Comic Report #87 - Hardhat Zone

Hello again!  This is a short week since the new comic page went up.  I wanted to get this page all-the-way penciled for today but I took a day to just rest and then I focused on thumbnailing out the next few pages so I make sure I can pace it right.  I have a partial construction of a page to share today which means today's write-up will be about P R O C E S S again!

I'm not going to share the other page thumbnails until those pages are ready for spoiler reasons, but when I'm prepping a page I want to make sure it flows well and I have space for everything I need to do.  One of my recurring Things is I want to have room for small talk but I don't want to drag empty dialogue out across multiple pages, so this first page of the encounter is sort of important to set up right.  I had this one thumbed out initially:

... but you can probably tell I ended up deviating from this plan.  My flowchart idea for this page was originally:  1) Alice sits down with Lizzie, 2) small chat, 3) Lizzie gives Alice the foam tray next to her 4) Alice opens it, 5) small chat, 6) set up for next page.  Cutting my panels up this way didn't really give me a lot of room to fit what I wanted, I ended up expanding panel 1 vertically to allow a better shot of the two sitting at the park bench, which meant the whole second row of panels needed to be rechopped.  

I turned two small panels in a row over one wide panel into two vertical panels next to a horizontal one to set up the foam box moment.  Normally for panel flow you want to keep a single large panel on the left and the pair on the right so the eye doesn't get lost, but since I really wanted the big shot on the right I have the panel borders angled in a way that would prevent the reader from skipping over the lower right panel by accident.  The big trick of this scene is the lunch Lizzie brought for Alice is a burger with an onion ring on it- Lizzie has her thing where she can read people's usuals and she does it on Alice.  Eagle-eyed readers might recall this particular interaction from minicomic #100, actually.

One of the changes I made in hacking this page up between thumbnail and final was I moved the burger moment down the page a bit.  I wanted them to sit, talk a bit and then oh yeah, I brought you lunch, and then I can set up the setup for the next page.  Dropping the burger right at the start felt really abrupt, so moving it down to give room for the chit-chat felt like a better pacing.  It also keeps me from filling out a page of nothing and then next page I can just get right to it.  

When I'm drawing a page I often will hop around sketching out panels I think are important and then filling in the gaps between, rather than going straight in order all the time.  I generally know what I want to achieve so putting those posts in the ground and then figuring out the in-between helps me pace the action and the camera how I want it.

Thank you for your patience with all this.  I know this scene has been a very long time coming and a (surprisingly) large number of readers have really been anticipating this, so I'm trying to get it drawn as fast as I can while trying to do it "right".  I'll have much more progress in for next Friday, so until then, have a pleasant weekend!