Comic Report #93 - Party Crashers

Hello!  Here is a rough block-in sketch of the next page, which I expect to have finished before next week.  This is getting into a very fun part of this mini arc so I am genuinely excited to get these scenes down on paper and move forward. So anyways, about the new page!

From the top, we move from the theater interior into the lobby. One of my favorite gags to draw is that Looney Tunes sort of peeking out from different places and just invisibly moving up across them. I think Liz actually did this in the Omni-Mart when she was fighting Clark, and here Trevor and Mary are doing it from behind pillars in a move up towards the concession stand.  This theater lobby is, like the exterior, loosely based around my old memories of my hometown movie theater, where there was just one lobby and some archways into a hall that led to the theaters.  It is a bit sketchy now but in the third panel they are peeking out through the candy display shelves beneath the countertop.

I originally planned to do these three panels as three wide shots, but I set up the previous page that way and when I laid out my initial plan it ended up looking exactly like the last page.  I like to try to keep my panel layouts different on consecutive pages so to keep up with that I cut it into vertical shots and tried to establish environmental cues to convey the camera panning to the left.  It's not my first choice but it makes my brain happier not to repeat a layout.

For a very long time in the comic there's been a character who has been mentioned or talked about but never actually revealed, and this page gets to be their big debut.  The yellow poncho crew have been showing up as more and more of a presence as the story progresses and now here they are at the cinema of all places.  Astute readers might be able to predict this resolution based on prior minicomics, so that's not really the big surprise of this arc.  The big surprise is finally putting a face to their leader.

Karen is the mysterious leader of the ponchos who gives orders in mnemonic rhymes that her crew recite to each other, to make it easier to remember. I never had a concrete idea of what she looked like until I started planning this extended arc, like the Lizzie/Alice and Trevor/Mary relationship arc, since that ultimately would lead to the latter group meeting Karen herself.  I wanted Karen to be a strong and charismatic personality, since I think someone like that is important to hold together a group like hers, but I wasn't sure how she should look.  Parallel to this, I've wanted to include a character in a wheelchair in the comic for a while, so I combined the two to come up with Karen's design.  She is a strong woman with broad, solid shoulders and she's got a Chinese spear on the back of her wheelchair, so she's a competent melee fighter as well.  I'd actually seen a helpful post on Twitter once about the difference between a wheelchair and a Wheelchair so I did some research to try and make sure I got it right. She's got spiked knee pads and armored shin plates, which I think would compliment her spear-fighting well.  She's the leader of this other significant survivor group so I want her to be very cool.

The next row of panels before Karen's intro is Trevor and Mary huddling together.  They had until now been under the impression that it might just be the two of them still alive, like if they hadn't seen other survivors they should be getting used to each other's company- particularly coming from Mary.  They are outnumbered, which is a poncho staple, so how can they deal with this?  They don't have very long before they look up and find themselves discovered, with two of the crew holding them at weapon point.  Uh oh!  That might spell trouble if we haven't already read the minicomics!

The closing panel is a close-up shot from Karen's perspective, calling out and charismatically greeting the two movie-watching survivors.  The next page is telegraphed as being primarily about her talking so this panel lets me establish a good detail shot of her face and let people get familiar with her.

I should have this comic page finished before next Friday.  I hadn't calculated for next Friday being Christmas Eve so I might put my write-up up on Thursday instead, we'll see.  I'm still gonna get this whole intermission done before the new year, so I can end 2021 on a fairly solid note.  Thank you as always for supporting my work, I'm excited to share what I have in store for 2022!  Until next time, have a lovely weekend.