Chapter 2 - Page 39
In which Our Hero momentarily forgets the face he is presenting to the world at this time.
The Reality of the Situation.
First of all, thanks to the folks who chimed in on the last page. Yay, I have readers who I don’t know personally! Woo-hoo! Thanks for reading, and I hope you’re enjoying the ride so far.
So internet pal MedMapGuy received a copy of the print edition of Chapter One at the beginning of the week and he was wondering if Scwonkey Dog was supposed to be set in the real world or some alternate world or whatever. Clearly I’m too damn subtle; I’ve been trying to get the point across that Our Heroes are out of the ordinary in this world. I guess there just hasn’t been enough normal going on. Well, Chapter 3 is going to fix that right up. Hopefully the beginning of Chapter 2 did a little to mend that fence a bit, but once we get back to Jenn and Dani and the campus and such — and a lot of Chapters 3 & 4 are going to be there, believe you me — the world is going to come across a little more clearly. Chapters 1 & 2 are rather concerned with getting certain pieces set up right, certain characters on the stage, and building a status quo, and doing it quick as can be. I realize I’ve cut a few corners in trying to get all this built in forty-four pages, and there are some things I regret glossing over (I kept wanting to show the students reacting to the sounds of battle in the classroom where Nathan and the first Red Force robot were fighting, for instance) or staging a certain way (there are still things about the original layout for this page, for instance, that I like over the finished product) over the course of the past seven months (!), but all in all, with a few exceptions — some dialogue I’m probably going to polish before sending the second twenty-two pages off to the printer during that third week or so of March — I’m thinking this more or less holds together pretty well.
Am I right, people? Or am I delusional? Heaven knows I could be delusional …
Whatever. Five more pages to go in Chapter 2. Two weeks to wrap it all up. Let’s see if I can get this next one up on Monday, OK? Hope to see you all then.
–Jonathan
March 1st, 2008 at 8:44 am
REALLY?!
I figured it was an alternate reality Earth where it was just accepted that weird stuff happens. *laughs*
March 1st, 2008 at 11:27 am
They don’t HAVE to accept it — they don’t hear about it, because Leonard has enough money and charisma to make it all go away. (See next page, when I post it.) Speaking of whom … everyone accepts Leonard because chicks dig the ears, but remember Jenn’s reaction when he pulled the gloves off? Heck, remember Nathan’s reaction when Zappy said he was “just in the neighborhood”? “What, with a paper bag over your head?” On the last page of Chapter 1, Leonard makes a big deal about how easily Jenn accepted Dante Brooks’s whole spiel about Leonard being half-alien — his whole point was that a normal person wouldn’t have accepted all that so easily. And if you go back through Chapter 2, look at Danielle — our one normal person in this chapter — every time she shows up, she’s screaming, fainting, freaking out — and as Vanessa says, now, it’s all gonna be just a bad dream. See, it’s all there … just, I guess, too damn subtle. Oh well.
Mind you, people are going to have to accept the weirdness to some extent in a few chapters’ time, when all the charm and bribery in the world aren’t going to be able to cover things of a certain scale up — but for now, when Leonard tells the media that he was financing a movie and some props unfortunately caught on fire and exploded, and that’s all that was, people are going to believe him …
… because people are STUPID.