SPECTATORS - Part 116
Plus, BKV's full script for SAGA #65!
Have you also been hopelessly glued to the news for the last 48 hours?
Brian here, and I have zero hot takes to offer on this endlessly violent, increasingly fractured country/planet. Instead, I’ll try to take a page from my commendably consistent collaborators, and just keep plugging away at this story we’ve been gradually building together for the last thirty months.
In today’s new vignette of Spectators from artist/co-creator Niko Henrichon and letterer/unsung hero Fonografiks, the future United States continues to devolve into chaotic bloodshed, while our spectral protagonists Sam and Val discuss more secrets from the past.
As I type this, Niko is almost finished with another glorious double-page spread, but I don’t want UK-based Fonografiks to have to burn the midnight oil (again!), so we’ll wait to include those lettered pages with next Monday’s new chunk, thanks for your patience.
For now, presuming that the world and I can survive until Wednesday, I’ll be turning (the relatively meaningless age of) 48 this week.
In lieu of birthday wishes/taunts, I’d selfishly invite you to join your fellow generous paid subscribers in The Tower for our final few months here at Exploding Giraffe, but no pressure, thanks again for following our story every week. - Oldie Olsen
Yet Another Update from My Alarmingly Talented Friends
Speaking of The Tower, one of our most valued longtime contributors is my pal Goran Sudžuka, an artist you may know from his incredible work on Y: The Last Man and, more recently, the thoroughly harrowing A Walk Through Hell with writer/monster Garth Ennis.
Goran was kind enough to send me an advance look at his newest project Red Before Black, which I enjoyed a great deal. Here’s the scoop:
RED BEFORE BLACK is a violent, hyper kinetic, women-led Florida crime thriller in the tradition of 2000s-era Vertigo from Grim’s superstar writer Stephanie Phillips, the acclaimed and beloved artist Goran Sudžuka (Hellblazer, Y: The Last Man), colorist Ive Svorcina (Thor: God of Thunder, Secret Wars), and letterer Tom Napolitano (Grim, Justice League). Coming to BOOM! Studios in August 2024.
A disgraced army veteran, Val, arrives in everyone’s favorite state: Florida. Her goal? Hunt down an infamous drug runner named Leo. But soon she finds that the pair have an unexpected enemy in common, turning the time-honored game of cat and mouse into something far more sinister!
Today is the last day to “pre-order” Red Before Black #1, so if you want to guarantee that your favorite local comic shop will have a copy on hand for you, be sure to drop them a line about this asap.
And check out the killer variant cover from another old chum…
Last week’s missive about my newfound “aphantasia” (the inability to form mental images of objects that are not present) seemed to blow at least a few of your minds, and I’m very grateful for the added insight many of you were able to provide.
The Common Centrist shared:
I discovered I have Aphantasia a few years back. I’m a 1 but not just for “visual mental imagery”. I have a complete, multi-sensory form of the condition: I can’t imagine sounds, have no internal monologue, can’t imagine what things taste, sound or feel (tactile) like. As a musician, discovering that professional musicians train their audiation (“hearing” music in one’s “Mind’s Ear”) abilities so they can think in music (and even compose it in their heads) blew me away. I wrote my dissertation on this subject and looked at case studies of artists with aphantasia from several diciplines. Mainly musicians but also painters, sculptors, make-up artists, cartoonists, etc. If anyone wants to learn more about aphantasia and art they may find my dissertation interesting. It's on my SubStack entitled “Music and Aphantasia”.
Fascinating, thanks for that, Pete.
Reader Archibald Stein wanted to know:
I sort of thought I was a six but now that I think about it... is there really any color in my mind’s eye, or am I deceiving myself into thinking it’s red? I definitely can imagine vibrant colors with my eyes closed if I try to, but I think most of the time with my visualizations there’s some element of “not that vibrant color that I tell myself is more vibrant than it is on a more verbal level of consciousness.”
Apparently, when you normies without aphantasia (phants?) are told to close your eyes and imagine staring at a bright light, your pupils actually constrict (or expand, if you’re told to imagine being in a dark room), which suggests that this condition isn’t merely a differing interpretation of consciousness.
My imagination is nothing more than an imageless inky void… but I’m honestly finding that idea more peaceful than the never-ending mental Instagram scroll a lot of you evidently have to endure.
Finally, after John Murphy took that aphantasia test and “imagined a red star,” he replied:
I was honestly picturing more of a fiery red sphere, like artistic depictions of the sun using CGI in movies, etc. I guess I just didn’t properly interpret the question as referring to “the shape” rather than “the astronomical object”. But I was definitely closer to a 6 than anything else.
