Comic Report #96 - From The Top

Hello again!  This week I've got the sketch for the next page ready to share.  This one is one I've been thinking about for a while so I think I have a fair bit to type up about it.  But first: we've been continuing our ongoing website maintenance and spring cleaning process, and we have upgraded the site to be HTTPS compliant, the certification is in place so modern browsers won't scream at you anymore for visiting an unsecure site.  It's literally just a platform for serving images and doesn't collect data, or even run ads really, but https://www.deadwinter.cc should still work well all the same.  Now, about this page!

The main objective I have for the start of this new chapter is not only setting up the conflict with Pat, the Gravekeepers and the extended crew family, but also to try and establish clearly why Monday has it in for the Mayor.  When he confronted the bank manager it was about his funds being frozen, so how does a newspaper guy tie into his broader motivations?  Resolving that means going back to the beginning of the comic.

Just due to the nature of growing my artwork I have a bit of a rough time reading the earliest parts of the comic- seeing my old art is like listening to amp feedback but only for me, so it's something I haven't looked at in a while.  I went through it in preparation for these pages and I found two pages were double-sized for some reason and one was missing word balloons. I don't know how that happened, but it definitely fits in with my difficulty perceiving my own old artwork.  Anyways, the parts of the story I need to hook are back there so I gotta just suck it up and reference it.

The earliest parts of the comic were also kind of rough in that I was trying to find the right tone for my work, and I don't think I really hit the Dead Winter themes until around page 100.  So in addition to framing Monday's motivations with the Mayor of Tombstone I'd like to do a bit of live editing of some very old content, which ends up feeling like taking a risk with things since it's bringing very very old work back to the front page for a little bit.  I'd been thinking a lot about this and how to handle it, but I think it'd be useful for expanding on Monday's half of the story so I gotta just get it done and trust myself.

Following the previous page where Mayor Richardson is yelling at his personal militia to have Monday dealt with, this page is about Monday snooping around in the town's archive.  Stacy hinted at the town keeping records on page 596 and Monday sold himself as a clerical worker in his job interview with Mr. Malloy, so he has access to the room where all the hard copy records are kept.  The archive shots in panels 3 and 4 are going to be a devil to paint, I'm gonna tell you this right now, but I think all these drawers, shelves, boxes and binders should sell the idea that this is a room full of Information.

Now, the working theory for this page- and for Monday snooping around in it- is everything sorta stopped at a clean breaking point in the world.  Tombstone is using this room to keep its own records for the town it is now, but about a month ago it was a newspaper building, and "clean out all the old hard copy records" is probably extremely low, so if something was set to go to press just before The Big Collapse might still be lurking around in the record room.  I don't actually know how real newspaper offices work but I imagine as a vehicle for explaining Monday Things the premise is enough to work.

Rounding out the comic is the beginning of a short flashback.  As mentioned above I wanted to revisit and sort of retroactively recontextualize some earlier moments in the comic, so I'm tying together the guys who tried to kill Monday in the alleyway on page 9 and 10 (page 9 is the early Shower Scene page, incidentally) and the guys who tried to kill Monday on pages 36 and 32.  That whole sequence is sort of broken up in scattered flashback shards so I'd like to kinda tie it up and make it more coherent, and maybe clean up some of my earliest design choices.  There was a reference to page 36- where Monday puts his hand over the little peephole on the door while standing next to it- that was repeated on page 527 that I think never actually landed because of the broken or rough coherence of those earlier pages, so I hope this little bit of story suturing could fix that up a bit, among other things.

Anyways, that's where we're at for a little bit, revisiting the encounter at Monday's very fancy apartment building.  I'm nervous about referencing such a deep pull but I have all the pages plotted and I think it will be okay.  Thank you, as always, for your patient support.  If inking those middle archive panels doesn't actually kill me I should have a good bit of progress to share next week.  Until then, have a pleasant weekend.