Commissioned by Freezing Inferno
The page has seven panels divided unevenly into four rows. Row one has two panels, row two three, and rows three and four one. Row one takes up roughly two ninths of the page, row two a third, row three a ninth, and row four a third.
Panel 1: Medium shot of Nausicaä and Yupa hugging. Nausicaä’s face is hidden from the reader’s view. She is clothed practically with little to no frills. There is a small bag, behind which is the hilt of a sword. She is wearing gloves Yupa’s face is half shown to us in a portrait style. His eyes have a hint of concern within them, covered up mostly by surprise. We cannot see his mouth as his bushy moustache covers it entirely. He is wearing a dark cape and a cowboy hat with a white feather drooping atop it. He is also gloved. Teto is standing upright on Nausicaä’s shoulder. His tail upright. The characters are surrounded by their word balloons, Nausicaä’s highlighted by a tail jutting towards her as well as being an octogon, among which the top and right sides perfectly blend into the respective panel borders. While Yupa’s is a thought balloon, round and curly in shape save for the top and left portions, which are straight lines that also blend into their respective panel borders. The background is largely plant life, though we can see some hints of the tables some of them are lying on as well as a small waterfall to left of Yupa. The panel is rectangular in shape with the exception of the left border, which tilts upward slightly to the left. It takes up roughly two thirds of the row.
Nausicaä: Oh, Yupa! I don’t want to go to war!
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| Vaka Rangi (2013-2017) |
(While I was reading Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, an essay idea came to me.Throughout Miyazaki’s career, his work straddles the line between an abhorrence of violence and a desire for a more, for lack of a better term, utopian world where we are aligned with nature and a gearhead fondness for militaristic technology, in particular planes of war, as well as a desire to write violent stories. Though the violence within Nausicaä, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away is often presented as horrifying, there are moments where he revels in the violence. Not to the extent of, say, Eli Roth or what people think Tarantino’s work is like [more on this in a later project]. But rather more akin to an unflinching glance at the horrors of violence.
But for the purposes of this essay idea, the more interesting aspect is the line between militarism and utopianism. The apex of this being The Wind Rises, where Miyazaki did a [fictionalized] biopic of a man who designed airplanes for the Japanese military in the second World War. But it is also within the works that precede that film from the sympathy/respect Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind holds for Kushana given the amount of respect her troops hold for her and the ways the text aligns her with Nausicaä, even if they never fully align as well as in Princess Mononoke, where Lady Eboshi is presented as a highly sympathetic antagonist who [along with her fanatical need to kill the Spirit of the Forest] cares for the wounded and abused gives them purpose through the war effort. Equally, Miyazaki frequently critiques the militarism from his utter contempt for the War in Iraq in Howl’s Moving Castle to the sheer monstrosity of the war being waged in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. How it ravishes the landscape, displaces the people, and causes oceans of blood.
On the utopianism front, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind presents a vision of a world where one can live in peace with nature. It does not act as if nature isn’t a deadly force within the world. It’s aware that nature is dangerous, but it’s also aware that we can nonetheless live with it. For we too are a part of nature. We live and thrive in the fields and valleys of the world. We are capable of burning down the forests and causing great harm just as all the other animals. Nature will always bounce back from the brink, but so can we. We can be better, we can work together to form a world without kings, without pointless violence and cruelty.
Another text that has a similar relationship to militarism and utopianism is Star Trek: The Next Generation. Fitting, considering Nausicaä was a massive influence on the show’s staff [who stabbed Jean Luc Picard in the heart]. Unlike Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, the utopianism of Star Trek is more in line with traveling and technology. Not a oneness with earthly nature, but cosmic nature. Exploring the ocean of space and meeting new life forms, be they god like beings judging humanity, species who encounter language from a different angle, or the dead speaking one last time of how they lived.
At the same time, despite Gene Roddenberry’s protestations, there’s a twinge of militarism in TNG’s DNA. Part of this is due to the Federation being around in the TNG era, a byproduct of TOS. It is, after all, a flagrantly militaristic organization. Sure, the series is full of stories that critique the militarism from The Arsenal of Freedom, which apes Douglas Adams in a technology that works so well it kills the people buying it, to Too Short a Season where traditional Kirk like attitudes towards dealing with hostile forces are shown to be toxic, to The Wounded where the desire to start a war with the Cardassians is framed as, at best, pitiable and due to trauma and, at worst, contemptable. But at the same time, there’s a frequent desire to make more and more militaristic stories within TNG from the base assumption that the hierarchy dictated within the Federation of captains and ensigns is inherently good to the frequent clamoring of TOS fans within the writers staff to add more conflict, a phrase which typically means “Worf lies awake at night pleading to be able to at least kill Geordi.”
