Crisis Weekly, the fourteenth.

Crisis Weekly #14.

I realize that sometimes these scripts are hard to read, as they don't seem to give enough visual description, or seem overly repetitive.  This week's script has a series of repetitive images, and yes, it was deliberate.

Even if it's disappointing as a reader, as the writer I'm picturing generally what the illustrated page looks like, what the intended visual effect is supposed to be.  I can't make readers of a script see the same thing I do, but as the writer, the result is what matters, even if these pages are never drawn.  I'm not writing these to be read solely as an elaborate way to read a story, but as an exercise in comic book scriptwriting, easily the longest I've yet attempted.

The funny thing I learned, some time ago, is that in writing comic book scripts, I become a lot more interested in the visual progress of a story.  I become a lot more interested in what characters are doing.  When I write prose, I'm more interested in what they're thinking, in explaining their internal journeys.  This may be unusual and perhaps even disorienting for readers who are far more used to popular writing that relies on action to build momentum, moments that build on each other whether they're mysteries or similar stories.  But personally, I'm a little bored by writing that spends most of its time distracting the reader, that expands a story past the story so far that the story all but disappears behind narrative gloss.

My opinion, anyway.  But comic books are inherently a visual medium, and it would be unnatural to try and approach them any other way.  So, too, with film, which is why most visionary directors are known for, well, their visuals.  Some are known for their dialogue, too, but that's because they've spent a good amount of time developing how their characters talk.  A lot of writers, in any medium, mistake the ability to write with merely presenting the bare essentials, and not the ability to do it interestingly.

Again, perceptions will vary.  You might look at what I did this week and say I wasted my time, and your time.  But I had a character (the Caballero) who finally found himself in the spotlight, and there was a lot to accomplish in very little time, and there are bigger things yet to reveal about him, and so I had to be very deliberate in my approach.

So I made some creative decisions.

Crisis Weekly, the thirteenth

Crisis Weekly #13.

It should come as no surprise that Crisis Weekly was inspired by 52, a weekly series DC did back in 2006-07.  52 was a big deal at the time, both for the fact that it took on the challenge of coordinating a weekly series featuring a continuous story, something that had never been done before, but brought together DC's best writers (Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka, and Mark Waid) to collaborate on it.  I loved it.  I thought and still do that it was a seminal achievement filled with great moments, archetypal storytelling that knew how to turn a dramatic corner and take bold risks with characters nobody would've ever expected to enjoy such results. 

Along the way, 52 introduced new characters.  Batwoman had the greatest sticking power.  She's starred in a few ongoing series of her own since then, and even made a spectacular live action debut in the "Arrowverse" TV crossover event last year, "Elseworlds."  There was also Supernova, who was ultimately revealed to be Booster Gold all along, a fact that was a little disappointing to fans who hoped there was another standout newcomer in the mix.  (Later, DC attempted to draft Booster's present-day ancestor into the role, but the idea had little staying power.) 

This week's installment of Crisis Weekly plays with the legacy of Supernova.  I had introduced the character of Boxer (meant to be a representative of a competing space cop organization to the Green Lantern Corps) early on, but hadn't featured him since, knowing that he had little other purpose than to be eventually exposed as one of the White Martians.  So, rather than letting readers bond with the guy, I saved him for the moment he gets revealed.  Hopefully he still works as interesting in and of himself, what he attempted to represent, above and beyond what he actually is.

This week I also sketched out the rest of the story.  Assuming all goes according to plan, Crisis Weekly will end with #21, eight installments later.  When I originally conceived of it, I thought the story might go longer, but I didn't want something that eventually just sort of existed.  I wanted a story that kept hitting its beats at a reasonable pace.  Readers will tell me whether or not I'll have succeeded.

Crisis Weekly, the twelfth

Crisis Weekly #12.

This is one of the moments I've been building toward, one of the ones I've been eagerly anticipating writing.  President Reilly, a.k.a. Firehawk, finally gets to command the spotlight, in the most dramatic fashion possible.  In a way, it's a reprise of her earlier battle against a legion of Man-Bats, but it's also the State of the Union address!  And it's her confronting, head-on, the challenges of the public's negative perception of superheroes, allowing herself to be viewed as the first time, as president, as a superhero.

I didn't invent the concept of Firehawk as a politician.  I first came across her in that regard in the pages of Firestorm.  Her secret origin is actually horrifying.  The daughter of a US senator, Lorraine is kidnapped as forcibly experimented on, in the hopes of duplicating Firestorm's powers.  The results aren't quite as intended, but she does in fact gain superpowers, and eventually a reputation as a bona fide superhero, who eventually for a time joins the odd "Firestorm matrix," in effect finally becoming Firestorm.  But not before becoming herself a US senator. 

She doesn't even rate her own Wikipedia page, however.  She's lumped in for one of those group pages of miscellaneous characters, with a fairly brief entry even at that.  Yet Firehawk has fascinated me since, as I've previously mentioned, I first learned about her on the back of a trading card, and then her later appearances in Firestorm, as a senator, as part of the Firestorm matrix (there's usually two individuals who comprise Firestorm: the one who represents the body and the one who in effect represents the mind, the role Firehawk assumed).

Her major role in Crisis Weekly is a small indication of what I consider to be her vast potential.

Crisis Weekly, the eleventh.

Crisis Weekly #11.

