Comic Report #78 - Reciprocation

Hello again!  I've got some new comic sketches to share with you today.  I've been working towards this page for a while, since it sort of caps off one scene and when it goes up I can start working on the next, so I'm excited to get it done.  Today I'll go into the sketch phase write-up and share a bit of my thought process on this one.

This page as planned is intended to compliment the previous page, like they are meant to fit together to tie off the little mini-arc of Lizzie and Monday having a talk with each other.  Their relationship throughout the comic has always been antagonistic, they do not like each other, and throughout their journey through the crucible they have clashed horns multiple times on how to proceed with their situations.  So in the safety of Tombstone I wanted to give them a moment to interact outside of immediate pressure and see how they come away.  On the previous page Lizzie learned about Monday's samaritan work helping reunite Sally with her family, commenting how he might have had a heart all along.  On this page it's Monday's turn to reciprocate. 

Opening up the page is a long depth of field exterior shot down the street where the Jade Garden is.  In my map of Tombstone notes that would be right here:

Yellow is the Jade Garden and red is the road itself in the establishing shot.  The first two pages are like one big panel, but I split it into two panels to make each half its own story beat.  The curved perspective of the buildings ends up at the top right corner of the panel so it fits neatly into the frame- a big dark U shape with a light background, and a silhouette of Monday leaving the diner.  The building shapes here are plotted to direct the eye towards Monday, to kinda create this quiet atmosphere of him leaving and carrying on to the next moment. 

The second panel here is a close-up shot, just at the corner by the end of the street.  This is about where the reunion scene with the Omnimart crew took place, where the crowd has dispersed and activity has returned to normal.  Since Tombstone is built around a newspaper building I thought one of the features the town would have would be a little daily newspaper printed on tri-folded tabloid paper, run not on the giant presses but on a smaller AB Dick style press.  Those are something that could easily be run with available materials in the print shop and off the small amount of electrical power provided by the steam electric generator, pictured to the right side of the above image.  

Anyways, since there's a daily newspaper, some of the town's kids would be perfect to pick up a stack and go outside to let everyone know they're ready, and hand them out to people.  Flowing to the third panel, Monday picks up a paper, the headline highlighting the previous night's fight outside the bus wall.  In a similar way to Sally showing Lizzie a lighter side of Monday, the paper shows Monday a scrappier side of Lizzie.  The pile of raiders from page 595 are photographed here, all walloped and delivered to the gate watchman.  The last panel of 595 was a note Lizzie left crediting the feat to Pat, the boy who has been praised for rescuing Lizzie and Alice and delivering them safely to town.  I've described Pat once before as a "scapegoat for heroism", letting him take the praise and attention for difficult things Lizzie and Alice did for him, so him ending up in the paper is a better outcome than the local waitress ending up there instead.

This time there's a bit of a hitch to passing the heroism buck onto Pat.  The Gravekeepers- the Mayor's personal roughnecks and the town's bad boys- picked up on Pat's streak of heroic feats and have started to take a shine to him.  He's in with the bullies now, which is kinda-sorta what he always wanted, to sit at the cool kids' table so to speak, so he's rolling with it.  The potential trouble here is he can't actually deliver on the image he's building, but we'll have to see how that angle pans out down the road.

Monday knows better of Pat, however.  The headline in the paper puts Lizzie's black eye into perspective, and so the last panels are Monday's turn to reflect on how he perceives Lizzie.  His line in the penultimate panel, "a real peacemaker, huh?", calls back to page 607 where Lizzie admits she "passed a fist or two" the night before.  Knocking out three belligerents and maintaining one's cover is in his profession a fairly impressive feat, so the page ends with a quiet "not bad, kid", tying a bow on this arc of the comic.  The page after this one starts a new scene I'm really excited to expand on, but right now we've reached the end of an important story beat.

I'll be working on this page a little bit in this coming week, but I need to put some focus onto the minicomics so I might not have a lot more than just the inks to share next week.  I'll be posting a minicomic write-up after this one where I'll explain a bit about where I am, but for now I'm happy to share the sketch phase of this page.  Thank you, as always, for your kind support of my work.  Until next week, take care and be well.