Thursday, May 28, 2009

Contact page 3

So far these three pages look as they are about unrelated things. The first page showed the guy on the ground, who at the end took a potshot at the airships. On the second page the airships
were flying around doing their thing, and the denizens of the sky were gathering together for we don't know exactly what.
Now on this page, the first frame has this flier, attached by a lot of cords to a balloon. The next one shows a woman sitting on a little stool and bathing in Japanese style. (Is she the same woman from the previous page?) The third frame shows the driverless plane heading straight down, while the pilot hangs in the air behind it. Is that what happened when the guy on the ground shot his gun?
Lots of questions. As far as I know, Seth didn't write anything about this particular story. In part he may have meant these early Nimbus stories to explore the setting of the world he had created, maybe even more than to tell their own tales.
He also liked to leave some aspects of the story to the reader's imagination. He didn't want to tell his readers how they were supposed to feel about the things that happened in his stories.
When he did his ALIENS A--Z alphabet book, one of the things he liked about it was that he didn't make any of the creatures scary, or cute, or slimy, or fuzzy, or any of the things that either repel or attract a person. They were very clean, flat, line drawings of weird creatures. Myself I thought it was a weakness of the book; I thought you would want to know how big they were, how slimy, how fearsome, etc. But to Seth, he liked that there was no emotional content to those drawings at all. My son the mathematician.

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