Comic Report #116 - Plan of Attack (Patreon)

Hello!  It's about the middle of the month so it's time for me to get back on track and push forward on the next comic page.  We got a lot of work done in a big gamedev push but a lot of it was sort of invisible, under-the-hood stuff, with a new long-awaited thing we might be able to wrap up in this coming week cycle.  I started work coloring Alice's sprites but I will save that for next week's update in a more complete package with the new thing we're bolting together.  It's a bit hot this week and I'm feeling somewhat lethargic so I'm gonna try to blast through this update and get back to drawing things.  Typing in this heat ain't a lot of fun, but it's gotta get done.

Okay so last week we checked in on our friend Pat, who'd been enlisted by the leader of the Tombstone Gravekeepers to do a favor for the Mayor and earn his place on the team.  That favor is to make one of Monday's friends disappear, using a still-snappy zombie head in a bag, as a way to let Monday know that if he makes a move on his own plans that his friends can be reached anywhere at any time.  That Monday has friends at all is a remarkable evolution of his character, but they do represent a new vulnerability to him as a guy who visits unkindness upon wealthier guys.  

In the first panel of this page Pat points out the obvious:  isn't using a zombie bite to make them turn and set them up to be cleaned up the next day a bit convoluted?  Why go through all that trouble?  Many of us are probably asking this question as well.  In the next panel Pat's handler clears things up:  if you just up and pop someone, that raises questions as to who done it and people start snooping around.  If someone gets sick, well, people just assume that's their own fault and don't really examine what conditions caused them to become sick.  It's not the Mayor ordering harm to befall a townsperson, it's an outsider who just showed up a few days prior revealing they were infected the whole time, and people would thank the Gravekeepers for taking care of them.  That's how the Gravekeepers handle their internal affairs, in a manner as big and overwrought as their preferred weapons of choice.

That sort of roundabouts back to the original question Pat's handler put to him:  which one of Monday's friends do you pick to be the messenger?  They've seen him talking to those new girls in town, right?  They had a whole conversation in the diner today.  They're probably easy pickins, right?  Pat doesn't agree.  Pat is afraid of Lizzie and Alice.  After meeting them and being rescued by them and having his car mistreated by them he thinks they are basically completely out of their minds and is lowkey terrified of them.  He's gonna be like, uhhh, maybe not them.

His handler concurs, and expands on his line of thinking.  In order to keep Monday in check you don't want to hit his inner circle or his closest people, you want to hit his closest people's closest people.  When the Gravekeepers rolled back into town with the Omnimart crew, there was one person in particular Monday seemed to actually talk to and like being around.  Dale is Monday's favorite guy, so picking him would probably cause more problems for the Mayor than it'd prevent, but if you get at one of Dale's friends, that tells him that we can get your favorite guy too if you don't play nice.  It works out nicely in their head, but Pat knows a little bit more about Monday and his friends than the Gravekeepers do, and if he's put increasingly on the spot like this, he's going to have to decide who he's more afraid of.  

That's it for today.  I'm gonna keep progressing on the comic towards the end of the month and I'm gonna try to juggle more gamedev progress where I can, I should have a bigger writeup on that either next week or the week after, depending on how well things progress this week.  For now, though, I'm going to sit next to a box fan and conserve as much energy as I can.  Stay comfortable out there.  I'll catch you again next week.