Broken Frontier

Decompression is easy. Don’t let anyone tell you different. I know because I’ve done it. I’ve written a 180-page manga for Tokyopop and I love it. You can let a single scene stretch for twenty or thirty pages; you can go all cinematic with tracking shots and close-up reactions, spend four pages or more establishing a setting, let an action scene play itself out in slo-mo, Pekinpah-style. I love it, and it can make great comics. But on a monthly 22-page book I always feel I’m not giving the readers their money’s worth if they don’t get at least a twenty-minute read.

So this week I’m going to go old-school and demonstrate how to do compression. The example is from one of my earliest jobs for Marvel. Reprinted here are pages 15-19 of District X #2. I’ll refer to them here as Pages 1-5. At this point in District X I’d set up the background of Mutant Town, where the everyday mutants who aren’t in the super hero or super villain category hang out. These are just everyday citizens who happen to be mutants. Most of their mutant powers are pretty dopey, like Filthy Frankie who sweats a lot and Jazz who has blue skin. That’s it. Blue skin. Most of these characters are no longer mutants because of House of M. Or they’re dead because I killed them off. But that’s now. This is then.

We know that there are two major gangs in District X, led by the aforementioned Filthy Frankie and Daniel Kaufman. We also know that there is a new drug on the streets called Toad Juice, but that’s about it. In this scene I’m going to introduce a whole bunch of brand new characters and set the scene for the coming battle to control the trade in Toad Juice. This is the first time we see most of these characters so I need to establish them as memorably as possible in a short space of time.

Page 1 opens with Daniel Kaufman. David Yardin did a great job on the character. I did some doodles for myself of how he should look and David’s depiction was remarkably close. The guy looks totally wired. He’s on a knife-edge. I asked David to draw him snapping matches, one after the other to show just how nervy he is, and give David credit – he drew thousands of the things, one at a time. There’s going to be a lot of exposition here, but I don’t want it to sound like exposition. I want the dialogue to flow naturally and entertain as well as inform. Kaufman is the perfect personality to drive the scene forward. Like the man says “Let’s get right to the point.” Kaufman knows no more than the reader, but this blue guy, Jazz knows everything. So let’s hear it.

First though, I want to establish the personalities. Kaufman and Mr Punch have a strange, even perverse relationship. Kaufman’s mutation is in the form of a nervous disorder that entails letting off steam at regular intervals. He gets violent. Mr Punch has no pain receptors, so he makes the perfect punch bag for his boss to let rip on. Hence the many scars covering his body. Jazz’s initial reluctance to talk allows Mr Punch to explain Kaufman’s condition to Jazz, and also to the reader.

As Jazz chickens out and agrees to squeal, Kaufman unleashes his pent-up energy on Mr Punch and we get an unusual little action scene.

The script for Page 3 Panel 1 reads:
Kaufman stands up, straightening his jacket, pushing his hair back behind his ears. Mr Punch (maybe with nose-bleed?), looks unruffled.

Kaufman: THANK YOU MR PUNCH.

Now that is a weird relationship.

We’re ready for the Toad Juice back-story. The fastest way to get information across is with flashbacks and a voice over. This two-page scenario could have been spread over an entire 22-page book. If we were doing decompression. What makes this scene work is Jazz’s use of language. The guy is a wannabe gangsta. It’s always dodgy for us middle-class white English guys to do black American street slang, but put this dialogue in the mouth of a guy who is a total dickhead and you can get away with it. The Toad Boy’s entire life flashes by in five panels, but that’s enough to put across the squalor, the sheer sleazy claustrophobic waste of a life that he and his mother have led. We now know what Toad Juice is. And we also have an even more perverse, skin-crawling relationship as we see Toad Boy’s Mom licking him to get high. I’m amazed I actually got away with this in a PSR-rated book.

Toad Boy’s Mom gets hooked on the juice, stops working and we get a credible reason for Frankie’s mob to get involved. She owes the guy money.

Panel 2 of Page 5 is one of my personal favourites. The panel description reads thus:
The goon’s face transforms like he is seeing the face of God. The guy’s zipper teeth make his smile grotesque.

         Caption (voice-over): FRANKIE’S GOON IS WELL IMPRESSED.

David Yardin as always, takes that line and runs with it.

In the following panel, Jazz is in danger of slowing the scene down with his pathetic attempt at developing a rap, so once again Kaufman tells him to cut to the chase and Jazz winds up the exposition at a run. Frankie gives Toad Boy a home, sets up a factory, blah blah blah. The turnover is twenty grand a day. Kaufman wants in and the scene is set for gang war.

Now that’s a lot of info but it doesn’t seem forced because it’s done with humour and using Kaufman’s hyped up metabolism to drive the scene forward at an amphetamine pace.

Five fairly major characters have been introduced. If I did my job properly they are all unique individuals and the reader is grabbed enough – and this is the only thing that really counts in storytelling – to want to know what happens to next…

Next week: How to write compression and make it look like decompression.

And lastly, this week’s superunderwearperverts link: 

http://superunderwearperverts.blogspot.com/search/label/Bizarro%20World