At Least He Got One Thing Right, I Guess.

RIP Victoria Dallon you would have loved that stupid blue cop from League Of Legends

I made a zine! An Inaccurate Recap of "The Power Fantasy" Issue 1. It's the dumbest, messiest thing I've drawn in a looooong time, and I laughed the entire time I was drawing it. Under the cut: spoilers for the entirety of TPF #1, swear words, and some incredibly cartoonish violence.

...it's not actually as inaccurate as I thought it was going to be? I want to clarify that Heavy is saying the same thing as the other four, but means it in the opposite way. I'm not doing another draft though, because any possible improvements to this would really only be making it worse.

Oh, and here's the whole thing laid out in zine format. Feel free to print, cut out along the border, and assemble- here's a decent diagram of how to fold a zine.

Blue Delliquanti, the creator of one of my all-time favorite comics, did this post a while back about cartooning technique. The quote I want to highlight is:

"A question I ask is who the “viewer” of a scene is intended to be. Adversary is often framed through Curtis’s visual perspective, but not always. There are certain things that he doesn’t see or can’t recognize, and I was very deliberate about what those moments were." (Where Curtis is one of the characters in another comic they created.)

When I first read that quote I found it intriguing, but I couldn't quite make sense of what they meant by it. I got the sense it meant more than just "Is the panel showing what any one character literally sees?" but I couldn't reason through what someone's visual perspective really was.

Now, after spending about a zillion years staring at certain pages of The Power Fantasy, I think I get it. Let's talk about what Tonya sees in this page, versus what she experiences, and how the visual storytelling zig-zags between those two things.

There's two interesting things- okay, there's a bunch of interesting things going on in this page, but let's talk about the shift between panels 1 and 2, and between panels 3 and 4. They're both communicating what Tonya experiences, but not by showing what she sees- in fact, showing the world through her eyes (literally) would probably do a much worse job of putting you in her shoes (metaphorically.)

Panels 1 and 2

While Tonya is being yanked through the air by Heavy's gravity powers, the colors go from "realistic" (full-spectrum) to a limited palette that turns her skin blue. This isn't an indication that gravity powers turn things blue- they never do that any other time, and also it doesn't make sense for gravity to have a color. Heavy's powers aren't blue, Tonya's feelings are blue- it looks weird and unnatural to have blue skin, and it feels weird and unnatural to be sent flying. Also- I think the implication is that in panel 1 of this page, she's already arrived, because the only movement we see is her opening her eyes. She continues to feel like the world has gone all wrong, right up until she opens her eyes and sees that she's arrived.

Panels 3 and 4

Panel 3 is the one panel on this page that could plausibly be what Tonya actually sees- page 4 definitely isn't. But they both communicate how she interprets Heavy in that moment, even if she can't literally see his face from their positions in panel 4. He goes from a friendly, somewhat romanticized figure in panel 3 to sketchy and roguish in panel 4. Heavy's suddenly in shadow (even though he's facing a light source, if you really think about it!) because he's acting shady. (A lot of visual effects overlap with verbal idioms, which is something I could talk about for about a million years if given the change, but I'm trying to stay on topic.)

...so this entire page is fairly strongly from Tonya's perspective, even if only one panel of it is through her eyes. I plan to keep digging into this topic, because I don't think that's always the case- I think there's scenes/pages that switch back and forth between characters, that don't align the reader with any one character, and so on. Updates forthcoming as I learn more.

“young witch trying to solve the mystery of her neighbor’s missing cat in a small village in the Alps” continues to be hilarious don’t get me wrong but it’s kind of making me want to take a crack at treating the concept seriously. In this insular rural community, a cat goes missing. A young woman who takes her community’s professed ideals of helpfulness and harmony in witchcraft seriously volunteers to try to find him. Realizes the more she searches and the more she asks around that everyone in this idyllic village is quietly seething with resentment against their neighbors and against the world, that the insularity of her village is harboring a festering social rot that no one is allowed to address. No one can leave. The hills have fallen silent. Something is eating the cats and no one is allowed to address this. Ötzi is there

You could make a pretty good Worm game with the bones of Tactical Breach Wizards

Ward, but it's Dot fighting Amy's Nine Evil Exes.

I did a painting party for my birthday and here’s what I made

oooh have you ever done a post about the ridiculous mandatory twist endings in old sci-fi and horror comics? Like when the guy at the end would be like "I saved the Earth from Martians because I am in fact a Vensuvian who has sworn to protect our sister planet!" with no build up whatsoever.

Yeah, that is a good question - why do some scifi twist endings fail?

As a teenager obsessed with Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone, I bought every single one of Rod Serling’s guides to writing. I wanted to know what he knew.

The reason that Rod Serling’s twist endings work is because they “answer the question” that the story raised in the first place. They are connected to the very clear reason to even tell the story at all. Rod’s story structures were all about starting off with a question, the way he did in his script for Planet of the Apes (yes, Rod Serling wrote the script for Planet of the Apes, which makes sense, since it feels like a Twilight Zone episode): “is mankind inherently violent and self-destructive?” The plot of Planet of the Apes argues the point back and forth, and finally, we get an answer to the question: the Planet of the Apes was earth, after we destroyed ourselves. The reason the ending has “oomph” is because it answers the question that the story asked. 

My friend and fellow Rod Serling fan Brian McDonald wrote an article about this where he explains everything beautifully. Check it out. His articles are all worth reading and he’s one of the most intelligent guys I’ve run into if you want to know how to be a better writer.

According to Rod Serling, every story has three parts: proposal, argument, and conclusion. Proposal is where you express the idea the story will go over, like, “are humans violent and self destructive?” Argument is where the characters go back and forth on this, and conclusion is where you answer the question the story raised in a definitive and clear fashion. 

The reason that a lot of twist endings like those of M. Night Shyamalan’s and a lot of the 1950s horror comics fail is that they’re just a thing that happens instead of being connected to the theme of the story. 

One of the most effective and memorable “final panels” in old scifi comics is EC Comics’ “Judgment Day,” where an astronaut from an enlightened earth visits a backward planet divided between orange and blue robots, where one group has more rights than the other. The point of the story is “is prejudice permanent, and will things ever get better?” And in the final panel, the astronaut from earth takes his helmet off and reveals he is a black man, answering the question the story raised. 

There really is basically no reason for Imp Vista friendship to happen in a world where Regent doesn't blow up but I really wish there was. Maybe in comedic less serious AU they can still be Best Friends because there really is something so engaging about a world where the Undersiders and Wards hate each other but are also forcing friendship through gritted teeth off the clock for the sake of Team Little Sisters

Imp invites Vista to one of Taylors block parties in hopes that exposure to raw villainous joy will turn Vista supervillain. Vista brings the Wards with her in hopes that exposure to good natured heroes with a system of ethics will make Aisha want to join the Wards. Everyone is out of costume and random adults try and solve the tension between what they perceive as two groups of teenagers having a spat over nothing. Lisa and Chris Win are forced to shake hands and apologize lest they set a bad example for the kids watching. They play Cornhole and Regent makes the Wards mess up every single throw. Emotionally charged game of Uno turned philosophical debate between Brian, Taylor and Dennis.

In conclusion I have a vision for a beautiful world of WardSiders frienemyship and it all boils down to this image

The Chicago Wards would be a good team; shakers (and those that can function as shakers) would be best for the format considering the versatility they offer

You could make a pretty good Worm game with the bones of Tactical Breach Wizards