Comic Report #74 - Breakfast Crowd (Patreon)

Hello again!  Today I've got the sketch phase of the first new comic page of 2021 to share with you!  I had a lot of fun planning and laying this one out so I'm excited to get it inked and painted!  But for now, let's hop into this week's page breakdown!

There was a bit of engineering going into laying this page out, so the top panel is wide and somewhat shorter than normal, with the top half of Monday's head going outside of the shot.  The reason for this is I actually have two major plot beats I wanted to work into this page, so I didn't need to fit them into two separate pages, and so this page has to effectively serve two punchlines.  It's a nine-panel shot, so the first four panels are planned to address one beat and the last four another beat, with panel 5 serving as the gateway point linking the two.  

This page opens up with Monday enjoying his steak sandwich.  The last page ended with Lizzie getting Lee to make one for him- she didn't really need to use her order-sensing ability on Monday, this was the order he stiffed her on back at Frank's in a flashback scene from before the zombies were a thing.  I've been having fun letting Monday's frosty emotional wall crack a bit lately, so now that he's been fed he opens up and shares some intel with Lizzie.  She was looking for him to pull records in town hall to find out who Ethel Mulgrave was, but Monday already knows in a roundabout way.  On page 598 Lou was talking his ear off about his day at work, and makes mention of his main boss, Marty Mulgrave.  Marty runs the part of Tombstone in charge of generating electricity, which can be found here on the map:

The blue square is the Jade Garden, where Lizzie and Monday currently are, and the red square is the steam electric generator.  That's Marty Mulgrave's domain.

I want to use the second panel to convey just a Lou-style torrent of information and fast facts about Marty.  Since this is a diner conversation I want to make sure I'm not just drawing the same camera shots of each character against their background wall over and over, so for this panel I want to include a bunch of background images of Lou talking happily, like Monday is reflecting on this endless stream of information keeping him up at all hours.

The next two panels, these two little triangles, are my attempt to fit two panels into one smaller space.  The way this setup works is I have two triangles- one with the wide part on the top and one with the wide part on the bottom.  I can reasonably fit a character's head into the middle of each triangle, but only one of them has the overhead space to put a word balloon.  In the left triangle Lizzie is poking Monday about how much fun he must be having sharing a place with their chatty friend Lou- her facial expression and leaning in on the table is all I really need to convey her emotions, so her body can disappear into the small point of that triangle.  The right triangle has Monday's reaction, tipping his glasses to give a rare look at his eyes.  He doesn't need to say anything so the narrow point of his triangle being overhead is fine, but since his shot is all body language having the wide base of his triangle lets him fit his whole body and sandwich.  I'd originally thought about doing this page as a sort of angled shot with either Lizzie or Monday's face in profile on one edge of the page but I felt like I was doing that shot too much, which is why I opted to find another way to sell the interaction.  The double-triangle worked out much better.

I'd mentioned how I wanted to include two story beats on this page- the next panel, the fifth one, is the glue between those two beats.  After giving Lizzie her intel and then her razzing him about his source, Monday pushes his glasses up and reminds Lizzie that her breakfast crowd is on its way.  She's technically at work and probably doesn't have a ton of time, and spent a bunch of it unexpectedly talking to Monday about her personal matters, so their time together is up and he can tell her to buzz off.  She's getting up in the next shot, with one hand reaching down to her apron.  I found myself really having a limited amount of space to work with so I needed to be efficient with my camerawork and character acting- Lizzie standing up and reaching down like that flows into her having her notepad and pen in the next paragraph of panels.  I have a habit of stretching out pages, but that's because I really like camerawork and acting to be fluid and I want to make sure each shot blends naturally into the next, which is why a little thing like having Lizzie's hand below the table on panel 6 is important in my mind, since it sets up panels 7 and 8.

The last panel is the big payoff, the second story beat of the page.  Lizzie has her intel and knows what the next stop on her mystery-solving caper is, but she has to get back to work.  She knows Monday is heading to his job in the newspaper building where Alice is, so she jots up a quick note for him to pass on to Alice when he sees her.  The jotting, tearing and presenting of the note in the last three panels are all planned to look like one fluid motion.  This beat is important since I want to weave the buildup to this story point into other important scenes, I want to make sure it doesn't just drop off and then come back later.  At the end of the page now there's A Note, which makes every other page after this a live part of this arc.  I've been thinking about how to play this out and do it right for a while, and it's going to take me a bit to draw and paint all the pages I need to make it all happen, but this is just a step in that direction to make sure the rest of the comics in between have that momentum.

This week I should be able to work towards finishing up this page.  Since this one has a lot of deep angle background shots I don't think it will go quite as fast as previous pages have, but sometimes I surprise myself so who knows!  Thank you as always for supporting my work.  Take care and be well out there.