The problem with such an essay is that I need a third example to really tie the other two together. A utopian text where the militarism is a bug rather than a feature and one that has interesting implications to dive into. Maybe someday I’ll find one…)
Yupa: …. ….
Panel 2: Close up on Nausicaä. Only the briefest hint of Yupa can be seen, at most his shoulder. Her face can be clearly seen fully. There is a look of quiet melancholy within her eyes and the simple line that is her mouth. Likewise, her nose is made by a slight line by her left eye and two small lines slightly in-between her eyes and mouth. There are no irises within the eyes. They are large and expressive. Puffs of hair can be seen coming out from underneath her cap. Part of the cap has lenses to cover the eyes. The top portion of the cap has what looks like an arrow pointing towards the word balloon to the left of Nausicaä. The balloon is a hexagon with its top and left sides blending into the panel. The panel takes up one third of the page and is rectangular in shape, save for the right side, which leans downwardly to the right.
Nausicaä: There’s a terrible hatred hiding inside of me. I won’t be able to control it anymore…
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| Princess With a Thousand Enemies |
(Out of all the historical figures I’ve encountered, perhaps my favorite is Walter Morrison. An anti-war protester in his later days, I first discovered him through an interview his son gave, which lead me to his obituary, which described an eventful life even beyond being the father of one of the more interesting comics writers around. I became intrigued with the man, wanting to learn more of his life. I had heard of a book, which talked about his experiences with the Second World War. I didn’t know specifics of it beyond that.
It would take me many years to find the book, Peter Grafton’s You, You, and You: Those Out of Step With WWII. It was a series of interviews from various people who subverted the traditional narrative of the Second World War as a war between good and evil, highlighting things like the lack of interest in the Jews, the anti-war protesters, and, in Morrison’s case, the Indian front. There are many aspects of this front that I could go into, things that would be rather unpleasant to describe. But the one I always go back to is the story of Morrison’s arrest. For seven months, Walter and members of his platoon were locked up for, to be quite blunt, trumped up charges. They were treated to a variety of mistreatment from slave labor to counting the grains of sand to having their heads forcibly shaven. Morrison was also witness to the treatment of the Indians by the Military Police. They had a tendency to act as cattle rustlers. And when the Indian tried to get their cattle back, they would strip them naked and beat them. Morrison provided a sketch of this occurrence, and it’s frankly startling.
Eventually, it became too much for Morrison and he had to act, lest he lose his mind. He called for the Doctor, pleading for mercy. When the Doctors said no, Morrison then told him the actual reason he called him over: if he wasn’t given some degree of mercy, he was going to kill someone. Morrison had a reputation as being a straight shooter. If he said something, he meant it. He was also an agitator within the ranks, stopping the men from mistreating the Indians the way they had done for centuries. So when he said that he was going to kill the next man who came into his cell to punish him, they knew he meant it. And for seven days, no one came to his cell, not even to feed him.
Over the course of those seven days, Morrison was horrified by the prospect of killing. He didn’t want to kill anyone. He joined the war to fight Nazis and fascism, not be a tool of imperialism. It was this event that led him to become a pacifist later in life. But at the end of those seven days, Morrison and his platoon were let go due to a “filing error.” When the war ended, he was the only man in his regiment to have volunteered to fight in the war rather than being drafted into the conflict.)
Panel 3: Distanced aerial shot. Yupa and Nausicaä are still hugging. The hug is tighter than it was before. While Nausicaä’s face is slightly visible, details of it are harder to glimpse. We can see part of her right eye, a mere dot in the tapestry. Yupa’s face is completely obscured by his hat, Nausicaä’s face, and his moustache. We get a clearer view of Nausicaä and Yupa’s shoes. Yupa has a simple shoe design while Nausicaä’s boots each have four circles going up the back of them and a separate section for the shoes themselves. Yupa’s cloak is lighter in color than in the first panel. Teto has moved onto Yupa’s right shoulder. More of the plants can be seen, some in water while others in soil. A table can also be seen left of the embrace. Said embrace is circled by two word balloons. The one on the right is an octagon with its top and right sides bleeding into the panel. The one on the left is a hexagon with the top and left sides bleeding into the panel. The panel is rectangular in shape, save for the bottom, which extends slightly downward towards the right. It takes up three eighths of the row.
