Into the Deep - 1
Into the Deep: Part 1
One thing before we get into this episode of Into the Deep: make sure you're signed up to be notified when Below the Depths goes live on Kickstarter.
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Hey everybody! As promised, a little peek behind the curtain for how Into the Deep came together.
As anybody whose ever written anything knows, way before you ever put anything down on paper, there's the weird, amorphous blob of a story that exists only in your head. Into the Deep first started germinating in the summer of 2021. I was off from my normal day job as an in-class special education aide and instead working a summer job doing 2nd shift at the San Francisco Post Office distribution center. That meant I had a lot of time where my hands were busy sorting letters and my brain was not doing pretty much nothing at all.
And most of what I spent time thinking about, unfortunately for me, was The Rise of Skywalker. I say that Into the Deep started that summer in the post office, but I guess it really began the moment I saw J. J. Abrams try to make Kylo Ren's face turn happen in theaters two winters before. Say what you want about The Last Jedi, but it was at least a movie that had discernable character motivations and something to say. And so, while I spent my evenings shuffling letters from a massive sorter into their zipcode based trays, I thought about what I actually wanted from an end to the sequel trilogy.
Into the Deep is not that. This is a different story, with different characters in a fundementally different world. But thinking about that, thinking about what interesting things you could do with the ideological differences between the main characters in The Last Jedi, and what my own personal Star Wars might look like, was the springboard for this project.
Now, before I ever start writing a comic script, before I start writing an outline, before I even start coming up with a basic, high level pitch, I start every comic I write with a few, foundational scenes. Something visual, something that tells me that this project has to be a comic, rather than just a prose novel. I don't start doing any work on a comic until I have at least a couple of those scenes. One of those scenes is the one with Sai above. "You know me" as a man gets sucked out of an airlock was one of three core, foundational moments of this book. It's one of the moments that everything else grows out of. I'll try to note the other two as we get to them.
Last thing, I want to talk about Felipe's work on these pages. I'll get more into the design process for Kor and her Gravus suit next time, but for now, I just want to say how much I love these first three pages. When I was working on this script, I had a friend tell me that I should rewrite the first 3 pages, getting rid of the zoom into on the eyes. They said, from experience, that you can't always trust an artist to do the sort of small, expression change in the character acting that I asked for as Kor goes into and out of her vision. I'm happy I didn't change it, because Felipe's character acting work is one of the things I love the most about his comic pages, both in this prohect and Below the Depths.
I think I'll leave it there for this time. Until next time, make sure you're signed up for our Kickstarter, and I'll see you next month!