Ten Notes on Page 254

by on December 19, 2018
Posted In: Uncategorized

Page 254 lives, and breathes, and walks! Gaze upon it here.

 
1. This page is another example of Sam coming up with a layout I never would have come up with on my own. When I was planning the layouts I generally tried not to give her more than six panels on a page, because more panels take more time to draw. But she went ahead and gave herself eight panels, because she’s dedicated. She could’ve done it into fewer panels, but she gets more good character moments this way.

2. Long ago, when I was first planning this story, I worried about how to fit in the beginning of Brianna and Jaxula’s relationship. Jaxula had his own backstory, and his own role in the conflict with the Ultimage, and I wanted to show how they met, and how they got to know each other, and eventually I realized, again, that the story is about Brianna. We only needed two panels, a couple of pages ago, to establish that E.D.I.C.T. has tried to stop the Ultimage, and that he threw them into the dungeon. Given that, we just need Shelly to take Brianna down into the dungeon to introduce her to Jax.

3. There’s only one caption on this page, which is, “That sounded pretty boring, but I wanted Shelly to be happy, so I humored her.” The first reminds us that Brianna is basically a hedonist, looking for excitement and thrills, who doesn’t want to do boring stuff. If you look back across the Electric Team stories so far, this character trait should be fairly consistent. It’s mainly manifested as her wanting to fight people. Now that we’ve gotten to know her better, we can see that when she’s excited about fighting bad guys, it’s maybe not so much because she’s dedicated to lofty ideals of making the world a better place, but because it’s exciting.

The second part of this line of dialogue, though, reminds us that Brianna’s not a sociopath or anything. She values her friend Shelly, and wants her to be happy.

4. From the beginning of The Electric Team, Abi, Sam, and I knew that Brianna used to be a villain and became a hero. This storyline is us exploring how someone makes that transition. To be fair to Brianna, many people make mistakes and do questionable things when they’re teenagers; most people just don’t have the opportunity to rule over a castle.

5. I imagined the dungeon as just being dirty and made of rocks, but Sam gave it a neat sci-fi look.

6. As I’m writing this, Mad Max: Fury Road is playing in the background. I don’t watch many movies, and I almost never rewatch movies, but I’d happily watch Fury Road over and over. on a regular basis. It’s my favorite movie of the last five years or so, and one of my top ten movies of all time. Sam is also a big fan; Abi hasn’t seen it yet, but will when she’s older. The only time it’s specifically come up in the production of the comic was when I asked Sam to give the dudes in the bar back in Chapter Four a Mad Max kind of look.

Presumably there are more Mad Max-like parts of the Electric Team’s world; hopefully we’ll get to see some in the near future.

7. I can’t remember if I mentioned this recently, but Josh Burnett came up with the name E.D.I.C.T. I knew what the organization was, and I wanted a cool acronym name, so I went to him, because he’s great at acronyms, and he came back to me with two possibilities. E.D.I.C.T. fit better, and I love it, and I’m glad we’ve got it.

8. We’re only seeing this from Brianna’s standpoint, but you may wonder, what does that look like on the worlds where time is breaking down? I’m glad you asked, because we’ve covered that—in the Time Trouble story, illustrated by Joshua Burnett. We saw how, in 1950’s New York, there were a number of strange time anomalies, which resulted in Yarko the Great recruiting Bart Hill to come help fight the Ultimage.

It makes me happy that, in the world of 1950s comics, the breakdown of time and space manifests as bacon turning back into pigs, clocks running backwards, and pilgrims showing up and being confused by skyscrapers. That seems like a very period-appropriate take.

9. The dream is that you read that story about the Ultimage months ago, and vaguely wondered  who he was, and then started reading this story about Jason Occult, and when you found out Jason was the Ultimage, it was a blinding revelation that filled you with a sense of deep satisfaction. That’s the dream, anyway.

10. We’ve known from the beginning that Brianna ends up with Jaxula, and we know that the Ultimage gets defeated, so we know where this story is going, but we don’t really, but we . . . kinda do? Getting there is more than half the fun!

Ten Notes on Page 253

by on December 13, 2018
Posted In: Uncategorized

TPage 253 is now a thing that exists in the world, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should.


1. After spending several pages telling how Jason Occult became the Ultimage, I’m glad we’ve shifted our focus back to Brianna. Jason only appears once on this page, off to the side, and he doesn’t speak.

2. Our previous Electric Team flashbacks were, with the exception of Leeta’s, four pages long.  Brianna’s is going to be 25. She’s getting a lot more page space, but the other flashbacks were all one defining moment from a character’s youth; Brianna’s is telling her whole life story. So even though hers is much longer, it’s way more condensed.

3. Brianna’s Story could easily be a 12 issue mini-series. Squeezing it all into 30 pages requires the use of a high-level writing technique called “Tell, Don’t Show.” But seriously, the other flashbacks have been much more grounded in one moment in time, and have played out moment to moment. This one covers a lot of ground in the captions, summarizing whole years. As I’ve alluded to before, the key is to remember that is Brianna’s story, not Jason’s. Jason’s got his whole epic tale going on, battling to keep control of the castle, and we’re going to mostly ignore that, and only touch on it when it becomes relevant to Brianna. It’s helpful to imagine that there has already been a comic book series about the Terror of the Ultimage, and we’re summarizing the high points as background to the story we’re telling. Like a story set during World War II; you don’t have to explain the whole geopolitical situation, or all the battles, just give a sense of what’s going on.