(From The Hell of It: Paul Williams, song by song
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| I Am The ARM, and I Sound Like This... |
This is a story about a love that will never happen.
The problem with talking about Touch in the context of Paul Williams is that it is the end of someone else’s story. As we’ve discussed earlier, Paul Williams’ story ended quite nicely with Muppet Christmas Carol. Touch, meanwhile, is like I Love You Too Much and Still Alive: an epilogue of a kind. But where the latter was a moment of reflection and, to some degree, sadness, this is a moment of pure triumph. Paul Williams, standing at the Grammy Awards proudly saying, “Back when I was drinking and using, I used to imagine things that weren’t there that were frightening. Then I got sober, and two robots called me and asked me to make an album.”
It’s a song about nostalgia for the feeling of a hug.
But perhaps the more interesting part is the praise for the then recent legalization of same-sex marriage in the US. The song doesn’t really exude queerness, not to the extent of, say, the works of D--- Carter or Janelle Monáe. And yet, one can’t help but see the potential of queerness. The song is, after all, about the love that will never be. And the queer community is very familiar with stories, both from within and without, that tell of love that will never be.
It’s about desiring things you know you will never have, because you are physically incapable of having them.
Equally, the line “A tourist in a dream/A visitor it seems/A half-forgotten song/Where do I belong?” invokes the feeling amongst many queer people of feeling like we don’t fit within the society we were born in. One that doesn’t accept us for who we are for a ton of, to be quite blunt, stupid and arcane reasons.
It’s about the desire for something more.
And yet, Touch is also about the lacking that causes. Of how…
And then, I lose the plot. The problem with writing about Touch is that it’s not Paul Williams song in the sense that Our World or The Rainbow Connection are. It’s a Daft Punk song, and a damn good one. Williams is the specter on the song, the lurking thing from a bygone era lost to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. He’s here because once upon a time he was Swan. Now, faced with two Phantoms, Williams performs a final ritual. One not for eternal youth, fame, or other Faustian bargains. It’s a spell of generosity.
It’s a song about remembering who you were when you were young, feeling young for just one moment, then looking in the mirror to see just how old you are.
Daft Punk- modular synthesizer; Thomas Bangalter- Writer; Thomas Bloch-ondes Martenot; Chris Caswell-Keyboards, Orchestration, Arrangements, Writer; James Genus- Bass; Omar Hakim- Drums; Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo- Writer; Paul Jackson Jr.- Guitar; Greg Leisz- Lap Steel Guitar; Quinn- Percussion; Paul Williams- Vocals, Lyrics.
Recorded at Henson Recording Studio
Photos/art: Panel from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind Vol. 5, 1991 [Hayao Miyazaki]; Cover from Vision no. 5 and panel from Vision no. 12 [Tom King, Gabriel Hernadez Walta, and Marco D’Alfonso]; 56th Annual Grammy Awards, January 26, 2014; art from Jerusalem [Alan Moore]; panel from Doom Patrol no. 63 [Grant Morrison and Richard Case]; Sketch by Sean Dillon, May 29th 2020
Apologies for the rushed and incomplete quality on this one. [55 words under the minimum, what the hell, Sean!] Work on We’ve Only Just Begun took up a lot of energy. And I promised to have it up before my birthday [why I keep making promises I know I won’t be able to keep, I’ll never know]. Will try to have an extended, less crap version up once the book is done.)
Nausicaä: I can understand how the Ohmu felt…
Nausicaä: The hate takes over and makes him kill. And then he cries.
Panel 4: Distance shot of Nausicaä. Only her head can be seen in the panel in portrait style. She is looking upwards towards a semicircular window with “X” bars. There’s an air of sadness in both her single visible eye and in her mouth. The head is smaller than in the close up above it. The room is at its darkest on the page with the only bright areas being the window, a plant beneath it, and Nausicaä’s face. Even her helmet, which was previously shaded minimally is darkened. Nausicaä is slightly to the right of the center of the panel. The word balloon is to her left, slightly covering her cap. It is hexagonal in shape with the top and right sides bleeding into the panel border. The panel is rectangular in shape and takes up three eighths of the row. It is stacked atop panel 5.
