SR 1 PAGE FIFTY-SEVEN

This page full of TV screens was definitely inspired by Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. If you were a kid in the late 80’s, The Dark Knight Returns was the COOLEST THING IMAGINABLE. Batman throws a little batarang through the Joker’s eyeball! THROUGH. HIS. EYEBALL.

This was a big deal because in the 80’s Batman wasn’t normally throwing stuff in people’s eyeballs. Maybe the Ninja Turtles did that, but not Batman.

I’m flipping through my childhood copy of The Dark Knight Returns now (part of The Complete Frank Miller Batman collection, 1989, in “genuine bonded leather”), and you know what? I still like it. Not really my thing anymore, but there’s a lot of cool stuff in here (Carrie Kelley Robin, unsettling flag-draped Ronald Reagan, nuclear-irradiated beef jerky Superman). The mutant gang’s goofy slang is amazing. “BALLS nasty,” you might even say.

But it’s the storytelling techniques in this book I like most. Dropping in all these little TV screens to show media reactions to the story was pretty innovative at the time. Frank Miller realized you didn’t need to waste time gathering characters around a TV, just show the show. The reader knows what’s happening. So of course I ganked it.

The politics in The Dark Knight Returns are a mess, though. A charitable reading would be “in a world gone mad with violence and corruption, the people need symbolic figures to inspire them,” but mostly it reads as “vigilantes are awesome, actually.” I know this is a basic problem with many (most?) superhero comics, but most comics don’t claim to be interrogating the concept. If you’re forcing us to actually think about vigilantism, probably best not to give it a big thumbs up?

Batman isn’t an inspirational figure! He’s a dirty little freak the police tolerate because they’re up to their ears in clown crimes! FREAK BATMAN IS BEST BATMAN.

Incidentally, in the mid-aughts Frank Miller pitched a book about Batman slaughtering Muslims called, breathtakingly, Holy Terror, Batman! Believe it or not, DC didn’t want it.

SR 1 PAGE FIFTY-EIGHT

What is this guy, some kind of evil Mirror Universe Ben Franklin? Such an odd design! Probably inspired by Del Close’s raving preacher character from The Blob (1988).

(Definitely check out The Blob if you’re a fellow fan of deeply disgusting body horror meltdowns. Second only to The Thing in my opinion.)

Seriously thought Reverend Dr. Lester Tempen of the Church of Right Thinking would be a bigger recurring character in Serenity Rose. A world with real witches would have even more of these disgusting Jerry Falwell-type rageaholics than our own.

I probably never did anything more with Lester because, honestly, characters like this are a drag to write. It’s fun in tiny chunks, but after a while it just gets boring. Just one long, loud, garbagey note played over and over. 

To make Lester interesting for myself (and, theoretically, the reader), I’d have to find some fresh new twist on the “religious extremist” trope. Some cool contrast… Like maybe the Church of Right Thinking is way into green energy? Yeah, we see Lester tear into some oil tycoons with exactly the same “HAYULL FAYURR” intensity demo’ed on this page. That’d be a twist. Maybe Lester hates all the capitalists. Donates all the church’s money to house the homeless. Some actual Christ-like stuff.

Or maybe Lester’s a cat guy. Goes all gentle and placid whenever he sees a big fluffy kitty. He has fifty cats in his compound, with Ms. Sprinkle Berries is his #1 closest confidante. (This would make him very relatable to me!) Maybe all his most horrible ideas come from Ms. Sprinkle Berries?

Or maybe Lester’s whole arc could be designed to defy expectations. Imagine the hateful lunatic we see on this page coming aaaalllll the way around to loving and defending witches by the end. How would we get there from here? What would his followers think? Would they stick with him? Would they eat him alive?

Writing is fun, is my point!

BACK TO THE PRESENT!

DRAWING is really hard, though. Intermittently fun, but super-duper hard. I’m about twenty pages into drawing my new book, and silently cursing Past Aaron for putting so many complicated backgrounds and crowd shots into the beginning of this thing. What an absolute creep that guy is.

SPOILER ALERT: SHOCK CITY book two starts out with complicated backgrounds and crowd shots.

NEXT WEEK: LOUD = PROFIT!