January 27, 2019

Opening Statements, Dropgangs, Numbering Panels

Updates

Curriculum Issue 4 is almost complete:

Head over to take a look.

On Wednesday next week, Issue 5 will drop which is my first issue on writing duties for the series.

For those into such things, here’s a Spotify playlist I made for the issue when writing it eons ago^.

CURRICULUM #5 - playlist by Dan Hill | Spotify

Dan Hill · Playlist · 5 songs · 1 likes

^ I will always go to bat for Giacchino’s score for the Star Trek movie.

Thoughts

I’m beginning to ramp up my comic book reading again. The opening pages of the new Martian Manhunter (Steve Orlando, Riley Rossmo and Ivan Plascencia) caught my eye.

Here’s the first one:

That straight away tells you what kind of tone the creative team are going for with their take on the character. You have the flurry of traumatic images at the top of the page that vastly overwhelm the reader’s eye as well as the fact they’re literally bearing down on the titular hero.

The entire page is bathed in a kind of hellish orange glow. This obviously connotes Jonn’s fear of fire, but also gives this fear a much greater (and deeper) context. Also, whilst all of these images are cast in a bright glow, perhaps indicating how ‘real’ and ‘recent’ they seem to Jonn, they’re juxtaposed with the narration captions which indicate this is a memory that Jonn has suppressed and hidden from those around him.

Turning over the page:

This page is an immediate contrast to what came before, showing Jonn in the dark alone with his trauma and memories. Again, the narration captions help us along here, selling the ‘promise’ of what’s in store for this run on the character, a redemption story, one born of secrets and trauma. There’s also another flurry of images, this time moved to the centre of the page, still ensuring it remains the reader’s focus.

These images, although empty of trauma, show the every day of Jonn’s lonely existence. By repeating a similar image layout/device, the artist here is also reminding the reader of the previous page, and the trauma that sits just below the surface for Jonn. There’s duality there, but the trauma overbears both sides.

A great example of an opening mission statement!

Links

I think I missed this Aeon essay on CreepyPasta when it was originally published. The essay very much focuses on the idea of CreepyPasta as a modern exorcising our modern fears via collective storytelling:

“These days, instead of the campfire, we are gathered around the flickering light of our computer monitors, and such is the internet’s hunger for creepy stories that the stock of ‘authentic’ urban legends was exhausted long ago; now they must be manufactured, in bulk. The uncanny has been crowdsourced.”

“Vincent compares Slenderman to the ‘tulpa’, a Tibetan mystical phenomenon described by the French-Belgian explorer Alexandra David-Néel in her book Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1932). The tulpa is a thought experiment: a way of manifesting an imaginary creature in the real world by focused meditation.”

===

MediaLens‘ latest alert talks about the public act of ‘rememberance’ in the UK and how it anonymizes or distorts the corporate origins of warfare and the subsequent body count.

===

Seymour Hersh is back on it over at LRB, this time talking about Regan and his vice president, Bush, during the cold war and the many byzantine plots the latter had in motion during that era.

“The only problem was that it was not deception. We came to realise that the American intelligence community needed the threat from Russia to get their money. Those of us who were running the operations were also amazed that the American press was so incompetent. You could do this kind of stuff all over the world and nobody would ask any questions.”

It’s good we’re past all that now.

===

This fascinating link centres around the idea of ‘dropgangs’, the physical manifestation of online dark markets. Given the recent clamp down and attacks against such sites, aspects of their standard operating procedure are moving into the physical world.

Instead of regular delivery via the postal service, dead drops and other espionage type methods are being employed instead, including entire markets and post-transaction conversations being moved to secure messaging services like Telegram. Amazing.

===

Food for thought: How to Fix Social Media by Injecting A Chunk of the Blogosphere. If only.

===

I’d perhaps switch a few movies around towards the bottom, but I pretty much agree with Vulture’s ranking of David Fincher’s movies.

===

Matt Taibbi is a journalist whose work I seem to be reading more and more of lately. His latest piece for Rolling Stone is about how various strands of the political spectrum have appropriated the legacy and politics of Martin Luther King for their own needs and ideologies.

It’s also worth noting that Taibbi has a newsletter which is essentially half blog, half serialised book. It’s called Hate Inc and covers the present political hellscape in scathing and analytical fashion. There is a $5 a month sub fee for it, but it’s worth it. His latest chapter on why reading the news is like smoking for instance:

“The coverage formula on both channels is to scare the crap out of audiences, then offer them micro doses of safety and solidarity, which comes when they see people onscreen sharing their fears. There is a promise of reassurance that comes with both coverage formulas.”

Preach.

===

Excellent tip from Jen Bartel in numbering your panels in your comic book scripts.

I totally copied this formatting from looking at Fraction’s scripts over the years but never even twigged to how helpful this would be for the rest of the creative team.

The whole Twitter thread is worth a look. I found it via the excellent newsletter of Jim Gibbons.

I especially recommend the most recent edition where Jim chats about some of the other things a writer can do with their scripts to make things easier on others involved in the project.

This includes sending scripts in PDF or RTF format. I cannot emphasise this tip enough. Neither of those formats work well with comments or tracking changes. As Jim points out, either send a Word doc or share it via Google Docs (personally, I prefer the latter).

===

I’m off now to see if that’s what it really does sound like when Doves cry.

See you in two!