davebarrack
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Grrl Power #1284 - Hey baby, I bet your sign is bioyield
🕑 Added 2024-08-15 10:00:11 +0000 UTCThank you for the support! You guys are awesome!
We cut away from the fight since it's not going to be, as at least one reader complained, a 30-episode chocked-full of flashback Naruto style fight. Honestly I tried to watch Naruto once upon a time, and I just couldn't hang in for fights that legit lasted 5 episodes due to all the training flashbacks to justify all the ninja powers. Like, they're teenage ninjas in an anime. You don't have to convince me that they've earned their powers. Just show me the fight. I think I lost interest before finishing a single season.
Instead we cut to Sciona's after work prowling. If that is indeed what she's doing. Which it is.
Oh, and can I just say, a destination wedding in Cabo? Fuck you, Ian and Clara, unless Ian invented some obscure piece of software that no one's heard about but is critical for back-end inter-bank fungible exchange transactions blah blah blah compounding crypto tariffs blah blah econobabble etc., and is one of those low-key millionaires and thusly paid for everyone's flights and accomodations, in which case, well done Clara. And Ian also, obviously. But mostly Clara. The other possibility is that this friend group all somehow are in the mid to high six-figure income range, and dropping a few grand out of the blue is truly no big deal. But still, you know they have that one friend who is doing okay... but not that okay, and made it to the wedding on the back of credit cards and took heavy advantage of the complimentary breakfast bar by loading his pockets with toast and packets of jam and a ziplock back of scrambled eggs that he rationed out by cutting a tiny corner off the bag and squeezing it into his mouth like an icing piping bag?
Can you tell my original script about the trip to Cabo was like, 400% longer than what appears on this page and it took me about 8x longer to edit it down to something manageable than it did to write it?
Comments
Timothy Mayfield
Unless the "destination" is a pretty barn on the neighbor's back 40, I'd have to pass.
Torabi
To clarify, I'm having a Dr. Brennan style "I don't know what that means" moment, and the average human being with normal human experiences probably won't have half the difficulty following the conversation that I do.
Swedish Chef
Just curious, "Raconteur" Is that a form used in French speaking Canada ?
Torabi
It feels different... Probably because the conversation takes the whole page. And because I don't have the relevant context to understand any of it. I would say that normally when your characters talk like this, it's a joke, a single line within a comprehensible context, which has been built up over the course of the thousand-plus pages of the comic. Here, you've introduced new characters with no relation to anything previously established, and I'm guessing that you just expect the reader to have had relevant life experiences to understand the things they're saying. I get the impression that neither of our lives are typical, but in very different ways. I might also just be having a very dissociative sort of day.
Ian Dickinson
I feel like I was listening to some gen Zs with some of the words they were using. Also, Naruto Shippuden is a much better one to go off of (though you lose out on base character information skipping to it).
Michael Obert
π
Anton Schleef
Even assuming I had friends who did things like that I'd be the friend who sends them a best wishes card and gift and doesn't show up for the wedding. When they complain I'd tell them that some of us actually have to work for a living and can't afford to spend a normal middle-income person's year's worth of income on a single trip. Yeah, IF I had such rich friends I wouldn't have them for very long. I'm so heartbroken over the thought that I think I already forgot those fictional friends.
Miyaa
I blame the 1970βs for making Cabo so popular.
BigKumaDM
Thank you so much for taking the time to give a breakdown of your process! Im really honored, thank you.
Dave Barrack
Okay, but for real, it's about having a series of scenes that I want to do because either they're funny, actiony, or develop characters/relationships/and/or backstory. Everything else is bridging those scenes, but of course the trick is making the in-between content entertaining as well. The biggest challenge for me, writing-wise, is maintaining editorial oversight over myself to keep content from spiraling off into a million tangents. Which, arguably I'm not always successful at. Page to page, the trick is maintaining just the right level of terseness so readers aren't confronted with a wall of text. Again, my success rate there is arguable. What I really want to do, especially after going back and reading through a stretch of the archive, is make every page a double page so I can emphasize certain panels better and give the whole thing a better overall sense of pacing. 9 panels a page is really just too much. Most comics have 5-7 at most, and the comic feels really... dense, and certain important panels wind up getting crushed down into whatever space I can wedge them into.
Dave Barrack
Plan? Hah hah hah hah oh wait you're serious?
Dave Barrack
Is this page markedly different than the entire rest of the comic? Personally I'm a fan of Dr. Katz type retroscripting, but that takes up a lot more space on the page to do all the "Um"s and false starts and sentence fragments.
Dave Barrack
It totally could go the other way. It just... didn't this time.
Marc Vun Kannon
Smash cut to Math standing on top of a pile of opponents' bodies, saying to Sydney, "Happy now?"
Madeleine
Grrl Power Director's Cut: 23 times as long because it contains everything that has been whittled away for the original comic!
Madcat6204
Not that you have to listen to me about this or anything. You should write the story the way you like.
Madcat6204
When you say you compressed this scene, did you by any chance compress it down to just this page? Because, I will be honest, my tolerance for Sciona kind of dipped way down into the negative numbers after the last scene with her.
ThorbjΓΈrn Steen
My thought as well. Though admittedly I've only ever seen that trope as a way to explain why the male protagonist is independently wealthy.. in erotic fiction. I don't know any other media which has a need to explain why someone has loads of money in a way that will have absolutely no impact on the rest of the story. Most of the time you want to make it at least a bit more interesting.
BigKumaDM
Hey Dave, since you're talking about your script writing, can we see some of that? id love to see how you plan everything out. It might even help some aspiring writers out there *cough* *cough*.
Madeleine
By the way, who are Tiny Blue and Purple Persons in the background of panel 1? The room doesn't seem to be *this* big.
Madeleine
Normal sitcom humans, maybe
Madeleine
So why would it have to be Ian who earns the shitload of money instead of Clara?
Torabi
Is this how normal humans talk? I am so lost.
Michael Obert
Agreed, F destination weddings. They only work for young, rich beautiful people with tons of disposable income dedicated to swimsuits and I will stand by that forever. All you need is an open bar anyway π
Mathew Aaberg
Ignore the haters. 30 page fight scene wooo!.. Or just do you. Your story your rules.
