#and also even an implicit comparison to racism makes me really uncomfortable.

[monstermoviedean]

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[kierongillen]

Writer Notes: The Wicked + the Divine 28

Spoilers, obv.

I mentioned in the back of the issue that I was thinking that Imperial Phase Part I would just end with no climax. As in, what would be more proggy and self-indulgent than to do that? Just to assume that people would accept a whole year of issues as a single trade, and have that slow build. And if people are expecting a surprise, not having a surprise would be the bigger one?

Except I plotted out the fucker, and realised this issue would end the trade, and that works pretty well as a climax.  Not as big as any of the other ones, arguably, but wider and certainly a change of status quo. Plus it's an unexpected answer to the question of “Who's going to die?” undermining the assumption that it has to be one of our core cast.

This is probably a good example of how I talk about knowing everything in WicDiv, but the execution being more flexible. As in, all these beats are there, but working out how to play them came when planning these two arcs.

It's a hard issue for me, to be honest. WicDiv is definitely in a cause of anxiety place for me now, and thematically I can see why. WicDiv is always a juggling act, but I'm aware I'm juggling knives.

Jamie's Cover: The last of the first half of Imperial Phase. The design continues to the second half of Imperial Phase, with variations. I think this one is particularly beautiful, but pointed.

Elsa Charretier's Cover: We met Elsa when we were launching WicDiv in France. Glenat, our French Publisher, had commissioned her to do a WicDiv print. That was beautiful, and we asked her if she'd be up for a cover. And lo, this was born. The commission was glamour and sex – I think I suggested the idea of a sun in a martini glass. Elsa summoned this panorama that I just lose myself in.

It's also one of our rare Alt covers which is actually coloured by Matt Wilson, who took a pretty radical approach to the image. Matt Wilson for Eisner!

Page 1 Last time I talked about having a surplus of material and working out how to present it, and it actually all compressing down worryingly well. I had my list of things I wanted to happen before the party. I realised that some of them – mainly Sakhmet related – I could move into issue 29. Which left this, which I felt as an incredibly low-key mundane scene made a fun thing to hard cut from to the party.

Roehampton chosen due to me doing a seminar at the University there last year. I felt that Blake would be teaching in a place like it.

Jamie had a hefty re-write of this one when drawing it, and we chewed over the execution in chat a little. “The script is the start of a conversation, not the end of it.”

Wall stuff was also done in conversation. I gave Jamie a bunch of suggestions and we unpacked a little more.  Shall I go though and say what they all are? I'm not sure if I can recognise them in fragments. That's Girl's Generation, the K-Pop band on the left. They were the primary visual inspiration for the Valkyries. Oh – and Jamie tells me that's Katy Perry on the right.

Page 2 I am very fond of the side-eye of Blake in the second panel. Strong Jamie expression.

Behind Blake is... League of Legends, Ghost in the Machine and Voltron.

And another really strong face in the last panel.

Page 3 Oddly, Cassandra's habit of little encouraging asides to people seems to be a thing now. How will people read them in world? Actually sincerely or patronising? I guess it depends how defensive they were feeling on any given day.

Page 4 A call back to Larkin's This Be The Verse, quoted by Luci in the first issue, recalled by Laura in issue 6.

My first draft title was Pride, drawing a line between Blake's parental pride and Sakmet's pride of lions. And then we remembered it'll also call to mind Pride, which when there's a slaughter at a pansexual orgy, is definitely not a comparison we wanted to make. So we went to this.

I suspect these writer notes are mainly my “here are some of the landmines we nearly stepped on” log.

Page 5 Originally the line was a lift of Lady Vox's in Phonogram, but something more noxious was clearly better. I called for the cocaine-tool, and Jamie out-did himself. The mosquito-like device emerging from the helmet is quite the thing. I suspect this is a left over Iron Man idea.

The visual element of the performance of the colouring-stage added symbols came from Matt. He was playing with various overlapping shapes, which were beautiful, but didn't seem to be anything other than a cute aesthetic. And then we realised that if we made them all Amaterasu symbols it'll integrate into the whole book. And lo, it does.

