A few weeks back I told everyone here about my Lone Samurai idea that many people thought was too blah and wouldn't be really good. After thinking about it, I've decided to change the story up a bit. Instead of it being post-nuclear war New York City, it's placed in a 1800 steampunk inspired Victorian England. The Samurai follows his Master to help protect the Dragon's Rock, a mystical stone that creates large amounts of steam if it's touched by water. English Scientist want to look at it and hopefully use it to power the first Steam Power plant that would help create a totally steam powered London or power a floating steam/clockwork city. Once in England, the Samurai and his Master are overpowered by a unknown enemy who takes the Dragon's Rock and pushes the Samurai into a Steam vent. With his body destroyed, a young doctor uses a small piece of the dragon's Rock that broke off and clockwork to make the Steampunk Samurai who must find his Master and the Dragon's Rock. I haven't written down much but I'll post stuff once I have a better idea where the story goes.
Sam, a story like that is a set-up for some great action scenes, and possibly some unique visuals, but its appeal, to me at least, is entirely dependent on your artists' skills. There is nothing wrong with making a fight comic-- I think it is awesome, and it can be amazing if done correctly.
The problem with writing a.story that is completely dependent on its visuals is that you learn nothing about writing, nor do you find your story mattering in the long run.
Why do we care about anything that is going on?
If you can't answer this question with something more than just about how neat the setting is, you have failed.
The person who saved the Samurai (I still haven't come up with a name yet. Looking around for something that seems right.) is a young woman who's father is one of the greatest scientist of the time. He created the automatic arms used in factories and the crane (all steam and clockworks). However, he has since disappeared, the young woman (between the age of 18-21) has no idea where he has gone to. She believes her father was kidnapped, but no evidence shows this to be true. While the father has been gone, she (I'm going to call her Alice for now as I hate using she all the time. Plus I'm watching Alice in Wonderland :P ) has been working on using her father's work in creating Prosthetic limbs. Since this is 1800s Victorian age, Alice can't really claim the work as her own and thus the credit goes to her father. She finds the Samurai (I'll call him Sam for now) and saves him using some of the projects she's been working on.
Sam's whole system is powered using the Dragon's Rock piece inside a jar of water. This is one of Sam's weaknesses as once he is out of water, he can't move. He can go for about 6 hours without needing to refill his tank. However, I'm thinking of having Sam be a hot-headed character. The leap before looking type who is a comical short fused. One idea I have is that when Sam is angry, it causes the Dragon's Rock piece to burn hotter, shorting the amount of time he can move, but increasing the strength and speed of his movements. One idea of design is to have a steam whistle like on a old train come from his back or shoulder area. When Sam is mad (which could be often) steam and a high pitch whistle will blow from it.
I'm still working on a villain but I want to kinda recycle Maximilian from the Lone Samurai idea (villain who gains all his knowledge from a copy of the internet in his Vault) and mix some Professor Moriarty. He may be French as I'm playing with the idea of the French trying to get the Dragon's Rock to power their own Steam cities and become the most powerful nation in Europe.
Here are some sorta-teaser images for a comic I want to do, after I clear my plate of all the other stuff. The basic gist is that it's a crime/superhero comic, alternately focusing on the lives of three men, one a hero cop, one a reluctant criminal, and one a vigilante folk hero.
I actually did the first one to experiment with how I want to color the Chupacabra comic TLB and I are working on, and then just kept going with them over the past couple days. Which is why none of them have a consistent background color, size, etc.
When I do the Chupacabra comic, I'll probably use a combination of a very subdued blue/blue tone dots, and bright splashes of color where appropriate.
@Munch: I'd buy it. There's something a bit unsettling about the two faces in the spoiler, but I'm guessing at least for the second one that's intentional.
@DouglasDanger: There's a lot of interesting potential there. 6 hours of movement seems like a fairly arbitrary number - is there a particular reason for choosing that? You could doll the character up with all sorts of cloud chambers and condensers so that he can go indefinitely until he needs to tap the power of the rock if not. Would provide you with a number of things at once - a weakness, a piece of character dressing, and a nice transition point when the rock gets hot where you go into countdown mode.
One of the things I ran across recently talked about the origins of steampunk and how originally (before it became a style) they just thought of it as "gonzo history", which I think is brilliant and has hooks into all sorts of interesting combinations. I don't know that it's helpful, but I always like to point it out, as I think the subgenre could probably at this point use some innovators.
