Comic Report #106.1 - Former or Ladder (Patreon)

Hello again!  This week I've got some comic progress to share with you.  Thank you for your patience on this one, I'd been chipping away at some gamedev tasks the past few weeks and I'd just been focusing on the one thing instead of splitting my time up, but I'm very close to wrapping up that milestone so I can just focus on this task.  I expect this page should be ready to read in the coming week, there isn't any particular background detail that should be too egregious to paint and there aren't quite as many bodies in each panel as the previous page.  But for now, here's a bit about where I'm at.

This page involves a lot of walking through Tombstone so I'll be consulting reference shots from previous pages to make sure I get the right buildings where they should be.  I go to lengths to try to keep the city's layout consistent so on any given readthrough of the comic the reader can build a sense of where they are in the world, and the town itself can be as much a character participating in a scene as anyone else.  Doing this involves a lot of archive diving, but thankfully Dead Winter's archive system is super easy to navigate so it's pretty simple to pinpoint a previous scene I've drawn looking down an angle of street that shows the building faces I'm looking for.  Some areas are genuine gaps that I haven't drawn yet so I can do with a bit of making things up, but this particular stretch of road is where the Jade Garden is so I've drawn it extensively already, there's plenty to reference.  

The new part is going to be the very last panel, where Lou is guiding the girls into the power plant area of town.  I've drawn the crane and the warehouse in this area in background shots of other pages but I haven't dug all the way in to it yet, so I'm expecting to have a lot of fun with it in the coming page or so.  I've drawn a close-up shot of the big steam-electric generator and there's a few shipping crates in the area, but I'll be expanding on the kind of workshop yard aesthetic on the next page to come.  On this page I can imply things to come from the last shot in front of the gates.

There's one little detail on this page that I want to try and get just right for it to parse clearly.  On panel four Lou checks his wristwatch, I thought it'd be funny if he had an actual classic-style calculator watch, with the black rubber strap and all the buttons on the face.  It's at an odd angle to really show this but I have one row of buttons sticking up in front of his other wrist.  If I should fail in making this calculator watch parseable please know what I was going for.

That's it for today.  I have a gamedev writeup coming up after this post goes up so game friends please stick around for that.  I'm probably going to take Saturday to wrap up my work on Alice's attack animations and then shift back to comics until the page is ready, so expect to see the textless page post before next Friday's report.  Thanks as always for sticking with me on this project!  I'll be back sooner than later.