Comic Report EX - Planning and Preparation

This week I wanted to get all my ducks in order and make sure I had everything I needed prepared to tackle a monumental task: one last musical choreography scene before I lead towards the end of the comic. The song is Queen's Dead on Time, off their 1978 album "Jazz"- as always, the choreography is intended as a read-along with the artist's own original studio recording, I don't take credit for their work and the presence of the lyrics are included to allow a reader to match the pace and flow of the comic with the song. This is my third time tackling something like this, and it'll be the culmination of my experiences with this sort of exercise; it's a bit more ambitious, but I think with a good plan I'll be able to execute in a reasonable amount of time. Today I'll present an overview of how I set something like this up, what my considerations are, how I pace it out and other details I try to account for in making the reading experience novel and engaging. This update will be a bit spoilery, provided you can read my thumbnails, so that's a heads-up for you.

When I'm approaching an action scene like this, one of my first considerations is which song I should actually pair my artwork with. Like every artist who has ever breathed on this Earth, whenever I listen to music I will imagine a little scene in my head, and these pages are my attempt to put that scene on paper. So far I've chosen Sympathy for the Devil, Kickstart My Heart and now, Dead on Time; I listen to a lot of music, but for these pages to have the widest and easiest possible impact on readers I have tried to curate songs that people have heard, or they might be familiar with, so there's minimal extra steps in facilitating a read-along. "Can someone conceivably recognize the song and listen along in their own head? Will they have heard this before?" My art is still and silent on its own, so making sure I can convey the tune I'm choreographing to as many people as possible is the biggest objective; making up a song of my own is out of the question since no one will be able to divine the flow I intend them to follow along with.

Once I have a song selected, I'll go through and try to find my breakpoints in the track. Breakpoints are what enable me to pace my action to a song, these are natural points in a track where it feels like a good time to turn the page. Breakpoints are kind of a "by feel" thing for me, like, it's never 100% clear but when I'm listening to a song over and over and over, replaying it in my head, there's usually a spot just before a surge of energy that feels like a good spot to plan for a break. Page density is also important, sooner or later I'm gonna run out of room on a page so finding the right breakpoint will let me keep what's on that page individually satisfying while also pacing out the whole thing. As a small example: with the Kickstart My Heart arc ( https://deadwinter.cc/page/473 ) I used the instrumental buildup to ease into the action, and then the breakpoint for the first into the second page was just before the lyrics kicked off.

I hadn't done this in the past but for this run I decided to include timestamps for which portions of a song each page would follow, and it averaged out to ~20-30 seconds per page, which feels about right. Comics don't take super long to read so it paces out to maybe a little slower than people actually spend reading a page of comics. In the past I'd also kind of picked a point near the end of a song to truncate things and taper off a bit quicker, but for this last run I'm plotting out the whole thing end to end. The Kickstart My Heart run ran for eight pages- marked with a star in my notes- where the last one involved the characters turning down the stereo on the last page and talking over a lot of the outro, which helped truncate things a lot. My plan for Dead On Time is about ten-and-a-half pages, so two-and-a-half pages longer than the last one. It's not too bad. I consider the last page a half-page since it's a big impactful splash page and I plan to draw it alongside the penultimate page and post it a day later to minimize downtime in the conclusion as much as possible- I did this with the end of the Liz vs. Marv fight a little while ago ( https://deadwinter.cc/page/591 ) and I think it's the right way to handle a big impact page like that. Either way, eleven individual pages is what I'm looking at for this thing. Uh oh!

I realize the gravity of the situation I have invited upon myself. The pace at which I'd been producing pages in recent years has been about one a month- this isn't going to be acceptable for a big action scene, that's almost an entire year. I can't sustain energy like that. I've needed to divert my time towards other things in order to keep a roof over my head, but with a bit of success from Kitsune Tails launch I think I can afford to focus really heavily on just comics again for a little bit and churn out eleven pages in a shorter amount of time. This might mean working on Dead Winter game stuff a bit less than I was planning to, but seeing the total page number is eleven I need to really dig in and do this if I want people to have a good time reading it. I kind of expect I might take a financial hit in chasing this ambition, but I think I'll be fine.

