Dead Winter Minicomics Batch #5 (Patreon)

Hello again!  This week I put up a new main-comic page, I thought about getting a jump on the next page for today but I was really exhausted and I had a bunch of other tasks I needed to attend to, so I decided to just let this partial week be about minis and gamedev- there'll be a games post coming up after this one.  I've gotta say, getting deeper into the covid quarantine cabin fever madness these little mini strips have been really good for my mental health- not only do I have this small way to share the Dead Winter universe with more people who may not know about yet, but it lets me do something fresh and different than what I'm always grinding away at all the time.  I'm really glad people seem to like these, because they've been genuinely good for my health to work on.  I'm up to 23 strips so far, and I got so many more written!  I got three done for this week's update so let's jump right into that!

#021: This strip was a combination of a number of things.  One is I want to include lots of characters from the main Dead Winter comic into the minis, so I wanted to let a strip be about Lee, the young chef at the Jade Garden where Lizzie works.  Back on page 367 of the main comic it's established that as a waitress at Frank's Lizzie has been taught in the ways of the Short-Order Style of fry cooking.  Since she works with the Leung family now I thought it'd be fitting that she get to learn Lee's Anything-Goes Style of Apocalypse Cooking.  I kinda imagine that everyone still alive in the world has developed the kind of stomach to just be able to eat whatever garbage they can get their hands on, so someone's probably developed a style of taking that garbage and turning it into tasty meals.  Sometimes I get a song stuck in my head that I'll listen to hundreds of times on loop, and last week that song was "Toasty Buns" from Parappa 2, so I ended up making the Lee and Lizzie Anything-Goes strip into a Parappa-style lesson.

#022: I'd had this thought in my head of like, what if you find some weird-looking creature out in the wild, how would you deal with that?  If it sees you and its defense response is to run in a weird way and flail its arms, like some kind of bug.  I dunno, I'd run away from it.  For this page I mostly wanted to draw something that was kinda silly but unpleasant to look at.  There's an element to the game that would explain where this kind of creature would come from but I'll let that stay a secret of the game for now.  In this strip it's an L-shaped thing with long hands pursuing ambitions we can only imagine.

#023: This is one of those pages which I think is only funny to me but that's part of the fun of these minis I guess.  For these minis I'd been trying to cycle through which characters are either central or lead characters- in the comic it leans heavily on Lizzie and Alice, and I have a lot of strips written with those two in mind because they work together so well, but these comics are also a way to let all characters have some central focus so when we get our game demo out people can pick out their favorite character and have a lot more media stuff around them.  Anyways, this is one of the handful of strips so far that features the whole crew together.  I've done musician cameos in the main comic before- page 517 has Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and Johnny Cash hanging out together- but I thought just selling one as a really corny sort of saturday morning cartoon cameo would be funny.  I'm a big White Zombie fan and I think Rob Zombie is an interesting looking performer so I thought he'd be a good fit for the role to deliver a classic "yeah".  Fun fact: the word "zombie" has not been used once in 13 years of Dead Winter, the word is never mentioned anywhere.  This is probably the first and only time it'll be written in a comic, and only because it's someone's name.

That's it for this week's batch.  I'm probably going to do a couple more this week before starting the next comic page.  I have a gamedev post to go up after this as well so games friends keep an eye out for that.  Thank you again, as always, for sticking with me through these rough times.  Be well out there, and I'll have more to share next week.