Comic Report #82 - A Familiar Face

Hello again, long time no see!  Since I put up the last comic Wednesday night into Thursday morning, I got about 80% of the sketch phase done, which is a bit rougher than I usually like to share, but these partial-phase posts are nice to kinda reveal how I tend to block things in.  For now, though, let's get into today's update!

When I'm plotting comics I try to keep the flow of time in mind in my layouts.  Pages can generally be assumed to be a contained moment of time, but the gap between one page and the next can be anything from instantaneous to very prolonged.  The past two pages involving Alice and Marv are meant as one conversation, but for this page I wanted to jump forward in time a bit.  If I'd cut back in and kept the camera on the same scene as before then the gap in time would have been lost, I felt, so I decided to open this page up with an external shot of the medical ward.  This way the scene is in basically the same place but the flow of time is broken, so it can be presumed to be later after the previous page.

I want to keep the punchline of this comic a secret until the last panel so I set it up as a first-person perspective.  This also lets me build a sense of the building outside the medical ward- that staircase to the right is going to be a big pain in the ass to paint.  Tombstone's two deputies, Martin and Staggs, haven't popped up a whole lot yet, so posting them outside the medical ward gives them a presence while also underscoring how the town is handling its three new guests.

The next row of panels is a hand pushing the door open.  The left panel is going to be incredibly easy to paint, but the right one is a nice interior perspective shot entering the medical ward.  I wanted to set up a nurse's station for Alice to hang out at while she's not tending to any patients on the ward- in the previous pages I'd drawn this setting I put a desk in the corner of a shot, so I decided to expand on that and let it be just this whole desk area, somewhere she can chart notes and write things down, with some organizing paper baskets hanging on the wall behind her.  She's got a big ol' CRT monitor on her desk too, since it's ambiguously somewhere in the 2010s and there's probably still a bunch of industrial CRTs hanging around to salvage in this kind of world.  All the paperwork is on paper, so she can use it to play mahjong solitaire instead.

For the third panel row I wanted to capture the first-person perspective looking to the left, so I can establish that all three of the poncho raiders are alive and taken care of.  Pruning Saw definitely got the worst of it so they're all bandaged up and certified scalpel-free; Blood Goggles is laying on her side with her ringing ear upward, and Marv is busy in the back with his homework.  Alice is a compassionate nurse so she's pulled the curtains back so the three can all be together, which incidentally also lets me set up this shot more clearly.  To kinda imply that the viewer's head is turned I have the floorboards bending that certain way, like straight is forward and the lines all turn to the left.  You can see the Hand Cabinet from minicomic #62 in the back there, it's also there on the current page.

I got to the bottom cluster of panels today but I didn't quite get it done, so you can see how I'm blocking in my shots in the panel stack on the left.  I start out by roughly positioning the shapes where I think they would make a good composition, and make sure I leave enough room for text.  Then I can start blocking in major details to kinda get the feel that I want, and then from there move on to a final phase.

The last panel, the panel on the right, is the page's payoff.  Back in the job interview strips Monday was seen taking off his glasses and combing his hair back.  He puts on his best fake smile and wouldn't you know it, that's a pretty good disguise he's got!  Monday's got a pretty long plot thread he's fixing to resolve, so now that he's well-positioned as a clerk inside Tombstone's makeshift town hall building he can go about doing the thing that he does.  The scar on his face and the sideburns are a bit of a tell but with a smile on instead of his glasses I wonder if anyone would do a double-take on who that is when the page actually goes up.  As a fun aside: Monday still has some particular item on his person, and he's just arrived in the medical ward to talk to Alice, so that thread is slowly being pulled.

That's it for today.  I've got a mix of tasks I need to take care of this week, but Sunday is my birthday so I'm gonna be sure to not do any strenuous work for that day.  Until next Friday, be well and take care.