Comic Report #122 - On The Windowsill

This week I put a lot more focus onto working on this comic page. I made some headway on a gamedev task but that can probably best wait for a more complete achievement for its writeup.  Today I have a followup to last week's header image, where I'd just posted a page thumbnail and then said "I rested this week."  Well, THIS week I got the ball rolling on that page, and there's enough figures in it that it's probably better to get started on it sooner than later.  Last week I said I'd wait until this week to explain what the thumbnails were, so now I have something meaty to write about!  Let's get to it.

The previous page ended with a close-up shot of Pat telling Liz that he needed help because he was in trouble, and that she had to help him because they were in trouble too.  The opening panel of this page cuts to an interior of Liz and Alice's room, where Alice is asking who it was tapping at their window in the middle of the night, and Liz is nonchalantly explaining the situation to her.  One of the little details here is Liz has pulled her arm up to lean on the windowsill, so her flashlight isn't pointing at Pat anymore.  This comes up again in a moment.

In the next panel, Pat shouts up at Liz that he's being serious, like she isn't treating the situation with the attention it demands.  Liz and Alice and their friends have seen and done a lot in their journey, so a midnight crisis like this isn't exactly ringing a lot of alarm bells for them.  Pat raises his voice a little bit to insist.

Next shot is what I like to think of as a row of melded panels.  This is essentially three panel shots but the border would take up too much space so I blended them together into one larger combined panel.  Pat's kinda pleading his case asking the girls for help again and then mid-sentence Liz points her flashlight back at him again, like he has her attention.  He gets blasted in the face by the bright light, pauses a moment and then continues.  To delineate the panels I'm using the contrast of the flashlight cones to break up the longer rectangle- panel borders are thick and absolute, they take up a lot of space, where a contrast point between light and dark shapes is infinitely thin and takes up no space, so setting up a sequence like this is a lot more efficient than dropping vertical bars across my page.

The camera cuts from Pat getting blasted with a flashlight to Liz pointing her flashlight down, listening as Pat scrambles to make a case.  This one's also a melded panel shot, since I can put three windows in one brick wall and each window is like a panel that Liz is leaning out of.  It's another case of a panel layout that works a lot better without the vertical panel dividers in place, because I'm using the scenery details themselves as my panel borders.  Either way, Liz is just rubbing her forehead while Pat pleads his case and then she's like, okay, listen:

Liz explains to Pat that she needs a minute to prepare to deal with whatever all this is.  She explains that they'll unlock the front door, but in the meantime Pat should go round up their friends and bring them all over so everyone's all in one place.  She hasn't revealed to Pat just what it is he interrupted, but it buys her and Alice some time regardless.  Before Pat disappears, though, Liz stops him with just one more thing, an "And Pat?" sort of interjection.  The last panel, the closeup on her face, emphasizes her final point:  "Get Everyone."  Not just Monday and Lou, get the whole squad.  Get Everyone.

That's that for today.  I'm gonna put time into fleshing out the other gamedev thing I'm hacking away at but I do want to make sure I stay on top of this page so I have it done in a reasonable amount of time, so I'm gonna put a bit of focus on it.  February being a short month with a projected "page of Everyone Being Here" on the horizon does kinda mean doing this page a bit sooner will buy me a lot more breathing room, so I'll plan it smartly and we'll see what I can do with it.  Until next time, take it easy out there.