Well, this first “out-take” jumps right into the midst of the fray – covering with the twins and their outrageous activities.

In that regard it is a bit of truth in fiction in so far that I did do a fair bit of wavering on how to deal with that precisely in terms of showing vs telling. Ultimately, as you’ve seen, I settled for showing little and telling nothing specific, which I think did turn out relatively well. Partly, as I’ve said before, because I could never really have come up with any specific act that would have truly justified the reaction shots and other hype surrounding it – so leaving it to the viewers’ imagination worked a lot better in a number of ways.

That wavering, of course, concerned substance, not style – but there were alternative option with regards to style, as well, and that’s where the director, Erich von Strohhut, gets a bit experimentalist today. Thanks to the ‘out-take’ framing, he’s seen for the very first time, although he’s been mentioned in the credits for a while. In name as well as appearance, he’s naturally based on Erich von Stroheim (1885–1957), while “Strohhut” means ‘straw hat’ in German. I depicted him with the classic cap, though, instead of a straw hat, otherwise people could have thought I was trying to reference Luffy D. Monkey…

As for Erich’s experiments, the first alternative version is based on a 70ies shoujo manga style, while the second version, obviously, uses classic Greco-Roman statuery to tell the (sordid) tale. That later approach might even have worked, in terms of making it more acceptable by cloaking it in the mantle of art and history…but replacing the twins with statues would have limited their flexibility as characters considerably – and, ultimately, Erich had to settle for the original version in any case, since it was already published long before I came up with today’s strip…

More on Monday.