Yeah, you have to know when to start something new. I wrote two notebooks' worth of cyberpunk vampire ninja stories, 100 pages of of Yakuza stories, all kinds of stuff. I wrote thousands of words about this power ranger type thing, a thing about a ptsd guy with a piece of rebar, I have these half-finished action figure space picaresque scripts... I think it is probably all trash.
@DouglasDanger: There's a lot of interesting potential there. 6 hours of movement seems like a fairly arbitrary number - is there a particular reason for choosing that? You could doll the character up with all sorts of cloud chambers and condensers so that he can go indefinitely until he needs to tap the power of the rock if not. Would provide you with a number of things at once - a weakness, a piece of character dressing, and a nice transition point when the rock gets hot where you go into countdown mode.
One of the things I ran across recently talked about the origins of steampunk and how originally (before it became a style) they just thought of it as "gonzo history", which I think is brilliant and has hooks into all sorts of interesting combinations. I don't know that it's helpful, but I always like to point it out, as I think the subgenre could probably at this point use some innovators.
I'm the Steampunk Samurai guy. I picked 6 hours mainly because I wanted him to have a weakness but I didn't want to to be something that always shows up. And that I have a villain idea for a guy who's like you are talking about with indefinite steam suit (I haven't come up with how it works but I didn't want him to have a Dragon's Rock. If he doesn't have a rock piece, then I'm thinking that he is always running a fever hot enough to create steam and the steam helps keep his temperature down below killing him but that would mean his body temp would be 212F (100C) or higher. Somehow I want this villain to need the steam to keep him alive.) The best I can come up with his the Dragon's Rock causes the molecules of the steam to spread more than normal and could cause them to explode if something as simple as a spark happens to hit it (Hydrogen and Oxygen are highly flammable.) With it open, normal air can mix in and keep it more stable but that lets steam out.
I could have the Sam or Alice narrate the story in a journal style (Most likely Alice since she seems more of the writer type) to give it some sort of gonzo-ish style. Thanks for the idea!
There's a problem with thinking you have to start something new to work. That's not how a story gets made, and it's definitely not how a story gets good. It's fine to admit you don't like your old ideas and toss those away, but when writers talk about a million words of garbage they're not talking about ideas. You hear a lot of stories about writers putting old ideas in the drawer until they're ready to tackle them. What you don't hear a lot about is how a writer threw away all their old ideas and suddenly experienced a creative breakthrough. A writer builds a notes file, a starts file, a notions file, a writing morgue, or maybe all of the above, and then cherrypicks choice ideas from those when there's a gap to be filled in a working project.
There are a few counterexamples I can think of, but I don't take my How to be a Writer cues from the guy who wrote James Bond.
The only things I've "reused" from the Lone Samurai story is the word samurai. The two Samurai(s) are as different as night and day. Lone was a cold, killing machine who was looking for humanity and revenge at the same time. Steampunk is a hot headed, short-fused young man who is looking for this Master and the Dragon's Rock he's been tasked to protect in a world that is very strange to him. The worlds themselves will be different as I've gone from a post-nuclear, gritty, dark city to this lively, bright, wonder land of dreams and innovations. The villains' roles will be different and their personalities will be different. I've come up with an idea for the main villain, however, I don't want to post it here as it would spoil it.
Posts
http://supervillain.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/emma-peel-sessions-53-determined-without-being-ruthless/
I recently found this blog via Brandon Graham, and this article/entry in particular is very interesting.
Why do we care about anything that is going on?
If you can't answer this question with something more than just about how neat the setting is, you have failed.
The person who saved the Samurai (I still haven't come up with a name yet. Looking around for something that seems right.) is a young woman who's father is one of the greatest scientist of the time. He created the automatic arms used in factories and the crane (all steam and clockworks). However, he has since disappeared, the young woman (between the age of 18-21) has no idea where he has gone to. She believes her father was kidnapped, but no evidence shows this to be true. While the father has been gone, she (I'm going to call her Alice for now as I hate using she all the time. Plus I'm watching Alice in Wonderland :P ) has been working on using her father's work in creating Prosthetic limbs. Since this is 1800s Victorian age, Alice can't really claim the work as her own and thus the credit goes to her father. She finds the Samurai (I'll call him Sam for now) and saves him using some of the projects she's been working on.
