earth -25-
posted 2008.03.09 at 16:29
It's been awhile since we've seen the Jump Circuit, and it bears about as much resemblance to its previous appearance as the rest of the Daedalus bridge does. Oops.
See also its appearance in the worst page ever (though not twpe's replacement).
In the first couple of script drafts, West's line was "Do I look like Chris Claremont? You want a walkthrough? Read the manual, I'm busy!" or similar, which was changed for a variety of obvious reasons. I'm not a fan of Claremont's bloated prose, chapter-length narrative blocks and obese exposition. Point of fact, I've repeatedly shot down "suggestions" from a few people that I inject similar elements into ATC to make it "more readable." There are two major reasons for this. The first is that I firmly believe you shouldn't tell what you can show - showing being kind of the point of doing a comic in the first place. The second is that by avoiding these tropes, elements can stay vague or undefined until the story demands that they step up.
Third, the people making this recommendation always cite Claremont as an example, as if a paragraph-length explanation of what the Hellfire Club is every 22 pages and characters describing their origins, internal conflicts, abilities and what they're about to do with all of that - in the middle of a fight - is a good thing. I disagree. I'm fairly certain I'm the only American creating comics who's long since outgrown superheroes, no longer reads superhero comics* and doesn't want to work for Marvel. Deaf ears, etceteras.
If you like enormous paragraphs of overly detailed prose coupled to monolithic slabs of exposition-masquerading-as-dialogue, Claremont's run on X-Men is definitive. If you like prose-in-place-of-sequential-narrative, go check out Poison Elves (Drew Hayes died? News to me!). While both approaches have their uses (and their advocates), I consider them to run counter to the ATC mandate of in medias res. Date/time/location flags and chapter/book titles are as close as the story will ever get to extra-character exposition. I think the story is stronger for it, even if it does take it longer to get where it's going.
* Okay, so I've been reading The Savage Dragon Archives as they're released, but that's one book. One. And I stick with it because the phonebooks pack a great bang for the buck and Eric Larsen has written and drawn every single issue - which gives the book unprecidented consistency for a hero title. I like consistency, and it's difficult to come by in long-running comics. Consistent creative team? Over 100 issues? Your options are Savage Dragon, Cerebus, and Gold Digger. Fuck if I can think of anything else off the top of my head. Matt Howarth's total body of work, but that's a bit more 'wide' than 'deep.' Maybe Elfquest, but the Pinis were complete shits to an animator I greatly respect and the few issues I flipped through utterly failed to grab me, so.
14:02 : Note to self - fix West's nose in the morning. :P
20080310.00:59 : Fixed. Compare to previous.
