Comic Report #29 - Doctor's Orders

Here's the inks for the next page.  I'm gonna push through it and spend this week getting it done and posted, since I've put a bit of work into game time I need to swing back into comics. I'm always torn about sharing unfinished grey tones vs. sharing the lineart, and I think the lines are just nice and clean and I tend to lose that in the final comics, so I share my inks this week.

I encountered an odd problem in planning this page that one maybe wouldn't expect given the nature of my work.  This is the first time I've had to draw a human corpse that isn't dramatic or cartoonish- in the beginning I made them kinda raw-looking but eventually started doing X-out eyes to keep it lighthearted and cartoony. The sheriff's body is a straight-up dead dude, though, so the X eyes wouldn't be quite the right tone (or maybe it will? Filing away for future consideration). I opted to draw him with his usual grimacing expession, since he always had the eyes-closed schema, even in death he looks like a disappointed father.  The medical staff are seasoned pros, though, so they're not shy about the corpsiness of the sheriff, it's just business as usual for them- even after Alice's initial surprise at meeting the sheriff like this she just goes right back to work.

One of the earlier story seeds I planted a long time ago (in the pp.304-308 range) was that Alice had wanted to be a surgeon, but her uncle lost her inheritance money so she pursued nursing instead. Dr. Parker could have been any type of doctor, like even a general practitioner, but I thought that it would be better if she was a surgeon at the hospital Alice worked at. This way, in a lemons-to-lemonade sort of deal, she could use the opportunity of medical examination in a makeshift survivortown to teach Alice a little bit of her surgical knowledge. It's a small way to expand her knowledgebase and help her grow as a medical professional.

I'd thought a bit about how I wanted to decorate the interior of the medical exam rooms. I think I touched on this in my last comic post but there's a lot of metal toolshelf cases everywhere, but in the surgical room I wanted to put a bunch of hand tools on the wall, specifically the sawing, drilling and cranking-open kind. I doubt I will actually draw them directly being used, as that's a bit much, but just having them there implies the way a lot of surgery is handled in Tombstone.

I'm gonna get back to work now.  As I mentioned above this week is all about comics, so I'll have something more complete to share by this time next week.  Thanks for sticking with us!