A few months ago broadcast TV offered us the series Strike Back, which in our opinion is a lot like the series 24. The more episodes we watched, the more we would see the screenwriters stretching out the plot to make it last 12 or 24 episodes. The need to create twists and turns in the story to keep the viewer’s interest, instead of focusing on a denser storyline, makes the overall plot seem like an obstacle course. We’re not saying it makes for bad TV. On the contrary, it’s fun to watch. But we do feel it had potential that could have been drawn out more convincingly.

Similarly the plot of our story “Plunging into the Depths,” whose original title was “Race against Time,” was quite different in the first draft. The plot wasn’t even finished with 95 panels because we were writing following an obstacle-course model: a first event leading to a second, etc. However the further along we got, the less the story seemed to work. So we eliminated a lot of stuff and kept only the essential elements: the watches that might have some signification, the gadget creating an invisible protective wall, and Fabien’s strange, mystical meeting with deceased colleagues. In the end the story was much shorter, more direct, and in our opinion, much more pleasing.