Comic Report #72 - Lizzie and Alice (Patreon)

Hello again!  This has been a busy week but I managed to get the next page started, so I've got that to share with you today.  This one's got a bit of weight behind it so there's a lot for me to talk about, so I'm gonna jump right into it.

Over the course of however many pages I've spent a lot of time setting up Tombstone as a place the characters live and established a bunch of new characters and new threads, so for this scene I wanted to tie up some loose ends with older characters or older threads.  A lot of Lizzie's motivation in running around the world of undead is trying to reunite with her family and her loved ones, specifically her mom, her dad and her fiance Trevor.  In the pursuit of those ends she has made a bunch of new friends, specifically Lou, Monday and Alice.  This complicates things in a way she hasn't fully considered until now.

Here is a secret: years ago when I originally started working on Dead Winter I had a lot of ideas on what kind of story it could have been, and one of the original ideas was Alice and Officer Bradley help pull Lizzie out of her car wreck, set her up on this path and then they would both have been lost in the escape attempt from the house.  Alice ended up being way too fun to write so I realized very quickly that this was a bad idea, and so that was the origin of Lizzie and Alice as an inseparable duo, forged in that particular crucible.  Alice started out showing some affection for Officer Bradley, wearing his hat for a while after their escape, just like Lizzie started out with her affection for Trevor by way of the ring on her finger she'd been wearing for much of the comic.  So they both started out this story with some other separated loved ones and found themselves embarking on this journey together, saving one another's lives almost in turns, and they ended up developing a sort of bond I honestly didn't plan from the outset- it's one of those things in writing where you follow this organic flow and things just happen, but it brings us to where we currently stand.

Lizzie and Monday have an antagonistic relationship, they don't like each other or their mirror philosophies but they're both working together towards the common goal of reuniting with Nigel Cooper, Lizzie's father, though for wildly different reasons.  Monday is a cold and very direct person, so in trying to deal with the Lizzie and Alice question I thought it would be good to route it through him, since he doesn't put up with bullshit whatsoever.  It'd also be a good way to expand his character a bit, like he's cold but he's not isolated, he's observant and practical- his interest isn't in Lizzie's well-being, but rather trying to press some layer of wishy-washiness out of her.

The question of Lizzie and Alice has been looming over the comic for a long time.  To be honest I never really directly addressed it head-on because I was afraid of ruining the bond they had- they work together like a couple who had been married for a decade already, with that kind of ease and confidence in one another, I wanted to maintain this thing they organically developed together.  I also had this feeling like, my work has never been super popular so I didn't want anyone to think exploring that was some attempt at getting attention.  I wanted to address the thread regardless, so the approach I decided on was a case review of the facts of the past with Monday.

Starting out the page, in the first panel I wanted to have a continuation from the previous page's dialogue, where it left off with Monday accusing Lizzie of being unfair to Alice.  I used a bending camera lens here so I could get a head-on shot of both sides of the diner table while leaving enough space in-between for words to exist.  I've used this technique a few times in the past where the panel border between two shots took up too much space so I freed up that real estate by blending the two panels into one.  Like if you just look at either half of the panel individually,

and

.. you can see both of the "panels" work on their own.  The way the bending camera works is that your eyes fixate on a single focal point, and all the context around that one point is viewed in relation to where you're looking.  You have to deliberately step back and see the whole panel as one bendy thing, but when you naturally read it you're scanning the left side, the middle or the right on its own, and in that context they all look like correct camera shots, blended together to flow from point to point.

The next row of panels is my "making the case" paragraph.  Monday makes a point of referencing two specific events; the first time they ran into each other back on page 106, where Alice was carrying a wounded Lizzie to safety:

... and a moment on page 380, where Lizzie jumped in front of Arlen's gun after Alice's appeal took a bad turn, the moment where they both got the notch in their ears from the same bullet:

These moments both mark the beginning and climax point of their journey together and also highlights the nature of their relationship, where Alice keeps Lizzie on her feet and Lizzie keeps Alice safe from harm.  The next panel down, the head-on shot of Monday, is presenting the strength of this bond in the context of, and you're going to ask this woman to help you find, who?  Trevor has been an absent figure throughout the entire comic, through multiple brushes with death and he's only really existed as a voice on a cellphone.  Meanwhile you and Alice have been through all of this together, you are willing to go to these lengths for each other and you're still going to treat -who- as your lost loved one?  That's the case on the table.

The penultimate row of panels is the dawning awareness shots.  Lizzie is trying to stand her ground against that accusation of being unfair to Alice in the context that she loves her dearly, -but- they're just friends, and in trying to form that sentence her brain clicks and she realizes that she hasn't been fair, she'd been lost in her own headspace pursuing her goals and she's been too boneheaded to realize the full scope of what her bond with Alice meant.  Alice had left Officer Bradley at the old house but Lizzie was still hanging on to Trevor- at least subconsciously- when there's really no other person still alive in the world who has a stronger bond with her than the woman who pulled her out of a car wreck, patched her up and won her heart enough that she'd take a bullet for her.  Monday isn't telling her directly but rather setting up the context and letting her fill in the missing piece, and that last row of panels is where it clicks.

The last panel is the resolution to this moment.  Lizzie's realizing where on the divide between love and in-love she currently stands and is reflecting on how she had overlooked something like that, and Monday is giving her a last little nudge of, you have to tell her. You can't let her guess or assume, you have to make it clear.  No more bullshit.  

I really like how that last panel came out. It's doing the same thing I did in panel one where I needed space to fit dialogue so I adapted an abstract camera position, but this one has the camera on the table pointing up between the two, and I just really like the effect it has. I'm real excited to get that one inked and painted.

This one's been a bit of a long write-up but given the nature of the moment I think it's good to just put it all down into words.  There's a few panels in this comic so it might take me a bit to get it all inked and painted, but it shouldn't be too much longer to get it ready to post.  Thanks as always for supporting my work, take care and be safe out there.