Comic Report #91 - Closure

Hello again!  I've got the start of another comic page to share with you today.  This one is the last page of the chapter, which means there will be three intermission pages to follow it.  The relationship thread between Lizzie and Alice has been a very long one, so it feels a bit odd to have it decisively tied, but this also means I get to write them together moving forward, which is new and fun.  In that regard this page is sort of an ending and a beginning point, but I'll write more about that in a moment.

Before I get into things, I do want to make a note that I kept forgetting to include in these write-ups: I've started work on planning the next and probably last music scene in the comic. I can't say what song I picked or what the context will be, but if you read this now and somehow remember whenever that moment hits you'll know how far back I started planning things.  

Now, as for this page!  As you might be able to tell from the big space and the characters' expressions, this is planned to be a Liz Monologue page, reflecting on the past twenty or so pages building up to this point.  There's plenty of space left for dialogue and once all the art is drawn in I can figure out what it is I want that dialogue to say.  Getting to that point from here should be fairly easy, but getting to this point from a blank page has been a bit of a challenge.  

I'm not opposed to using references for drawing, and frequently do for objects or actions I need to render, but the bulk of what I want to draw and the camera angles I want to draw them from I generally have to pull out of my own head.  The poses in this page are meant to have a meaningful stillness to them which I'm honestly not super used to drawing.  It's been a challenge but I think I got everything blocked in how I need it so I can just move forward with the ink and paint.

The first panel is a carryover from the closeness of the previous page.  In the Big Kiss page I had the camera zoomed in enough where I didn't need to draw their legs sitting on the bench, but on this page that was one of the challenges I needed to account for.  In the second panel Alice shifts over and just rests her head on Lizzie's shoulder- her last fear is gone and she's finally able to embrace what she's wanted for a while so you just have maximum-comfort Alice fully relaxing next to Liz.  

The second row of panels brings back Chekov's Burger.  This is the burger with an onion ring introduced in minicomic #100, and later either recalled by Liz or read with her order-reading talent, it's Alice's favorite and now she gets to enjoy her lunch.  Leading into the third panel below, Liz grabs a fry from the box and takes a bite.  This is just a nice quiet scene where none of the bad things people kept assuming would happen will happen.  The culmination in the last panel, just leaning against each other and looking out at the cityscape, is I think a nice punctuation and is incidentally how minicomic #100 ended too.  This is a big dangerous world and they've both had hard journeys in their lives but at this point, in this moment, everything is quiet and peaceful.  They have each other, just as they always have.

I've been focusing heavily on making comic pages lately so I could get this scene drawn and posted without a lot of delay, but once it draws to a close I'll be trying to split my attention up in a few other directions again, so updates might slow down. I will have more gamedev updates to share, though, so that should be fun.  But for now, I really just wanted to get this in the archive so there's no more uncertainty.  Thank you for joining me on this journey, I hope you've enjoyed the past few pages as much as I've had fun drawing them.  

Have a nice weekend!