(This blog post is guest-written by Damien M. Giles, the author of the comic The Eye Over Aftbren! Now that it has finally been released, here’s some of his thoughts and considerations when writing this story:)
Hello, boys and girls, my name is Damien – and I worked on the script for “Ricki is Cool #1” or, after we decided to properly give it a name, “The Eye Over Aftbren”.
I’m invading this blog at the good grace of Lonnie – the artist and owner of Ricki and her setting – because we thought it’d be a nice idea to talk through some of the comic’s ideas and inspiration, act-by-act. Hopefully, anyone who’s read the comic will enjoy it, and go back for a second peek at what they’ve snatched up.
If you haven’t read it yet – please do! It was a lot of fun to make. Particularly for me because, once the script was done, I simply watched Lonnie’s heavy lifting and clapped my hands together like a monkey with cymbals.
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Page 1 (ACT 1 INTRODUCTION)
Panel 1: Open onto an abandoned camp at dusk (where Ricki was raised). The horizon looks prettier than the foreground of the manic tents. [Slightly uphill, to seem imposing?]
Panel 2: Two strangers go up to the camp, one short and one tall. They’re holding something – maybe shovels. [2D silhouette?]
Panel 3: The silhouette of a shovel sticks into the earth, but we don’t see the top of it. It’s low down; the POV is aimed up towards the darkening horizon, and the edge of the camp is a blur.
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The intent of this introduction was quite clearly to create mystery. In Eye of D’akess, we see Ricki reluctantly partner with Edmund, but it’s a marriage of convenience – she’s not looking for friends, and it’s just a job to do.
Here, in The Eye Above Aftbren, she seems to be with someone again – but it’s not necessarily business like before.
Trying to translate that in the script was important – and these characters, on the first page, were meant to be strangers. In the script, I called them “TALL” and “SHORT” (sorry Ricki). We don’t know who TALL is, but we find out fairly quickly that SHORT is Ricki, and it seems like they’re both revisiting her past.
At first, TALL is simply asking questions – he’s not the focus here, and he’s just a prompt to help Ricki narrate; but by the end of the comic, it stands out that TALL is making some judgement calls, and he seemingly has some more depth that won’t be explored in this issue alone.
That’s pretty interesting, I thought, because the question is – why would Ricki come up here at all, let alone with someone else? Who are they? Who is she? What happened? And some of that starts to get answered near the very end…
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Page 3 (CHOICE / ACT 2 – CONFLICT)
Panel 1: Like Page 1’s Panel 1 we get another view of the camp, this time during the day. Everything is fixed, alive and busy. Guards are on its edge; children appear to run around and play; adults carry firewood; robed figures read large books.
[Narration]
1. RICKI: But they’d already been beaten by the time I got back. Everyone was angry, and I heard them whispering in class.
2. RICKI: The apprentices could get away with more.
[Narration]
3. TALL: Every class has its favourites. Did the matron like them?
[Narration]
4. RICKI: They kept quiet but they didn’t like them. It was the mages. They liked it when their students did bad things.
—-
To contrast the safety of the dead, we have the lively risk of the living – and that’s an important thing at play here. They’re burying someone out of respect and it’s gruesome, but there’s a certain safety in it. The “threat” here is the past – and I think that a lot of people connect with that.
If you’ve ever walked past a group of teenagers on your way home or to the shops, you might still get snagged by the familiar feeling of being that age and walking around your town or city. Here, I think we’re seeing Ricki get sucked into that – and it’s making her heart race, like it did then.
Who knows what she’s done since then? She could have conquered anything – but this revisiting of the past makes her tense.
It was formative, but as a reader, you have to wonder: Just what – exactly – did it form…? And if you’ve played Eye of D’akess, you’ll know that Ricki certainly isn’t a simple adventurer out on her quest – and at that point, you might start to wonder… Just what – exactly – is this ‘Eye Over Aftbren’?
We’ll explore a few more panels in upcoming posts and look back on the script and its process – maybe that will help to add some depth to the question.
I hope this was interesting to you. See you again?