Comic Report #73 - Back On Track (Patreon)

Hello again!  Today's a bit of a late edition, thank you for your patience.  I've got the sketch phase of a new page ready for you, so it's time to expand a bit on the storyline!

The last few pages have been a bit of a segue to address an important issue and set up future interactions, but "I think I might actually be in love with this person" wasn't the issue Lizzie was seeking Monday's help with.  She has a name from a book she found in a bus where an old lady spotted someone shifting about at night and told the boy who she'd rescued from a building full of the undead and brought safely back to Tombstone in the first place.  She has no idea who Ethel Mulgrave is, but she knows Monday's job assignment involved the city's records so he's her ticket to chasing the lead in her "who shot the sheriff" mystery case.  Astute readers may pick out that Monday already knows something about the name "Mulgrave", but the trick is getting that out of him.

The start of the page is a segue from the previous page to this one, where Lizzie is still contemplating her revelation, before just getting down to business.  When I want to make a segue on a page like this I need to make sure it doesn't take up too much panel space, just enough to hook into the end of the previous page and get the ball rolling on this one- it takes me a bit of time to get my pages painted but I always prioritize an archival read over an immediate post-to-post read, since I think that is the bulk of how my work is going to be read, in general, that's the format I aim for.

The second paragraph here is a nice wide panel. When I draw comics I know the "feel" of what I want a page to do and I plan all the action and camerawork to flow organically, but I don't have the specific dialogue written out until after I post the textless page on here.  The reason for this is because I prefer not to cover up my main character subjects with word balloons so I'll use my internal thesaurus to reword ideas in a way that physically fits into the space around my characters.  So like for this second paragraph panel you can see I have Lizzie on one side, Monday on the other and a bunch of space in between that I could conceivably fill with little sentence chunks, but those chunks will be about how no, I'm not looking for Trevor, I'm looking for an Ethel Mulgrave instead.  

In the next paragraph I've got the set-up for the page's big payoff- Lizzie puts the job to Monday and Monday is like, okay, what's in it for me?  He just helped her with one problem, why would he help her again?  When the scene opened up Lizzie zipped over to whisper something to Lee before she scooted over to see Monday at the booth.  So now after a bit of talking he's arriving with a plate of something.  So in the following panels he interjects and slides over one steak sandwich, on the house.  The steak sandwich is the order Monday placed in a flashback at Frank's diner, which Lizzie made him pay for on page 300.  Lizzie's special trick of knowing someone's order by glance plays out here and she and Lee deliver him a free meal that he actually likes and it sort of catches him off-guard, the way he caught Lizzie off-guard the page before.  That's sort of just the punchline of this strip, which would lead into a more successfully-negotiated outcome on the next page.  I like to depict Lizzie with a friendly and healthy work environment, so her teaming up with Lee is a fun extension of that.

That's it for now, this week I'm gonna try to ink and paint as much as I can to get this page going, since I think the pages after it will be a lot of fun.  Thanks again for your patience with me.  Take care and be well out there.