The Standard

Now we get to an interesting sequence.  It’s funny, looking back on the 4-page sequence this page opens, it feels utterly integral to the story.  The scene as a whole is one of the ones from this issue that people most often tell me is their favourite, and even in this page in particular, the imagery of the statues introduced here would become a significant recurring motif throughout the series.  But these four pages actually weren’t in the original comic.

As alluded to earlier, the first draft of issue #1 was 22 pages long.  Some discussion with editor Steven Forbes on how to best format the series led to the per-issue page count being bumped up to 28, leading to me needing another 6 pages of content for issue #1.  It’s funny, looking back through old 2009 e-mail exchanges with Steve Forbes, it seems like there were actually multiple drafts of the series at 22 pages, and that first chapter was considered complete for some time.  It was actually a good 4 months or so after “finalising” the first issue that I went back and added the additional pages.  Previously, we went straight from yesterday’s page to what is now Page 20.

Looking now, I’d say these 4 pages are some of the best-written of the issue.  I think it’s because they were the only four pages written AFTER I’d planned out the 6-issue series as a whole and had relatively firmly nailed down where the characters were going, which allowed me to write them accordingly.

This was also the first example of me finding an excuse to cram more Bill Finney into the narrative.  In hindsight, I think his dialogue is maybe a little too crude here.  The banter about the intense scrotal trauma The Corpse may be inclined to perform on criminals is a bit much.  Aside from that, though, I like the Bill/Alex interplay featured here.