Posted in: Comics | Tagged: comic scripting, Comics, entertainment, the avengers

From Strip To Script – The Avengers (No, The First Ones)

Published Wed, 12 Aug 2015 17:00:45 -0500

By Josh Hechinger

Welcome to From Strip to Script, where I take a page of finished comic art and try to derive a script from it, to see what I can learn from the exercise.

You know, I don't actually think I've ever seen an episode of The Avengers. No, I don't mean Avengers: United We Stand with the basically-West-Coast roster and the inexplicable armors. No, I don't mean Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes (which I rather liked; best versions of Ant-Man and Wasp in anything). I mean the other Avengers, with the hat and the catsuit, the one Claremont jacked The Hellfire Club from.

Without being dismissive of it, that last bit's telling: I just never had any exposure to it outside of vague cultural osmosis. When it came to spy stuff, Bond was ubiquitous, either in theaters or on TNT or whatever, and The Prisoner was what the really cool kids in high school caught on their parents' VHS copies or whatever but The Avengers just wasn't on anywhere that I was aware of.

I still haven't caught an ep, but I'm mostly aware of it by a kind of impressionistic contrast to those other British spies: Bond's Bond, the quips and the gadgets and the sociopathy and the fantastic art design. The Prisoner is a cerebral, furious, and frequently trippy psych-out or psych-op.

John Steed? The impression that I get is that he's a gentleman spy, a partner to women, even in the dark days of the 1960s, and a foiler of intrigue.

Seems like my kind of guy, really, which makes it surprising that I've not checked the series out. Well, the show, anyway: when I saw that Ian Gibson had drawn a comic of it, I couldn't really resist. Nor was I disappointed, so let's look at this page from The Golden Game by Ellie De Ville (letters), Ian Gibson (art), and Grant Morrison (script).

PAGE SEVENTY-FOUR (ELEVEN PANELS)

P1. Blackness.

– FOX (no tail) Well done, Steed. Still as smug and cocksure as ever.

– FOX (no tail) Perhaps you might just surivive long enough to take part in the Golden Game after all.

P2. The armed target men have been shot to splinters. STEED leans casually on his umbrella, one arm slung over the mounted rifle.

P3. STEED lifts his umbrella slightly, ready to make his way forward.

– STEED What exactly is the Golden Game?

P4. Blackness.

– FOX (no tail) They wouldn't let me join their stupid club. They said Rooks and Ravens wouldn't work. Story of my life.

– FOX (no tail) So I've devised the game to end all games.

P5. Close on STEED, face half-shadowed by his hat. Watchful, if not especially concerned or cautious.

P6. Blackness.

– STEED (tail to P5) Does this have anything to do with the Hangman programme?

– FOX (no tail) Oh, go to the top of the class Steed! That's where you always were, wasn't it?

P7. STEED strolls down a long white hallway, with alternating red and yellow arrows painted on the wall, pointing to a door at the end of it.

– FOX (no tail) The game begins with a roll of the thermonuclear dice. Think about that while you play the next game.

P8. Blackness.

– FOX (no tail) Jackstraws.

– FOX (no tail) You have two minutes to get the key out and escape from the room. It's only fair that I should point out the pressure sensitive pad on which the straws are placed.

– FOX (no tail) One false move, one misplaced straw, and there'll be a new star in heaven tonight.

P9. STEED comes through the doorway to see a large room with arrows all over it, all leading to a small pile of jackstraws on a bullseye; it's not a million miles away from a Wile E. Coyote trap.

P10. STEED on all fours, as close to the pile and pad as he can dare, peering at the golden key in the center of the straw tangle.

P10. STEED delicately draws a straw clear of the pile.

– FOX (no tail) Careful, Steed.

– FOX (no tail) That's it.

So, What'd We Learn?

– The strobing/alternating blackness, focused on Fox's lines, is an interesting effect. It creates the effect of a voice from nowhere, even beyond the tailless balloons. The show could just have the actor playing Fox come over a loudspeaker, but in a soundless medium, the creative team has to not only find an effect to express the disembodied voice, but make a bunch of tiny creative calls which effect or effects to use: captions, wordless balloons, electric balloons, balloons whose tail points above (like God in last week's Dinosaur Comics strip), so on and so forth.

There's an inarguable grammar to depicting sound in comics, but there's not a standardized way to capture the variety of it.

– Of course, on a practical front, it also saves Gibson having to draw roughly half of the eleven panels on the page and/or it may well be that an eleven panel page couldn't have fit both art and that dialogue in all eleven panels.

– "Oh, go to the top of the class Steed! That's where you always were, wasn't it?" You know, it's funny…that first line sounds mock congratulatory, in the manner that masterminds can be. But the second bit, with the outright envious sneering recontextualizes the "delivery", in my head, at least: it's not "bless your heart" patronizing, it becomes "oh go <do something unprintably rude> to yourself". It can read as exasperated, but I think you can only read it like that after you read the second half, because comics are basically just futzing weird in terms of non-linear storytelling.

Philly-based comic writer Josh Hechinger [joshhechinger.tumblr.com] is a Cancer, and his blood type is A+. You can find him being a loquacious dope on Twitter, and read his comic collaborations on Comixology.

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