Dead Winter Minicomics Batch #1

Okay, so!  I've had this little project I've been thinking about for a while, and this week I finally committed to making it real.  I have a lot of projects on my plate right now- I work on the fully-painted Dead Winter comic pages, animating art assets for the Dead Winter game, working as a sprite art contractor for another game studio, self-studying Japanese and presently working on some 6x6" portrait commissions.  I've got a pretty full plate, so if I add something else to my workload I'm gonna have to be sure it is low-impact and worthwhile.  I've been thinking about how to make this work and I made a trial run this week, so today I'd like to introduce you to the Dead Winter Minicomic Series!

So the idea I've had goes like this: I've been building Dead Winter since March 2007, that's a long time of developing this world, these characters, the tone and personality of everything. I think I've got some fun resources to work with, which we drew from to build the Dead Winter arcade game.  With all that lore stuff already sorted out it made planning the game pretty easy, the hard part of that has just been drawing and coding everything we need to make it work. The plan for the game has always been "you don't need to read the comic to understand the game", which had put me in the mindset of figuring out how to distill the personality of the comic in a way that is appealing as a gamer coming into the world cold.  

If someone wanted to learn more about the setting there's this whole free webcomic online for them to read, but that comic is a lot to chew on.  So my brilliant idea to help promote the whole Dead Winter thing has been to start making a series of 4koma-style minicomics, based on the game, based on the comic.  A sort of recursive comic loop twice-digested, perceiving the source through the lens of the adaptation to create a work that is in the same medium as the original but distinctly its own thing.  I feel like I've hit some sort of ouroboros third-eye webcartoonist ascendance on this project- a comic about a game about a comic, all of which I draw myself.  It's the stupidest idea I've ever had, but what's important here is that it's cheap to do!

My plan is to collect these somewhere on my main site, but mostly I'd want to post them on my social media outlets.  I'd like to return to my old old update schedule of Tuesdays and Fridays as a symbolic return to the beginning.  In my test run I found I could churn these things out super easily, like three a day, so once I build a buffer it's very little effort to keep making more of them.  I've got a three-month backlog of ideas jotted down in a text document, so I'm prepared to embark on this strange journey for the long haul.

One of the hard things about my work is that it's good- I think its good- but it takes a long time to put out and its hard to share in-progress shots without spoiling it, so one of the functions of Dead Winter Minicomics is to have more regular exposure to the world through these little character vignettes while I work on painting the comic or animating the game.  I'm doing these entirely in Clip Studio Paint as a way to acclimate myself to the program, so it serves a number of functions.  But the foremost is to have something fun to share and let people know what this little world is all about.

I'm building a buffer before I start officially releasing these, and I plan to share the ones I draw with Patrons first, which means if you're reading this you're going to have a considerable headstart on these things on everyone else!  In this first trial batch I made four strips, so with the whole explanation written up, I'll get to sharing those with you right now!

#001: The main comic currently takes place inside Tombstone, but in the game the characters run all over the whole city getting into trouble, so this comic is more just, "what kind of stupid thing could they get up to out there?"  Lizzie and Alice are a team, so where one shows up the other is likely to also be there, and here they are goofing off in the Mayor's office doing their best impersonation of whatever they think government does.

#002: This strip introduces Monday has the the straightman of the group.  These minis are intended to be fun and goofy in an overblown sort of way, so Monday is here as the foil.  You ever notice how in movies or games whenever something happens "in the sewer" its this high-overhead big echoing labyrinth with all these little rooms and spaces that seem almost cool to hang out in?  I don't know where that came from but the Ninja Turtles definitely made that popular and as one of the inspirations for our game's genre I thought this would be a fun joke.  

#003: This one's my favorite so far.  The next faction of enemies I have planned to draw for the game are the cops, so as a little combat scene I drew the shotgun cop from the game getting bopped with a mop.  Compared to action in the comic or even in the game, the minicomic is much more just, "action is happening".  I've only got four panels to work with so just trim all the fat.  Well, after bopping the cop with her mop a loot item drops.  The setup into the last panel is what I like the most about this page, I'm gonna try to capture that energy for future strips.

#004: I wanted to make sure the first couple strips kinda captures everything at the core of Dead Winter, so I wanted a Lou-centric strip to let him show off his deal as well.  I also needed to include the zombies, so someone who is brand new understands that everyone lives in zombie world.  Where Lizzie and Alice are kinda goofy and Monday is the anchor, Lou is clever and helpful.  In the game he is a builder who constructs decoys to lure enemies away from himself or his teammates, so I want to present him as the smart boy in the minicomics.  I'm not entirely sure how I want to handle the gun action in minicomics yet so for now its zombies getting shot, I want to be conscious of not letting regular people get popped on camera, since I do want to keep the minicomics fun, but it is still definitely Dead Winter.

That's what I've got so far, I'm gonna keep building up a buffer before release so you can expect to see some more of these posts in my weekly updates, and once I start posting them you can expect to stay well ahead of the crowd!

Since this is somewhat of a new format for me, leave me a note in the comments here what you think about the minicomics, if you like them or whatever, feedback helps me improve my formula.  Thanks for reading, I'll be back with more to share next Friday.  Be well.