Annotated 34-9
As usual, I spend far too much time nattering on “here’s what I was thinking in mid-2014” and far too little appreciating John’s amazing artwork, but every once in a while, appreciation for the images pierces even my self-regard. That first panel, whoa. RIP, Shanna’s big-hat era.
If Guilded Age were a movie (haha, like we could ever cut this story down to even Snyder-Cut-length onscreen), we’d use some version of that image on a variant poster, maybe tilted and tinted blue. (Credit for the below image should go to the master of diagnosing movie-poster tropes, Christophe Courtois, though several English-language blogs have tried taking credit for his work.)
Not sure if keeping his car keys on the same chain as that huge switchblade counts as a dumb move or merely eccentric on JJ’s part, but I think it’s safe to assume no one’s ever run off with his knife in them before. That little smile of Xan’s in panel 2 is also a great touch. Poor guy should relish this victory, since he just burned his entire database to a crisp. As soon as he can use both his hands again, he’s not gonna know what to do with them.
That movie-poster collage is missing Minority Report.
So did Shanna take the knife out of Xan’s hand, or did she detach the car key while his hand was still impaled? Either one would be a delicate operation.
Neither – Xan is sitting in the passenger seat holding his hand next to the ignition
OOOOhhhh, that’s JJ’s car!
Now I can stop asking “why in the world would Xan have a car like that?”
Better hope JJ doesn’t have OnStar
Yeah I was gonna say, why wouldn’t he have a tracker in his car tbh. First
and lasttime his car got stolen by a target?Technically, it’s a rental: JJ doesn’t like to use the same vehicle on multiple jobs or even too many legs of the same job. He also, for obvious reasons, doesn’t want to work too closely with any authorities. That said, Shanna and (when conscious) Xan will be very much aware that they have a limited window of time before this vehicle becomes a liability, and the need to get Xan to a doctor complicates things further. The next time we see them, they’ll allude to overcoming these difficulties, and we could’ve spent more time showing that, but we had a lot of other stuff that was more important to get to.
A criminal would probably prefer to not be traceable remotely than to be able to trace their car.
Hm, so Body of Lies must be Chaotic Good then?
And really nice visual story-telling here. How much did you script a page like this and how much was just rough outlines and John doing his thing?
Some pages are more mapped-out than others. I trust John and Jason a lot and they knew me fairly well at this point, so it wouldn’t be unusual for a entire page’s panel descriptions to just be a line or two of text each. But I’d say this one was more mapped-out than average (see script for it, enclosed below). The numbers below the “PAGE NINE” were my shorthand request for panel layouts: three tall panels in one tier, then one long one in another.
——
PAGE NINE
1,2,3 (tall panels with lots of vertical motion in 1 and 3).
4
1. Xan and Shanna are scrambling like mad to get out of the apartment, . As JJ’s cursing emerges from Xan’s busted front door, Xan and Shanna run like maniacs down the apartment complex hallway. Shanna’s hat falls off as she runs (no big deal: it’s pretty much outlived its usefulness as a disguise anyway) and Xan has a large black duffel bag’s straps around the wrist of his good hand (a “bug out bag” or amateur survival kit for the hacker on the go, which we’ll get into later). Shanna is focused– there’ll be time for self-recrimination later– and Xan gives a woozy grin.
JJ BERTEN (from door, not seen)
Goddammit–
SHANNA
We can lose him– at the train station–
XAN
Yes– OR–
2. Close on Xan’s hands. Xan lifts his strapped-down hand to the keys and hits the electronic lock remote.
SFX
CHIRP CHIRP
3. JJ opens the door to the apartment complex just in time to see Shanna and Xan speeding away in his car, Shanna behind the wheel. They have not had time to disconnect the key ring from the knife impaling Xan’s hand, so that hand is awkwardly leashed to the keys in the ignition (they’ll fix it once they get far enough to be sure JJ won’t follow).
XAN
You’ll have to do all the driving… I don’t… have a license.
SHANNA
You’re also about to pass out from pain again once the adrenaline wears off, so I kind of assumed.
4. JJ grimaces in frustration, leaning against the door, finally letting a little more infirmity in his leg show. All he wanted was to solve things simply and now he’s probably going to have to go out and kill some more people and honestly, what is this world coming to when you can’t even rely on death threats any more?
JJ BERTEN
Why do people have to be this way?
JJ BERTEN
Ow.
—-
You can see that John changed the grin on Xan from panel 1 to panel 2 (I’d forgotten that was in the script at all) and that the issue of Xan’s hand couldn’t really be rendered in panel 3. Also, we never really did follow up on that “bug out bag” of Xan’s, I don’t think. But it’s still a good detail that he has one, and all in all, this was pretty close!