Electric Team

As seen on page 117, Zarko has escaped from the jar where he was imprisoned. Abby has created her own illustration of this important moment:

I finished writing the script for Electric Team Chapter 4 in early June, sent it off to Sam, and sat back and watched the pages roll in. Things were going great, until something happened. Actually, a lot of things happened, bad things, not in my personal life, but out there in the world. Everything seemed to be falling apart. Like so many others, I asked myself, “What am I doing to make the world better?” I could tell myself, “Well, I’m writing a comic,” but that didn’t seem like much.

And it’s really not much, I know that, but I wanted to try and communicate something worthwhile. I’d written a scene on page 112 where Leeta and Amazing talk about rebuilding civilization, but there was no sense of context–what kind of civilization were they talking about? What made it so great? Why did they care? These ideas seemed like they should be the heart of the issue, but when I wrote that scene, I’d rushed through it, hit the beats necessary to move the story along, and moved on. There was no heart to it.

So I thought it over, and eventually went back and expanded the scene. It went from one page to three pages, with page 112 rewritten to give more background to the characters. Then, with Sam and Abby’s input, I wrote a new page 113, which included some background of the Electric Team’s world. Abby had already made up the war between magic and science as part of the backstory, but until now it hadn’t been discussed in the text. Abby and I figured out more details of the war, she named the Three Great Nations, and we used page 113 to give a helpful historical overview.

BTW, Sam killed that page.

And then we added the all-new page 114, which I’m still not satisfied with, but which does a much better job than my first draft of getting to the heart of the matter. In this revised version of the script, I name the reason that civilization fell apart. It may seem too obvious, but like I said, I’m fairly concerned about the fate of civilization in the real world, so it seems like a topic worth addressing, even in a heavy-handed way.