Comic Report #115 - Peer Pressure (Patreon)

This week I got a bit of gamedev and a bit of comic work done, preparing the foundation of the next page and a new scene in the comic.  It's always fun to shift into a new scene in the comic, pulling out new characters and new settings to set up and draw, so since that's where we are today I'll go over a little bit of my planning for the stage I'm preparing to set.

Given the timeframe in which I can reasonably make comic pages things tend to move a little slower than I like, so sometimes when I shift a scene back to a certain thread I'd been building people might forget who or what everyone was, so I gotta accommodate this and pot reminders into the work.  This next scene follows a thread of events that began at the very start of this chapter, with the Mayor yelling over a secure radio to Nate Mulgrave.

The Mayor had become aware of Monday's presence not just in his town, but in his office, working very close to his own seat of power, and he knows exactly what Monday's intentions are regarding him and his friends.

The Sheriff just turned up dead following a dispute with the Mayor at the Jade Garden restaurant, so the Mayor can't afford the direct answer of simply evicting Monday from this mortal coil, he has to coexist with this particular man and somehow wrangle his particular intentions into submission.  Fortunately he's got a small cadre of tough guys to make persuasive arguments for him.

The Gravekeepers have a mixed reputation as Tombstone's safe-keepers, led by one Nate Mulgrave, aka Snake-Eye.  The Mayor has a problem and he wants his Gravekeepers to solve it, right now, so he's on the horn with Nate telling him, you can't kill this guy, but do Your Thing and convince him that the choices he makes have reprecussions and that he is not unreachable.  Normally this wouldn't work on a guy like Monday, who his a very lonesome person, but things have changed since the start of the comic and now he has friends. 

Whether he'd admit to it or not, Monday has people whose well-being are a concern to him now, and that's a vector by which Mayor Richardson can get to him.  He isn't just one guy in an apartment now, he's a network of friends who aren't all cutthroats and killers, so in a brand new way, he's vulnerable.  If you rock the Mayor's boat, his Gravekeepers can reach your new friends.  Any one of them can.  And there's one Gravekeeper in particular who has yet to fully secure their place within the group.

Why, it's our boy Pat!  The squishy, nervous aspiring adventurer who has been given credit for rescuing Lizzie and Alice and has also earned acclaim as the guy who beat three Harbor City Hornets and a horde of undead into submission outside the Tombstone city walls.  He undoubtedly has what it takes to be a Gravekeeper, all he has to do is one little thing for Nate and the Mayor to seal the deal and make himself a core member of the team: pick out one of Monday's friends and put the hurt on 'em.  That's easy, right?

So now Pat is in a difficult spot, knowing fully well what "Monday's friends" are capable of, while also still being not openly antagonistic towards them, and that brings us to today.  Pat and one of the other recurring Gravekeeper hangers-on are staked out on a rooftop watching people in Tombstone, looking for particular people, finding their routes and picking which one of their potential targets is in for a surprise.

The actual rooftop they're hiding on has been planned for a little bit, it's the spot in Tombstone where the Leung family keep a rooftop vegetable garden.  While this scene is about Pat and his moral conundrum, it is also partly a way to show off the secret vegetables of Tombstone hidden above everyone's heads.  They have water from the river, they have electricity, they have gardens.  It's a nice community- shame about the guy in charge of it.  I wonder how that will be resolved, hmmm!

That's what I got for you today.  Since it's the back half of the month I'm gonna shift focus back to making sure I can get a comic page finished before the 1st of the next month, that feels like a regular and sustainable rhythm for me to hit.  Thanks for checking in!  I should have another post coming up after this one, so stick around if you're into the game posts.  Otherwise, have a nice weekend!