The last new character is introduced this week (probably), and his name is Ezrah.  Ezrah is named after someone I met during my first six months in childcare, who was in fact one of the kids.  Interacting with kids all day, you see a wide variety of personalities, and naturally some are going to stick out.  Sometimes it seems like the ones who do stick out for all the wrong reasons, and sometimes it's not even their fault, but because for one reason or another they have developmental delays.  Ezrah required a lot of attention, but I didn't mind at all.  I tend to feel most accomplished when it's clear I'm helping kids like Ezrah, and I guess that kind of instant gratification is basis human nature.  You want to know you're making a difference.  Most of the other staff in the facility are women, and it was theorized that Ezrah responded to me because I'm male, as he was at the time otherwise at home with a single dad, and you can do the math for the rest of it.  I like to believe it wasn't so simple, but who can say?

For those keeping score at home, I'd love to disclose some additional inspiration for the fictional Ezrah, but that would be telling.  Instead, I'd like to just reference one additional source of inspiration that cropped up this week, for the splash page involving El Dorado's apparent death, which is a callback for me to Mike Costa's brilliant G.I. Joe/Cobra comics, in which Chuckles gets the last laugh by assassinating Cobra Commander.  It was Costa's biggest moment in his long run (and led directly to two G.I. Joe crossover events, "Cobra Civil War" and "Cobra Command") across several series, and I just like to bring up his work, on the chance it'll inspire more people to read it.

Crisis Weekly, the tenth.

Crisis Weekly #10.

I don't necessarily have a lot to talk about this time, except to note that Jack Ryder as depicted here is being inspired by Tom Hardy's Eddy Brock in Venom.  Bloodwynd, too, as revealed last installment, is inspired in part by Cormoran Strike, the amputee detective in J.K. Rowling's Robert Gailbraith mysteries (who is himself inspired, I'm sure, by Rowling's own "Mad-Eye" Moody from the Harry Potter books).  And, since we're talking inspiration here, some of Rachel "Bulletproof" Rogerson's arc is inspired by the movie Isle of Dogs, which I love.

So there's that! 

Crisis Weekly, nine installments completed.

I was barely a dozen years old when Superman died.

Nowadays, it's almost difficult to remember, the seismic impact a fictional event like that had, even if there have now been two animated and one live action movie adaptations of the story.  Sure, DC had created a media frenzy over the death of the second Robin, Jason Todd, a few years previous.  But sensational superhero deaths became almost a matter of course in later years.  Captain America died, in the aftermath of the original Civil War comic, and that got some pretty good coverage.  Johnny Storm died, and his passing merited a special black bag edition of Fantastic Four, much like Superman's.  It started to seem that if you wanted the public to pay attention to comic books, you had to kill off a major character.

Because the death of Superman was huge.  It coincided with a massive boom in comic book buying.  Marvel had struck big with comics drawn by artists who somewhat promptly left to start Image.  A whole speculator market flooded the medium, and of course the bubble burst, and really, comics are still struggling to emerge from the fallout.

The story everyone remembers, though, from that time is the death of Superman.  Like I said, I was a kid at the time.  I can't say that I was emotionally affected, but it was a powerful formative experience, a touchstone event right there near the beginning of my reading life.  It's impossible for me not to think of it in relation to Superman and comics in general.  The story itself quickly segued into another grand adventure, four impostor Supermen appearing only to make room for Superman himself, returning from the dead.  Lots of people now like to believe it happened at all as a crass publicity stunt, but the creators insist it was a way to delay the wedding of Clark Kent and Lois Lane, since the TV show Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was about to launch, and the comics had only just got around to letting the silly lovebirds approach a happy ending to their decades-long romance, and they didn't want to get there before the show could.  So they threw a crisis at Superman, the biggest imaginable.

The comic book creator most synonymous with the whole thing is the guy who wrote and drew the pivotal issue, Superman #75, Dan Jurgens, and he's freely returned to the story whenever he's had the opportunity over the years.  But I figured there was still room to play around with it.  So this edition of Crisis Weekly begins to make clear how this particular story dives into that one.

Crisis Weekly, eight weeks completed!

Wow.  So I've just posted Crisis Weekly #8.

I say "wow" for a couple reasons.  The first is that this week's script is double the length of previous ones, sixteen script pages as opposed to eight.  This is because I'm hedging my bets about how next week will turn out.  I've been writing these scripts on Saturday, but next Saturday I'll be participating in a mini family reunion, so if I don't get a chance to write something before then, I'll at least know I've got the script numbers where they should be (old NaNo habit). 

The second is that I finally got around to something I've been itching to write since I started this thing, which is to say the first of two spotlights on Bloodwynd's origins.  This week is the origin itself, which I've revised.  It was previously detailed in the pages of DC's '90s Showcase comics.  I decided that it would be interesting, given the confusion some fans still have about this, to have Martian Manhunter help explain it, because these fans think Martian Manhunter is Bloodwynd, which I again reference in the script.  Probably won't get around to actually exploring that, although I certainly have ideas.  Likewise, I obliquely reference Firehawk's origins, but probably won't be getting back into that, either, but it's nice to mention, something I remember from DC's '90s trading cards, where I first learned about Firehawk at all.

And for once, action fills the story, and that felt nice, too, a change of pace, and getting into the thick of the White Martian plot, which will continue to ramp up in the weeks to come.

The next script, whenever I get around to it, will continue Bloodwynd's origins, and I'm very much looking forward to writing that one...