Newsletter #172: The First Pages

Hey guys, it's Scott. It is Tuesday, January 23rd, and I am so sorry that I've been so off-radar, but it snowed like an arctic planet here, like Hoth, and everything iced over, and we had a four-year-old who actually had the flu and was home from school, and then we had a 16 year-old who got sick, and Jeanie got sick, and it was a whole mess. But everybody's better now, and although my back still hurts from shoveling, we're up and running again. And also, this is the very last week of the Zoom writer's room for Wytches. After this, we still have a month of polishing scripts, but we don't have to meet every day from like, 9am to 3pm PST/noon to 6pm EST. So I'll have my days back to be able to work on comics and also to focus on this space a little bit more. We will do a class soon. I think it will be next week. I'll let you know a little later this week if we can swing it for a Thursday of next week. If not, we'll do the following week. But we're going to get back into it. We're going to look at your work, we're going to look at published work, and today's post is going to sort of get back to craft a little bit that way. We'll do sort of a two-question Friday, I think, instead of Tuesday this week. But yes, I can't wait for you guys to see Wytches. We start the animation process really soon. We're having our first meeting in a week with the animation studio. I can't wait. I'm really excited. Jock is going to be there too and we're going to start talking designs. And then we have about two to three months off before we start season two! And then we have another project together after that that I can't announce yet or talk about, but I think you guys are going to be really excited. So I'm going to be making a lot of cartoons over the next few years, which I love, but I'll also be making a lot of comics! So anyway, I wanted to do a quick thing today because I made a post the other day. I was like, up late and just waiting for my 12 year-old to come down to watch Adventure Time and I was like, ask me anything. And people were asking me different things about Batman and about my favorite food and whatever. And I made a post just about how good I think the opening page to Dark Knight Returns is. And Ty, the best assistant, can link to it here. But I've mentioned it in class, but the basic concept is that the very first page tells the entire story. It sets everything up that you need to know, and it actually is a microcosm of the story itself. In fact, I once had a teacher, when I was just starting writing back in high school, essentially he said that every story should be encapsulated by the very first sentence. And I don't believe that. I don't believe it needs to be the first sentence. But I do think that the very first scene should capture the essence of what you're going for, which we'll talk about a little bit today. People were asking me, have I ever read a story that that happened with? And The Dark Knight Returns is that story: The opening line about Bruce driving a race car and saying that the finish line is in sight when all the controls, the readings, go haywire. So he switches to manual. That's an encapsulation of the entire story, right? He's older, he is retired, he sees death coming and he could just sort of lay down and it's right there, the finish line. And all the readings, meaning Gotham, stops making sense. Life is chaotic in Gotham and horrible and dangerous. It doesn't track anymore and he doesn't know who he is. So he switches to manual, he becomes Batman. And then the page itself is almost a microcosm of the story. Halfway through, about two-thirds of the way through, he talks about being able to die, this would be a good death. He's staring into the eye of the sun, which is essentially the explosive incendiary burst coming out of the race car he's driving, but it also represents Superman, right? Superman is the sun, and he appears at the end of the story, and Bruce could just die there, but he doesn't. At the very end, he lives on with a new generation of fighters to make the world better. So my point was simply that a lot of great stories find a way of encapsulating what the story is about, at least. Maybe not the actual plot or arc of the story the way The Dark Knight Returns does, but they capture the essence of what they're going for in that first scene, in that first panel, in that first sentence. And it's a mark of something that's really confident and really well designed for that to happen. Absolutely, there's stories that you don't really understand what it's about for a few scenes, but it's still within that zone for me—the first scene, the first couple scenes, the first few scenes, that what you get out of it as a reader is a core understanding of what's being explored, what the essence of the thing is in some way. It doesn't give you answers necessarily about how it's going to end or it doesn’t even tell you where you’re going to go, but you have a feeling of what you’re in for in some way and it might continually surprise you. But it’s almost like the expectations are set for a surprise in that way. So I wanted to take a look at a couple of things I just read that I thought did this. One is Ultimate Spider-Man by Jon Hickman and Marco Checchetto. I thought it was a great book, I really enjoyed it very much. And if you look at it, and Ty can just post the first pages now: It opens with Peter Parker waking up, and he's essentially older. Looks like he's in his late thirties, possibly forties. But it starts with a view of the city and it's snowing, and another view, and then it says ‘January,’ so it's the beginning of the year. It's a new start, the first days of a brand new moment. And it opens with Peter sighing, and I would argue that like, his life at this point is sort of a sigh. “Peter Parker, you are not getting any younger,” he says, staring at a mirror with glasses and a beard. So he’s looking at his own reflection, telling himself it’s almost time to do something motivating. Time to change his life, time to do something that makes him feel like he’s affecting things more. There’s a sense there right away that this is a book about someone who's in a stage of inflection, of transition, right? So I would argue that page alone, beginning of a new year, the whiteness of the snow, a blank page, Peter staring in the mirror, looking at his face, saying to himself, “you're not getting any younger,” is itself, again, speaking to the essence of what the book's about. And if you look at the first scene, the next page is him getting ready, seeing the snow, the snow readings outside, it's going to get buried, so whiteness everywhere, the blankness of a new page. He puts his belt on, he gets his ring, he puts the ring on, and then he comes out and asks the kids, “how's it going?” All of this, and clearly something is bothering him. But we get a sense that he has a good relationship with his kids, and then there's MJ, who's made coffee, and MJ says to him, “do you want to talk about it?” And he says, “I do definitely want to talk about it, but I'll talk about it tonight” after, his daughter May pulls a strange-looking mysterious ball out of his bag. It could’ve started with action, it could’ve started with him as Spider-Man, it could’ve started with him at work. I mean, there’s a million ways it could’ve started, but what Jon decided to do was start in a way where he’s staring into the mirror thinking about his own life and then an assessment of it as he comes out, right? He's looking and talking to all the members of his family and we see that he loves them, he's happy, and yet at the same time he's longing for something and he's going to talk about it later. So for me, the core of what the book is about is there in those… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bestjackettpress.substack.com/subscribe