Comic Report #101 - Table Talk

Hello!  This week I put a bit of time into getting some gamedev tasks in the can but I also wanted to get the next page started, since it sets up a fun new scene in the story.  The big page 600 reveal was that these knuckleheads have moved to Tombstone, but since then we took a couple little detours to wrap up a few other loose ends, but now it's time to check in on the crew and integrate them into the neighborhood.

This page is fairly rough at the moment because I want to block in the camerawork and the character positions first.  There's going to be a lot of details I want to coordinate so I need to make sure all my positions are in place from the start.  I hadn't got to drawing the first panel just yet, but it's Lee handing off some food orders to Lizzie.  I haven't decided exactly what everyone is ordering, but I'm gonna need to draw it here, so I saved this panel for later.

Panel two is the big hook of the page- the Omnimart crew are sitting in one of the diner booths we've seen quite a few times by now.  Lizzie is absolutely riding the high of getting a kiss from her girlfriend a few pages back, and now she gets to see all her friends here at work again!  One of the overarching threads of Lizzie's story is she came to Tombstone looking for her family, and while it wasn't exactly what she had in mind that is essentially what she's finding here.  She was also the one who told Deputy Mayor Maria about the Omnimart crew so there's a little spark of a good feeling about being responsible for bringing them into town this way.  It's all just good vibes on this page.

The middle quadrant of panels are there for a review of where everyone gets to fit into Tombstone.  While Lizzie and her crew had fairly direct connections from their pre-Tombstone jobs to now, the Omnimart crew are coming in from a big box store and they get to share a bit more of their skills than that sort of environment would otherwise allow.  Amy and Melody, for example, landed a job as town stylists.  They'll get to spruce up the barber shop that all the old blues singers were sitting in front of, down at the corner across from the pizza place.  This is reflected in minicomic #071!  

Meanwhile, Clark heard there's an armory and wanted to get a job working there.  He ends up landing the job as Randy's assistant but the thing Randy tells him to do is go outside and sweep up all the brass that has been laying in the streets.  Clark doesn't seem happy about this but Melody thinks it will keep him out of trouble so she's quite happy with the arrangement.  Like in minicomic #063, he thinks this sort of work is a lot more cinematic than it is, and he gets cranky when he learns how plain actual helpful work can be.

Dale worked in receiving at the Omnimart, managing the unloading of trucks and the storage of merchandise in the back, so with his credentials Marcus Malloy made him the quartermaster of Tombstone, put in charge of managing the warehouse.  The warehouse has come up briefly a few times, like in panel 2 of mini #041, as well as panel 1 of #618.  Since Dale is the new quartermaster, that implies there was an old quartermaster who no longer has this job; that would be Mr. Pibbsly, who features in minicomic #076, first losing his sandwich shop duties to the Leung family and now losing the role of quartermaster to Dale.  Poor old man.

For the last panel I wanted to tie up all the good family vibes.  Lizzie is happy to have such a full life, to have her friends here in town and her girlfriend waiting for her after she clocks out from work.  Things haven't been great for her long-term, but in the moment they're going pretty alright, and she's enjoying it.  Even when times are hard, life is still good.

That's it for this week.  I've got to focus to flesh out the pencil details a lot more before I can begin inking this one, so we'll see how far I can get by next week.  I'll be typing up a gamedev post next so keep an eye out for that as well.