When plotting this issue, it's very much a “okay, what order CAN they be in.” I suspect I'd have rather taken more time to get to the confrontation, but everything else is more important to be in its place. Space is the interesting one – I suspect given an infinite budget we'd have have played more space to introduce this party/temple, probably with a issue-8 style dance-floor shot. But we don't, so we go completely the other way with this very TIGHT open, and put you in the middle of this slightly disorientating party you build up piecemeal. 

Page 6 This involved some consultancy here, as I suspected (and I was right) that the original draft of Cassandra's dialogue let Woden off the hook too easily. We ended up tweaking a bunch to make her angrier to start, and still angry at the end, even after she takes Woden's point. I suspect I'd have gone even further given a chance to do it again.

(I mean, do you believe Woden that he didn't click? Plus that he knows the implicit threat by saying he didn't click – as in, he definitely could click if he wanted to. This is particularly noxious by Woden.)

End of the page is the closest we get to an establishing shot of the club/temple, btw.

Note that Jamie has moved away from a strict eight panel grid here, which suits the material. That panels two and five are these relatively smaller moments means that it would be dead space.

Page 7 And notice the strict eight panel grid here, which Jamie maintains as all these beats are basically of equal narrative weight.

Panel 7 is Jamie redrawing the splash from Brandon Graham's issue. Clearly relevant to what's coming further down the line.

In an issue of fairly bleak jokes, I think Woden's last panel takes the prize.

Page 8 The sequence is the last bit of set-up for the end of the issue. I suspect a re-read of the last couple of issues will see what I considered the necessary Sakhmet beats to get here. Next issue has more, but it's all very morning-after.

Special call out for Clayton for the second panel, which uses a PING! To basically split this panel into two panels in terms of reading. There's Amaterasu's first line... a small delay – and then the next piece of information. This is joined to the left-right movement across the panel from seeing the back of her head (I'm leaving!) to the right side of the panel (Where we then see she's looking at her phone.)

The softest beat of the issue, and probably one that I'd have stressed more if it was only a grace note, would be the reason for Baal's absence. Persephone assumes it's because that she is there, hence the segue in conversation on hurting people.

(In a boring practical way, Baal and Minerva not being here streamlines an issue which all the cast are present at. They don't need to be here, and their absence says more.)

The last three panels on the page are the closest that Sakhmet has come to a speech. Originally, there was about twice as much dialogue, but we worked it over obsessively to get to the core essentials (and try and avoid juxtapositions which we simply didn't want.) C and I shouting various takes and word-switches for about an hour in the living room.

All the WicDiv characters depress me. I think Sakhmet depresses me most of all.

Page 9 Anyway, yes, Sakhmet, that is a very good look.

Sakhmet's entry for the bleak joke competition, evidently.

Page 10 That we cut away from Casssandra means we get to cut back to her after the reasonable stage of an exchange and straight into this.

Hmm. There's something odd about this issue in terms of how pretty it all is, versus the emotions that are flying around. That's Amaterasu all over though.

The third panel was key for us to have Amaterasu's lines juxtaposed by Cassandra's response, so that it couldn't be taken out of context. A character responding to another character's incoherent racism is important context. I considered the archaic spelling “Moslem” but decided that while I'm sure that Amaterasu would use it, it wasn't worth putting in the text. It's offensive enough anyway.

Page 11 Some fascinating character work by Matt and Jamie on Amaterasu's speech to camera. The passive-aggressive nature of her threat is particularly sickly.

Cass' swearing is a delight.

I think I originally did something like “Clawing her eyes out” and tweaked as I) gendered ii) with where the issue goes, sets up all sorts of uncomfortable resonances with both Morrigan and Sakhmet. WicDiv is designed to be viewed as a hologram, so removing data strands that aren't intended is key.

(I mean, I talk about being anxious earlier? That's certainly a reason. There's so many moving parts in this fucker, and for all our efforts we can’t be sure that some of them are going to mesh awkwardly. We can always miss something.)

Anyway – there goes Cass, told to go home, the first of the people to leave the party. Everyone else gradually leaves, until it's just the people who remain. Woden doesn't get an exit, but let's be candid – no-one would have ever assumed Woden would be invited to the orgy.

