Un fill in devenu culte.
Simonson :
Sans oublier l’apport d’un jeune Dan Slott à cette couverture :
Très réussi.
Walt Simonson à propos du #352 (extrait de « Comics Creators on Fantastic Four ») :
Tom DeFalco : Getting back to FF #352 - the cover is part of the story, and I remember when I first read it, I thought, « What the hell ? »
Walt Simonson : That comic is among my favourite pieces of my own work: one of the single issues I’m proudest of. I feel I did something nobody else had done in comics before. I’m not doing it again, either ! I’ve been there, done that, but in the process I got a solution to a storytelling problem that I thought worked really well. It requires a tad more effort on the reader’s part than most comic books, but that’s not bad thing. In fact, I wasn’t even going to include a key on how to read the issue ; it seemed so obvious to me, because I had been working on it for months. However, Weezie (Louise Simonson) said, « No, no, you’d better put an explanation in there. » So I typed up an explanation and put it in the letter column - upside down, like the solution to a brainteaser.
That issue was at least inspired by Roger Zelazny’s novel, Creatures of Light and Darkness. I haven’t read it in a million years, but there’s a scene in there with a ruined city, and the way I remember it is that he has these figures strobing through, buildings falling and other stuff going on, and it turns out that there are a couple of combatants in a mode Zelazny called temporal fugue. They move around in time, and the other guy shifts, and they fight through eternity destroying and re-destroying the city. A great image.
So, after all the times Reed and Doom had fought, when it was my turn to make them fight, I wanted to make the whole confrontation as different as possible. I had the idea of this sort of time-fight, where they’re moving around in time ; fighting each other that way. And, of course, it’s already been established that Doom had that time square of his, so he was already associated with time travel. To the extent that it didn’t seem like a stretch to work this particular fight into this story. And besides, he’d just come back from elsewhere with all this new technology.
Plot-wise, I had to work out two sequences. The first was about what was happening in ordinary time. The second was choreographing Reed and Doom jumping around, minute to minute, fighting each other: striking, and then jumping to a different time, each jump following the previous one and so on. I decided the way to do this was to borrow from the kids’ books choose-your-own-adventure books where you read a page and have to choose between two doors. If you choose the green door, you’re sent to page forty-five ; if you choose the red door you go to page seventy-six. Basically, the page forks ; you follow where the forks go and you can read the book in a variety of different ways. I wasn’t doing forks but I thought I could use the device.
I didn’t want to make the fight too long — because you read a comic fairly quickly and because I thought the device would get hold fast — so I chose a starting time and had Reed and Doom fight over about forty minutes of real time.
Essentially, I wanted the physical act of the reader turning the pages to reinforce the notion of the combatants jumping through time. Once I got the time-fight organised across the comic effectively, I taped the regular story layouts and the time-fight layouts together so I wouldn’t mix them up, and began matching the time jumps to my clocks. Basically, what it did was give me a comic that you really had to read at least twice in order to understand the sequencing. You had one regular sequence, which began on page one and ended on page twenty-two, and you had the time-fight sequence that really began on about page three and went through about eighteen pages. But you had to jump all over the book in order to read that sequence in order. And it does read in order. It’s all there.
Then I got really clever — maybe too clever, as I’m sure that many readers actually figured it out. In the previous issue, Reed had been caught by Dr Doom in a very simple trap: a cul-de-sac with no exits. There was no crack to ooze through, no obvious way out, and all the over FF members were trapped.
At the end of the issue, Reed shows up to confront Doom and they prepare to have their time-fight. But there’s never an explanation for how Reed gets out of the cul-de-sac. Nobody thought about it much. You know, it was Reed — he shows up.
But what actually happens is that the next issue, the splash page begins at 1am. The cover as a clock on it, set to 12:33. And the cover image is Reed exploding out of a bunch of flying rocks.
If you read the time-fight, you’ll find that at some point Reed has managed to arm himself with some kind of a techno-magic quarterstaff and — when Doom blasts him — Reed catches the blast with the quarterstaff and redirects it to 12:33am. So what Reed’s doing is blowing himself out of the trap that he was caught in previously. That’s him escaping from the cul-de-sac on the cover ! I love time paradoxes !
Bon, j’écrirai mes deux derniers petits billets (dont celui sur l’épisode dont il est question ci-dessus) sur le run de Walt Simonson la semaine prochaine.
Un petit mot pour dire que je m’absente quelques jours. Pas pour un long week-end (j’aimerai bien) mais pour raisons médicales. Je dois me faire opérer de plusieurs hernies, je rentre en clinique demain matin et si tout se passe bien, je sors vendredi dans la journée. Mais je ne pense pas que je reprendrai ma petite routine à peine rentré à la maison donc je vais certainement me reposer samedi.
J’ai déjà prévenu l’indispensable @Marko pour les news et previews comics, mais si vous tombez sur une info, une bande-annonce, n’hésitez pas à partager !
Et si je ne repasse pas dans la soirée, on se revoit dimanche ou lundi ! ^^
Bah sinon, quand tu es remis tu prends la dolorean pour revenir poster les news à temps !
Take care.
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Whattttt.
Soigne toi bien Doc.
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Bon, le mot est passé : vendredi en soirée, on te bombarde de messages privés !
À tout bientôt, donc.
Jim
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Prends bien le temps de te reposer.
Tori.
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Bon courage Doc.
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Soigne toi bien Doc.
Bon courage et prends soin de toi !
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C’est pas le doc qui opère ? !
Punaise, prends bien soin de toi.
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Le chanceux, tu vas profiter d’un lit super confortable avec matelas en plastique et de succulent repas. Reviens nous vite et prends soin de toi.
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Mignola
C’es dire le niveau.
Leonardo Romero :
Très chouette.
Jim
Doc Shaner :
