Final Project Idea Rundown

The comic opens up on a squad of soldiers in a trench on Mars. The atmosphere is dark, cloudy, and very cold.

The squad of soldiers is waiting for the cavalry to arrive before moving on, most carry gear and weapons specced for long range combat over the relatively unbroken red terrain.

The cavalry they are waiting for is an over flight meant to break the cloud cover, and for confirmation that the high accuracy ‘danger close’ artillery behind them is set up to provide high explosive cover fire.

The over flight consists of modified cargo haulers, VTOL craft, and the artillery consists of home brew magnetic accelerator canons, called ‘ground pounders’ for how their kickback strikes the earth, often leaving a very distinctive and deep footprint.

The soldier should talk about how they are waiting for their ‘angels’ to fly by and clear the air. They should look tentatively down their sights at the mist and fog outside the trench.

--

The shot should then cut to a far view of the earth, from space, and should follow some massive pressure vessel style ships as they move through space. The vehicle is a highly shielded pressure vessel; it should cross between earth and mars, impacting on mars’ southern ice cap.

The shot cuts to a long view of the Martian terrain and to a very small settlement somewhere on mars. The terrain should become greener, and the shot should cut to a handset of instruments reading that the atmosphere is within some kind of tolerance to earth standard.

The shot cuts back to space, this time on a colony ship, going one way to mars. The ship is a colony ship containing earth’s best and brightest, scientists, engineers, survivalists, and teachers. Everyone needed to start humanity again on a new world. (this would make a nice shot to say that and in the same shot show it winking next to a distant star.)

Wording should focus on leaving earth and its problems behind.

Fast forward 100ish years, communications with earth cut off. Nearby comm satellites are burned out in a manner consistent with high radiation exposure, long range sensors pick up a massive radiation spike in atmosphere.

Mars is now alone, cut to a shot of mars alone in the void. More time passes, mars moves on but society on mars continues to be marred by the fact that they are alone. Memorials to earth and peace are everywhere in the cities, citizens still mourn long lost branches of the family tree from earth.

More time passes, pole-ward settlements and small cities start to go dark. Before anyone can really put it all together the southern third of the planet, along with better than 500,000 new martians have gone dark. (shot of the planet again, but with lights seen from space dark on the bottom third)

Stories from survivors and refugees from the dark regions begin to filter in, stories of things, devils, waking up and coming from the icepack initially used to terraform mars’ atmosphere.

The martian farmers, some of mars’s best and brightest who have all gone out to try and feed themselves and the slowly growing cities, come together and decide to take back what has been lost. Farmers start to pick up and refine their old trades from before they became farmers, chemists, mechies, nukies, physicists, electricians and electrical engineers all start warming up the old family trade, using knowledge carefully passed down from the original settlers, and they bend it to making war.

Armor and weapons are made, and the young and restless from farms planet wide move south to be part of the movement to take mars back, to counter the ice-devil’s advance on all fronts.

--

Back to trench.

Headed to recapture all but last 8^th of planet surface, which is be held for the icemen. The farmers and the generals they selected from among them to lead this assault have no wish to commit genocide on an alien race.

Should show the VTOL moving across the sky above them, with the clouds retreating and mist clearing up in front of them, slowly revealing the massive form of one of the ‘Ice devils’.

--

And that should cover the first segment of the story. I’m sorry if it isn’t entirely clear and if the images I suggest are too closely linked with the plot I’ve made for you to easily separate them. The images and story are too closely linked in my mind to make either of them much clearer.

Response to Jim Steranko's Narrative Theory

     I have found Jim Steranko's narrative theory very helpful. It works to clarify many different aspects of comic creation, and is exteremly helpful in that regard, giving advice as it does to panels set-ups, lighting styles, shot styles, and overall page set-up in addition to many other more specific things. It is meant for a slightly different audience than I, which is something which I take issue with. It goes over the translation from text to art as though that act were a collaboration between two different people, the writer and the artist. However being in the position where I lack that other person to run ideas against I find myself at an advantage and disadvantage over what the text describes.
    Being that the reading is 18 very content rich pages, I'll go over it by general section as opposed to a closer inspection. The first section covered good content, regarding how the writing process in completely linked to the very visual art process, and the links between visual images and the services that provides to the overall narrative. Steranko put forward an interesting point when he mention how he had tailored his work to three different distinctive levels of reader, doing so using the combination of intrinsic and extrinsic meanings linking the images. The point of what he was describing is essentially to copy to a certain extent the writing in the art of the story. To use the reader inferred links between images to bring the story to a more basic art level that ca be grasped by a less developed audience. This tactic does its work twice, bringing the story to a younger audience and reinforcing and in fact adding depth to the story perceived by the more writing and text oriented reader.
   In the next general section Steranko covers specifics of the linkages between images and a couple specifics of panel construction. One of the first things he brought up is the temporal manipulation of the panels in an effort to better cover the story. To me the temporal manipulations represent the differences between your average straightforward movie and movies like Memento and Pulp Fiction. It can definitely enhance the story but at the same time, if your story requires temporal manipulation to keep it fresh and interesting, then bigger things are wrong with the story. as far as the other panel manipulations go, he recommends and explains pretty standard things, things we have covered in lecture before like the viewpoint or style of shot used in the individual panels, and the lighting of each panel with regards to character lighting.
   In the next section Steranko goes over some very interesting information regarding operating in a standard comic book setup where the viewer is actually reading two distinct pages of comics at once as part of a spread. this information was less useful for me as the work that i do is of a more digital nature and will not have that same kind of layout, he does however also discuss some alternate layouts for comics that can enhance the message or plot being delivered.
  In the final section Steranko goes over the creation of one page of comics. He went through each of the panels describing each of his design decisions, basically following all of his previous advice.
  

Frans Masereel's The City

[My modified piece]

I feel that even with the minor modifications that I have made the panel takes on an entirely new meaning. Suddenly the crowds are more fearful, the people, instead of being pushed together  by their sheer size, are now being pushed together as they all try to flee. The blasts of steam and exhaust are more threatening and sinister, and on the whole an entirely different image is created. 

[The original]

Directly above is a frame of Frans Masereel's The City, a frame which I took and modified as part of this project. I chose this image because I felt that it lended itself easily to the ideas that I had in mind. Everything in the frame is already in motion, and there is little unity to it. All of the people and cars are headed to their own locations, even if for a moment they share a common direction. With that in mind I wanted to give them a reason to do so, thus the alterations I made to the frame, which is something of an after image, taking place after the action in the panel below, but also something of an alternate panel, taking place at the same time in a different  world, perhaps.

Newspaper Poetry

Same as my last post, you might want to download this and look at it on your own computer because the downloading process messed with the resolution again. I made the poetry piece initially in a two columned system, but when I put it all together it actually worked out well.

I Used to Think but Now I Know

Alright, here is my comic for the "I Used to think but Now I Know" assignment. In order to get a good look at the image, you might want to download the image. The process of uploading to this blog makes my images smaller and messes with the resolution a little bit.