Comic Report #109 - The Book (Patreon)

Hello again!  Today I've got an early look at the next comic page to share with you.  I put a lot of focus on getting a gamedev task completed this week so the page sketch is a somewhat skeletal state at the moment.  The framework is there so I can show you what I'm going for, so let's hop into that.

The opening panel of this page is probably the clearest of all because I knew exactly the kind of visual joke I wanted to stick in there.  The first shot is Lou knocking on the doorframe to Marty Mulgrave's office, but I had it planned as a shot with Liz and Alice kinda standing behind him, but it's better if while he's setting up to introduce them they get to sneak another kiss in, just kinda back there in the background.  They're having a great time.  Anyways that's panel one.

Panel two pulls back from the doorframe to introduce Marty and the cramped scale of his little trailer office.  I'm thinking of drawing influence on this one from the little mechanic's office at my old job when I started working on this comic, so lots of metal filing cabinets and little shelves full of thick-spine binders.  "Cramped" is the overall adjective I'm aiming for in this scene, so I'm gonna have to do a bit more 3D planning before I can really hack out all my camera angles, which partly explains the sparsity of the panels to follow.

A fun note about Marty's design, but I'd secretly already introduced him in the minicomics era.  Here he is in Minicomic #036: 

One of my goals on this page is to upscale this minicomic-style design into a whole actual person with a nose and everything.  I've been leaning kinda heavy on the bean-eyed characters so I might switch that up, but overall he's got that kinda shaggy hair with a particular cut of mustache and hashline hair on his forearms.  So we're meeting Marty but we've sorta met Marty, sometime in the future from the past.  I'm curious to see if a non-Patreon person picks up on that detail.

The rest of the page to follow is mostly just blocked in, but the aim of it is Lou, having linked up the girls with his boss, excuses himself to go meet up with Chops & Bobby again, so be sure to wave goodbye to Lou before he exits the scene!  The remainder of the page is Marty inquiring as to what he could do for Liz and Alice, and then Alice produces the book, the clue to the Sheriff's murder, Scarlet & Herringbone, offering it to Marty, saying they found it and are returning it.  This will set up the next page and we'll finally get to learn a little bit about why this book was under a seat in one of the buses just outside the Sheriff's house.  After all this time I can finally pull that hook in.

That's it for comics for now.  I'll have a gamedev post coming up after this article so stick around for that.  I should have the inks and at least the flats done for this page by this time next week but I would like to put a bit more time into the current gamedev task before I sink back into full comics mode, so please bear with me on that.  Thanks as always for sticking with me on these long projects.  Until next time, have a lovely weekend!