Wednesday 17 November 2010

Comic in progress

Close ups and work space.




First 3 pages.



Prep work for comic

Drowning cosmonaut, doodled
in a sketch book weeks
ago.
Working out panels from the script


Possible 1st panel

Script

For my last show and listen I typed out an internal conversation with some characters I'd been playing about with for a while; a puppet boy, a skeleton and a cosmonaut. I fleshed it out a bit and I got this:



DESERT/ EXT – DUSK
Cosmonaut is stranded next to the remains of her spacecraft. 
S is a skeleton that has just come across the cosmonaut. SEAGUL is a (possibly) 
life-size puppet in the form of a young boy. VOSTOK is the lost cosmonaut, who gets more and more distraught as the conversation continues. Eventually her helmet fills up with tears, getting in the way of her speech. 
S starts by inspecting the spacecraft before engaging the apathetic cosmonaut.


S
Space! How’d it feel? You’re a pioneer

VOSTOK
The Earth is blue, how wonderful.

SEAGUL
A pioneer for what? For ridiculous endeavours? There is nothing up there. There’s not even a God to meet.

S
But, but it’s Space – the final frontier. It’s the imagination. It’s possibility, science!

VOSTOK
I want to go back, earth is not enough now. I have seen how fragile it is.

SEAGUL
You’re the fragile one. The only reality is here now

VOSTOK
(Silently crying)

S
Yes, but one day we can make fantasies a reality.

SEAGUL
For what point or purpose?

S
For a utopia, a….a better life for all!

SEAGUL
A better life for all you say? The very action of ‘striving’ for a better future creates a ‘utopia’ of sorts. It allows a chance for change within a mind. However ‘life’ is not changed, life would not necessarily be better.

S
You are too closed minded. If everyone worked together to create a better system, a happier society, a fairer world then…then…

SEAGUL
Then what? That sort of system only takes advantage of the dead. The only way to truly achieve equality or fairness would be to eradicate death, and bring back everyone who’d ever lived. Then, everyone who worked towards a ‘better society’ could experience it.

VOSTOK
The Motherland! My Motherland! I miss the faces of my parents.

S
But, but that’s impossible

SEAGUL
Uh, uh uh uh! Nothing’s impossible remember, ‘science’! If your beloved science can take a man-

VOSTOK
(Quietly weeping)

SEAGUL
-or woman, into space, into the cosmos, then what’s to stop it from bringing back the dead? All we need to attain immortality is the right technology.

S
You’re confusing science and the spirit.

SEAGUL
No perhaps it is you who is confused. Who’s to say that science and the spirit are separate; that they belong on different planes?

S
Are you saying that the only way it’s right, or fair, to try and better our existence, is if we simultaneously work on removing the only certainty in life? If you think like that you may as well end it all now

VOSTOK
Without my spacecraft I am already dead.

SEAGUL
Why should I? I’m perfectly content with my life now. Just because I believe space travel is pointless.

S
You only think it’s pointless because you are selfish and small. You lack imagination.

SEAGUL
I see no problem with having little imagination, and it all depends on your morals whether I’m seen as selfish.
Besides all this talk of immortality is rich coming from you, no?

VOSTOK
(Tears have been filling her helmet and have just reached her mouth)
How is this [inaudible] monument[?] [inaudible] Blessed heroes.

S
I will reach my end just as you and all others.

SEAGUL
Humph, how poetic.


S
“The struggle
itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart.”

SEAGUL
That’s absurd

S
Yes, but it’s also happiness

VOSTOK
(Craning her head to reach the air bubble in her helmet)
Oh, how I want to be happy again!

SEAGUL
(Kicks cosmonaut)
Get out of that bloody suit!
[To S]
Who’s ‘Happiness’ what did they do?

VOSTOK
I used to be – [tears finally fill up helmet]

S
(Looking with concern at flailing cosmonaut)
…Happiness is an emotion; the quote is Camus - is she going to be alright?

SEAGUL
(Dismissively)
She’ll be fine.

Tears forcibly break the helmet and the cosmonaut is flushed out.

SEAGUL
There, see? Fine.

I'm going to turn it into a comic and see what happens.