincenzo's will host a pizza party for whichever community wins a motor race.  This page gets dangerously close to both "new lore" and "drawing really detailed narrative shots" vs making stupid cheap jokes, and I was like, I can feel myself being pulled deeper into these things.  They're meant to be cheap and fast to make, so I gotta remember to let myself take it easy.  The soundtrack to this page is Jesus Built My Hotrod.

#010: The idea of "character palette swaps" came up in my head, since in our game we do have code working that allows you to give each character another character's palette, so then I thought about Lou in Monday's outfit.  Monday has always been the odd character out from the group- three working stiffs and one guy who hunts rich people- but the nature of who he is in the main comic has translated to him being a pretty good foil in these little strips, playing the straightman for whatever goofy thing the other characters are doing. This scene is in their room from page 598.

#011: An Alice-centric page that doesn't involve her hanging out with Lizzie.  Alice has always been a really sunny personality so I wanted to capture that kind of aura in a page, so this whole strip is just her being this radiant source of warmth and ease wherever she goes.  In the first panel I wanted to draw the sunlight peeking in the window, but then I had this thought to draw the sun in that old Victorian illustration style where it has that particular kind of eyes and cherubic cheeks, and the sun being in that top panel still makes me laugh every time I look at it.  I thought about if I wanted the last line to be fentanyl or morphine, but "Sunshine and Morphine" makes a great title for a song track, like Alice's theme song or whatever, so I went with that.  It describes her role in the game pretty well.

#012: This was one of the earliest ideas I had for a comic but I didn't want to start this minicomic project with Lizzie being punched through a window by her boss.  Since this is partly for new people who might be interested in the game to kinda "cliff's notes" what Dead Winter is I wanted to do some pages before I got into a drawn-out action shot that frame and fill out the setting a bit more.  Now that we're in the 10's pages though, Lizzie can go through the window.  A friend of mine introduced me to McVitie's Digestives a while ago and I just always love to tell people about them- you want to get the Milk Chocolate kind.  They can be found in many American grocery stores, either in the aisle with the tea or if they have an International aisle with the British imported stuff.  The whole premise of this page was "Lizzie gets punched into a convenience store shelf, a thing falls on her and it's a food she likes", so I just made it McVitie's because it's a food I like.  Try McVitie's today.

#013: Since Tombstone exists right on a river I wanted to do a fishing joke.  When writing the comic I always kinda imagined zombies walking around on the riverbed, and this channel has high concrete walls so they're just down there walking around unseen below the waves.  Lou needs a foil so Stacy is back- these two shared a moment together back in the early comic pages where they were cleaning up zombie chunks outside Chantelle's place and Stacy's boot got bit, and only Lou knew where Stacy disappeared to.  The water zombie has a Jaws tee shirt on- I realized that a lot of my Lou pages have involved him having some comical interaction with the undead, so I'll need to spread that around amongst the other characters in future strips.

I'm about seven strips from my goal of a 20-strip buffer but now that I did this big chunk this week I can just do them at a more normal pace around my other work.  This week I'm gonna continue progress on the next page for the main comic.  I hope these strips are a fun addition for you.  Thank you as always for reading, and have a safe weekend!