As for the structure of the action sequence, this scene is going to be a bit more complicated than either Sympathy for the Devil or Kickstart My Heart, so having a solid plan in place should help a lot. Between eight members of our crew and something like a dozen-and-a-half Gravekeepers, I've gotta coordinate a lot of characters and make sure everyone has a bit of a moment for themselves. The fight scene is planned to play out in three major parts, set to the rising energy of the song's opening, the thick-of-it feel of the middle of the song and the explosive climax of its finale. Here's my choreography plan for how to make that all work, and probably the bulk of the spoilers I'll be posting, in case you want to skip around them. I'll denote the beginning and the end of the spoilers with dash marks.

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Pages A, B and C represent the beginning of the scene. Dale, Amy and Monday take point and charge in from the front. The Gravekeepers were at ease at the start so this is the first ripple disrupting their calm. This is a small skirmish establishing a foothold inside the Gravekeepers' hideout, so there's a bit of light fighting meant to push one member into the main room to activate the rest of the Gravekeepers. Dale knocking the door off its hinges and using it as a tower shield is a key visual element in this phase, as when the Gravekeepers are activated in Page D they take up their arms and focus fire at the front office, through the brick wall, starting on Page E. This was why I said the other week that "I need to make this wall brick and not drywall," it's going to be fired through. The intro to the action ends with Dale, Amy and Monday hunkered down behind the big steel door, weathering the directed fire from the Gravekeepers.

Pages E, F and G are the thick-of-it part of the scene. While the Gravekeepers have their attention fixed on our first team; Lou, Clark and Melody break through a glass window, weapons at the ready. This is timed to "bangin' on the ceiling, hammerin' on the walls, gotta get out, gotta get out, oh you know I'm going crazy" in Dead On Time- the beat of that part of the song felt like actual hammering so I planned this team's intro to break through in accordance with that feel. With Lou's team flanking the Gravekeepers, Clark and Melody can use the weapons Randy made to lay suppressing fire, corraling the Gravekeepers into cover which then gives Monday's team the opportunity to close the gap and get dug in in close range.

Page G has that checkerboard section- there's about 32 beats of instrumental happening in this section. In past pages I've tried different ways of visualizing instrumental segments with action, like plotting bullet ricochet patterns to raise or lower with the notes of a song in Sympathy for the Devil ( https://deadwinter.cc/page/195 ) or the pattern in the gunfire from the bikers in Kickstart My Heart ( https://deadwinter.cc/page/476 ), these are my attempts to visualize a non-vocal segment of the song. I'm planning to use a two-stage checkerboard black-out pattern to convey a rapid sequence of small action panels showing a string of close-range combat choreography to the beat of this segment; if it works out how I think it will it should be easy to follow along with the instrumentals. Following The Checkerboard there's a guitar-riff burst from Snake-Eye scattering the action, and a retaliatory wind-up and sling of a brick from Amy back at Snake-Eye, knocking his weapon away.

Page H represents an escalating scale of instrumentals in the notes, the energy is rising and it's building up to an explosive conclusion. To pair this to my choreography I've plotted this as the end of the thick-of-it, where the remaining Gravekeepers are routed and opt to retreat up the staircase to the top office and escape out the fire exit. I took some pains to draw that fire escape on the currently-posted page since I wanted to establish that it was there for this moment, so there's a spot for them to funnel into and try to break away from the crew. As the music ascends they race up the stairs, through the door, around the corner and towards the fire exit where, at the peak of the energy, Liz and Alice burst through that door to greet their retreat. Being the big stars of the comic these two are the closers, and pages I, J and K are dedicated to them mopping up the remainder of the Gravekeepers. On page I they thin out most of the mooks until Spade finds himself alone on page J. Freddie Mercury's vocals build to a jagged edge here as Spade pumps himself up and in a quick flash at the bottom of the page he and Lizzie have a one-on-one melee battle building up to the last huge impact of the scene on Page K. If you know the song, you'll understand. If you haven't heard it before, you'll understand soon enough. It's the big hit that closes out the scene, and then from here I can move on with the rest of the story.

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My thumbnails are a language that is just for me to read, so I don't feel too bad about revealing the whole thing here, but if you want a preview you should be able to read along with my prepwork ahead of time and feel out what I'm building towards. I'll be writing more in-depth about each page as I draw them, and I'll be posting them all here, so please look forward to that. I expect that, since I have all my action plotted and I don't need to worry too much about backgrounds or dialogue I should be able to post pages faster than once a month; I'm gonna press myself so if there's something else you wanted to see from me, I apologize in advance but I gotta be expedient with this scene. It's just how it's gotta go.

Thanks, as always, for checking in with me. If I'm on a good pace I should have inks and flats for next Saturday, so let's see how that goes. Until then, please wish me luck. This is gonna be a big one.