Thursday, August 16, 2007

The Road to Now, pt. 3


Teen Times

I have in front of me a copy of the original Labor Days script. Draft is dated March 2003. Yikes.

As written it is 26 pages. That ended up ballooning to over 36 pages after Rick expanded the comic's fight scene into an 11+ page epic of back alley scrapping.

Let's see here.

I haven't broken the pages down into panels in the script.

I haven't paid a lick of attention to pacing or structure.

Dialogue scenes are bloated, rambling, and at times baldly self-indulgent.

The third act is laughably convoluted (we actually fought over this third act quite a bit, with me constantly using this as an argument "just trust me, it makes sense.")

As a very first draft, I guess it functions. It did give Team Labor Days something to spar with in the interest of developing our skills and functionality as a team.

We worked from this pimply, awkward monster, as well as it slow-witted brother (the original chapter 2 script), for about 2 1/2 years. In that time, Rick drew most of the first issue, including all of that epic fight scene he laid out. What a humdinger that thing is.

Meanwhile, in our lives away from Labor Days, I started honing my writing and thinking seriously about the "how" of writing. Rick was off getting other professional comic book gigs along side his animation work.

In other words, we were figuring some shit it out.

So when the decisions to gut the script and build it better came along, it seemed the obvious thing to do. I think we both knew that we loved the material and we loved the characters, but that this version wasn't working.

In particular, I knew I could do it better. Or maybe I knew I had to do it better if we ever wanted to find a publisher who'd want to work with us.

So in the interest of a leaner, bolder, stronger Bags, I started ripping the thing apart.

Rick, would you mind giving these people some of the old pages to look at? Or at least the old designs? They've been suffering through a shit load of reading this week.

And now here, just to prove it's still out there, the first page of "Storms a'Brewin," the original LD script: