Annotated 49-26
FB: [“Pacific Rim” soundtrack plays, interspersed with a few phrases from Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn”]
[Puzzled frown]
Okay. Overall, I’m pretty happy with our conclusion. And I don’t like to gripe too much, especially about stuff Flo has done–most of what she did was amazing, I’m hardly perfect myself, et cetera. But there are three lengthy, Flo-written speeches in our last two chapters that, in my view, we’d have been better off skipping. The Sepia parts here feature the first and most skippable of them. At this point, Shanna seems to be reiterating arguments already made and not adding anything that interesting or meaningful to them. Sure, sometimes you have to keep repeating the same arguments, especially when you’re dealing with someone who’s brainwashed, but that doesn’t mean we need to see it.
It’s not hard for me to figure out why I dislike the speeches. All three of them involved Flo improvising at more or less the last minute because she couldn’t quite say “Okay, we’re done” before it was time to upload the page. And “stabs at profundity, improvised on a midnight deadline” is my least favorite comics genre. The evidence it was done this way is in the script file for the chapter, in which Flo the writer left these jobs for Flo the letterer to figure out. This effectively left me no time to approve or veto the final results. Not that we were editing each other like that much anymore, anyway…but the fact that I was being shut out of the process didn’t make me like the results any better. Here, for instance, the Carol and Shanna parts are scripted as “CAROL: [AN ATTEMPT TO ANSWER SHANNA’S QUESTION ABOUT HR’S BEST SELF]” and “SHANNA: [AN INCREDIBLY WELL REASONED ARGUMENT THAT MAYBE ACTUALLY GETS THROUGH TO CAROL].”
Flo convinced me, rightly I think, that Shanna’s “What would the ideal HR do?” question was a good bit but still not enough to push Carol over the edge. But neither of us quite knew what to try after that, so I ended up deferring to Flo’s “pray to the gods of sleep deprivation” approach. In fairness, she had done lots of other last-minute script modifications in the same way that had worked out fine, for most of our time on Guilded Age. But she’d generally modified a complete draft, rarely a bracketed “insert dialogue here” note.
Your mileage may vary, of course! I think most readers had no problem with this speech, though I’d say our story’s overall momentum carried some of them through it.
With the benefit of hindsight, I would now push the idea that Carol should refuse to help in that moment, leaving Xan and Shanna paralyzed and ratcheting up the tension instead of deflating it. Because in a few more pages, another factor will come in…the factor of HR’s own words and actions in the present moment. And that’s the final ingredient needed to spur Carol to her role in the climax.
Shanna’s speech here definitely reads like it was improvised on the fly. At the time, I kind of thought that was the point.
Like, “shoot, my last gamble didn’t work. I’m gonna have to throw some pseudo-philosophical nonsense at the wall and hope it sticks.”
The fact that it wasn’t intended that way kind of feels weird.
Hey, as long as you enjoyed it somehow, that’s the important thing!
It’s odd. On the one hand, I feel like it makes sense to return to the sepia world at this point. On the other hand, I feel the tone of this speech is the weird thing. I keep thinking at this point Shanna should push harder instead of going with the “good-cop” thing? I mean, she’s trespassing on a basement with six bodies, one glowing. I would definitely be pushing stuff by now.
And yet, I can’t think what other reason we could have to return to sepia world, if not to listen in on something. And returning to sepia world feels right around now. So….
I think overall chapter 49 works as a long crescendo up the final fight, which at least for me means I don’t notice the small stuff.
This reminds me of… ehm… I am trying to remember a name of an 80ies comic, starts with Z (or maybe X).
Anyway, the titel is also the name of the main character, an english pop musician with latent super powers, inherited from his parents who died in a mysterious car crash. The UK defense minister, and later PM, is a Xavier-type if Xavier was a Tory politiciann in the 80ies. It is written at about the same time as the Watchmen, and it has a similar setting in an 80ies that are post a golden age of superpeople.
But there the similariteis ends, because where Watchmen is a fine tuned watch, where everything fits oh so neatly, the comic I am thinking about doesn’t actually make sense if you step back and analyse. Which you won’t because now the main character is building up a team of former super heroes and BOOM, there a super-nazi blows one of them up! Hey, that isn’t fair! He just quit drinking and was regaining his powers! And when the super-nazi looks defeated, here comes the outerdimensional being that empowered the super-nazi! Take that!
And that actually works, there are enough going on that wasn’t until I re-read it and tried to saw how the pieces entered the puzzle that I realized that they didn’t fit.
I guess what I am trying to say is that the story needs to make enough sense, the worldbuilding needs to be deep enough, for the story you are telling. And having firmly established the characters and the world building in the previous 48 chapters, in this phase the crescendo is carrying the story forward, in a way that smooths over any small bumps.
Zenith, from 2000AD
Yes, that is it!
Thank you, it’s really hard to search for something when you have forgotten its name.
It’s kind of funny, but I thought the kaiju battle going on in the background to the sepiaworld and the five vs purple-smoke-HR-thing was the weak part in this bit of the story. It seems to go nowhere for no purpose (other than keeping the camera on Penk, Magda, and Fringe). The sepiaworld discussion is maybe not as exciting as a giant monster battle, but it’s got some forward momentum and man if I can’t relate to how annoying talking to someone who is trying to convince themselves they’re a true believer is.
I’m just not sure what the narrative point is in having a character who never really did anything before this exact second (Tectonicus) get killed by another character I thought was HR (Tarozerker) while characters I sort of care about stand around and offer commentary on the fight (Penk, Magda, and Fringe). Like… I guess having a god die is supposed to tell me the stakes are high, but we kinda already got that from the other two things going on and I care way more about those other things. It feels like it’s a spectacle for the sake of having a spectacle.
Even with genie-HR eating the purple thing and, I assume, getting a power up from it I’m not clear on why any of that was necessary for the story. He’s already an apocalyptic threat at this point.
Before Tectonicus showed up and wasn’t able to just wink him out of existence, I assumed that the Tarozerker should be easier to beat than the Corruptor beast, since the touch of Pruplezerkers is apparently not ending one’s existence. My assumption was that if Madga could open that rift she was trying to make, it should just swallow the Tarozerker, and that’d be it. Now that Tectonicus himself is struggling, we have established that that beast can probably obliterate anyone trying to oppose it.
…but I agree. Tectonicus dying is not really having that much of an impact on me as a a reader. And I also find Magda’s and Penk’s reaction a bit underwhelming. Understandably so because they’re in the middle of a battle and to professional to start showing nerves, but that still lessens the impact even further.