Dead Winter Minicomics Batch #9

As I've been working on these minis for a little while I've received words of encouragement from my friends, but also they wanted to get into it too and make some suggestions for strip ideas.  Since these are so simple and self-contained that's an easy thing to accommodate I'm happy to put them into my ideas list.  This week I drew a couple suggestions that came from my pals!  I'm also planning ahead for the end of the year holiday week, where I'd like to buy myself enough time to do nothing at all, so I'm making a buffer for my buffer, so to speak.  But anyways, here's the strips for this week.

#033: The idea for this strip was "the gang draws straws to do something stupid", so I gave it some thought and I felt like climbing a tree to get an object that a bird has would be fun to draw.  There is a famous real-life bird named Canuck the crow, who is known for stealing knives from crime scenes, who this bird is loosely based off of.  The hardest part about executing a "draw straws" idea is probably finding a way to make the straws read clearly in the middle two panels, it took me a few passes to get that part working right.

#034: The Roommates have a little adventure.  In the Dead Winter game each character has a main weapon and a backup, so for this strip Lizzie and Alice are both only carrying their backup weapons, like Stacy is putting them through some kind of readiness training.  This works out since Lizzie's pistol has a flashlight on it and she would probably not use it otherwise, and I needed the light to set up the punchline.  For reference, this strip is a backstory to a level background that we had in our playable game demos:

At the end of our last ECCC playable demo you fought a big horde wave in front of The Spider House, a boarded-up building with a ton of messages spraypainted on it and a suspicious-looking soot pattern radiating from the doorway.  My hope is for people to read this one and then play the game at some point and be like, oh!  This is from there!

#035: A fun take on Monday's trademark shades.  He could technically wear any sort of sunglasses but the oval frames are what really make his glowering expression.  The choice for a 2007 New Year's glasses pick at the end was specifically because the comic launched in March of 2007, the actual events of the comic take place vaguely within the 2010s, which is admittedly a decade that brought us from the flipphone to the smartphone so a lot of the technology represented in different points of the comic could have been relevant to either end of the decade.  Now that this strip is in the can I of course am going to have to give Monday some fun glasses in another strip down the line.

I'm happy people have been enjoying these little strips.  I'm gonna focus on getting the main comic finished up for this weekend and then I'll work on some more little strips for next week.  Have a safe week!