Electric Team

The amazing Samantha Albert killed it on page 16, don’t you think? In the script I specified that panel 5 “should be crazy, trippy, psychedelic, visually stunning, with bizarre occult symbols in the background, strange lighting effects, etc.” That’s pretty vague; not much more than “hey, make this look real cool,” but she certainly did. It’s a great looking panel. Go look at it again, I’ll wait.

Sam Albert is young and full of life; like a young person, she generally reads comics online. But I am old, and come from a time when you could buy comic books at grocery stores and gas stations, so I think of comics as coming in 24 page chunks.

When I planned this first chapter of The Electric Team, I conceived of it as a 24 page story. That divides up into three sections of eight pages each.

The first eight page section introduces the setting and gives the backstory of Leeta and her father.

The second eight page section, now complete, shows the battle between the Electric Team and Commander McCarrot and his vegetroids. That’s over now, and the Electric Team won. Hurray!

The third section relates what happens after the battle. That begins on Thursday. SPOILER WARNING: The Electric Team will be invited to dinner!

On page 14, the fight scene is well under way–Plant Man battles Commander McCarrot! Leeta jumps into the fray!

When I was writing the script for these pages, I ran into an age-old question–how do you write dialogue for a fight scene? It’s trickier than I had realized. If you think about real-life fights, people don’t really talk much. It’s mainly grunting and maybe some generic threats. If you have panel after panel of people grunting and moaning, occasionally shouting, “I’m gonna beat you up!” and “No you’re not!” it starts to get boring for the reader.

That’s why many comic book writers have tried to jazz things up by adding jokes and snappy banter. After a certain point, though, it starts to get unbelievable for readers, the sheer amount of conversation some characters have as they jump around and punch each other. If you think of a Chris Claremont X-Men comic, for example, you’ll often see a character delivering entire paragraphs worth of exposition during what had to be no more than a second.

How much talking is too much talking? Stan Lee is famous for snappy fight scene banter, but there were times even he just gave up, like in this famous Jack Kirby page:

Sometimes you just have to let the art speak for itself. I tried to hit the right balance between words and actions in this scene, but for whatever reason my favorite panel on page 14 is the one without any words.

In other news, that Laser Ponies game I mentioned, the one at Gen Con, was a big success. Pictured below is Lemonbell, wearing a sassy yellow bandanna, leading the party in search of the ancient evil sorcerer Memnon.