Comic Report #103 - Here He Is!

Today's a big day! It's been a hot minute since we've seen Lou in the comics, but now it's time for him to make his big return!  He's also the focus of my game development efforts at the moment as well so July is essentially The Month of Lou.  Let's just get right into it then.

Out of the whole crew Lou probably has the most important job of all- his practical repair and mechanical adaptation skills are a perfect fit for Tombstone's growing needs as a long-term home for survivors.  With his friends Chops and Bobby- who he was talking about to Monday at night on page 598- he's currently wiring the Omni-Mart's refrigerated trailer into the town's makeshift electrical grid.  This is extremely useful long-term, because it means they can store all kinds of perishable things for a longer period of time, above and beyond the influx of stuff the Omni-Mart crew brought with them.  Lou's got designs on building a water wheel to supplement the electrical output of the steam generator, and he actually gets to start doing this in minicomic 036, but today he's wiring the grid into a transformer wired to the trailer's refrigeration unit so it can run indefinitely.  Good ol' Lou!

When I gotta add new characters I like to try to pull from some prior hook I left to keep them more contained in the world.  This isn't always possible, but when coming up with some friends and workmates for Lou this was really easy.  I imagined the electrical crew in Tombstone to be like the dance competition guys from American Astronaut, that sort of aesthetic, so in my top-secret thumbnails document I did a quick sketch of "Chops and Bobby".

Rough men with good hearts clad in reinforced sweaters and big thick suspenders.  There's a bunch of them in town but Lou needs himself some henchmen and here they are.  We'll get to learn more about them very shortly.  

Liz and Alice have been on their own little quest, (inhales) starting with Liz snooping around the diner for clues to who murdered the sheriff, then her finding Pat who has been given local hero status for taking credit in saving Liz and Alice both, who says that one of the old ladies asked him to look into a disturbance she saw by the schoolbus wall the night of the sheriff's murder, which Pat is nervous about looking into because the last time he crawled in a window he got stuck, to Liz recruiting Alice into her secret mission to Alice providing cover fire from the roof while Liz sneaks into the bus to find an old book with a name in it, to Liz and Alice fighting three Hornets and a bunch of zombies, to Liz confronting Monday who has a job in records to find out who "Ethel Mulgrave" is, who Monday could already identify as being related to Marty Mulgrave, who is Lou's boss, which Monday knows because of Lou's energetic late-night story session, who is now the next point in Liz and Alice's quest to find out who killed the sheriff for the deputy mayor (exhales).  In short, they gotta go see Lou's boss about returning a lost book so the next logical thing is to go pay Lou a visit.  Simple, right?

Lou hasn't really seen either of the girls since they got their jobs and met at the diner, and then again when the Omni-Mart rolled through, so he's excited to see his people again.  So when Chops is like hey your friends are here and he looks over, he gets looped in to the new turn of events that happened over lunch, which itself sets up a warm reception in the pages to come.

Nothing on this page looks particularly difficult to paint so I think I should have a fairly easy time getting it done.  Barring any surprises I should have a considerable bit of progress made for next week, so we'll see where that lands by then.  I've got a gamedev bit to report after this so stick around a bit for that to come up.