Comic Report #105 - The Power of Friendship (Patreon)

Hello!  This week I managed to hit my gamedev milestone pretty early so I could jump right into the next page.  This works out pretty well since this page is shaping up to be fairly character dense, I don't know if that means it will be faster or slower to draw so it's good to get a jump start on it sooner than later.  

Edit: The power actually went out here in Boston as I was typing this, so I might keep this a bit shorter than otherwise.  Thank you for your patience!

Okay so, our next page after Lou meets the girls and gives them a big hug.  They are looking for him to get in contact with his boss, but Lou has his own agenda.  The major theme of this page that I want to hit is Lou proudly introducing his new friends to his old friends.  I've always felt throughout the comic that Lou was maybe the one member of the main crew whose character wasn't quite as fleshed out as the others, so I'm kinda expanding on him a bit more with this opportunity.  He's always been a real can-do team member in the early half of the comic, and he has always had a sort of awkward but endearing way of latching onto his loved ones.  Lou is very sociable, so now that he's in Tombstone and he is working with the engineering department he naturally has some new handyman friends of his own, and he would love for them to meet his girls.  Specifically, these friends have come up before:

On page 598 Lou is blabbing about his day to Monday and he talks about his friends Chops and Bobby.  We're getting to know them a bit better today.  Also, there's a third buddy mentioned on this page:

Frankie is yet to be seen, so you can look forward to meeting another Lou Friend in the pages to come.

I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to draw the first panel of this page so I just left it for later and didn't get to it in time.  For that one I want to have Lou talking to Lizzie and Alice and being proud of them, but I need to think of a good camera angle for it.  A lot of the rest of this page is a very from-the-side camera angle so I gotta think about how to approach this panel, but I can get to that after I put these posts up.  

To be honest, I started on panel 2 because it helped set up one of the funny little actions I really wanted to draw here.  Lou is so excited about sharing his friends with his other friends that he just picks Liz up like a plank and plants her in the ground in front of Chops & Bobby.  This gesture just sits in my head so I want to put it to paper.  Lou introduces Lizzie as being "all da way from London" since that's a fun trivia fact about her that he likes, and it turns out Chops is from the UK as well.  I thought it'd be nice if Lizzie had a friend from the UK who isn't her parents to flesh out the population of Tombstone, and that also makes an intersect between Lou's friend groups.  

Right after Lizzie gets planted, Alice gets the same treatment.  Pthunk!  Alice's introduction shares the fact that she saved Lou's life, when he got grazed in the neck during the cop/army chase scene Alice was the one who stitched him back up, so he basically thinks she's a lifesaver.  Bobby makes a comment about having a doctor handy, and Alice clarifies that she's a nurse.  There is a B-side ending joke here I might stick in the alt text, but the last time someone commented on Liz coming from London they assumed Alice did too- this was when Pat was getting rescued and she clarified:

Since Alice's backstory has her heading up into the woods to go plinking with her dad she's not a city girl, she's from upstate. You can't make an "upstate New York" joke about Utica or Albany anymore for Reasons, but Alice is actually from Ithaca, New York.  It's a pretty area near New York's beautiful scenery, so it's absolutely the kind of place she would be from.  Also, I genuinely didn't know upstate New York included both an Elizabethtown and a Cooperstown, so it was probably fate that Alice would eventually find her future girlfriend.

That's where I am today.  I got a little bit of prepwork I gotta do for the gamedev post coming up so please bear with me while I hack that together.  This page shouldn't be too hard to finish but there are a bunch of characters in it so I'm just gonna do my best.  Thanks for checking in, I'll have more to share next week!