Bonus
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On Tone
When Spurgeon interviewed Ed Brubaker (“CR Sunday Interview: Ed Brubaker,” www.comicsreporter.com, June 24, 2012) he offered this introduction to one of his questions: “When I read a bunch of your Captain America recently, I was surprised how somber it was. I don’t mean that it was depressing or sad, I mean serious and sober.”
We came across this sentence a long time after we’d started writing and we felt that it was in keeping with what we are trying to do. Our dialogue is imbued with restraint—some would even say banality, and we accept that. Our goal isn’t to write transcendent dialogue. Instead we want to convey ambiguous moods, as though the characters were unable to reconcile all the mysteries around them or all the lies they’ve told others and themselves.
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Writing Challenges : Divide and Conquer – Part II
Despite its simplicity, Benson’s escape from Grant posed a lot of challenges. First, once Benson escaped, how would he find his way? This is the early 90s, when GPS devices still weren’t very popular. That’s why he finds a map in the car. There was also the final battle between Grant and Benson. Originally, this was supposed to take place along a country road, but we gave up that idea. Benson had to get to the aircraft to go to Bhutan and every minute counted. But how far exactly was this country road from the departure platform? We solved the problem by staging the battle directly on the platform. The final challenge was to figure out a way to get rid of Grant temporarily, without killing him off, so he would be out of commission long enough to not warn his partners.
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A reference in «Takeover – Part I »
In this adventure, Leonard goes on a long tirade to explain that he isn’t welcome in the middle-class neighbourhood into which he has moved. Once, a friend who was selling his house in this type of neighbourhood told us that his neighbours had been mortified to learn that the potential buyer was a person of colour. This story came back to us while writing the story.
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A glimpse at “Takeover Part I”
In this story, Leonard’s bank is called Marx Capital. This is us having some fun by combining the name of Karl Marx with the title of his famous book Das Capital and thereby subverting Marx’s message.
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Writing Challenges : Divide and Conquer – Part I
This story is constructed in two sections. First, there is a description of the location, and then the events accelerate and omissions are made to compress the action. Also, the script does not contain a lot of dialogue. That’s because Benson is a consummate professional, so he doesn’t need to say his feelings and questions out loud.
