Friday, May 2, 2008

Spanner: Context and World Building

Script Frenzy was, as you'd expect from the name (and the 100-page-in-a-month goal), frenzied. As I focused on writing 170 pages of the Spanner script in the last 2 1/2 weeks (my total page count till then being 1), I didn't put much time or thought into the full context in which Shira and her friends, lovers, and enemies live, love, hate, and otherwise do their thing. Now that Script Frenzy is over, I'm dedicating the next several Spanner-related entries to world building.

What kind of government do they live under and have to deal with? What are the political dynamics of Spanner's world? The class relations? The economy? Are people starving in the streets and rioting for the right to eat, and why (or why not)? What are the pop culture phenomena in Euro-America in 2014? What technologies and Internet crazes are sweeping the world in the next six years? What is the Euro-American Union, how did it come about, and why is it all but permanently at odds with the New Chinese Empire and the New Caliphate? What religions are vying for supremacy, and to what lengths are they willing to go to achieve it? What is the relationship between the two rising phenomena of secularism and fundamentalism?

These are just some of the world-related questions I need to answer in order to put Spanner into its full context. Also, I need to keep in mind that everything has a history, and everything is connected to everything else. I will not allow anything in Spanner to be superfluous or gratuitous. So I'm dedicating the next several entries on Spanner to answering these questions and filling in the story's context. Once I've done that, and after I've fixed up the script for the first 5 issues, I'll start up again on the character notes.

I intend to create the best comics I possibly can. World building is a necessary step.

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