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| A Good King is a King Nonetheless |
(I had to stop writing this for a short period of time. Not that I wasn’t liking what I was doing, I think this is going swimmingly. Rather, I had finally gotten the edits for One Must Imagine Scott Free Happy back and I had to get through them. Which is to say, a number was done on my brain such that I couldn’t work on this and edit that. Either way, I would end up locked in my room working on some major project.
I’m not much of an extrovert. I am one, just not much of one. I need to interact with people in a physical space, otherwise I slowly start to go mad. This pandemic hasn’t been that good for me. I miss being able to go for long walks in town, go for drives, meet new people. I miss being on my own with no one but strangers around me. The bustling sounds of the city. I’m starting to grow used to the environment I’m in. It’s driving me mad.
At the same time, I don’t interact with the people closest to me as often as I should. Most of the day, they’re busy with work. But while I was editing the book, members of the family came over for dinner. I was too busy editing to join them. I didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye. I often do whatever it takes to avoid people. Most of the time, it’s just because I don’t like the vibe they give off or I’m genuinely too busy to interact. Often, I’m not doing anything of importance. I’m just surfing the web or having a conversation. Nothing that couldn’t be done after saying hello to the people downstairs.
In my isolation, I’m also thinking about something I wrote in a conversation while reading Nausicaä, about the video game Red Dead Redemption II: “It's the kind of game where the Rooty Tooty Cowboy Shooty parts of it aren't as fun as simply riding a horse through the woods or fishing with friends. It's about the end of an era as it's ending rather than after it's over [a kind of period I'm extremely interested in exploring in my own work]. It's about how dreams can break your heart almost as much as the grinding engines of capitalistic modernity. How the cowboy outlaw died a slow death and the horrors that would come in its wake. Of those who died just to keep that dream alive when it turned toxic. The game's slow, somewhat self-indulgent, and at times problematic. But it's... it's like saying goodbye to an old man you knew briefly but well. He's not necessarily the best of men, might not even be that good of a man, but he tried to be better at the end.
It also made me nostalgic for my childhood wandering the small wood nearby my house, sitting by the river with my neighbors. Sleeping under the stars at summer camp. Hiking with the Boy Scouts [which, at the time, I wasn't that fond of due to the pace we'd go at, but now I kinda get it]. Being lost in an unfamiliar forest as it was turning to night, barely finding my way out before they needed to send the dogs to find me. Just being outside in the world. Nowadays, when I go on long walks, it's in more urban environments, which [while nice] has a different flavor to it. But every now and then, as I'm stuck inside, I look out the window and see some of the forests of my childhood.” I don’t think I can ever reconcile all the aspects of me into someone coherent. But I can live with being a mess.)
Nausicaä: The… the sky’s getting light… I have to go.
Panel 5: Close up on Yupa. Closer than even panel 2. We only see Yupa’s face in a barely seen dark background. Where in panel 2, Nausicaä’s nose was made by abstraction, Yupa’s is more directly drawn, complete with detailed shape and nostrils. His eyes have irises detailed to see the lines within them. Yupa’s eyebrows can be slightly seen poking out from beneath his hat. The hat, though mostly obscured outside the panel, has seemingly metallic circles placed around the large hatband. Four are visible. Yupa is heavily cross stitched in this panel. The word balloon left of Yupa, unlike the others on the page, is lacking any border. It is a pure white nothingness to contrast with the darkness it envelopes. Parts of Yupa’s hat and moustache are consumed by the balloon. The panel is rectangular in shape. It takes up two eighths of the row. It is stacked beneath panel 4.
(From One Must Imagine Scott Free Happy Coming Soon!
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| God is Change |
Ah yes, eyes: one of the Mister Miracle’s many visual motifs. There are several moments throughout the story where numerous characters’ eyes are obscured, be it by sunglasses[1], tape[2], or simply being closed[3]; indeed, throughout large swaths of the fifth chapter, Barda’s eyes are obfuscated in some fashion. Such a motif could be missed upon a first reading, but the comic explicitly discusses sight and eyes throughout the series. “Have you ever seen the face of God[4],” Barda’s ever shifting eye color[5], “And the Fourth World, my child, that is my world. The world I see when I close my eyes… and try to escape[6],” among others.
