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Freakangels: FREAKANGELS Episode 0132

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  1.  (9787.1)
    Well, there's no reason Warren and Paul can't re-visit this world someday, if it suits them to do so. But yeah, it's usually more fun to be left with some loose ends one can play with in one's own imagination.
  2.  (9787.2)
    Wow. Page 2. Wow.

    I'm going to have to sit back and process that page more.
  3.  (9787.3)
    The problem with getting to these threads late is everyone else has already said exactly what I was going to :D

    Another great ep - good to see them considering options other than blowing things up. I like the idea of a gigantic, shielded tunnel running straight down the Thames with big flashy "SAFE ROUTE HERE!" signs all over it.
    •  
      CommentAuthortaphead
    • CommentTimeApr 22nd 2011
     (9787.4)
    I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Warren and the gang for telling a story where the solution isn't PUNCHING SOMETHING REAL HARD LIKE, but rather deals with the (personal, physical, political) fallout from said punch. "This is the story of what happened next" is a really good way of putting it, and right there on page 1.

    So: Thank you.
    • CommentAuthorElimGarak
    • CommentTimeApr 22nd 2011
     (9787.5)
    Wait, if there is a way into England and other countries have survived relatively intact, why isn't the US military already there? If they send a few thousand UAVs, they can map things out, find clear paths, and go in. This is around 2020, I am guessing, right? By then the UAV technology should be several times more advanced than it is now. Autonomous UAVs, semi-autonomous, helicopter-based, planes, crawlers, etc.

    For that matter, this brings to mind "Roadside Picnic", where a bunch of aliens (maybe aliens - it's not clear) landed in a place and screwed up reality in a similar way. Within a few years the area around the zones is full of scientists. And the zones are regularly being visited by hundreds of Stalkers to retrieve artifacts and do measurements. The game Stalker is roughly based on this story.

    Also, Warren, I would also like to thank you for an awesome story. It is getting to be more interesting with each episode! Every week I can't wait for a the new one, and reread the previous week several times. :-)
    •  
      CommentAuthorrickiep00h
    • CommentTimeApr 22nd 2011
     (9787.6)
    While "throw more money at it" has been US military policy for many years, throwing a potentially infinite amount of money at this particular hole seems like a bad move. The world is probably busy dealing with having one of its largest economies simply removed from the grid without warning, so I'm sure there's many irons in the global fire after the punch. Finding out what happened is likely secondary to figuring out how to cope with it for most of the world.

    Which is, I think, a nice way to describe the series as a whole, since it's The Story of What Happened Next and all.
    • CommentAuthorthud
    • CommentTimeApr 22nd 2011
     (9787.7)
    I'm sorry but my critical eye has noticed something.

    Page 2 is very cool, but it would be an opportunity to actually show the temporal displacements and distortions.
    What we see is the distant aircraft carrier and the aurora-like curtains of light on some windswept cliff.
    At last, we get a view of the outside world- so is THAT the time-effect?
    It looks like nothing.
    Where are the optical bulges and mirages, so that the aircraft carrier is there, then it isn't- ?
    Like heat waves in the desert that break images up into bands that are sometimes magnified, sometimes layered in with other images from many miles away.
    In this case maybe some of that, but also bands of yesterday and tomorrow.
    That would be something that no pilot would fly into willingly.
    This would not be VFR (visual flight rules) conditions. You couldn't trust your eyes.
    More like IFR (instrument flight rules), very cautiously, and then flying blind- because the instruments would not work.

    This one page illustration could be a real slammer!
  8.  (9787.8)
    I have a couple issues to what you just said, thud. But to get into it I want to make an analogy.

    There was an interview (forgive me but I don't have the link) with LORD OF THE RINGS director Peter Jackson where he said he had just finished his beautiful set work and was ready to start filming the movie, expecting to do a lot of wide shots and blow the audience away with stunning visuals.

