Comic Report - Planning the Action

Hello again! So, I'm glad I got that comic page finished when I did, because it turned out that three vaccines at once knocked me out for the entirety of Friday. Man! Lemme tell ya. I did manage to begin prepping a little bit for the next scene of the comic, so I thought that today I could go over my big action choreography process without spoiling too much of the fun. Today's update will be a bunch of that, a lot of broad ideas without getting into the specifics, so depending on how much of the upcoming pages you'd want to keep as a surprise, bear that in mind before you read further.

Over the years I've established a flow for how Dead Winter works. There's narrative buildup, and then there's a big payoff. Buildup, payoff, buildup, payoff. There's stretches of lows to set up context in the story for spikes of action that have some sort of purpose behind them- I love to draw action scenes, but I feel like if I drew only action it would be boring and listless, so I try to maintain a heartbeat pulse. In the story where it stands right now, the EKG is about to hit one of these spikes. The Mayor of the town employs his private army of Gravekeepers, sharing his power with them in order to keep authority over the budding new town largely for themselves. Our crew, and their extended friend network, are largely regarded as a threat to that power via Monday's relationship with the Mayor, and no one appreciates the threat against them revealed by Pat to neutralize them as opposition to that power, so what they decided to do about it was march out to where the Gravekeepers hang out and take that fight to them. There's a lot of Gravekeepers, there's four main ones and a satellite group of a dozen or so other hanger-ons, but combined with the Omni-Mart crew there's now eight members of our crew, so the number game is a bit more even. It's gonna be a big fight, but it's probably gonna also be a bigger fight than any of the previous fights I'd drawn, so a little bit of planning will help make things make sense.

This is the interior of the FISH building, the Gravekeepers' hangout. It's been planned as the location of a big fight for a while, but a hint at it was back on the first page of this chapter:

 It's a big warehouse space with an upper-deck office and a front room ahead of the warehouse itself. Drawing the shelves in the background and the fish along the tops of the walls is going to be a big pain in the ass, but hopefully it won't be too bad, since action shots usually benefit from exaggerated cameras. This is the existing space as I've already defined it, so I shaped the rest of the building in my plans around that.

What I'm planning for this scene is to have it flow between stages, so having each stage roughly plotted will help me direct the action and the way the camera follows it. The main room, the large interior space, is where the bulk of the action will take place. It's big and roomy, but there's obstructions like boxes and shelves to act as landmarks so camera rotation makes sense when it maneuvers in this space. In the front I have an office area, imagining it as the customer-facing front office people would go to when visiting the FISH building in the beforetimes. This room would probably be a secure point of entry into the Gravekeepers' hideout, so if you wanted to get into the main area, you'd have to go through this little spot- and the guys who secure it- first. Outside of this space, there's also a top overseer's office, an internal manager's office for running the whole fish warehouse separate from the customer-facing front desk area. In my plans I've set this area up with access from the far end of the warehouse, opposite the front office, accessed by a set of metal stairs.

In planning out my action sequence, I intend to start at the front entrance, which is on the interior side of a bus wall, and and move through the front office. The door into the main warehouse is on the far end of that room from the main entrance so it gives the action a bit of focused direction to move in with a clear goal to get to. From here the action will move into the large central space. The established "place with the TV the guys hang out in" is diagonally opposite of that doorway so there's a long line between there and the entryway, with lateral space to move into for action to happen. At the far end of this room is the stairwell leading up to the manager's office, which is a suspended room that loops back towards the front of the building, giving the whole structure a sense of consistent and contained space. After the action flows from the front office to the main room, those back stairs act as a pressure release valve to let the action spill from the main room up into the office, where a final confrontation can take place. Three rooms, structured with a consistent flow, setting up a satisfying narrative flow with a defined build-up and conclusion. Where it goes from here? I hope you will stick around to find out.

I've mentioned it a lot by now but with Kitsune Tails off my plate I'm gonna try to knock out these pages a bit quicker than "by the end of each month." My work on the Dead Winter game itself might end up taking a back seat to getting this scene done in a timely manner, since- if you've figured out by now- it'll be the last musical choreography in the comic, it'd be better suited to a faster pace. Juno and I are ramping our gamedev production back up to speed, but I think in the short term this might end up being the higher priority until the scene's conclusion gets posted. Thanks for checking in with me, I should have something more substantial next Saturday. The Covid booster was a wild ride, but it's worth saying: it's out and available, seek it out in your area if you have the opportunity to do so. Until next time, have a nice week!