The Letters Page: Episode #222 - Writers' Room: Freedom Five #293

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Bald eagles are super derpy and sound like weenies. XD Any time you hear one in a movie, it’s been overdubbed with a hawk. They’re the real cool birds.

inb4 all the Euros being shocked we have to pay to get our taxes done in the US :B

The Glamsdale Glam-o-drome? :V

Do I hear Glamour event for Definitive Miss Information? I could totally ship Glamfo. ;D

Love how she gets out of the force field. :smiley: That’s classic.

Absolute Zero, man of the people. Weird that he’s Proletariat’s nemesis. :V

Ooh, it me! :smiley:

So what I am hearing is that the tattoo protected Christopher from worse damage. Also hearing that Waykeep is in fact the secret to bringing Scholar back. :V

Okay but seriously, what did I miss? Do they mean Guise? Is it Guise? He’s not that smart though, c’mon.

“I am so unhappy.” Love it. Great to see this bit reach its ultimate conclusion. :smiley:

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The cover

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Nah, Scholar and Nightmist are gone gone. Those are definite demises, as he mentioned.

Now, Maria Helena, OTOH…

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The funny thing though is that none of them “died” in the traditional sense.

Erased from existence just means he needs to be drawn back in. Turned into mist? That mist’s still around, at least in one universe.

This is the kind of thing that is more readily undone in comics. It would feel far less cheap, imo, than just saying, “Oh, they’re not really dead” to someone who, like, got speared through the head or something. Arguments about invalidating sacrifice aside, of course.

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True enough. “Invalidating sacrifice” is also not something that I’m too concerned with, if the sacrifice feels forced, rather than part of the story. Best examples from recent-ish media the destruction of the Pegasus in Battlestar Galactica, or the entirety of Mass Effect 3. Nightmist actually felt like a part of her story, and part of her power, using herself as the fuel and the connection to other realms. Scholar also felt like a consequence of what he had done and what he had become. Wraith’s father, Thiago, so many others feel complete.

I guess I keep coming back to La Commodora because she’s the one that feels incomplete, like how there are threads that only make sense if she’s going to come back (especially after reading Time Slinger’s write up in the RPG…).

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She also seems like a good candiate to, if not break, at least uncover the sandwich bag - what with being one of the most knowledgeable non-singular beings in multiversal matters & whatnot.

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Much as I don’t like the isolation and the lack of dimensional or time travel, I don’t think that’s going to happen at any point in the foreseeable future in the metaplot. If I had to guess, I would say that if it does happen, it’ll be something to do with the whole Prime War thing, if that ever happens. I had though that the RPG universe would eventually grow to become a new multiverse, but A&C recently said that the sandwich bag wouldn’t stretch.

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Is the misspelling of ‘seized’ deliberate, do you think? For verisimilitude?

Adam told us on TLP discord is was totally intentional and for verisimilitude :grinning:

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I’m just surprised they didn’t go with “Aminia, abducted!”

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For the scene where they talk about Aminia being grabbed and Wraith noticing, I like the idea of the page (or double-page spread) being an X by X square grid of panels, where X is whatever number fits, probably 4 or 5 or 6. In the top left panel, it’s divided by a diagonal bar (sinister alignment), and we can see both Wraith radioing Aminia and Aminia receiving the radio transmission. Then, time moves forward a few seconds with every panel to either the right or down, and on the top we follow Aminia as she puts out fires for the team, only to get grabbed at the far right. On the left column of panels, we follow Wraith in the battle as she continues radioing Aminia, only to notice by the bottom that she isn’t answering. And with the entire lower-right square of panels other than the top row and left side, we see the other four FF members and the rest of their battle, ideally laying out these events so that every row or column is a consistent timeline following one character or location or something. That way, assuming a 6-by-6 layout of small but intricately well-drawn panels, we can read down column 2, and the top is Aminia radioing Legacy to say that a building is falling down, and the rest of column 2 shows Legacy dealing with the building, but meanwhile a bus careens off a bridge, and in column 3 Aminia is radioing Tachyon to run over and grab all the people off the bus before it can hit the ground, and in column 4 she tells Bunker to do something, and column 5 is her getting grabbed, and column 6 is her being gone while the other heroes gradually wonder why they’re no longer getting messages from her, before in the 36th panel we get Wraith having gathered up all the heroes to say that Aminia is definitely missing.

A page layout this complicated of course doesn’t work with a Silver Age comic, but then neither does the level of suggestion alluded to in Christopher’s planned dialogue of Aminia taking down Glamour and lecturing her about it. In actual 70s comics, the writing was still too broad for that level of clever, planned-out storytelling, particularly revolving around a secondary character with no superpowers who’s also a damsel in distress.