NOTES FROM JASON
We’ve made it to lucky number thirteen. Following our quick check-in on Penny, we’re heading back to Colton and Avery, making steady progress on their road trip. Good to see that car hasn’t broken down yet. A long drive marks a perfect opportunity for our characters to discuss and process Avery’s surprising revelation in the previous chapter. A tale like this might seem suited for a whole set of flashbacks, and indeed there was a time when that was the plan, back in the earliest drafts of The Jacket. I was (and still am) a huge fan of the show Lost, where each episode focused on a particular character’s backstory. That definitely rubbed off on me when plotting out The Jacket. Somewhere along the line though I realized that that wasn’t necessary. Not for this story anyway. I’d much rather keep the focus on the main action as much as possible and avoid each chapter becoming formulaic. Some character background could be told in a few pages and/or panels and that was ok. Hence why only select characters have full flashback sequences, like Penny in Volume 1, Harker in this chapter, and…well, we’ll see if and when we get another in a future chapter (bet on it).
I will mention that Avery did get a brief flashback snippet, in the last chapter. At least, he did in the first few drafts. Nothing long, just a quick scene in which we see his grandfather give him something that we can’t see in the panel, but it was something near and dear to the grandfather that he wanted Avery to have. If you go back to Chapter 3, the page where Avery heads to his room and pulls out that something from a box under his bed, that’s where this snippet would have unfolded. But I ended up cutting the flashback because I thought it was telegraphing what was to come way too much. The scene as it stands now is a bit more subdued and subtle, or at least I think so, though you may disagree.
Another note is that this scene changed a bit throughout the drafting process. Yes, that’s become a running trend all throughout, and will continue to be so. The original draft had Colton and Avery going back to Via Studios, Harker’s base of operations that we saw last chapter. There they would pick up Penny’s trail, eventually finding their way into the sewers and following the trail. Along the way, this conversation would still play out, more or less the same. This was early on, when the time gap between Chapters 3 and 4 was a little shorter. Might have even been a day or so, I don’t quite remember. Ultimately, I didn’t really like the whole setup, just didn’t make much sense that they’d know exactly which way to go. In later drafts, the time gap increased to two weeks, with the implication being that Colton and the Agency/DOGS have been chasing Penny around the city the whole time, with her eluding capture via her ring and her wits. There were some close calls I assure you. And she still did end up in the sewers for a bit, as we saw earlier in the chapter, the only remaining fragment from that original plan. It also changed as a result of some other revisions to this chapter, but I’ll save that for another page. I’ve gone on long enough for today.