Comic Report #116.1 - The Middle Pages (Patreon)

Hello again!  I've got a double writeup to share this week, for comics and for gamedev progress.  I had planned to shift more into comic stuff earlier but honestly I spent the week feeling a bit sluggish in the heat, so I just did what my brain was already in the headspace to do.  I got comic progress up to the paint and finalize phases, but I didn't get a chance to start painting in the panels yet.  I'm still planning to get it finished by the end of the month, I just needed to make it through the bulk of this heatwave intact.  Drink lots of water and stay cool!  Rest and conserve your energy.  We'll get the work done on time, we just gotta keep ourselves in good condition to make it over the finish line.

This page is one of those occasional pages I hit which I tend to think of as the "middle pages".  Over the course of the comic I try to maintain a kind of action pulse that has high and low points of action, with the low points being needed to set up the high points.  Pages like this one are somewhere in the middle of those points, and while I feel like I need them to make the overall comic work, I do feel like I need to push through them a little bit in order to get to drawing the juicy parts I'm looking forward to further down the line.  But for now, though, we set that scene up so when we get there it can play out properly.

There are a few things I want to establish with these pages where I don't just skip over them.  Firstly is I want to have a closer look at how the Gravekeepers perceive their fellow townsfolk.  They occupy a position of trust and power within the Mayor's authority and they find townsfolk- newcomers in particular- as expendable in the maintenance of their position.  The other is to put Pat in a bit of an extreme position.  He's always aspired to celebrated heroism and following his stellar performance against a gang of three Hornets outside the town walls he'd been adopted by the Cool Kids of Tombstone, but now they're asking him to do something reprehensible to people he kinda sorta knows.  He's where he thought he wanted to be, but he finds himself at the edge of his moral boundaries and sort of stuck between a rock and another rock, and unlike his situation at that office building no one's coming to save him.  He's gonna have to figure something out on his own, and quick.  

This week looks to be a bit cooler so I expect I should make a lot more progress painting up the final phases of this page so I can get it posted and move on to the next one.  Thanks for your patience with my work, I should have something good to share next Friday.  Until then, have a nice weekend!