Bonus
-
Archiving and timeline – Part IV
While some characters are confined to specific story lines, others recur in, like Markham, Blascovitch, Brookbank and Wood.
-
Archiving and timeline – Part III
The Exile story line focuses on Benson and Eva. The Damned revolves mainly around the experiences of various recruits prior to their arrival at one of the two training camps. And Vultures explores the characters of Valasquez, Cordo, Blascovitch and Markham.
The upshot of having set these constraints for the story lines is that some characters only appear in some story lines. Therefore Fabien, Rebel and all Consortium characters are only in The Cycle of Shadows. Benson and Eva are only in Exile and The Cycle of Shadows, while Valasquez and Cordo are only present in The Cycle of Shadows and Vultures.
-
Archiving and timeline – Part II
The Cycle of Shadows is the only story line that is published chronologically and that brings together all of our characters. The other story lines (Exile, The Damned, Vultures) focus on a specific group of characters whose stories can take place in different eras. The constraints of these story lines will be explained in another post.
-
References in Plain View
We are constantly bombarded by stories (TV, movies, newspapers, books, etc.). Unconsciously or even deliberately, we borrow ideas we’ve seen elsewhere and insert them into our stories. So in the story, “The Test,” we reuse the tunnel that heats up and the electric grate from Doctor No. Surely many people recognized it. We didn’t try to hide that we were borrowing it. In fact, Jason explicitly refers to it in one of his one-liners.
-
So, you read minds then?
On the Web, there are a lot of critics bemoaning the fact that recent comic books are much faster reads than they were in the 60s and 70s. Should this bother us? We certainly don’t think so. Those older comics were often overwritten, with bubbles narrating what was already clear in the illustrations. And thought bubbles became an easy way to explain what was going on—often at the expense of suspense. In the movies, we only get access to characters’ thoughts y illustrated. In movies (that don’t resort to the use of voiceover), characters’ thoughts are mainly conveyed to the audience by way of powerful images. This can create much stronger scenes because they give viewers some freedom of interpretation. So, for our comic, we gave ourselves the goal of not saying what the illustrations already show. And that’s why you won’t see us resorting to thought bubbles.
