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Lotsa Alan Moore scripts and script excerpts for "Nightjar", "The Killing Joke", "Big Numbers", "Watchmen" and more over at four color heroes, that would be HERE.
They're cool and all, but they're generally too verbose and difficult to read through because of too much exposition. I find his stuff hard to analyze specifically because of lenght. Alan Moore was pretty control-freaky about the images he asked from his artists, whereas if you look at what little we have of Grant's script samples, he tends to be more laid-back about it, letting the artist breath, putting only enough detail in the script for the artist to understand the story.
Of course, I could be wrong; as I've said, his scripting style is implied to differ per project. In Arkham Asylum for instance, Grant spends a lot of time sharing his story ideas to Dave McKean, rather than dictating every minute detail in a single specific image, as shown by this really verbose example (depicted and expanded by McKean on page 39 of the comic):
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Batman pushes the glass into his palm. His face creases with the flare of pain. ((This act deepens some of the ritual symbolism of the story. The recurring Fish motif--which relates to Pisces, the astrological attribution of the Moon card - also relates to Christ, who in turn can be linked to the Egyptian God Osiris, whose life and descent into the underworld parallels with the story of Amadeus Arkham. We also see later that the Asylum is built upon a Vescica Pisces - this symbol (...) forms the ground plan of much religious architecture and is used in the construction of most of the major buildings of antiquity, like Stonehenge and Avebury in England. It is a development of the Greek symbol for Christ (...). We also have the Clown Fish in our story, of course. Interestingly enough, while doing some research into folklore, I came across a book, published in the 16th century by a quack doctor Andrew Borde, called 'Merrie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham'. The English village of Gotham in Nottinghamshire was famous for the antics of its fools and the three stories mentioned all contained some reference to images in our Arkham story. On one occasion, for instance, the Gotham villagers, upon seeing the reflection of the moon in a pool attempt to fish it out. In another story, they surround a bush with stakes in an attempt to catch a cuckoo. The third story tells of how an eel was eating all the fish in their pond. The villagers take the eel and throw it into another pond, leaving it to drown. Synchronicity is alive and well!
As a final interesting aside on the subject of fish, the Vescica Piscis symbol is a very basic representation of the holographic process in which intersecting circular wave patterns produce three dimensional images. Physicist David Bohm believes the hologram to be an analogy for his vision of a vast interconnecting universe, in which every part is in some sense a reflection of every other part. In a few pages time, the Mad Hatter will endeavour to outline Bohm's theories as applied to child molestation.
In the same way, everyhting in this story reflects and comments upon everything else.
What was I talking about anyway?
Yeah, so Batman is here inflicting upon himself one of Christ's wounds and it's all got something to do with fish, okay?
Maybe I've been doing this for too long.))
BATMAN: UH!
BATMAN: JESUS!
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...and the script moves along again with one or two-liner descriptions of action, interspersed with dialogue. You'll notice that in this, what, 400-word segue, Grant outlines a ton of motifs and ideas in his work, David Bohm used in Animal Man and Invisibles and Doom Patrol, fish imagery and Vescica pisces again, in Invisibles and Doom Patrol, etcetera etcetera. Grant opens a glass panel on his head and shows the creative process bubbling in his brain. And all these wonderful little details aren't seen or made clear in the comicbook itself--that's all in the script! All these references and bits of intertextuality--makes you want to check out where he read them in the first place. You get a sense of the immense scope of thought and creativity Grant's pouring into the comic book, into that one little scene.
This is what I'm talking about when I say I want to see more Grant scripts. Aren't they fascinating? |
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