I know in general people would rather see the pure, uncolored drawings straight from the pen of Seth, but some of those are gone, sold years ago, and the ones I have, I have just not taken photos of yet. I do have these color scans though. So with your forebearance I am going to use the color Flash scans.This is the page following the one I posted yesterday. What is happening here is that Steve Kriozere, the test pilot, has flown his plane so fast that somehow his own molecules have become fast, and now he is speeding into the Future. That's what is pictured here: him bursting the thin membrane that keeps Today intact, and hurtling into Tomorrow.
Back behind the paper is the city we saw on pages 2-3. You can see some of the same buildings, but from a different angle. After all, the airplane is in a different place than our point of view in the double-page spread. Steve flies out toward us, ejected from his seat, while his plane falls apart, the bolts, wires, and engine parts being flung in every direction, many of them toward us.
Lately when I look at Seth's comic book pages, I always wonder what the script said that he was following. Did the author (John Rozum) say, "While Steve's plane falls apart, he flies out toward us through a paper screen"? I have no idea if this was his idea or Seth's.
In any case, this image shows pretty clearly that pilot Steve is heading toward another dimension. His posture, hand reaching out, indicates that he is not falling down, but straining for something more. The hole in the paper, the plane beginning to disassemble, all put together show us the old falling away, the new beginning.
2 comments:
I'd have to do some digging to see if I still have a script for that.
I'm suspecting that that was something Seth came up with. In the original script, Steve's jet exploded through the upper floors of a high rise building. A few months later came 9/11, and that scene was changed for obvious reasons. I'm pretty sure Seth drew it the original way first. I remember the editor calling me and telling me it would need to be changed, but don't remember if I changed it, he changed it, or Seth changed it.
I tend to script very fully with lots of visual description for the artists I work with. Seth followed the general instructions, but ignored most of the specifics. This was something we talked about, and I was okay with it, since he clearly had a specific design for the future world he wanted to use. I was sad to see some elements dropped, but he made up for it with his overall vision of what he wanted to do.
John, I am touched that you read this blog.
I am always really curious about scripts. I know that comic book scriptwriters have to have a pretty good feel for what the actual book will look like. You have to figure out how many pages the story will take up, and more or less what will go on each page--maybe even what will go in each frame. But I think I always thought that writers deal with words and artists deal with images. Maybe the lines are not so clearly drawn between those two aspects...
Thank you for your insider's view into the process. For me, as maybe for other readers of this blog, how a graphic novel gets put together is a bit of a mystery.
Yes, I can see Seth not being willing to stick to the writer's plan for all the details in an image-heavy script. Imagining details was one of the pleasures to him of illustrating a story.
This particular page came out pretty dramatic, I think, and quite effective as an image of bursting into The Future. I hope you were pleased with the finished project.
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