And Dio takes over as the connective tissue. Hmm. Re-reading this after a few weeks is making me realise how tightly wound it really is. I had a friend write to tell me how many panels the last two issues had. 26 with 127 and 27 with 142. I did a quick count, and this one is (about) 119, so a little down, but when an average mainstream comic would have around 80 panels in (No more than a 5 panel beat, with average panel count lower than due to splashes, action pages, etc) it speaks to how compressed this is running on. No wonder I feel like it's going to explode.

Anyway, Dio. What have you seen?

Page 12 The main worry on this page was not making the storytelling too comic. The “someone leaves” And then “Someone unexpected follows pushing first person out of the way” can definitely come across as slapstick. Jamie doesn't do that, so phew. It's setting up for the destination.

The hyper-distorted close-up-to-reader Amaterasu symbols here are fascinating. Well done, Matt.

Page 13 And out in the street. Matt's glow from the door, into the cold blues of the street is strong. Immediate change of mood.

(Also, has me thinking of the break to darkness in issue 8 before going back to the party, as a structural parallel)

I don't actually use much contemporary slang in WicDiv. I suspect this isn't actually something people have noticed. As such, I had a good hard think before using Ghosting, but it's the right word and sentiment. And – well – Ghosting and Goths is an interesting line.

The goth kids absence from the comic have been notable. As they'd been major players earlier, they were always going to step back so other characters can move closer to the spotlight. I realised pretty early in planning Imperial Phase that the necessary retreat from the spotlight would be a way to explicitly introduce the plot. We could delineate their absence.

Page 14 Yeah, I'm uncomfortable too.

I don't think it's worth talking about this in any more detail now. Probably more later as we continue into the story.

Dionysus is the character who has most often surprised me in WicDiv. When he enters a scene, he goes in an unusual direction. He asks slightly different questions from most of the cast. “She chased him out the building and now he looks like this? Clearly...” seems a fair leap to make.

Page 15 “I love you, but...” is one of the more obvious bits of connective tissue in the issue.

Jamie does an interesting choice in terms of panel 4 and Persephone's response.

Another bit of peak Amaterasu here in the “What happened to my party?” response. Upset of her party not going according to her plans is, of course, how the arc starts for Amy as well.

Matt obviously gets the colouring interesting – all amber here – but Jamie is doing a lot to bridge the gap between two sub-scenes. That fifth panel re-sets it all, and hopefully Amaterasu's voice carries people back inside.

Page 16 The first panel landed very well. There's a lot of emotional weight that this has to carry, and suggesting of other things, and it seems to hold together. I suspect you can patch together all the Persephone Lines To Camera in WicDiv and get an interesting portrait of where she thinks she is.

(I mean, this is Jamie. It's never just about the line. I can't even imagine trying to write this stuff for another artist.)

My favourite person in all of WicDiv may be the guy in the hat in the bottom panel who goes “You know – actually, no, I don't think so. I think I'll have an early night” when presented with this offer. Good call, random person.

Interesting choice of panel breaking by Jamie on the last panel, which gets a sense of the rush of the response.

Page 17 Well, yes.

Page 18 When someone asked me about sex scenes a while back, this was already written and perhaps even being drawn, so I was aware of this in terms of a hypothetical WicDiv scene scene. Let's quote the thing here for reference...

We certainly don’t linger on the sex scenes. There’s an orgy in issue 11. There’s one beat where you see Morrigan and Baphomet in issue 16. There’s the repurposed Sex Criminal pages in 14. There’s very little kissing in terms of what you actually see  - there’s one in 20 and one in 24, so far. While at the same time, characters having sex with one another is one of the things which drives the plot.

Speaking generally, I’ve got no moral reservation about sex scenes in stories per se. It always speaks to the effect the story is trying to have. To state the obvious, in erotica it’s very much the point of the thing.

There’s a couple of problems specifically in WicDiv…

1) Seeings someone have sex has a tendency to make the scene about you watching. Our characters are often, in their own way, viewpoint characters. Anything which makes a character perform for the viewer is against our intent there. There’s times we’ve approached it, and Jamie has very much backed away when we approached the page, as it was just extraneous. Why do it if it serves no purpose? 2) Probably more importantly, sex is usually dead pages in terms of drama. The fight scenes WicDiv does are almost always not about fighting. They’re about a change of dramatic states, a visually interesting way to push the plot along. Go through a fight scene and note down what you learn about each character in it. You can certainly do that in a sex scene… but dramatically speaking, the “decision to have sex” and “how you feel afterwards” are the key beats. So we linger on them a LOT.

