Comic Report #77.1 - Aesthetic

Hello again! This week has been very busy, I've been juggling a few tasks with dayjob gamedev work so I didn't get as much of the comic painted as I wanted to, but I expect to be able to finish the rest of this page this week.  It's felt like I've had a lot on my plate this past year, and I'm somewhat impressed with myself for being able to keep pushing in spite of everything.  I did get three minicomics done as well, though, which I'll post right after this write-up.  Since I went over the meat of the comic page last week, today I'll talk a bit about character design choices.

I started writing Dead Winter when I was working as a bowling alley mechanic in March of 2007. I'd always grown up in a sort of work culture, like at one point I worked two jobs- the other job was in a print shop doing silkscreening and running embroidery machines- while going to school and if I was ever caught idle my dad would say, you could work another job with this free time. The zombie genre has always been a genre that centralizes ordinary working people in its narrative, so with this background the comic being primarily about the characters it's about makes more sense.  The antagonists being bosses and petty tyrant middle managers also makes sense.

When I designed Lizzie's work outfit it was based a bit on my own workshirt.  At my job you got to choose from long or short sleeve Dickie's button-ups, or button-down polo shirts, and when I draw anyone wearing a nametag- so like Lizzie, Doris and the Omni-Mart crew- their uniforms reflect this.  There's some gaudier or more stylized waitress outfits, and I think the comic would have had a different feel if Lizzie ended up in one of those, but Frank's Diner was a sort of hole-in-the-wall business where you get hired and you get to pick whether you want a short-sleeve or long-sleeve button-up or a polo shirt.  All the character designs in the comic are reflections of my own work history, since they're all aspects of myself or people I knew.

When I design secondary or tertiary characters I try to draw them with the same rules as the main character.  I don't want any particular feature of a main character to be completely unique, like an eye shape or a hairstyle, since I want to be sure everyone fits into the same world together.  I end up drawing hair as kinda pointy shapes and that method has been used to build everyone's hair.  Like over time Lizzie's front hair framing situation evened out to be triangles swept to one side, and Monday's hair is always drawn as five points swept back, where it used to be a lot more wild.  Alice has probably had the biggest hair change of all, her swept-up hair curls have sorta slowly come undone over time and are now just tattered jagged triangles that still try to sweep up to the sides, but she's still recognizable as Alice.

One of the other small details I've started doing is I've ended up drawing some of the more seasoned characters a bit more cockeyed.  Somewhere in my cartooning I found that drawing the pupils a bit uneven gives them more character, but also applying it to the characters who have undergone their own trial-by-fire may be a bit more wild in their personality, so that reflects as a change in the look in their eyes.  Like on this page you can see Sally's pupils are drawn evenly, like she's still young, but Lizzie's eyes have a different look to them, on account of all the near-death experiences and rationalizing with her own commitment to non-violence compromising with the tremendous amount of violence she's caused on her journey.  It's a small detail but it's one I've been experimenting with.

That's it for today's report.  As mentioned, I should be able to get the rest of this page finished by this time next week, possibly before, so I'm gonna do my best to make that happen.  I've been getting updates going with less than one-month intervals in between, but I also find myself doing three times as much work as I was prior to the pandemic, trying to build a steady foundation for myself.  Thank you for your patient support of my work, I should have something new to post before the week is up.  Until then, take care!