Sam's whole system is powered using the Dragon's Rock piece inside a jar of water. This is one of Sam's weaknesses as once he is out of water, he can't move. He can go for about 6 hours without needing to refill his tank. However, I'm thinking of having Sam be a hot-headed character. The leap before looking type who is a comical short fused. One idea I have is that when Sam is angry, it causes the Dragon's Rock piece to burn hotter, shorting the amount of time he can move, but increasing the strength and speed of his movements. One idea of design is to have a steam whistle like on a old train come from his back or shoulder area. When Sam is mad (which could be often) steam and a high pitch whistle will blow from it.
I'm still working on a villain but I want to kinda recycle Maximilian from the Lone Samurai idea (villain who gains all his knowledge from a copy of the internet in his Vault) and mix some Professor Moriarty. He may be French as I'm playing with the idea of the French trying to get the Dragon's Rock to power their own Steam cities and become the most powerful nation in Europe.
I actually did the first one to experiment with how I want to color the Chupacabra comic TLB and I are working on, and then just kept going with them over the past couple days. Which is why none of them have a consistent background color, size, etc.
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@DouglasDanger: There's a lot of interesting potential there. 6 hours of movement seems like a fairly arbitrary number - is there a particular reason for choosing that? You could doll the character up with all sorts of cloud chambers and condensers so that he can go indefinitely until he needs to tap the power of the rock if not. Would provide you with a number of things at once - a weakness, a piece of character dressing, and a nice transition point when the rock gets hot where you go into countdown mode.
One of the things I ran across recently talked about the origins of steampunk and how originally (before it became a style) they just thought of it as "gonzo history", which I think is brilliant and has hooks into all sorts of interesting combinations. I don't know that it's helpful, but I always like to point it out, as I think the subgenre could probably at this point use some innovators.
@oldmanhero .programming .web comic .everything
NOW DRAW ME SOME CHUPACABRAS
I'm the Steampunk Samurai guy. I picked 6 hours mainly because I wanted him to have a weakness but I didn't want to to be something that always shows up. And that I have a villain idea for a guy who's like you are talking about with indefinite steam suit (I haven't come up with how it works but I didn't want him to have a Dragon's Rock. If he doesn't have a rock piece, then I'm thinking that he is always running a fever hot enough to create steam and the steam helps keep his temperature down below killing him but that would mean his body temp would be 212F (100C) or higher. Somehow I want this villain to need the steam to keep him alive.) The best I can come up with his the Dragon's Rock causes the molecules of the steam to spread more than normal and could cause them to explode if something as simple as a spark happens to hit it (Hydrogen and Oxygen are highly flammable.) With it open, normal air can mix in and keep it more stable but that lets steam out.
I could have the Sam or Alice narrate the story in a journal style (Most likely Alice since she seems more of the writer type) to give it some sort of gonzo-ish style. Thanks for the idea!
@oldmanhero .programming .web comic .everything
I still haven't read the script Blank sent me, which I feel really bad about, but will totally remedy ASAP.
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There are a few counterexamples I can think of, but I don't take my How to be a Writer cues from the guy who wrote James Bond.
@oldmanhero .programming .web comic .everything
Those character drawings are nice, Munch.
I've done a re-write(the first of many)
Totally overhauled one character's dialogue and am going to further change it up
the one we are workin on
I wanted to get another set of eyes on it, particuarly an artists'
I GOT A DEGREE FROM ART SCHOOL
AN ART DEGREE
I AM A BACHELOR OF FINE ARTS
KNEEL BEFORE MY PROMISCUITY AMONG DADA
It is of similar style.
JordynNolz.com <- All my blogs (Shepard, Wasted, J'onn, DCAU) are here now!
you seem like exactly the type of person to show it to
JordynNolz.com <- All my blogs (Shepard, Wasted, J'onn, DCAU) are here now!
send me your e-mail address and I can rectify this
he has to start arting faster and harder
Now TLB will never leave you alone
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@oldmanhero .programming .web comic .everything
Mostly because you produce
Also because you are rad
And blank I'mma read that prism script this weekend
and munch I am also working on that Speed type story
or maybe an adventure of JACK OF THE SECOND DIMENSION
basically, I am gonna produce
But if you want another pair of eyes on yo kookaburra script
I got ya dogg
is this Speed story the one you tried to pitch me but was waaaay wrong for Prism?
It will be radical
Gonna go daaaaaaaark.
it's very Jason Aaron-Ghost Rider-Grindhouse-y
mass effect fields
magic
JordynNolz.com <- All my blogs (Shepard, Wasted, J'onn, DCAU) are here now!