But there’s certainly sex scenes I’ve written in my notes, and they’re much more character driven things, one way or another. I suspect one will come up sooner rather than later, though watching how we do it will be the interesting one.

That “interesting” sits uncomfortably with me, as it sounds like I'm foreshadowing this awful mess, when I'm talking in terms of craft. How do you do that and stay to our aims? The things I'd point to here is primarily Jamie's choices – how he chooses to frame nakedness, how he chooses to frame sex. Generally speaking, this is an illustrative scene. The neutrality is key – Amaterasu's nakedness  in panel 6 would be a key one. There is no pose for the readers' eye's delight. This is a character who happens to be naked. Or at least, that's how we hope it's read.

(There's also other things – we thought that if Sakhmet is the first character to be shown naked just as she turns on a killing range, that has a lot of semiotics in there we'd like to avoid.)

Page 19 You know how life can just shatter in a second? I guess that's what we were going for here. Just one character being thoughtless, and...

(Fill in “That escalated quickly” gif, obviously)

For my money, perhaps Jamie's best art of the issue is the last two panels. The suspended glass, and then that close up – which is not one, but both of the best single expressions in the book.

Page 20-21 Amaterasu runs – I've seen some people think that Sakhmet killed her in this scene, which is one of those “you always must remember your audience is diverse in terms of how much they're aware of things like knowing what a character's power looks like, especially when a larger than normal percentage of your readers are new to comics.” I'm not sure there's much we could have done, except maybe a “come back!” from Sakhmet in the first panel. But  that feels too crass for the people who DO get it. Balancing what is too opaque and what is too crass is basically 95% of comics for me.

This spread was budgeted as a single page, in terms of the amount Jamie has drawn. I may have done it anyway, but it is a way to ensure that we have a page turn onto the image on page 22.

(Also visual symmetry with Sakhmet in issue 17, where the black out image is also used.)

Page 22 I like how careful Jamie is here as well. I suspect the page with the most colouring tweaks in it, as Jamie wanted it to have the correct level of horror to it.

I originally had a more on-the-nose element to the image – a message scrawled in blood – but as much as I like a good System Shock homage, it was decided it was just too much. It's a Grand Guignol beat, sure, but not like that. It seems that there is a thing such as “too unsubtle” even for WicDiv.

Page 23 When originally planning the book, I thought this flashback was going to be at the end of Rising Action. After writing it, we realised we didn't need it – Persephone terrible and resplendent, with all the awful potential didn't need anything else. This is probably a good example of what I talk about in terms of when we say “we know all the material – it's just a question of execution.” I find myself thinking of how movies are really made by the editor, cutting scenes around.

(There's certainly things I've wanted to get in this arc which I've lost as something else was always more pressing. You may remember me saying one of my worries about year 3 in WicDiv was it was mainly girls being involved with girls, and there wasn't enough male/male intimacy? That would be an example of something which I'd like to find a place for, but have failed to do so far. Still, onwards.)

As a craft note, I'd point towards “6 months earlier” as a choice worth considering for creators. If you just write dates to control flashbacks rather than stating the relative position, you will lose your reader almost completely. They don't remember what period a story is set in just via numbers. They need either word based hand-holding or something much more visual in the story. Be very careful with this shit.

Page 24 In an issue as compressed as this, a page of Ananke way back in issue 21 me a luxury. But for someone like Ananke, it's so rare I hope it's interesting. Some strong expression work in here.

Clearly the advantage of that mask of hers is that it means it's harder for people to see that she's been crying.

Page 25 A “free” page in terms of budget, though Jamie clearly committed to it  with the hand.

In the third year's hardback, we may include our somewhat hilarious lettering trial runs where Chrissy and Katie tried their handwriting. The final one is actually the work of Marguerite Bennett, who as a self-described Supervillain seemed a good person to ask to do it. Also, I've seen enough of her pen when signing issues of Angela, so knew she had a fascinating font. She was enormously ill and bed-ridden, so it was touch or go whether she would be able to do it, but thankfully it all came together. Thanks, M.

