Comic Report #34 - Tying Up Loose Ends

Hello! Today I have the sketch phase of the next comic.  As an aside before I go into detail about my thought process on this page, I'd like to mention that I've hit a milestone in my gamedev work where I've just plum run out of things I need to animate in preparation for our next game build. It's taken me like a year to get this last chunk of assets done but I'm over that hill, so I'll be working on comic pages with fewer interruption weeks in between.  If you're here for my comic work, good news!  I'll be updating more of those.

This is the last of the three black & white intermission pages for this run, and since the previous two pages were a continuation of a different thread I decided to use this page to revisit some old friends.  Since the comic story has settled into civilization I haven't drawn as much fighting-in-the-wild as I used to- not that the story doesn't need it, or that I don't have a plan for it in the future, but that I couldn't sustain a story that was only that forever- so what I decided to do for this page was draw some action shots. That was the first layer of writing this page, was that I wanted to draw zombies getting punched in the face again, as I love drawing kinetic energy more than anything else. This is the framework laid out for me.

The next layer of writing was that I wanted to reach back and bring out a beloved character I haven't had time nor story reason to highlight in the main comic narrative.  Yuri is a favorite of mine, so I decided if zombies are going to get socked in the maw he'll be the one to do it.  He was last seen on page 338, setting out on a humanitarian mission to clear a safe space from Reverend Murphy's church. These are the loose ends I decided to pick up and tie into something else.   So we have pugilism, Yuri and the concept of helping people.  What can I tie -that- to to make a decent one-shot strip?

The last thread I pulled for this bit of writing was to go all the way back seven, where a child was in a hospital waiting room with a black eye. We saw the fate of his mother in later pages but never established what happened to him.  That one-off joke was one I regret writing 11 years ago, so I thought I could salvage a bit by connecting it to something else.  So for this page, Yuri's humanitarian mission would be helping that kid out of a bind, and inviting him to the shelter at the church.  Giving him one of those hospital IV racks as a self-defense implement could connect him back to the hospital, and then Yuri's aide can give him some pleasant closure within the story.  Since I wanted to expand on Yuri bringing people to the shelter, I thought maybe Reverend Murphy could stick with him and help him out, so the two are a bit more of a pair than I originally anticipated.  That ties a whole bunch of stray threads together.

I'll be inking this page this weekend and, rough estimate, I'll probably have it done by Monday, and then after that I'll get to work on the next comic page rather than jump into more gamedev work.  Thanks for your patience with me, I'm still quite dedicated to seeing this project through to the end.