After getting our first shot of the team on page 9, we’re now introduced to three of them by name on page 10. Rest assured, page 11 will introduce the other three (one of whom is Leeta, and we already know all about her.)
Instead of going through a lengthy introduction of each character, and showing how they all met, and gradually building to this battle with the vegetroids, I wanted to jump right into the action. Knowing that a character is called Mr. Amazing, and he is a “walking electrical dynamo,” is all you’ll need to understand what’s going on.
I was inspired, when writing this scene, by a comic book from The Glory Days of My Youth, AKA the 1990s. I speak of Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority #1:
Wow, that cover hasn’t aged very well. It’s possible the comic hasn’t, either; I haven’t read it in a long time. The Authority is one of those pieces of pop culture that, if you were to read it now for the first time, you would say, “What’s the big deal? I’ve seen this kind of thing a million times.” That’s because it caught people’s attention when it first came out by being different and fresh and exciting, so everybody copied it, and it ended up being incredibly influential and, before long, felt obsolete.
But I bought that first issue, the week it came out, and loved it. One of the ways that Warren Ellis hooked me was by cutting right to the exciting part; he never bothered to show how the main characters met, or how they got their giant spaceship. Four of the characters came from another series, called Stormwatch, that I hadn’t read, and two of them were brand new, but I didn’t feel lost at all. Ellis gave an overview of the characters on one page, six panels, one character per panel, a couple of words describing each one. Jenny Sparks shoots lightning, the Doctor does magic, Swift has wings . . . okay, that’s enough, we’re good. Let’s get back to the action.
[Edited to add: Actually there are seven members of the Authority, not six. I must have been remembering that page wrong. What it seven panels on a page? Was it two pages?]
I don’t want to bog down the story with the characters’ backgrounds . . . that said, all of the characters have backstories, and we will be working them in over time. Want to know about Mr. Amazing’s childhood? Keep reading.
