Dead Winter Minicomics Batch #3 (Patreon)

This week I made some more progress on building my comic buffer, and I feel confident enough that I've decided I'm gonna start publishing them this coming Tuesday.  I originally updated Dead Winter on a Tuesday/Friday schedule so I'm gonna go back to that for these minis.  I managed to draw three more this week around all my other work, which is good, since if I can fit three a week around other tasks and I post two a week that's net growth for my buffer.  I was aiming to have 20 done before I post the first one and I made it to 16, so I think I can knock a few more out this weekend and be in good shape. If you're reading this now you'll always be far ahead of the curve in terms of staying on top of these updates- I do sorta hope it encourages more people to join this Patreon but I'm mostly just happy to provide more Dead Winter content during the long wait between full pages.  Today we'll be moving up to strip #16, so I'll just get right to it.

#014: One of the big challenges of these strips is going to be finding ways to write Monday's whole carnival-of-killers character angle without it being overly violent.  I want to find ways to keep it fun, or to imply the violence rather than depicting it directly the way I would in the main comic, so for this page I have a kind of spy vs spy situation that Lou helpfully interrupts.  Monday's not the only guy like himself in the city so sometimes he's got to handle business.  Lou bringing him his packed lunch like a happy dog was just funny in my head so I thought it'd make a good little vignette.  This one has an ambiguous follow-up, where the reader can decide for themselves how the sandwich gambit plays out.

#015:  This was honestly one of the earliest ideas I had for a "4koma Dead Winter strip" project, but I knew if someone was coming into these things cold I needed to plan the first ten strips to kinda guide them into what kind of world Dead Winter exists in.  With that squared away I can do funnier things like this.  Part of Lizzie's fighting style in the game itself is she flings herself into a big attack and often does not stick the landing, like her two dash attacks and her up attack animations have her crash-land on the ground.  You can follow the hair clips on Alice's head in the middle two panels to track where she's looking in each shot.  Also a little background detail:  in the comic itself, during the Kickstart My Heart arc the gang drove through Mallory Park, which was named after Mallary, a purple duck who lived in my very first Animal Crossing town.  So when I needed to draw another part I named it Vesta Park, named after a beloved villager from my New Leaf town.  I'll likely end up naming a lot more parks in the city after my Animal Crossing friends, because I think that's cute.

#016: This page I drew last night but ended up inking this morning. It took me about an hour and change to knock out all the inks, so I'm happy with how fast I can finish these up and put them in the queue.  Early in the comic, like page 2, I'd introduced the super-minor character detail that Lizzie is so deep in her waitress life that she can read someone's order just by looking at them. This comes up again on page 561, where she impresses Deputy Mayor Martinez by reading the exact amount of cream and sugar she takes her coffee with, earning her a moment of the editor's time.    The three guys here were incidentals from page 570 who ended up being in the crowd on page 600 as well, so now I've kinda taken a shine to them as this group of three goofballs who always hang out in the diner, like Moe's barflies but for food.  For whatever reason I was thinking about Cameron from Ferris Bueller when I originally drew the sleepy-eyed dude in the hockey shirt, so that's just sort of the energy he channels.  This strip also features a nice close-up of Lizzie's pencap-chewing habit, which ties back to strip #005, where Alice is taking notes with a chewed-up pen.

This week isn't as many new minis as last week, that was sort of a bulk drive, but I plan to always have at least two, preferably three new strips to share on here each week.  I'm gonna make a push to try to get to 20 before Tuesday when I officially start posting these publicly, but in a way where I can keep making progress on my main comic page, so we'll see how that goes.  I'm happy to hear the positive reception to this idea and I look forward to having fun with it in the months to come.  Thank you, as always, for supporting my work. Be well out there, and I'll see you again next Friday.