Comic Report #100 - Back to the Future

It looks like today marks the 100th update since I started putting numbers on updates on this Patreon, so it's fitting that this page is sort of a special one.  I say it a lot but I always mean it, thank you sincerely for supporting this project all this time, I literally could not be working on it without you.  Now let's get down to brass tacks and talk comics, and why this one is a bit special.

If I were to sing my own praise I think one of the strengths of my comic work has been novel and interesting uses of panels.  Some pages just have a certain extra sauce to them because of the shape or theme of the panel borders, and this one is one of those pages.  This is the conclusion of our flashback segment, which began by blending Monday reading an unprinted newspaper article about a shootout in a luxury highrise in the nicer part of the city behind a foreground of some familiar old faces entering a secured building lobby. Events unfold and bring us to the previous page, which is an expanded retelling of a moment Monday was dreaming about when he was resting in an old house.  The end of that page continuing into this one extends the events of that moment a bit more, showing the rest of the hit on Monday blowing through his front door, leading up to a breakline where shotgun guy takes a shot at a diving Monday, shattering the panel borders themselves.  Below this breakline the narrative returns to the present, back to that unpublished newspaper hard copy, which is a writeup about the events unfolding above it.  Shards of the broken flashback fall around the bottom half of the paper, reflecting scattered moments from the frantic and sudden gunfight as it unfolds, before we get to the bottom row of panels and normal time fully resumes.  I think it's a pretty cool page layout.

A major concern of mine going into this flashback was how to handle the roaring gunfight.  Early on in the comic, like in the early days where this scene originally took place, I might not have had a second thought about rendering it in gory detail but as I grew as an artist and as this project matured it turns out that's not really the correct tone for the comic.  It is still a comic where people meet unfortunate ends but I can be more tasteful or creative with how I portray those ends, and so we find out why the guy with the dualies was designed with a big hat.  When I publish this page I will probably use the second panel as the thumbnail, since the first one is sort of a very sudden release of anticipating from the end of the previous page, where the gentleman bursts through the door thinking they got Monday and he fell backwards away from the door, when he was in fact on the side.  To render him getting popped in the noodle I am planning to evoke shattered glass again, a theme on this page.  I have the background shattered and cracked behind him, and I plan to color his head as a dark silhouette with the back shattered like glass as well, no blood or brains or gory details; the effect is implied but we don't have our noses rubbed in it, which I think is the best way to handle Dead Winter fights.  The hat flies up in the air like an old western, implying the terminal head shot.

The sketch phase is a bit rough this week because it's going to take me a bit more work to get all the action shots just right, and there should be a bit more work done between now and when this page is finished.  There are some perspective and action choreographing I need to refine on the concept: shotgun follows in the door behind dualies, calls out Monday on the right, and tommygun rips a line through the wall, which Monday has to duck.  He then dives behind his couch as shotgun fires at him, and the shattered panel pieces show the rest of the fight in frantic little moments which I still need to work out.  Right now its "you get the idea" stage.

The top half serves to round out the revision of the early scene of the comic, which I was nervous about approaching at first but which I'm more happy about now that I'm at the end.  I think the recontextualizing makes the scenes fit together better and overall improves that aspect of the story, so mission successful.  The bottom half of this page serves a different purpose, like why we went back to that scene in the first place.  The whole chapter opened with Mayor Richardson yelling on the phone because the guy who has been hunting his network is now working in his building and he wants him dealt with discretely, since the Sheriff is already dead and he doesn't need more heat on him, he is locked out of dealing with Monday more permanently without blowing up his whole situation as the mayor of Tombstone.  Monday was then seen snooping around in the records room, finding a particular article about the shootout in that midtown highrise.  We know now that this was a newspaper article that was meant to be published just as the zombies hit, and it was about the attempt on his life.  The punchline here is the little yellow post-it note at the bottom of the article, implied in the beginning by a "See attached" mark at the top of the article.  I have to work out the specific wording but the gist of it is, "we don't need to publish shock scare pieces, our paper is better than that".  There is an attempt on Monday's life and Mayor Richardson had left a little note on a hard copy of the article about the aftermath of that attempt, saying to keep it out of print.  The scene builds on Monday selling himself to job coordinator Marcus Malloy as a *clerk* specifically-

-- to get access to the records room so he has a clean cover to find evidence of how Mayor Richardson used his leverage as the owner of the city newspaper to disappear him informationally after the attempt was made to disappear him mortally.  He folds up the hard copy and tucks it into his suit jacket for later.  The little pieces start to fit together.

There's a fair bit of work I need to do on these pencils but I should have a bit more for you for next week.  I do want to wrap up Lizzie's initial game art colorization so I'm gonna focus on that this weekend, since I sidelined it a bit to get this most recent page finished.  I am happy to finally almost have this whole scene in the archives, and I'm excited to move on to the next scenes.  Thanks for reading, and have a nice weekend!