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.
Honestly, it’s been so long since we’ve seen all this “behind the scenes” stuff, it’s almost strange to see it again! Not that I mind, though. It’s neat to see the framing!
My prediction remains that we’re eventually getting a villain team up with how many of them are still around in some form, but that feels like it’d be movie 10. Movie 9… we did mummies, zombies, undersea, space, time travel, kaiju, fantasy, mahoshoujo…
Calling my shot now: movie 9 is a proper full blown Robot Invasion. Our silicon masters will rise up and walk to crush the earth!
Yeah, all the past villains are still out there…mostly because I never managed to get myself to kill any of them off properly, mostly by having grown too fond of them by the end of any given chapter. XD But I guess I shouldn’t blame me too much for that – after all, killing a villain off isn’t actually any kind of impediment to their eventual return. ._. I could have killed them all off in the most brutal way imaginable…and still brought them all back for a grand re-union later, without doing anything in the process that hasn’t been done before in comics. XD
I did play around with the idea of a robot uprising scenario at some point…but right now, the rapid development of AI, and my feelings about it…would probably lead to such a chapter ending up really dystopian, rather than just pretend-dystopian, and I don’t really think I’d want that to happen… ^_^;