And we’re back! In this next installment, we finally get to meet Oliver a little better, sort of. But maybe more importantly, we get to see what life on Xanadu is like.
“The end is nigh.” That’s straight out of Watchmen. Fun fact: Watchmen was the first comic book series I ever read. I was 13 and had just seen the trailer to the new movie ahead of The Dark Knight. I would not recommend Watchmen to a 13 year old, but here we are ripping from it years later.
Is it just me or does the “Crazed Man” not sound crazy enough?
“He doesn’t like you.” The most obvious Star Wars rip-off so far. I think there’s a line between being influenced and just stealing, and this is probably one step too far towards the latter. The scene even plays out similarly. Definitely just lazy writing from young Raf.
I like having Oliver having to calm himself down and catch his breath after this fight in the bar. Oliver isn’t the most badass character in the world, but he’s definitely capable. I like showing that he has a soul and isn’t some ruthless dude. I think it helps to make him more likeable.
Click is probably my favorite character from The Wretched. I inadvertently modeled him after the tharks from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter series, but I was thinking more the covenant and Arbiter from the Halo series. I even see a little Preed from Titan AE (I love that movie!). We’ll learn a little more about Click and his people later.
A bone pit is a pretty gnarly place to wake up. I wrote it with the bone pit being a sacrificial place for Click’s people, hence Click’s determination to carry out this sick scene. The opposite of a meet-cute.
Similarly to hravis, I don’t have a defined image of what catchees look like, but space coyotes sums it up nicely. Again, something I’d leave for an actual artist to design.
This bone pit scene with these new characters sliding down and killing all the catchees is cool, but I feel I could do a better job of telling this in the action. Since I’m so close to it I know what’s happening, but I feel it isn’t clear as to what’s happening, or the scene isn’t exciting as it should’ve been. Maybe I’m just being hard on myself, but I feel I dropped the ball a little here. It’s missing something.
We’ll be back this Friday for the final part of Act 1.
::RC