I’m very surprised that artistic prowess/aptitude is not hindered by aphantasia. Even moreso that a foremost writer of comic books has the condition (is it rude to refer to it that way?... At least I didn’t say “affliction”!).
Have you ever gotten feedback or notes that your scripts are particularly unique or unusual in their style or format from any of your collaborators? Or compared them to other writers’ and noticed a difference?
I feel like not visualising things in vivid detail would make a difference when writing a comic script... Maybe Niko could have an insight from working with other writers?
Thanks for the update. Looking forward to the next issue of Saga!
Much appreciated, sir. I haven’t had a chance to chat about this with Niko yet, but I’m including a never-before-seen script to a recent issue of Saga at the end of this dispatch, so maybe comparing it to other scripts out there (and to the finished comic by Fiona Staples) will shed some light on whether my “condition” is a help or hindrance to the bizarre career I’ve somehow dedicated my life to.
But first, our intrepid intern Genesis the Exploded Giraffe promised to send a copy of this delightful look at the collision of words and imagery to one lucky member of The Tower…
…and they randomly selected Andrew Yeung!
Congrats, Andrew, and Genesis will be reaching out for your mailing address as soon as they’re back from safari later this month.
With Saga finally returning to stands this July 31st, I thought I’d share my script for Chapter 65, the penultimate issue of our previous arc, but one that sets the stage for our upcoming storyline.
Obviously, SPOILERS FOLLOW for those of you who have yet to reach this major turning point of our series, so please proceed with caution.
BEWARE, MAJOR SAGA SPOILERS FROM THE PREVIOUS STORYLINE AHEAD!
PLEASE TURN BACK NOW IF YOU’RE NOT CAUGHT UP YET…!
My body of work to the contrary, I don’t enjoy killing off characters I helped create.
For one thing, it understandably makes a lot of folks deeply depressed. But if you’re a writer who ends the life of one of your main players, and there aren’t at least a few readers out there who are so upset that they no longer want to read your story, you probably weren’t doing your job in the first place.
Still, especially in comics, there’s a segment of the audience that will only accept a character’s death if it’s a) at least somewhat heroic, b) kind of beautiful, and most importantly, c) potentially reversible. But that’s obviously not how death works in the real world, and it’s not what I’m interested in writing about in my fiction either.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work on a few long-running series with relatable stakes (where characters can and do expire for good), and my collaborators and I inevitably have to contend with what I call The Sopranos Dilemma, where after a certain point, a vocal minority (?) tends to focus solely on whether or not somebody got whacked. If so, it’s evidence that the series is only about “cheap shock value,” but if nobody dies, the episode is just “pointless filler.”
At the end of the day, I try my best to block out all that noise and just tell the story my fellow creators and I always intended to tell, which I hope is what most readers want, too.
Chapter 65 of Saga contains the first death of a major character since our series’ midpoint a few years earlier, and it’s a death I feel confident saying that not a single reader predicted, despite the fact that the seeds of this horrific tragedy had been planted long ago, a sadly inevitable outcome that had even been explicitly presaged by other characters (especially Alana) throughout this very arc.
Speaking of Alana, this issue was as much about her life (and the lives of her family) as it was about an innocent character’s senseless death, as co-author Fiona Staples and I wanted to celebrate the quiet heroism of parenthood, which is often about what actions we don’t take even more than the ones we do.
If you read my attached, bare-bones, aphantasia-fueled script, you’ll see just how much Fiona does with what can charitably be called my shorthand. The final, exquisitely paced comic contains some of the most brilliant visual storytelling I’ve ever seen, and that’s 100% Fiona, whose unbelievable skills have only deepened over the years we’ve been working together.
Getting to collaborate across two different universes with artists like Fiona and an equally gifted Niko? I am so fucking lucky.
Anyway, before I share that Saga script with those of you in The Tower, a question: Which death of a fictional character (other than someone bumped off by my collaborators and/or me, you beautiful bootlickers!) hit you the hardest?
And please give a heads-up which work you’ll be talking about in your response before you name the dearly deceased character, just to help your fellow Tower commenters avoid spoilers for something they haven’t yet read/watched.
Genesis will randomly select one of you mourners to receive a signed copy of Saga #65, and since I won’t be able to make it to SDCC or any other cons this year, this is still your best opportunity to get something with my sloppy autograph on it, in the off-chance that’s your bag.
Everyone else, please stay safe this week, and Niko and I will meet you back here next Monday evening for more free Spectators.