Some Animal Man.

[skybard.insanejournal.com]

Two pages from when Animal Man met his maker, but first, an unrelated panel from the same trade:



The whole scene made me love the Crime Syndicate of America, but this panel in particular.

Recap: Animal Man has met his maker, who took him out and pitched him against some bad guys...so that he could run through his credits. Animal Man gets his arse kicked.





I love this whole trade. It really makes you think. :) (Apart from the Red Bee bit, which just made me feel sad. ._.)

So, what would you do if you found out your life was a comic, scansdaily?

Comments

[aaron_bourque.insanejournal.com]

You are obviously not a writer, or you would know that sometimes characters just do things the writer never expected.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Which we can change if we like, so it doesn't matter if they do(though you brought to mind that scene in Gorey's "the Unstrung Harp" when he meets his character at the top of the stairs and sees details he hadn't devised). Thing is, though, it's all coming out of you, whether consciously or not, so characters don't really do that, I think: it's an illusion based on our(probably necessary) ignorance of how our creative processes actually work. It's more like you end up coming to different conclusions while "in process" than you do in abstract planning: things change when you're doing it "hands-on." I mean, there have been many times a story took an odd turn just because when it came time to write a scene, I found what I'd planned bored me at the last minute. The work changes as your mind does.

[besamim.insanejournal.com]

I am a writer, and frankly I've never bought this "my characters just got away from me" bit. It strikes me (depending on the quality of the finished product) as either an excuse for slipshod, inconsistent, poorly-planned writing, or as a way for the writer to seem oh-so-whimsical and precious in interviews, prefaces, afterwords and such.

Characters come out of your mind. You create them and you see them through to the end. Even if the characters change radically between the inspiration and the finished manuscript, it is still you who made those changes.

Now if someone else (with or without your authorization or even knowledge) writes your characters, then yes, they do "get away from" you and do things you'd never expected. And if those characters genuinely reach something deep down in enough readers, they can indeed take on a life of their own. Maybe even a richer life than some of those who read them. Richard Bach writes in Illusions: "If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats."

If that happens to your characters, that's a wonderful thing even if you never live to see it. Nevertheless, when it's just you writing a character, then the character does exactly what you tell her, no matter what justifications or dressed-up rhetoric you use to convince yourself otherwise.

[aaron_bourque.insanejournal.com]

Talk to me after you've had a good argument with someone you've written.

Aaron "The Mad Whitaker" Bourque

[besamim.insanejournal.com]

With all due respect, I'll pass. If I were to start arguing with an aspect of my own mind, I might lose said mind. If you can pull it off, more power to you. I'm less confident in my own ability to deliberately fragment my personality and put it back together again. :-)

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

Once, as part of a writing exercise, I wrote out an interview with one of the characters in a novel that I was writing. Oddly enough, even though I was writing it, I wound up kind of losing control of the situation; the character ended up berating me for not fleshing him out more, and asked me a number of uncomfortable personal questions, neither of which were things I had had the slightest intention of having him say. You can call it logical progression or the subconscious taking over if you want, but it was pretty damn eerie at the time, I can tell you.