Comic Report #83 - Passing Notes

Hello again!  Thank you for your patience with last week's report, I've had a fairly busy weekend but I got a couple things accomplished for today that I'm happy to share with you.  I should have three articles in total today: one for the main comic, one for minicomics and one for some exciting gamedev progress news!  For now though let's just jump in with the next main comic page!

So Monday's introduction in the previous page took a few people by surprise, I was happy that people both didn't recognize him and also did recognize him after a little bit of thinking, it meant his disguise worked well.  His main job in Tombstone is to work as a clerk in town hall, which means he gets to move around and transfer data between departments.  At the end of the previous page he collected the night shift report from Alice, so the start of this one has him delivering her the inventory from the town's warehouse, which the medical staff would need to keep track of how much of what materials they actually have on hand.  This also means that Monday has access to the intake reports from the three Ponchos that were discovered outside of town, which he can add to his own mental database.  For a guy like him it's a pretty useful job to have.

In the second panel we see Monday making small talk with Dr. Pfeiffer while Alice quickly looks over the inventory update.  This one's sort of like, reinforcing the disguise and maintaining Monday's whole whatever he's doing while he's on the clock.  The fun shot is in the third panel, where both Dr. Pfeiffer and Alice are turned away from him; when no one's looking he can break kayfabe and just be regular Monday for a moment.  During panel three I'll probably fit in Alice mentioning the gentleman in bed number three having some literature she'd like him to deliver to the deputy mayor, but these panels are ultimately meant to lead up to the big moment this page was built around.

When plotting the note passing moment I wanted it to reflect the scene where Lizzie handed it to Monday in the diner.  When reading the pages in archive format I wanted this moment to feel like a relay, so plotting it with a similar visual connection was important.  

As for the contents of the note, it opens with a simple message: meet up by the river for lunch?  When planning this scene out I originally wanted to put it down as "after work" so I could draw that scene at night, but that would be such a long way off and the day is still early, so the plan is to set up the encounter for noonish, when it's reasonable for both characters to take a moment off from work without burning an entire day that could be spent on other plot threads.  I wanted Alice reading it to have the same sparkly effect around her Lizzie had after having her talk with Monday, as sort of another bridge between the two scenes.  However, I didn't want the note to just be one vague sentence, so it's got a bit of a second function to it.

It was a thought from page 605, and I felt like Lizzie also being goofy and kinda gross would be endearing in this particular context.  She did, in fact, end up wording it like that, and that lets me set up Alice working that specific expression in the last panel.  This page is one of the major beat points in setting up what would probably be one of the next scenes, so it's fun to finally arrive at this point.

This page isn't as background-intensive as the last one was so I might be able to knock it out in fairly short order.  I know now that I typed that it's gonna come back around and haunt me, but I feel like I can get this one out the door before the end of June.  Thank you for your patience, I'll have more to share next week.  Until then, take care.