This carries several implications; the most meta is to note that the nature of reality is faulty. Thus, through the visual nature of comics, we, the readers, must look carefully through the story for other visual signifiers. Alternatively, it could be used as a signifier for characters touched by the Anti-Life Equation [though Barda witnessing it is never directly brought up within the text]. Perhaps we should focus where eyes are most relevant, if silently so: the “dream” sequences wherein a young Scott Free tells us a story[7]. The first, of a child who drew God in class, much to the disbelief of the teacher[8]; the second, of the nature of the Fourth World[9]. In the first, the child’s eyes are covered in tape throughout; in the second, the tape is noticeably gone, even as one can see the damage it has done. Thus, the nature of eyes is a part of the nature of the universe within Mister Miracle; that is to say its ambiguity. We can never see the full picture, as it were. There’s It’s telling that, on the final page of Mister Miracle, Barda’s eyes are both brown and blue[10].)
Yupa: What a fool I’ve been! I’ve spent half my life searching for the key to the mystery of the forest--And I never saw that it was inside this girl, right before my eyes.
Panel 6: Medium shot of Yupa and one of the various old men of the Valley of the Wind (Yupa is to the right of the other old man). They are both directly looking at the reader. They both have moustaches. The nameless man has a cap with a line on its top. The line goes through two circles, one in the center and the other on the right end. Yupa’s cape billows rightwardly through the wind. The background is mostly white, but there are a few grains of dust permeating the air. The two men are surrounded by jagged word balloons with no clear source of who’s talking. In between Yupa and the right word balloon is a sound effect. The panel is pentagonal in shape, though the majority of it looks rectagonal. It’s only the top right side that goes downward which turns this panel into a pentagon. The panel fills the entire row.
Yupa: Nausicaä!
SFX: Gooo
Yupa: Whatever happens, return to us! The time is drawing nigh when all the world will have need of your power!
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| O Superman |
(I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Grant Morrison as a writer. Not the works he produces [though I do think of those a lot], but rather what mode of fiction he most often writes. Like how Alan Moore is a historical fiction author or Emily Carrol is a gothic romance writer or Geoff Johns is the most Shonen writer in the history of American Comics. Not merely the superhero genre, but the one that the superhero is placed within. Detective fiction, for example, features a wide array of genres ranging from character pieces to political thrillers to Withnail and I style flat mate comedies.
Out of all the potential genres Morrison is best suited for, it is perhaps the apocalypse genre that is the most surprising. Upon reputation, Morrison is considered to be one of the more optimistic and nostalgic writers in the medium, one who peddles in silver age minutia. However, upon closer examination, this is slightly inaccurate. While Morrison is certainly an optimist, he does not peddle in silver age minutia [that is a gross mischaracterization of someone who just flips through books and finds what’s interesting].
But the more interesting aspect about Morrison that goes against this characterization of his work is his focus with the apocalypse. Throughout his bibliography, Morrison has included some apocalyptical event, be this the Black Zoid saga opening with a list of alien apocalypses or Animal Man’s first climax being the Second Crisis or Nameless and its story of humanity being turned into psychopathic murderers by an alien prison giving off bad psychic waves. But more than just depicting the end of the world, Morrison is likewise interested in its flipside. As Jen Blue is oft fond of noting, the Apocalypse and the Revolution are the same thing, just seen from different perspectives.
And Morrison is very much interested in the Losian rebel: one who is young and angry at the world, who overthrows unjust systems and works to build a better one in its place. It doesn’t always work [his brief stint in the early 2000’s as a corporate shill who thought he could change things from within {which was, to some degree, Douglas Rushkoff’s fault} didn’t pan out as well as he thought it would {see Klaus for his current thoughts on that era and recall that Morrison has magnificent cheekbones}]. But time and time again, Morrison works to try for a better world.
The key to this is in his oft quoted and misunderstood sentiment “Before the bomb was a bomb, the bomb was an idea. Superman, however, was a better, faster, stronger idea.” While the use of Superman is rather suspect on the surface, it’s notable that Superman is still an idea whereas the Bomb is not. The bomb, as an idea, is a long history of imperialism, genocide, and conformity to systems of cruelty. Among which, The Martians, The Red Death, and Sodom and Gomorra. And the Bomb’s antithesis isn’t just Superman. Writers beyond Morrison have speculated that the alternative to the bomb includes Laura Palmer and Rock and Roll. Superman, in other words, is not the material solution to the bomb. It never could be. Even in the Morrison text where that quote comes from, Morrison concludes by noting that the titular Supergods are Superman, Spider-Man, or what have you; it’s us.
