I try to go pretty easy on the artists I work with. I play to their strengths, I think about how tricky a page or a panel might be and make the next one a little easier to balance things out, etc. But if there’s one thing I ask to be just right every time regardless of how difficult it may be, it’s the facial expressions. A lot of the stories I write are told through reactions and facial expressions, usually in the most subtle of ways.
I hit Marc with all sorts of weird, often contradictory demands on the emotions of the characters and he nails it every time. He’s got a real intuitive sense of character–sometimes even telling me how he thinks a particular character would react to a situation (and he’s right every time)–and it comes across in every panel he draws. For example, the third panel of today’s strip, this is how my description read:
3: Spy Gal. Her expression blank. She’s cold calculation. The life has been sucked out of her.
Hard to argue that isn’t what we’re looking at up there. I know I say it enough that you guys probably get sick of it, but I couldn’t ask for a better collaborator than Marc.
Today’s strip answers the question nobody asked: Where’s Nurse Carter and Gene? You’re welcome!
Wow, Gene’s been working out. I think she’s been wanting to say something like that to him for a long time.
Gene’s always been a pretty big guy, you’ve just never seen him playing video games before. He really gets into it. There’s lots of flexing.
Okay, even I’m scared with how calm Spy Girl is acting so far.
You must be planning something BIG in this chapter moment for her to act like this.
I am planning nothing. Spy Gal on the other hand…
“Why would I do anything foor you?”
“Because you didn’t specify whose hip we’d be breaking.”
I read that third panel as her saying it with a very conversational tone of voice, as if she were talking about taking a walk. It makes it even more scary. Nice.
You read that panel very much correctly.
Spy Girl – now scary enough to cow Gene into doing what she wants. Now, THAT’S what I call carrot and stick…
She scares me, man. She scares ME.
It’s long past time Gene learned to respect his elders. If I were her I’d still give him one in a kneecap. I wonder how asking Gene for a favor will turn out since I seem to recall him taking orders from the Third Man at one point, before Dictator Tot showed up to give the Fogeys’ their technology lesson. The big galoot might know more about what’s going on than suspected. Also, for some strange reason he reminds of a younger Jerry in this strip. With a unibrow. We haven’t seen Dictator Tot in quite a while, wonder what the pint-sized aspiring tyrant has been up to.
My daughter (the real-life basis for Dictator Tot) keeps asking when Dictator Tot will return. I’ve been thinking maybe in the next chapter, but we’ll see. I got big plans for that chapter and she may not fit.
Your memory of the Gene and the Third Man serves you well, but if he knows of any connection between the Third Man and Dr. Klein or Jerry, we’ve never seen it. Though SF 100 does give us some perspective on Gene’s relationship with our resident villain.
I think it’s all been essentially said already, but Spy Gal is the sorta mean ol’ biddy who just don’t cross. The same sort as your farmer’s wife grandma who can still beat you in an arm wrestling match and squeeze the life out or your earlobe if you sass her.
You made me think of Grandma Rose in Bone. You read Bone? Because you just painted her perfectly.
LOL