Comic Report #24 - Background Noise

Hello again!  Here's the sketch phase for the next comic page.  I'm going to type up some words about it, if that's alright with you:

As the story very slowly progresses I've been trying to establish pieces I can call up later on down the line; it's been a lot of setup and establishment for the last sixty pages of comic to shift from "adrift in the world" to "anchored in a harbor". This is one of the first pages where I can start pulling those strings and referencing details, now that all the details actually exist.  It's been a gamble I've worried about since I started pushing in this direction and I'm doing my best to make for a meaningful payout.

Here we have the mayor and the deputy mayor talking business in the wee hours before the morning breakfast crowd- it's early yet so I mercifully don't have to draw and manage specific people in all the booth seats.  Conversations are one of the most natural things two people can do together, but they are visually extremely boring.  One of my tricks for making a talk-heavy stretch of comic more interesting is to give the characters a secondary action they're performing while they talk, like even just holding or shifting a mug in your hands- or even just moving their empty hands in a way that emphasizes what they're saying- gives the character a more lively focus than if they sat there like a talking head. I've already had a scene involving the mayor and dialogue so this one is going to be a short bridge, it won't linger that long.

Another thing to help a talk-heavy page is to have something going on in the background.  Here the camera has been handed off from Lizzie to the mayor and deputy, so she's in the background with Lee getting ready for work.  While she's not the focus, she's back there doing something that's setting up for a future page- I penciled her holding up three fingers in blue so I can remember that number is significant.  I also realized I haven't shown her dealing with her busted rib in a while, since she hasn't been tumbling in the streets in a number of pages, so she's popping her early-morning codeine before the workday starts. These background details aren't necessary to the central focus of the page- the conversation- but they make the setting feel more alive.

Another thing to keep an eye on whenever you have a talking heads page is to not break the 180° rule.  What this means is you can spin the camera all you want and point it in whatever angle you need to, as long as that perspective keeps the left and right speaker on their respective sides.  This isn't an unbreakable rule, as you can switch panel positions with mindful camera work and environmental cues, but it parses much easier and it's more consistent for the reader if you don't erratically flip who is on which side of each rectangle.  

I'm going to switch back to gamedev for the next work week cycle and then hop back on the comic grind.  Thanks for your support!