Comic Report #19 - Shifting Scenes (Patreon)

After a blistering, uhh, handful of pages we get to meet these two again! This page is set to be a quiet page, not a lot of dialogue is spoken so I let the camera do most of the talking.  Not needing to budget a lot of space for word balloons means I can put a lot more panels on a page, and more panels means more moments to hop across like stones in a stream getting from one side to the other in a pleasant rhythm.

I'm thankful for the time I spent defining all the buildings and the town layout however many pages ago it was I made that profoundly-detailed town map for an establishing shot (pictured below, click for big):

I can look up my notes and say, okay, we're headed this way up this street, here's what those buildings look like.  The trouble I ran into on this page is, I haven't actually drawn the front faces of the buildings on the right in panel one, and it wasn't until I had a micropanic that I realized I can just make them up, the same as I've always done.  

The actual punchline of this page is a bit of a throwback. I like to call back to prior events to sort of tie together threads of consistency, but since my updates have been so consistent and spread-out this is actually calling back to a page I did years ago, so it'll be fun to see who picks up on it.  If it encourages a re-read of the archive, well, that's never a bad thing, and at 555 pages it isn't really that long.

Over the course of the comic I realize I like to tie scenes to the passing day and night, and I think part of me finds those to be very human moments. The meat of the day is action, events, plot or whatever, but gearing up or winding down  gives characters a quiet window to be people and to live and breathe, and I think it's important to have those moments in a work so your characters don't exist strictly as avatars of their base concepts.  You can put humanizing moments anywhere, I think I happen to stick them around sleep- I guess it fits scene transitions and story beats as well.  

I'm gonna switch back to gamedev this week, then next week it's paint and lighting time!  Thanks for sticking with me.