Dead Winter Minicomics Batch #25

Hello again!  This week I focused entirely on minis.  I'll have main comic progress to report next Friday, but for today I've got five new strips to share!  I managed to make it to five-and-a-half, but the last half comic is going to have to wait until next week.  For now, though, let's embed some minicomics and make a really tall patreon article!

#068: The bulk of Dead Winter was written in, and so takes place in, the 2010s.  That's an interesting specific decade for technology because it opened up with CRT TVs and closed with giant 60" flatscreens being the norm.  The 2010s saw a great leap in technology and in that transitional period you naturally had a mix of old and new tech intermingling.  VHS players and tapes show up in the comic, which isn't outlandish for a vaguely 2010s setting, but one detail that persists is Lizzie's phone.  She has a flip phone when all her peers would have smartphones. There are perks to maintaining all that old tech, though, like not depending on host servers to let you play the games on your phones, and having batteries that hold a charge for weeks.  The crack on the screen would have blown out the monochrome display but we're playing pretend here so she can have this little game to enjoy.

#069: The idea of this weird creature that just exists in the city was funny enough to me I wanted to bring it back and let Lou have a shot at it.  He found out who's been pinching all his hardware, and it's this little goblin with the L-shaped spine!  A little behind-the-scenes: the office in panel three is about 80% modeled after my memory of my old workshop office at my mechanic job, essentially the desk that Dead Winter was first created at.  We didn't have a goblin in the workshop, but we did have ghosts.

#070: If you're a member of our Discord community you'll know Jason and I are big fans of birds, so I wanted to make a strip featuring a bird doing bird things. Different types of birds have evolved different ways to solve challenging problems, like dropping their meals from great heights and letting gravity do the work of cracking it open.  Even though the landscape of mankind's world has shifted, the world of birds persists ever onward.  This one's just a cute quiet little vignette amidst the ocean of minicomics I've been drawing.

#071: Early on in the Omni-mart arc Amy and Melody gave Lizzie a haircut, fixing the middle part she started the comic with.  Since they have this established tradeskill already I thought it'd be neat if their job assignment in Tombstone was they got to run a hair salon exactly how they want- I went to a salon myself that hung colorful sheets over the fluorescent lighting to diffuse the light like that so I incorporated that detail as well.  I wanted to bring Lou in as the client in this strip since I think it's a good habit for older generations to connect with and understand the cultural language coming up from the younger generations.  The punchline here is a throwback to Lizzie and her socks, which I still think was the funniest mini I've written.  "You like my haircut?" while wearing a hat is roughly the same thing but it still gets me.

#072: I've had this one on the backburner for a while.  When I drew the Y-man with a notch in his ear I hadn't thought about that becoming a trait for Lizzie and Alice yet, and when I wrote that scene with Arlen I forgot I put a notch on the Y-man's ear, so I ended up with these two sets of characters who don't know each other and haven't met, but share a rare and specific physical trait.  The Y-man is planned to be a boss fight in the game, but not with any sort of antagonistic intent, rather he's looking for his good fights.  This one's formatting ended up being a bit different since I wanted to give a three-panel joke a title card how I like to do and put the strip's title, "Ear Apparent" in the first panel.  The mishmash of Alice, Lizzie and their new friend is still very funny to me, and their friendship is extremely canon.  Patreon still auto-flags his name when I type it, though.  He is a powerful ally.  Monday is going to have some words when he finds out.

That's it for this week's minicomics.  I'll be resuming work on the next page, but I wanted to focus and get a large batch of minis done since I'd been slipping on them the past few weeks.  I'm almost 3/4 of the way to my goal of 100 mini strips, so that's an exciting landmark.  Thank you for your kind support of my work!  I'll have new stuff to share next Friday, so until then have a safe and restful weekend.