Comic Report #97 - The Team

Hello again!  As promised I managed to get this whole page sketched up for today's update.   There's a whole bunch to post about here, so I'll just jump right to it.

This page and the previous one have been setting up a flashback scene to reinforce some loose or weaker parts of the earlier comic, and I've been very careful about how to patch up the holes in the walls to make sure the whole house stays strong.  To reiterate a bit, Monday's introduction in the first 50 pages of the comic have him confronted by a group of dudes who are somewhat out of their depth in dealing with him. I've always felt this was not as strong a scene as it could be so I'm sort of revisiting it to repair a bit of older writing and make it into something a bit more cohesive.  We've seen brief flashes at different moments in the comic (Monday attacked in his home -> Monday spotted at the diner -> Monday dine & dashes setting up Lizzie encounter on page 300 -> Monday confronted in the alleyway -> Monday confronted by Sloppy Joe, the guy who said he outsourced the Monday job to someone else), so that's the pieces I have to work with.

There are six team members on this page entering the lobby of Monday's safehouse highrise, three from the early pages and three new guys.  I wanted to try to build these guys out as more of a team of dirty-deed doers than the earlier "menagerie of mooks", I think it does them a better service this way.  The three survivors in the alley with more of their friends were not great at using guns, so one of the angles I'm thinking about here is to tie that to how our game development is structured, where there's Melee Guys and Ranged Guys.  So the setup here is the three surviving team members are brawlers, and their job was to handle the front lobby while the gunners go upstairs to handle the job.  This way, when the brawlers are left to confront the guy who escaped through the gunners confront him in the alley, they do so in a way that keeps their distance which also may not be their fighting specialty.  Bing bang boom, retroactive continuity repair job.

One of the other minor details in this strip that I'm kinda slipping in under the radar is the key in panel five.  A long-term thread in the comic is Monday's following Lizzie around to get to her dad, so what did her dad do to make this happen?  What was his role in Monday's attempted removal from service?  He's a real estate guy, and late in the 590-block of pages Stacy explained how he provided keys to local properties to give people the dignity and security of their very own homes; in short he's a keys guy.  Monday's fancy safehouse has barrel locks on the buttons specifically so people can't just walk past the security desk and head up to whatever floor they want, but here they have a key with a tag on it with a cryptic bit of code.  I wonder where that came from!

Thank you for your patient support of my work.  This page has a bunch of inking to do but the backgrounds shouldn't be anything too complicated, so I should be able to have it finished in relatively short order.  I don't plan to drag this scene out for too long but I feel like it's important housekeeping to get it in the archive for the benefit of the overall story.  Either way, I should have a lot more to share next week, so until then have a lovely weekend.