4. I should mention that, in using this approach, I am basically ripping off what Kurt Busiek does in his series Astro City. Astro City, which is one of my all-time favorite comic book series, imagines a super-hero world like those you find in comics, and then tells relatable human stories set in that world. Busiek’s done the thing where he made up a whole epic super-hero saga, then put it in the background of the story he’s telling.

5. Hey, let’s talk about page layout. I’ve mentioned several times in the past that I’ve handed over the bulk of the page layout decision-making authority to Sam. For a long time I broke the script up into panels, then gave suggestions for the how the panels should be arranged on the page. For our current story, I switched over to providing dialogue and general stage directions and letting Sam do all the layout. It was hard for me to let go, but my faith in Sam is continually rewarded. I’m very pleased with this page, because the layout is so different from what I would have come up with; my layouts tend to be functional and fairly predictable. Look how Sam started with the short wide panel, placing Brianna and Jason equidistant from Shelly. Then she made a large panel of the two friends reunited, then two stacked smaller panels of them trying to have fun in the castle . . . it’s nice, I like how she makes time flow across the page.

6. I talk about the decision-making process behind the scripts, so it probably sounds like I do all writing, but the story is still very much a collaboration with Abi. Abi created Shelly, for instance. To be honest, I wasn’t sure about Shelly at first, but Abi insisted, and she became an important part of the story.

When we got to page 245, I assumed we were done with Shelly, and wrote a line that implied that Brianna never saw her again. Abi disagreed, so I toned down the language, and changed it to, “Shelly had been such a good friend to me, I should’ve at least said good-bye. But, I didn’t.”  That left the door open for Shelly to come back. Then, months later, I realized what we needed to make this part of the story work was to bring Shelly back, hence this page.

7. Poor Shelly. Imagine that your best friend fell for a guy, and you didn’t like him, you thought he was a bad influence, and then your friend ran off with him. Then, years later, the guy came and got you, and he was a cosmic super-villain now, and brought you to his castle that he’s ruling over as an evil overlord. That would be very stressful.

8. I like that feast panel. Brianna’s best moment in the first chapter of The Electric Team is when she doesn’t know what corn is, but finds it delightful. She’s always open to new culinary experiences.

9. I’m happy I discovered this Ten Notes format. It’s lower pressure because I don’t have to come up with transitions between paragraphs, and I don’t have to worry if something fits. Every thought just has its own number, and if its kind of random or extraneous, that’s fine. I write a lot more with this format than I did without it. Unfortunately, I don’t always have ten things to say. Like today.

10. Why is Shelly taking Brianna to the dungeon? The answer will CHANGE BRIANNA’S LIFE FOREVER! No, seriously, it will. Tune in next week! 

Ten Notes on Page 252

by on December 5, 2018
Posted In: Uncategorized
Page 252 is here!

1. As you can see, we’ve gone to a darker color scheme, to reflect a darker time in Brianna’s life. We’re approaching the end, so this is the final color scheme, at least until we come back to present-day Brianna telling the story.

2. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I originally planned a longer scene showing the Ultimage fighting the castle guards, but I cut it. I realized that there’s no real need to show the battle with the guards; the Ultimage has got the powers of a god, so it’s not a suspenseful fight. By just consigning that battle to a line in a caption, and cutting right to the Queen and Princess surrendering, I saved precious space, without losing anything important from the narrative. Which is important, because I have a limited number of pages to tell this story.

I haven’t written the whole thing, but I’ve planned it for 30 pages, and I think it’s going to work.

3. I’m happy to see that Sam chose to make Queen Caroline and Princess Audrey look a lot like the toys that inspired them.

Those toys:

Not surprisingly, they’re named after Abi’s friends Caroline and Audrey.

4. It’s hard to believe, but Swann Castle and Luxum the city-moon first appeared way back in Chapter 2, on page 34, when Jaxula was describing where he was from. I knew it would be a long time before we got there, but I wanted to show the castle early on. I’m so happy to finally be telling this story.

On the next page, Amazing asks Jaxula how he and Brianna met. Jaxula says, “That’s . . . complicated.” You’ll find out how, in just a couple of pages!

5. I’m glad to see some E.D.I.C.T agents in action; it’s a shame they get taken out in one panel. Hopefully that doesn’t make them look too ineffective. Look closely, and you’ll see Jaxula in there.

6. As I’ve said many times, The Electric Team is based on characters and concepts that Abi and I made up while playing with toys. In most cases, the stories are not based on specific events from playing, but our current story is an exception. Jason Occult took over the castle in an epic tale that unfolded in our basement in July of 2013. We got a lot of material out of that.

7. I asked Sam to design Brianna a new outfit for this page, making her look like a super-villain. I didn’t specify that she should put spikes on the shoulders, but I’m so glad she did.

8. When I first described Brianna to Sam, way back when we started work on this comic, I said, “She used to be a villain.” At first I considered revealing this part of her background at the beginning, but I quickly decided it would be better if Brianna and Jax were keeping it secret. More potential for drama that way. It’s been a long road, with occasional little hints, but we’ve finally made it.

9. If you’re a servant to someone rich and powerful who mistreats you, you might learn the lesson that it’s wrong for people to abuse their authority. Humans being what they are, though, it’s likely that you’ll learn the lesson, “Someday I will be the master, and I’ll have my own servants.” That’s where Brianna is at this point.

10. Brianna first tasted chocolate when Jason gave it to her when they first met. Remember?