Chapter 5: Page 8

Land of Confusion: Page 8

NOTES FROM JASON

Well, you knew it wasn’t going to be anything good.

Here we see the foundations of this free and equal world. The quest for utopia is paved with the dead. A look at history shows this is not an unusual occurrence. More like an inevitability. Speaking of history, this week’s pages have given a little glimpse of the backstory of The Jacket’s world. In the first iterations of the comic, there was a lot more than a glimpse. Yesterday’s page mentioned Knoxley’s book, the same book we see Colton and Avery looking at in the mall’s bookstore back in the first chapter. That book, entitled The Man Who Sold the World, would have been a part of the story as well, with each chapter containing a small excerpt from the book, usually something that tied into the chapter. Not only would it tie in either thematically or narratively to the present storyline, but it’d be giving readers the world’s backstory all in one. That’s the Watchmen influence coming through, as those who’ve read that know of the supplemental material that plays out parallel to the main story.

As you can see, the book excerpts were scrapped, for a couple reasons. First was to keep the page count reasonable for printing purposes. Second was because I thought the excerpts were hurting the story’s pacing and momentum. The constant breaking from comic page to prose pages could get annoying. I know it’s been done before in other comics, to varying degrees of success in my opinion, but for this one it didn’t work the way I originally envisioned. Plus, as much of an inspiration Watchmen was in those early years, the story has grown into its own being that doesn’t need to mimic others (too much anyway). Cutting the book out also allowed me to fully flesh it out into a work that could stand on its own as a companion piece to this. One day I might release it in its entirety, but definitely not until this is completed.

This page is actually one of the newest additions. I say new even though the idea came about five years ago, though considering how long we’ve been at this, it’s still pretty new to me. With the book excerpts out, we needed other ways to give some backstory to the story’s world. We could do that with a lot of exposition leading to walls of text, but then we might as well put the book excerpts back. We needed something for the eyes, and a giant corpse pit was perfect. You get the history of the world, the history of Virgil and his ultimate goal, and for our main characters, stakes that they haven’t really considered. Virgil has effectively laid out his case for assistance. We’ll have to wait until next week to see how our characters respond.

And before anyone asks, this pit was not around when young Penny fled into the woods back in Chapter 2’s flashback. Plus, this is not the same direction she took in her escape. As for if her parents are actually down in that pit, they are. As for Colton’s parents, well, they’re not in this pit. We haven’t really touched upon Colton’s family, other than a brief mention that they ‘vanished’ sometime in the past. Avery mentioned this to Agent 629 back in Chapter 2, for reference. More on that later.