Page 26 A complete re-use of the opening of issue 21, with the final panel turned into a (tweaked) repeat of the penultimate panel. Once more we return and all that.

We'll be doing a little tweak to this page in the trade in the penultimate panel, to put a little glow on the machinery.

Page 27 We had to debate whether to put the present date or the flashback date here, but settled on this.

And that's it. Coming up shortly is the 455 AD special, which certainly fits thematically in with this arc and Andre (and Matt) have done wonderful work on. Then the trade in June, and back with Imperial Phase Part II in July.

Thanks for reading.

[thatsjustsupergirl]

enchntedapril ha respondido a tu publicación “ur post about fic & racism in the supergirl fandom really got me...”

I get the parts about Jimmy vs Mon-El, but the rest? Not so much. Since when has Sanvers NOT been huge? I see tons and tons and TONS of Sanvers fics, and let's keep in mind that Alex is not the main character. I don't know what you're talking about re:Floriana being or not being white having anything to do with her popularity. In fact the only criticism I saw was, as you say, about Floriana not being ENOUGH of a WOC. Roulette fic? M'gann??? Seriously?

Why the heck would there be Roulette fics? Perhaps the reason has less to do with race and more to do with the fact that she was a relatively poorly written character in two measly episodes? Likewise, M'Gann was never a main character, and if anything, I would pair her with J'onn, but the fandom (at least as represented on AO3) seems much more devoted to wlw pairings.

Personally, I'm a huge Sanvers shipper, as well as Kara/Lena, Kara/Cat and canon endgame Kara/James. I'm not even sure why any of this is an argument. Pairings between characters who rarely have shared screen time are simply never going to be as popular as those that do.

Also, where is Maggie being demonized within the fandom?? Apparently I'm blissfully unaware...

Sooooooo lemme kick this off with a seemingly-unrelated story, since “well-meaning” skeptics like you are the reason I started doing all this data-tracking in the first place:

Several years ago I took my daughter on vacation to a country where I used to live, speak the language fluently, and racially blend in. We went out to dinner the first night and the waiter didn’t give me my change when I paid the bill, then seemed annoyed when I asked for my money. It was a holiday and busy, so I shrugged it off. 

Except then it happened again the next morning at breakfast. And then again at lunch, where the waiter tried to give me the bill for another table that had ordered multiple bottles of alcohol and some seafood platters, when all I’d bought was two sandwiches and a Coke. At this point I was getting pissed off, because what the hell, I speak fucking Spanish and in ten years of traveling to this region I’d never had this happen before.

The next day, all of these mysterious “accidents” with trying to rip me off miraculously stopped. And when I figured out why, I got even more pissed off. Know what happened? My daughter had started wearing her sunglasses and people couldn’t see her eyes anymore. (She’s Asian. I’m not.)

Like. Whether it was malicious or not, people were straight-up ignoring my visibly local-ass face, hair, and accent like I wasn’t even there and fixating on the fact that my kid looked foreign, then treating us as they would have if she had been alone. That is how implicit racism works: there are always plenty of ~reasonable excuses~ for it when you’re not the one it’s happening to.

So congratulations, just because *you personally* don’t perceive fandom racism on your very narrowly-curated tumblr dashboard doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist -- or that you have any right to dismiss the hundreds of other people who see it for what it is.

Also, I am confused as to where you think anyone is arguing, or that this is even something to argue about. It is a fact that implicit racism affects fan behavior and preferences, just like it affects our behavior everywhere else. @diversehighfantasy made some excellent additions to my post with examples of how this behavior plays out across multiple fandoms in multiple ways. There is plenty of literature on this problem of racism by fans within the field of fan studies. None of this is an opinion. It’s a fact.

And the fact that you’re so quick to defend the disparity by a) scoffing off the idea that anyone might find Roulette shippable in the first place; b) suggesting that M’gann’s relative lack of screentime is the only factor explaining the general lack of interest in her; and c) throwing up “but everyone’s into femslash” as an excuse for the lack of black het pairings when I’ve spent the better part of a year and a half tracking this fandom and can tell you, with detailed references, that you are wrong ... says a whole lot about you, none of it flattering.