    Then he started filming. And he discovered the acting abilities of his cast (especially two of the leads, Elijah Wood and Ian McKellan) and how they could convey worlds of emotion without saying a word, in their faces alone. And his original plan went right out the window, because what he had now was even better.

    FREAKANGELS is like that. Paul could blow us away with page after page of gorgeous set pieces, and what we would have would still be a magnificent-looking piece of artwork. But what he can do with faces is most impressive of all. Those four panels where Mark is persuading the others. He's charming AND disgusting, or maybe he's disgusting BECAUSE he's charming. We've never seen anything like it before (or at least I haven't)

    Now the issues I have. You have a difference of opinion on how you would write and draw the time displacements. Fine. But that's all it is: a difference of taste. To me, it's like saying the Sistine Chapel would be better if the brain around God had more special effects, but whatever. Anyway, here's a clue: the way Warren has written it they're supposed to be invisible.

    No pilot would fly into a danger zone willingly. I'm sorry, that's just not accurate. Military pilots obey orders and risk their lives for search-and-rescue operations all the time. And to discover what Britain looks like now, and as an opportunity to redevelop the land and resources that are there? Americans would be all over that, especially in a destroyed economy.

    It doesn't have optical bulges and mirages, or bands of yesterday and tomorrow. Exactly what is that supposed to look like? A photograph of a bush taken on Monday is going to look a lot like it does on Tuesday, unless a few leaves fall off. You could be standing on a zone of Tuesday and be looking at a zone of Monday and you wouldn't know, unless you bounced a ball into it. Here's the problem: the ball won't be able to tell you what it saw along the way. Only people can do that. Only people would be able to bring other people back.
  9.  (9787.9)
    Where are the optical bulges and mirages, so that the aircraft carrier is there, then it isn't- ?


    1) that would be a motion picture

    2) clarity of storytelling requires that we see the ship
  10.  (9787.10)
    The internet should look like page 2 more often.
    • CommentAuthorthud
    • CommentTimeApr 23rd 2011 edited
     (9787.11)
    2 frames would be enough to do that easily, or as in a mirage we see portions of images in rolling waves, with very interesting textures blending between the images. The ship is in one wave and not in the next- then in the next. Also Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow would be simply lighter or darker or different colored depending on the time of day or night in absolute terms.
    Normally I don't much get involved in trying to suggest there might be something other than what was done.
    I doubt any of the work on this story was done with a haphazard attitude.
    But you can't possibly think of everything, and this is feedback.
    After all the mention and obvious effect of what the FA's did to Britain showing it seems really important.
    Sorry, but I just had to bring it up.
    •  
      CommentAuthorAriana
    • CommentTimeApr 23rd 2011 edited
     (9787.12)
    But you can't possibly think of everything, and this is feedback.
    I mean, frankly, I had much the same feeling the first time I went to the Grand Canyon -- it's not really that fucking big compared to, like, the ocean or something. I could see across it pretty easily. It was not, as I'd imagined from books when I was like 6, a gaping chasm of forever. If I'd been on the internet as an 8-year-old, I probably would have whined that my critical eye noticed it really could be more massive, and there didn't appear to be a single monster at the bottom of it. Turns out it's only precisely as deep as somewhere between 6-to-17 million years which, surprisingly, is not forever.

    The gentle reminder here, dear readers (nb: not artist, writer, or editor), is that sometimes we imagine things a certain way, and when they turn out to look different our knee-jerk reaction is to say "that can't be right, fix it." As we're getting to the end of a story and some more answers are going to come up, I expect to see this feeling a couple more times. Do try to remember you're not a 8-year-old visiting a national park, yeah? You should be a grown up that can adapt your imagination to the picture in front of you and say "well, it's not what I thought it would be, but maybe there's a reason for that, since it's someone else's story."
    • CommentAuthorthud
    • CommentTimeApr 23rd 2011
     (9787.13)
    Thank you for that perspective.
    I didn't do this for personal reasons, but for the story.
    And for the record, I flew in Vietnam, have had a degree in Art for more than 30 years and a pilot's license for longer than that. I specialize in special effects, 3d imaging, and build my own optics and telescopes. I know whereof I speak ! !
    • CommentAuthorFreddySez
    • CommentTimeApr 23rd 2011
     (9787.14)
    Hello all,

    First post from a recently de-lurked shadow man. (I've added an "introduce yourself" entry.)

