Double Cross Scene Compilation - CH3 Pgs 1-9

Howdy, y'all!

Time for another scene compilation with "DVD-style" commentary, which I'll be posting (more or less) weekly until I start getting the pages from Gabriel and Vero for Fallen Chapter Two in November.

On the personal front, there's been a bit of medical and financial drama with my mother that has taken up a lot of bandwidth over the last week, but hopefully we're getting to the end of that. On the plus side, things are still going well with the writing of my urban fantasy novel, and I'm currently reading some gay science-fiction YA that is really impressing me: The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer. Really engaging writing with very cool ideas. I'm only halfway through at this point. It gets quite dark in parts so I've needed to take a couple breaks, but the tone overall is not bleak, which means it's still been a fun ride. I'll let y'all know what I think when I finish.

And in this scene comp, we start Chapter 3 where we get some of my favorite visuals of the whole comic!

Check out what happens under the fold!

These pages were first published way back in April 2020 - May 2020. If you want to read the previous scene compilations (and, even better, read the whole first two chapters all at once), you can find them on the TYP:DC Scene Compilation Collection page. 

My DVD-style commentary is below the comic pages. And the pages themselves are full-resolution here on Patreon, so feel free to zoom-in!

Let's get dangerous!

Fade to black.

Very pretty pictures

So, as I said above, some of my favorite visuals in the whole comic are in this scene. I love the way Adam drew the action throughout, and the coloring of the mid-air explosion and the arc of our characters falling in the next panel are lovely.

But the real showstopper is Flyboy bursting through the stained glass. It's an image that came to me so clearly when I was writing this scene that I was sure that I had seen it in a comic before. (I thought Daredevil, perhaps.) But hours of Google searching for something to send penciler Adam DeKraker as a reference revealed nothing, so I had to do my best to describe what I was picturing with mere words (most of which didn't happen in the script, but in direct conversation with Adam and Vero as we worked on the art).

I knew this was going to be a big ask, for both Adam and colorist Veronica Gandini. And it was: it took Adam multiple passes of revisions instead of our usual two, and Vero suffered through even more revs as we worked to get the colors just right. But sometimes you've got to ask for the moon, and when you've got artists of Adam and Vero's caliber, you actually get it.

The smashing through the stained glass panel is simply stunning. Even better than I pictured it in my head. And, for me, it's one of, if not the, most iconic images of the whole story.

Most of my other thoughts about this scene really fall under

Odds and Ends

• As I said in an earlier compilations, I feel like if you're going to set something up for later, it should also stand on its own when you first introduce it. Here Flyboy conveniently has a knife to cut Spooky free—and it's the same one he got from Adult Spooky way back to cut the kids free in Chapter One and never returned. Does it actually need to be magic to cut through Shades' rope? No, especially since we will learn that Shades' power is essentially immune to Spooky's. But I felt the glow would help readers remember where that convenient knife came from in the first place. :)

• We have Shades attacking his own minions. A classic trope that lets folks know that this villain is really, truly bad.

• But we also have Shades impressed with Flyboy's escape. This is a trope I personally find a lot of fun: when the heroes earn the villain's respect. And I believe I was thinking about one of the most fun examples of it from an interaction in the TV series Heroes. I found a YouTube video of the actual scene, but unfortunately they cut away before the bad guy reacts with "Cool" which is what really filled me with delight when I saw it. Still, that first season was great.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5bqy4D65fQ

• This is the scene where we get the first hint that Flyboy's blue glow reacts with some things explosively.

• We also get to see confident, powerful Teen Spooky way out of his element. We know from Chapter One that he can't fly, and here he essentially wakes up plummeting to the city below. He has to improvise super fast with his Green Lantern (ahem, I mean "ectoplasmic manipulation") powers, which are always fun for me to play with.

• Unfortunately for Flyboy, Teen Spooky doesn't have complete control of those powers and he uses too much force when grabbing him. Teen Spooky is formidable even at this young age, but in this scene and the last, I really wanted to highlight his rough edges. This is a much younger, less experienced Spooky, and I wanted to make it clear that he's going to need all the help he can get if he's going to survive this story.

Let me know what you think!

So, those were the things I was thinking about when I was writing this scene. I hope you enjoyed revisiting it along with my own memories.

Please let me know your own thoughts below. It's your feedback that makes it fun for me to create these, so please jump in and share!

And thank you, as always, for making this comic possible. Sharing these scenes with you helps remind me of how much I love creating this story. And it's only possible because of your support.

Y'all totally rock. I'll post the next set of pages next Tuesday! I hope to see you there! :D