Thief 3
By Phil’s own account, he struggled a lot with how to get Isidro past the land sharks, so this is a good example of taking what was making him tear his hair out and using it to good constructive purpose. I have to confess I probably would’ve considered a couple of these options in a first draft, too.
Isidro’s tendency to draw out his ideas was not something given to us in Razgril’s notes on the character (more about those later). It’s a playful use of the medium and a bit of a break for John, who otherwise has to draw a big ol’ crowd of land sharks and an entirely new environment consistently over the last two and next two pages. At the same time, we knew we could count on John to do some xkcd-level stick-figuring that nevertheless made each idea totally clear from an engineering standpoint.
There’s an old Tom & Jerry cartoon where chalk drawn stick-figures come to “life” and start running around the place.
This was my inspiration.
“HEY THAT’S BROCCOLI!”
“HEY GUYS RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!”
“HEY THAT WAS CLOSE I ALMOST TOOK A BITE!”
OH! Of course!
I was thinking… they’re afraid of trees?
You have a gun. You need a distraction. Is there some way to fire the gun while not being in the same location as the gun?