Man Who Wasnt There The

Author notes

MWWT: Spaceman #1 pg07

barking_frog

on Oct. 1, 2007

The last panel on the previous page and the first two panels on this page turned out to be probably my favorite dialog sequence in Spaceman #1 as far as being a character note for Clark.

When I wrote it I didn't think anything special of it – it was a reader who drew my attention to how revealing it is about how Clark sees things. I guess it's also interesting to me how it sets up a contrast between what Clark and Ethel respectively think is important.

It's often entertaining to me how readers will find something in my work that I didn't deliberately put there. I think this has to do with the way I write dialog – I make a "grocery list" of info I need the dialog to cover, then "become" the characters and just let them talk.

A friend assures me this is a very unusual way to write, but it feels natural.

The only problem is when they don't want to talk about what's on my "grocery list." Truthfully I sometimes get what feels like my best material when I just let them go, but other times it's necessary to give them a nudge back on track to keep the plot moving.



j giar: I realized I was going to have to do something with the backgrounds or I'd risk this long conversation seeming even longer. At this stage the backgrounds are mostly just about setting the scene, showing life in the park – but in the latter part of the issue there'll be a little story going on entirely sans dialog back there.

TheMidge28: I don't believe there's any more truth to it than in the original model, but I know we used to have the idea of the "noble savage" in 'civilized' (meaning western and central European) culture. I guess that's basically dead now, but I think it's being replaced with the idea of the homeless mendicant as being somehow intrinsically "noble".

My wife was telling me a couple of her coworkers had gushed about Into the Wild and how moving the main character is and how powerful his personality. I gather he's voluntarily homeless (I haven't seen the film yet and don't really know anything about it) – but my wife doesn't believe the two people in question would ever even consider giving a dollar to a bum.

So we have a continuation of an idea that allows us to idolize from afar those who've become disassociated from society – so long as they don't get too close and frighten us!

DAJB: I do a bit of that too. Because of the complexity of the underlying story, I might write some dialog for a scene with a relatively undeveloped character nine months in advance, then write related dialog six months later and go back to my notes to stitch it all together and discover the character's speech patterns have totally, totally changed.