Dark, Brooding, Mentally Disturbed-Man » Archive » director’s commentary 56-66 (or so)

director’s commentary 56-66 (or so)

October 14th, 2009

First of all, new comic updates will resume this Monday, October 19th. Chapter 3 begins. That hole in your life will once again be plugged.

Before that happens, why don’t I share some more thoughts and comments on the end of Chapter 2? (Read up through strip 66 or risk spoilers) I renumbered some of the strips to reflect that missing one, but all of the links should remain constant.

Strip 57 here is where things start to get a little “plotty.” I have mixed feelings about this, because I always had a bit of a balancing act going on between being a “gag” comic and a “story” comic. Sometimes I do something to advance the story, and feel like I’ve sacrificed the funny. That strip doesn’t really have any punchline to speak of, but hopefully the events at the beginning are a little humorous. In fact, the thought of a new reader coming in and this being the first thing they read is pretty funny to me.

So the next strip, 58, is the one-and-only guest-drawn, guest-written one, as explained on that page of the website. I didn’t really plan on moving straight ahead to the showdown fight between DBMD-Man and Really Good-Man so quickly, but my guest comic artist, Devin T. Quin, left me no choice. Which explains why that showdown scene goes on for so long.

One of my complaints with other story- or adventure-based comic strips is the exremely slow pace they can move at. Sometimes you realize you’ve been reading for over a month and the main character still hasn’t made it to the bottom of that staircase, you know? I figure in a month, at least as much should have happened as in one issue of a monthly comic book. Actually, I think comic books today move too slowly also…

So I got stuck stretching the final events out a bit, complete with 2 epilogue-style strips. Thinking on it now, I realize there’s plenty more of the Dark Knight Returns I could have gotten around to parodying. I’m imagining that instead of the mutant punk gang, DBMD-Man could have gotten into a feud with a gang of juvenile skateboarders down the street or something. Maybe he’d have to have a grudge match in the sandbox with their 12-year-old leader to establish his dominance.

So, moving on, making fun of the handicapped… uh, yeah. You see, there’s this character who showed up in the Dark Knight Returns called Green Arrow. I guess his super-ability is that he can shoot green arrows, um… really good. Hey, I didn’t make him up. But anyway, in that story he has lost one of his arms, so Devin introduced the Green Plunger here, who has apparently lost both of his arms, yet still keeps his plungers strapped on his back, much like a bow and quiver of arrows. Hey, I didn’t make him up either. So you see, this is just what I got to work with here.

There are some direct jokes about very specific scenes from the Dark Knight Return that make me laugh personally, and then… the DEATH of DBMD-Man! Yes, at the end of Chapter 1 he quits, at the end of Chapter 2 he dies, and you won’t get any spoilers out of me here. You’ll just have to wait and see how it all plays out!

└ Tags: comic book, dark, dark knight returns, graphic novel, green plunger, mentally disturbed, parody, superhero, webcomic

director’s commentary 56-66 (or so)

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