Posted in: Comics, Recent Updates | Tagged: barbarella, comic scripting, Comics, entertainment, humanoids, Jean-Claude Forest, kelly sue deconnick

From Strip To Script – Barbarella

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.

Semi-recently: Humanoids Inc.  (Les Humanoïdes Associés if you're nasty), brought their current output of English translations of European comics to Comixoloxy. Cue me freaking out with delight, but still managing to restrain myself from spending all the money in the world on books I've heard about for years but had limited access to.

The comic I ended up pouncing on was the new translation of Jean-Claude Forest's Barbarella, adapted by Kelly Sue DeConnick.

I've seen the movie, but this was the first time I'd actually read the comic, which is an absolute hoot; a jaunty/flirty/weird/janky sci-fi story that flits from vignette to vignette. The running theme seems to be that Barbarella likes to solve social issues, stay alive, and get laid, and while she occasionally gets in over her head and/or runs into self-involved jerks, it all works out in the end.

On this page, we find her…well, basically getting mugged by Victorian schoolgirls.

PAGE Thirty-Three (Eight PANELS)

P1. GLOSSINA from behind, standing in the snow and staring at the ship. A doll dangles from her hand. BARBARELLA starts to raise a beckoning hand.

– KLILL                                          That was fast! She's Stomoxys…or Glossina. I'm not quite sure which. Anyway, she's one of the twin princesses of Yesteryear!

– BARBARELLA                             Come on over! No one's going to bite you!

P2. GLOSSINA, with the hint of a smile, pastes BARBARELLA in the face with a snowball the size of a fist.

P3. BARBARELLA jumps out of the ship, though KLILL tries to stop her.

– BARBARELLA                             You little brat! Why did you throw that snowball at me?

– KLILL                                          Don't waste your energy1 You won't get the last word with that one.

P4. GLOSSINA from behind again, concealing her doll behind her back as BARBARELLA strides through the snow towards her. KLILL waves an arm from the ship, ignored.

– BARBARELLA                             Would you like me to come over there and box your ears?

– KLILL                                          Careful! She's got more than one ace up her sleeve!

P5. GLOSSINA brings her doll forward; its tiny jaws chomp into BARBARELLA'S arm.

– BARBARELLA (no balloon)       OUCH!

P6. BARBARELLA stomps through the snow toward the distant, retreating figure of GLOSSINA, who's moving daintily deeper into the woods.

– KLILL (off)                                 And above all—don't give chase!

– BARBARELLA                             Why not!? Her nasty little mechanical doll bit me!

P7. BARBARELLA comes around a tree. GLOSSINA and STOMOXYS are pulling a trip-wire across her path.

P8. BARBARELLA'S tripped up, belly down in the snow. STOMOXYS has her in a side headlock, while GLOSSINA has traded her doll for a gun pointed at BARBARELLA'S head.

So, What'd We Learn?

– The rhythms of this page are pure slapstick: Advance-Block-Recovery, one-two-three. Barbarella makes an advance, Glossina blocks it, and Barbarella recovers and starts to advance again, angrier than ever.

– Okay, but…only the first two tiers track to a nine-panel grid (that one-two-three rhythm). The final tier is only two panels. We don't see the sisters actually trip Barbarella, which should be the second panel "Block" in the third tier.

But we don't need that second panel Block: the page has established a rhythm, and breaking it juuuust slightly at the end brings the overall sequence to a climax.

Forest could've dedicated a panel to the actual moment of Barbarella's foot catching on the wire, but he doesn't need to; we're already reading the page as "the middle third of the tier is where the Block happens". So, as our eyes pass over those last two panels:

The first panel establishes the trap.

Then the start of the second panel, which is the middle third of the tier, is a post-Block shot of Barb's ankle, already tripped.

Which means that readers fill in the blanks of what happened between panels one and two, but as their eyes scan past the Block, they catch the choke hold and gun, which also breaks the page's rhythm, and are pretty sharp escalations of the violence so far, which also makes for a pretty compelling cliffhanger, which will make the reader turn the page to see what happens next.

Whew!

Philly-based comic writer Josh Hechinger is a Cancer, and his blood type is A+.

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