Here’s another page I love. Writing this whole Silver Age sequence was a blast, and the decision to have recurring flashback segments throughout the series soon became a no-brainer. In particular, I relished the chance to tackle Zarthos’ purple prose and get my teeth into an old-school supervillain monologue – “I think not, wench!”
This particular page has had a continued life beyond the finale of The Standard. I will occasionally run comics workshops for kids, where I teach them a bit about the craft of making comics and give them a chance to create their own. During these workshops, one of the early exercises I do is present an unlettered version of this page with all text removed, and ask them to fill it in. Just before this, I will have taught the kids about the function of word balloons, thought bubbles, captions and sound-effects on the comic page, and they would have access to blank templates of each of those for using in filling up the page. It’s a credit to the clarity of Jonathan Rector’s artwork that most of the pupils were able to decipher the story quite clearly without the words, and so the dialogue they produced didn’t stray too far from the narative basics seen here.
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