Comic Report #110 - Taking Inventory (Patreon)

Hello!  I got the preliminaries for the next page to share with you today.  I've been working this week to hit gamedev milestones on my two game projects and the Dead Winter one I'm excited to share because that one looks really sick. I'll be typing up something about that tonight after this article goes up so keep an eye out for that if you're a gamester.  I want to keep the comic line going though so today I'll be able to share the next little arc in the story with you.

I've got all my contextual setup out of the way so on this page we can finally dig into sussing out a lead from the clue of The Book found in one of the buses.  The overall theme of this page is "the girls return the book but they need a hook to stick around and talk a bit more so they can get a lead, instead of just dropping the book off and leaving".  The back half of this comic has been a bit of sleuthing, a bit of action, a bit of character development and then a bit more sleuthing, and we've passed through character development and back into good old-fashioned detective work.

The first panels open up with Marty checking the nameplate on the book, confirming it belongs in his collection.  The girls hit a lucky strike on this lead, since Marty reveals the books have sentimental value to him.  They belonged to his late wife, she loved to read and she had built such a collection of books, when calamity came and she went away, the books were a lasting memory of her.  He's thankful to them for returning it to him.  

As he's sharing the sentimental value of their gesture, Liz notices the post on his office wall, the Reading List.  She intuits that Marty Mulgrave has been sharing his wife's legacy collection with Tombstone, running a little private library service on the side.  He's encouraging his crew to read so he posts a little list of titles in his office, so when the boys come by they can pick a title from the list in case they don't know what to ask for.  Liz, being a writer herself, recognizes this, and uses this as a possible hook to figure out who took out Scarlet & Herringbone, and thus who might have left it in the bus.

In panel four Liz takes a shot on this lead.  She says she's a big reader herself, she inquires if townsfolk are welcome to use Marty's library service as well and if he has a bigger list of books she might recognize.  She is actually genuinely interested in having actual books to read in the apocalypse but if there's a full list Marty might also be keeping records of who has which book from his late wife's collection.  

Sure enough, upon asking her question Marty opens his desk drawer in panel five.  He mentions that he's starting the pilot program with his work crew, to get them into the habit and to keep track of his precious book collection, but since they'd been so kind as to return his book he'd be happy to let Liz into the program.  He makes a remark about some careless person being removed from the program to make room and, in the last few panels, he discovers that no one signed out that copy of Scarlet & Herringbone.  That in itself is a potent lead- who might have access to the Mulgrave household to abscond with a book like that?  We're not far from finding the truth.

That's it for this week's comic report.  I've got to get something to eat and then I'll be assembling pictures for the gamedev journal writeup to follow.  I'm gonna try to get this page done by the end of the month as a personal goal for myself to hit, so here's to posting a more complete version of the page by this time next week.  Until then, have a pleasant weekend!