It also says that you don’t follow my tumblr, because I don’t write things I can’t back up. And thanks for telling me there’s lots of femslash like I don’t already know.

Let’s go through this step by step, shall we?

“I see tons and tons and TONS of Sanvers fics, and let's keep in mind that Alex is not the main character”

1) High five for your use of hyperbole, but here are the actual AO3 numbers from March:

2) Despite how hard CW keeps trying to change this, Alex is still the co-lead of the show. She has the most screentime after Kara. The amount of fics featuring each of them as a romantic lead is roughly proportional to their levels of screentime. (49% less time vs. 44% less fic)

3) There was a mass migration of queer fans explicitly because of Alex’s coming out arc that inflated the interest in her character. How do I know this was an inflation? Because S1 fans did not move away from their old ships -- output for every other femslash ship has stayed consistent since S1 ended. (Supercat is at 1/2 scale so it fits on the graph.)

“I don't know what you're talking about re:Floriana being or not being white having anything to do with her popularity.”

You say this like I didn’t explicitly note in my original post that I had the data to back myself up re: the drop in interest in Sanvers. Here you go:

This graph is on a log scale, aka it’s showing growth exponentially so it’s easier to make comparisons and see trends. Sanvers, when it first appeared onscreen, had the quickest growth of any Supergirl ship to date. And yet, there’s a sharper-than-expected publication slowdown throughout November of 2016.

That’s because this appeared on October 26th:

So, yes, the race/ethnicity clusterfuck did have something to do with the popularity of the ship. People backed off writing the pairing. I mean, I can explain further why the legitimate criticism from latina fans re: Kreisberg’s racist assumption was advantageous to racist people uncomfortable with Maggie’s clearly nonwhite skin color, but this post is long enough as it is. Moving on...

“Roulette fic? M'gann??? Seriously? Why the heck would there be Roulette fics?”

Gee, I don’t know, enchantedapril, maybe because there are published romantic and/or smutfics for all of the following:

Kara and Max Lord

Kara and Livewire

Kara and Silver Banshee

Alex and Max Lord

Alex and Silver Banshee

Alex and Cat Grant

Cat and Livewire

Cat and Astra

Lucy and Alura

J’onn and Jim Harper

J’onn and Clark

J’onn and Mon-El

Kara and Eliza

Kara and Non

Kara and Clark

Assorted threesomes of the above

Come on. Even your dismissiveness at the idea that people might see Roulette as desirable or interesting reeks of prejudice. And your incredulity over anyone thinking M’gann might be a ship-worthy partner is just gross. To put your comments into perspective: by 2x12, which aired in February, M’gann had racked up more screentime than Lena. And yet, by the end of January there were exactly four shipfics featuring M’gann on AO3 (zero of which included J’onn), compared against 1162 for Lena.

And to counter arguments about screentime proportions making a difference: Alex has had more scenes & time with M’gann than with Lena, yet there are 11 Alex/Lena fics and zero Alex/M’gann ones. There are also more femslash fics about Alex and her friend from high school than there are about Lena & Veronica Sinclair.

So, nice try.

“Pairings between characters who rarely have shared screen time are simply never going to be as popular as those that do.”

Ah, yes, and this is why Lucy Lane and Kara’s dead mother, who have never met onscreen, have more shipfics about them than multiple WOC from Season 2 who directly interact with main characters. This is why Karolsen flatlined for months, but Karamel took off like a rocket, and why there’s more fic of Winn & Mon-El than Winn & James. Like, if you’re going to make this basic argument, maybe crawl out of your Tumblr bubble a little more often, because multiple people in the fandom have started researching this shit specifically to refute people like you who insist that we’re exaggerating or imagining things. There is literally more shipfic on AO3 about Kara's terrorist uncle than there is about M’gann and anyone.

“Also, where is Maggie being demonized within the fandom??”

I don’t read a lot of Supercorp, which is where it tends to crop up most often, but here’s one example (in which the OP respectfully listened to people’s concerns and reworked their idea).

“Apparently I'm blissfully unaware...”

tl;dr: yay for being ignorant?