    The question that's brought me out into the light: If Mark's explanation makes even a little bit of sense under the present circumstances, how much more sense would it have made -- how much more warmly would he have been received -- before everything we've seen? Pre-Alice, pre-mudlarks, pre-psychodrones?

    It's true Mark had earned the group's mistrust before our story even began. But if he really believes keeping outsiders out is in the entire clan's interest, he could simply have walked back into Whitechapel and laid out his story. He'd be taking a chance, but not as great a chance as he ended up taking. What was Mark's purpose in attempting preemptive, fratricidal war instead?
  15.  (9787.15)
    What was Mark's purpose in attempting preemptive, fratricidal war instead?

    As stated: it made sense, in his mind, for him to infiltrate in pursuit of ensuring that everyone agreed with him.

    Or, put another way, paranoids find a way to fuck things up for themselves even when they're right.
  16.  (9787.16)
    2 frames would be enough to do that easily, or as in a mirage we see portions of images in rolling waves, with very interesting textures blending between the images. The ship is in one wave and not in the next- then in the next. Also Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow would be simply lighter or darker or different colored depending on the time of day or night in absolute terms.

    Obviously, I disagreed about what the important information in the panel was!
    •  
      CommentAuthordddrum
    • CommentTimeApr 23rd 2011
     (9787.17)
    I'm sticking my head above the parapet to agree with everyone!!

    With that said, I haveta say I know what thud meant. I too was looking forward to Paul's visual representation of the temporal tempest "out there," and after all the marvelous psychedelia that we've seen going on inside the FreakAngels' crania, I figured it would be pretty effin' crazy. So my first reaction to page 2 was a nonplussed "huh?" And, while Ariana's Grand Canyon story and longtime lurker's Rings tale both made perfect sense intellectually, that freaky stoner inside of me wanted the trip-thru-the-monolith instead of the Louis-XIV-hotel-room-with-Keir-Dullea-gumming-spinach-souffle (if I might throw in a third reference).

    Then I read Warren's last comment about what is important in the panel. And I looked at Page 2 with new eyes. Foreground: Mark, looking rather gobsmacked. Middleground: Things ...mysterious, diaphanous (but still very dark looking) things, going on. And then, back toward the horizon: an American warship. The cavalry? Or does Mark register only, Outsiders. Looking for a way IN. Now consider how long it might have taken Warren to convey that to us, had he instructed Paul to gild the lily.

    So, I say "well played, gentlemen."

    Of course, I am still expecting a heaping scoop of eye candy before we ring the curtain down. 'Kay?
    •  
      CommentAuthorSoftSpot
    • CommentTimeApr 24th 2011
     (9787.18)
    @thud: in fact I was completely satisfied with page 2: "symbolizing" timegaps and other strange things by drawing a northernlight-like curtain between the coast and the ship was enough for me. After all: a static comic is completely different from a motion-picture where it is a lot easier to arrange such optical effects. But the presence of the electrical curtain was enough for me to trigger my fantasy to imagine the rest of the effects.
    And isn't that what this medium is supposed to do too: besides telling a story trigger peoples fantasy? If all effects are arranged and laid out in front of you there's no need for your own fantasy anymore. And omitting the use of that would make the result a lot poorer.
    • CommentAuthorarvandor
    • CommentTimeApr 24th 2011
     (9787.19)
    Great twist, though. After all their talk of "growing up", they're still acting like scared kids.

    Mark is an evil sod. Damn I like him.
    • CommentAuthorthud
    • CommentTimeApr 24th 2011
     (9787.20)
    The price of change.
    If you see it- just a little bit- that's enough.

    If we all steered to the same star
    it would be so boring !

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