Comic Report #23 - The Great Outdoors (Patreon)

Since we spent all month in February making not-comics I wanted to focus entirely on comics for at least two pages before I start making more game assets again, to keep that ball rolling.  Last week's update was our ECCC game demos, and in the meantime I've been working on the next comic page, which you can see here! When I focus on things that aren't the comic I always get afraid that people think I abandoned the comic, but I keep writing them and I keep making them.

I have a couple scenes lined up and most of them are interiors, but this page sort of bridges one scene to the next so I have to go outside with it.  I may have mentioned before but exterior shots are always a big pain for me, especially as a painterly cartoonist, because I need to make sure specific buildings are in a specific order and they're in perspective going as far back to the horizon as the camera allows.  It's so much easier to just paint a wall or a corner than it is to paint a whole bunch of buildings, but it's a necessary labor to keep the world a relevant part of my comic- I don't think my art would have the same effect if I just substituted backgrounds with gradient panels, or maybe the fidelity of the art is too high for that to work.  Either way, it is what it is and I'm going to keep doing it, because I believe that even though it takes me a lot of time, in the long run it makes a more impressive comic.

When I plotted out this page I wasn't entirely sure what route I'd have the characters walk to get to where they're going. The whole city is mapped out and there's probably three or four routes you can take to go from the left side to the right side, so instead of fussing over it I just blocked in generic building shapes and said, I'll figure it out later.  Where I ended up going was putting Lizzie and Alice's home in the left side background of their walking-together shot, which meant they're heading towards the river. Instead of going down by the shore where I had Lou and Monday walk earlier, I'm gonna cut them through the side road where Lou and Monday's home is, since I don't think I've really highlighted that stretch of road yet.  Ultimately they bang a left and head up the street towards the newspaper building, and that's how I can get Lizzie entering the restaurant on the left side of the page with Alice heading away into the distance, towards where the medical facility is, and that works out to be how I'll paint the backgrounds on this page.  It's only like five exterior panels but I try to think about the momentum and the fluidity of my cameras, and that guides a lot of how I design my comic pages.

Anyways I'm gonna get back to work on this one. I had jury duty last week that sort of pushed my Patreons into the Friday realm so I'm going to post the next report on Wednesday to get back into the usual rhythm.  Thanks for your patience, and thanks for continuing to support my work!