Dead Winter Minicomics Batch #4 (Patreon)

I'm really happy this week.  My goal for this project was to hit 20 strips drawn before I began posting them, and with a little bit of crunching I managed to reach that goal before the first strip went up on Tuesday.  This project is officially live now, so I'll be maintaining my buffer as best I can.  I think moving forward you can expect two or three strips per week, that would either maintain or slightly grow the buffer, although some weeks after I finish a comic page I could possibly draw more if I don't have pressing gamedev tasks to attend to.  I've been posting large batches up to now in order to get this foundation built, but now that I'm here I'd like to pace myself so these strips supplement my other work, rather than replace it.  But anyways!  Last week I left off at strip 16, and in order to meet my target before Tuesday that meant I needed 4 more strips last weekend, so today I have four more strips to share with you!  So let's get right to it.

#017: This is a very gamey strip pairing up the two ranged specialist characters.  In the game we're building everyone has different dash attack animations based on which weapon they're using.  When Alice has her carbine out she swings her bag around and launches forward with it, doing a lot of damage.  The idea is like, it does so much damage because she just carries a bunch of stuff in there, so I thought to draw a lot of things cartoonishly falling out of the bag- the LAWS book from the first strip is in there too!  She kept it.

#018: This one is written in the notes file as "a bus pulls up, lou is driving. 'look what I found!'".  A lot goes on in the comic but sometimes when you're out in the world you've got nothing pressing going on, and then sometimes one of your friends shows up with a complete working commuter bus.  The real punchline of this strip is in panel 3, where Lou's reflection is seen both in the flat rectangular mirror and in the rounded blindspot mirror.

#019: Okay so funny story, the fella in this page's name gets flagged for review on Patreon, I'm just discovering as I type this, and I don't want to play around with that.  But anyways, he's still having a great time punching things he finds, seeking to elevate his punching art.  I've been slowly trying to include all the factions represented in the comic in the minis so that's why it's a biker in particular taking a ride backwards through time.  I did the stretching bleed effect in the last panel by hand, I want you to know.

#020: Rounding off the faction intros, here comes some friends in yellow ponchos!  I wanted to make a strip about random game enemies being completely outclassed by player characters and it ended up being a joke about fighting game intro animations.  The second panel features the loud KLAK of Alice's carbine locking and loading, and the third panel I was thinking like, what if Lizzie's mop is actually extremely heavy, like Piccolo's cloak or similar.  Just this 100lb battle mop she hoists around effortlessly on her shoulder, just drop it on the ground and let the earth shake.  I think that would be a pretty cool fighting game intro.  This page is best paired with #015 for maximum character contrast.

This is as far as I am this week but I've been writing down a ton more ideas for strips I'm really eager to get to, but I need to wrap up this next main-comic page first.  Thank you for the kind feedback on these minis, I am happy to hear people are enjoying them, since I'm having a lot of fun making them myself.  I'll have more to share next week, so I'll see you then.