Comic Report #71 - Reunion (Patreon)

Hello again!  It's been about a day since my previous page went up, and I've met my personal challenge to get the next page sketched in time for today's write-up!  Some of the panels are a bit fast and loose but I got what I needed blocked in so I can just start pushing forward on this page.  So anyways, let's jump into it!

It's been a little while since Lizzie and Monday have had a one-on-one interaction with each other.  Throughout the comic they've had a conflicting relationship- they have diametrically opposite moral codes and so they're not fans of doing things each other's way.  They did depend on each other to pull the team through mortal danger when they were out in the streets, but now that they're mostly settled in the safe haven of Tombstone so there's less pressure on them to compromise and work together.

In the first panel I wanted to try to draw Lizzie looking like she's doing her best attempt at a slick undercover spy, taking a casual pose while she talks to Monday while surveying the rest of the diner to be sure no one was within earshot.  One of the details I find I really like to incorporate in my comics is when I have perspective shots like this, I like to bend the receding lines, like you can see on the walls here.  Straight lines can be a bit boring, you know exactly where they're going, so I find a subtle curved line to be more interesting.  Also, I feel like when you scan your eyes around a page having perspective slightly different in different spots makes a space feel more three-dimensional, like if you're looking to the peripheral near the frame of the camera you would see the details there more from the side than what you're seeing deeper at the end of the shot.  It's a little detail I think is worth pointing out.

The second shot on the page up at the top is there as a sort of detail reveal- when Lizzie is talking to Monday with her hand propped up like that, he notices she isn't wearing her engagement ring anymore.  Lizzie hasn't had it drawn on her finger in perhaps the past hundred pages or so, and it's a small enough detail that a casual reader may not have picked up on it, but Monday's observant so he's the one who would pick up on something like that in the comic.  I'm probably going to end up animating this page to make that indicator detail a bit more clear with a small flash.

Including the shot with her ring is somewhat important for this scene since Lizzie is looking for Monday to find information on someone for her- the Ethel Mulgrave she found in her book.  Monday has been following her up to this point because she was leading him to her parents, but he also knows she had a fiance she was looking for.  When she asks for his help he presses her on that detail, since Trevor's been a non-factor for a long time.  The gist of this conversation is tying up a few loose ends, capping off with Monday pressing a seemingly obvious point that Lizzie seems to have been a bit boneheaded to pick up on.

I expect this page shouldn't take too long to ink and paint, since a lot of the shots are angled to face the side wall they should be really easy to paint.  With the new approach to painting I tried on the previous page I think I can come real close to finishing this page by next weekend sometime, or like next Monday by the latest.  I feel like I'm hitting a groove now so I should be able to put out pages quicker than I have been, but let's see if that actually pans out or not.  Until then, thanks for reading!   Take care and be well out there.