But regardless, the Bomb is a material object and we have been feeling its effects in the material world for close to a century. Time and time again, fascist movements have been growing more and more powerful, to the point where a man who has no experience in politics and a long history of being a failure in business can become President of the United States and the only alternative the liberal party can offer is, in the words of Jack Graham, “barbarism with brunch breaks for liberals.” And, from the looks of things, we might just be, in Morrison’s own words, an authoritarian suicide sphere.
But the optimism of Morrison is that we can be better. That if the marginalized, the abused, the strange, all of us come together, we can beat the bomb. It’s poison may be strong, but in the words of a children’s book author, no matter how monstrously it may be threatened, the world has never been known to succumb entirely. The apocalypse is not the end. It is simply a change full of grandeur and monstrosity.)
Panel 7: Distance shot of a plane preparing to fly into the sky. Nausicaä is in the plane along with Mito and Teto. Mito is standing next to Nausicaä, his face obscured by distance. Teto is on Nausicaä’s left shoulder, his tail flying in the wind like a flag. Nausicaä is preparing to sit down in the cockpit of the plane, her face turned away from us. Surrounding the plane are various men of the Valley of the Wind, their faces not detailed. Yupa stands in the foreground, looking away from the reader. His cape billowing in the wind. His left hand is clenched into a fist while his right hand looks to be grabbing something. There is a pouch and a knife attached to Yupa’s belt. The knife is on his right while the pouch is on his left. Yupa and the people in the plane are separated by a sound effect, which Yupa overlaps. The sky is filled with clouds, though the left side of the panel looks to be where they part. As one moves their eye right to left, the background of the panel begins to look brighter until all detail is lost. This panel is rectangular in shape and fills the entire row.
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| Touch. Sweet Touch. You've Almost Convinced Me I'm Real I Need Something More. I Need Something... More. |
(Hayao Miyazaki is an artist best compared to Frank Quietly or Moebius in the amount of detail he packs into every single panel. Take, for example, the final panel of Nausicaä. It’s an extremely far distanced shot of the survivors celebrating the end of the long and brutal war, coming together in a desire to, in Nausicaä’s words, live. You can’t quite see the people beyond squiggles and dots, but each of those squiggles gives off a distinct outline of the person being represented: you can see capes and feet. It’s not so much an amorphous blob as it is a distanced view of people.
Furthermore, you can see the lines of the ground that engulfs the panel, the dissipation of the clouds above. The ships the Dorok and Torumekian people arrived on have the detail they would have in a close up shot, with their cracks and bends visible on closer inspection. Even the final text box, drawn to be more akin to a scroll, has the shading and texture of old paper.
Equally, there’s a level of cartooning to the characters. Not the realism of Lee Bermejo, but the stylistic quality of Adam Kubert or, perhaps more accurately, Chris Burnham. You can see the brightness in Nausicaä’s eyes even when they’re far away. Look at the joviality the panel before the last springs, where all these strangers are coming together in one moment of joy and optimism. The glee in the mouths of the Worm-Handlers, the bemused surprise in Charuka’s body language, Chikuku’s childlike joy. I could go on and on about this book. It’s a book worth going into, a book that no one article or even a series of articles could ever truly do justice [I didn’t even go into the implications of panel structure or the environmentalism at the heart of the story or the ultimate fate of humanity or…]. It’s the greatest comic book ever made not simply because of its quality or importance. It’s the greatest comic book ever made for the simple fact that it does comic books the most out of any other comic ever made. If you haven’t read it already, let the world engulf you and remember
…
We
must
live.)
SFX: Hiiin hiiiin
[1] Ibid. pp. 77-79.
[2] Ibid. pp. 155-156.
[3] Ibid. pp. 180.
[4] Ibid. pp. 81.
[5] Ibid. pp. 24, 36, 47
[6] Ibid. pp. 293.
[7] These pages’ significance is especially pronounced by being the only pages (in the Mitch Gerads portions of the graphic novel) that cannot be split into a neat nine panel and still convey the information. Even the first Gerads page (and the climactic two page spread for that matter) could be cut up into a nine panel grid and still convey the sense of isolation and misery going through Scott’s eyes. On that note, note that his eyes are a lighter shade of blue on that first page.
[8] Ibid. pp. 18.
[9] Ibid. pp. 293.
[10] Ibid. pp. 300.
