Comic Report #98 - The Plan

It's been a pretty busy week this week, especially considering the last comic page went up just at the end of the weekend.  I've got a lot to share, both here and in a gamedev post to follow, so if you're a gamedev patron keep an eye out for that as well!  But for now I'm gonna just hop right into it and introduce the next page for you!

The past few pages have been an introduction into this scene, Mayor Richardson reacting poorly to meeting Monday and Monday rooting around in the records room, leading into a flashback of the scene where he is attacked in his safehouse.  He has, up to this point, dispatched the man who froze his bank account and the man who outsourced the job to the men seen above, and he has leads on the man who supplied the key to his safehouse and, for reasons we'll see soon enough, the man who runs the city's major newspaper.  It's been a bit of buildup to help emphasize and clarify aspects of Monday's part of the story, but this is the page that gets to lay it all out in words.

This should be a fairly simple page to ink and paint, since there aren't that many figures and most of the background is elevator mirrors.  Each of the three characters has a piece of story to share so they each get a panel with some overhead to fit dialogue into.  

In the first panel Shiba Inu is in the center of the group, loading his shotgun.  He throws out the classic "okay boys, let's go over the plan". In the next panel Bulldog is racking his Tommy gun; he's intended to be the straightforward professional one, so he lays out the details plainly: at this time of day the sun shines into the safehouse so you can see it through the peephole.  Brawlers cover the front door, gunners lure the target to the front door, then when the light goes out- from the target peeping through the peephole- you fire through the door.  This framing sets up a few things: this explains why the guys in the alley at the start of the comic had the safeties on their guns- they were melee specialists, and they'd picked up guns from the concierge and the bag in the elevator after Monday escaped the hit- to help make them a bit less incompetent-mook and more just out of their depth.  The second thing is framing it this way better emphasizes a minor detail about how Monday acts throughout the comic:

The top section is a clip from the scene the current scene is a flashback to, and the bottom one is in Tombstone when Liz and Alice knock on their door.  Monday is a guy who doesn't trust doors to the extent that he sticks his hand over the peephole as a matter of habit, it ends up saving his life once so the best-practice of his professional paranoia pays off.

One wrinkle in this is the voice coming through the door in the original scene is throwing an accent, and they're arguing a bit about how to frame who is knocking.  The idea I have is I wanted to get Greyhound to propose like, maybe we should disguise our voices at the door?  Any excuse to get Monday in front of the door.

In Greyhound's panel he talks about how Jefe got this job from an A-lister- being Sloppy Joe- and once they pull it off it'll punch their ticket to the big leagues.  This is meant to frame them less as random mooks and more as minor-league hopefuls who want to get into the bloodsport Monday is stuck in.  This is my plan to sort of renovate that bit of the comic and help shape it into something a bit better and a bit punchier, and how this links back to Mayor Richardson will play out in the next page or so.  The rest of the page from here out is basically setting up the return to Page 36, and the next page will be seeing that moment play out from a new perspective and in the new context.

Going into this scene I was a bit nervous about this kind of undertaking but I think it's working out okay.  I can pull the double-duty of punching up a very old moment of the comic, stitch a few scenes together better and reinforce a weaker thread of the overall story.  I think the comic could be better off for it, and there's not long to go to get to the end of the scene.  

That's it for now!  I should be able to make good progress on this page so I should have a lot more of it to share by next Friday.  I'm going to get dinner and then start work typing up the gamedev post to follow this one, since that one's going to be a doozy, so if you're getting the email ping for this post fresh, stick around.  Otherwise, have a nice weekend!