Commentary after the jump

The second page of talking heads continues.  Though I was able to break it up a little bit.  And Luis does interesting things with the shadowing that keeps the monotony back for at least a little bit.

Ah, and there’s the first appearance of the internal monologuing.  At least I didn’t use thought balloons (or as I’ve been told, “bubbles”).  I’m still not clear on the current disdain for internal monologue.  Granted, I’m not having it run for pages and pages, usually as an ironic addition or comment on the dialogue.  Though I know I end up doing it at times that I perhaps shouldn’t (“Must…grab…branch…”).

I’m convinced that writers hate internal monologuing because it’s considered passé in motion pictures.  What’s the single most reviled part of the otherwise revered BLADE RUNNER?  You guessed it.  Not sure that it’ll ever swing back around.  But to my mind, leaving that out is like leaving out the color green or refusing to use a Phillips-head screwdriver because “Phillips-head is stupid.”  They’re all tools, just you need to use them judiciously.

We get a lot more of what’s eating at Collins, and we’re more or less led to believe that this is the inciting incident for the story and perhaps central to it.  I’ll tell you, I got a lot of grief for how I chose to handle it.  But more of that later.

For some reason I always loved panel two here, where Luis puts Webster in a vignette.  That rendering was always very appealing to me and I was bothered that I had to lay so much dialogue over it.  I like to think I recognize now when I need to re-flow things, but I bet I don’t.  And again, so much of the story was being carried in the dialogue, that trimming it would be trimming out backstory that helped flesh things out.

Look carefully in panel six and you’ll note that it’s not a shrubbery that’s drooling at them, but the wolf.  This is one of the very few things that made it in from the original, original Strangeways script to what actually got printed.  I wanted to expand this, to have the wolf hunting the stage and give it a little more time to breathe.  But there’s very little breathing space in this script.

See you all on Wednesday.