Ensuring narrative consistency is a great challenge, particularly when there is a change of writers. In our opinion, it should be the publisher’s role to ensure a harmonious transition. But that is generally not what happens, and most often, getting a new author is seen as an opportunity to re-launch a title. This may lead publishers to agree to a change in direction that isn’t always elegant. Andrew Aardizzi was very critical about the work of Mark Waid on Daredevil. He claimed that the author was breaking away from recent events and going so far as to deny them (“Episode 12: I Object! (to Mark Waid’s ‘Daredevil’),” www.comicbookdaily.com, January 19, 2012).

TV offers a simple solution for this problem. It’s rare for a TV series to be written entirely by the same team of writers. A script editor has the job of making sure that the developments one writer creates will fit into the series’ overall storyline.

We are currently in the same situation. Due to lack of time, we have turned over the dialogue for some storylines to another writer. But we always check the work and do any tweaking necessary to ensure the consistency of our story.

Also, writing in a team is very stimulating. It creates opportunities for discussion that allow us to think more deeply about the characters.

This comment comes from Terressa Lezzi in her discussion of an academic video that looks at the TV series The Wire: “The result of this style was a show that allowed viewers the satisfaction of discovering the beauty of a story, instead of having it explicitly and repeatedly pointed out of them” (“Why You Love The Wire, Explained in Fascinating Detail,” www.fastcompany.com).

Marc Alan Fishman was talking along the same lines when he said the best comics are those that take the time to really present their concept in as many as five or six issues (“How To Succeed in Comics Without Really Trying,” www.comicbookdaily.com, February 25, 2012). In an interview, Brian K. Vaughan similarly said he hadn’t written a big twist at the end of the first issue of the SAGA series (“Interview: Brian K. Vaughan on SAGA, Lost, Twitter and more,” The Beat, comicsbeat.com, March 14, 2012).  We naturally agree with this point of view, but we’ll see in future comments that others favour a much more direct approach. 

We already spoke about some scenes that inspired the story “The Test.” But there is another reference in the story. In the scene where the Chinese and Indian men go down the tunnel and disappear, the image of the blood spurting from the opening is directly inspired by the film “Cube.” While we didn’t see the movie in its entirety, we did see that scene and we liked it so much it made its way into one of our stories.

The scene between Valasquez and Shirley at the end of the story, “Footing the Bill,” is liberally inspired by the behaviour of Francis Urquhart (played by Ian Richardson) in the British series “House of Cards.”  Urquhart would be double dealing with his close partners but would ask for their total trust while also bullying them physically. Valasquez is not a copy of this character. He’s much darker. But we like the idea of the unconditional devotion that Urquhart demands from his own partners, so that’s the aspect we tried to transpose to Valasquez.

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.

Tony “G-Man” Guerrero asked an excellent question on the ComicVine blog in November 2010: “Why do villains wear costumes?” For their first crime, it might be understandable that they’d want to be anonymous, but once they’ve been captured, the character’s costume loses its anonymity. We steer clear of giving our bad guys a too-fanciful or over-sophisticated look. We want them to wear clothes that are appropriate for the mission or that set them apart socially. For those reasons, we enjoyed the simplicity of the costumes in the movie X-Men First Class.

There are scenes we see when we are young that stay with us. At the end of season one of the Grendizer cartoon series, one of the main villains, Colonel Blaki, sacrifices himself in an attempt to defeat his opponent and allow his superior to leave the battlefield (see picture). We loved this gesture and it came to somewhat inspire Roslo’s actions in the story “Self-sacrifice.”

One of our readers asked about the link between Wally’s death and the story of when he arrived at the Bunker. He wanted to know if our use of the flashback technique was a nod to “Lost,” a TV series we’ve said that we admire. It’s a good question. We see one main difference between our temporal framework and the use of flashbacks by “Lost” scriptwriters. While they mainly used flashbacks to feed a given episode, we see all of our stories as part of one mosaic, which we hope to eventually reveal in its entirety. The order in which the various stories are published is not linear and, naturally, we want to keep some areas of our story shrouded in mystery.

We just received a copy of the Lost Encyclopaedia, so this seems like a good time to bring up again how much we admire this TV series. It’s popular culture at its best. We make the distinction of popular culture because some people say the series wasn’t as good as The Sopranos or Mad Men. We agree. But these two series were broadcast on specialty channels and were aimed at a more specific audience. Lost was broadcast on a major network, which imposed certain restrictions on the series. But those restrictions didn’t stop the two executive producers from making their narrative as complex as it was, which also made it denser and richer. They managed to balance emotion and action. They included all kinds of references into their stories without beating us over the head with them. We’re not saying it was perfect, and only time will tell if it will age well, but for now, let’s call it excellent scriptwriting.

Let’s talk about villains again. We’re convinced that every good story is based on a conflict, regardless of its form. In an oversimplified schema, the conflict pits good guys against bad guys. But how do we, the audience, distinguish between the two? Much too often, to help the audience make that distinction, the bad guys are made to dress in dark clothes or they are shown smoking. But do the bad guys know their actions are bad? Actor Will Smith was vilified a few years ago for saying that Hitler wasn’t conscious of his actions being evil. We agree. We believe that villains are profoundly convinced that they are doing the right thing for their own well-being or that of those around them. We’ve already talked about how the grey areas in the heroes’ personality create ambiguity that makes the conflict truly interesting. This is superbly illustrated by the decline of Michael Corleone in “The Godfather: Part II.”