Pain Train

Howdy friends! This comic is about a jail-break!! SCRIPT:

the great escape
1: *prisoners in yard, looking at plan scratched in the dirt* “so it’s decided. we bust out of here tonight!”
2: (that night:) *one prisoner on lookout* “okay, the coast is clear. get the door.”
3: one of them pulls at the cell door “let’s go, g-
4: *his head turns to us, looking confused and emotionally hurt* locked /again?!/

So the joke is that these guys who in the first two panels appeared to have a plan, didn’t even work out the first step – opening their cell door.

The joke itself came from me racking my brain for a comic subject ( I threw out some old scripts and failed at some new ones first), going over a list of settings to base a comic in and then prison somehow popped in there. I’ve done other prison comics before, but not one about attempted escape!

I numbered the panels this time so the title didn’t make me miscount the lines while editing… it’s only 4 panels, but it’s happened before! Also I usually use forward-slashes to indicate second-speakers in a panel, but sometimes also to help me remember to write some text in italics. Just in case you were confused there.

Seeing it in the panels is like looking at it with fresh eyes, so I made some phrasing changes, including the addition of two lines at the end from the other inmates which I think really ties it together well by better painting the fact that they’re really just three harmless dummies and not the masterminds they could have turned out to be. I like the idea of this being a constant thing with prisoners in the real world, but that’s a harder thought to convey…

This guy and his pose! I was trying to avoid drawing anyone with their legs crossed because I hate doing it as I’m bad at it, and while this pose looked kinda weird, I also kinda liked it, but ALSO-ALSO, sitting that way didn’t seem to fit the character? Bottom line: Didn’t feel right, so I drew him with his leg’s crossed anyway. WHICH DIDN’T MATTER because the third guy ended up obscuring half his legs!

The layout for the rest came pretty easily. The first face I drew was in panel 2 because I wasn’t sure how I was going to draw someone looking out of a cell without sticking their head all the way through between the bars (which would be less sneaky than I needed them to appear). Then I just threw the other faces together in panel 4 and worked backwards.

I added an extra speech bubble in panel 3 to better illustrate that the leader is actually caught off-guard by the cell being locked. To me, “What the-” has always felt like a goofy, perhaps even lazy thing to make a character say, but that might be because “What The?” was the title of a segment of a TV show which used to air in Australia. A segment so popular that it became a favourite catch-phrase for many years here and I became bitter at it’s over-usage. It is succinct, however. No getting past that.

In panel 1, I originally had two guards by the door in the wall at ground level, but I couldn’t work out if they should have guns or not which was an admittedly insane level of concern for detail on my part. I was wondering if they would even carry them in the yard in real life, given the danger of an inmate grabbing one, and so I tried drawing them with night-sticks instead, but they were so far away that it wasn’t possible to make that clear. As you can see below, I gave up and replaced them with a FENCE instead.

 

I cleaned up the dirt-map-maze by removing some paradoxical walls and making it actually look like dirt, or tried to at least. I also added barbed wire to the walls. Looks cool.

I made the bald inmate’s serial-number 07734, which upside-down on a calculator looks like “Hello”. Not my joke, just a reference to it as it was made on ‘Arrested Development’. An excellent TV comedy series I highly recommend.

I also decided to check my perspective of the second panel using our old/new friend the perspective tool, and wouldn’t you know it – I was off.

Way off. So, so off. There were also inconsistencies in how the cell doors were designed so I tried to fix those over the course of inking. I’m still not certain I got them all. It was confusing in black and white and adding colour at this point would have been more hassle than it was worth, I think. Changing the selected tool over and over really interrupts your flow. A funny mistake I made; when I found I had to lower the cell’s horizontal bar (the one the inmate is holding onto), I instinctively started lowering not only his hands, but the rest of him too – head and all. I noticed that early-ish though and corrected myself.

I used the perspective tool for the last two panels as well since my original sketch had it all messed up.

I gave the leader the prison-number 5663, which upside-down looks like “eggs” because if I’ve learned one thing from twitter, it’s that ‘egg’ is a funny word.

And here it is coloured. Now that I look at it again, I really like that 2nd panel. Praise be the perspective tool! I used the pencil tool to add the lighter shades on the floor, two strokes at different sizes and pen-pressures to give it that quick step in brightness. Does that make sense? I do hope it does. It’s very late.

Thank you for your patronage again, please ask any questions you have!