It’s a scary thing, being an alien.
on January 29, 2018 at 12:01 amThis strip was some High Concept shit I’m not sure I was able to pull off! The idea was that, y’know, Meighan hasn’t seen Head Alien yet, and as she’s blindfolded and he’s talking to her, she imagines what he looks like based on the tone he takes. First he’s businessmanlike, then he’s soldierlike, and then he’s paternal. What I… probably needed to do, in order to sell the idea better, was to somehow accomplish more of a Ben Affleck Daredevil effect, where you can see shapes formed out of sonics, like figures cut out of the rain. Instead I, uh, kind of just sharpied my usual lineart and threw in some green mist, I dunno. Neat idea not communicated well at all.
At the exact same moment Shanna’s hitting MM with “YOU WILL GET NOTHING,” Head Alien is finding Meighan a lot easier to deal with. As fun as it was to write HA’s foibles, it wouldn’t do justice to his character if he didn’t have a flash of ruthless effectiveness, right after his fumbling had lulled you off guard.
Fans began as a series about underdogs (can these seemingly normal nerds win a fight against a vampire?) but of course, underdogs get less underdog the more battles they win. Shanna was the underdoggest for a while: laughably bad at hand-to-hand combat and dealing with intellectual blind spots. But then she got good at shooting things and the blind spots faded away in that transformation I described yesterday.So to serve as the new underdog, Meighan joined the fold. No better at hand-to-hand than Shanna, not particularly strong-willed or brave, terrible at marksmanship, guilt-ridden after sleeping with Alisin, unpopular with most of the others for the same reason, and focused on a business degree that rarely translates to the Fans’ adventures, she’s so underdog that I sometimes felt guilty for involving her. Still not completely useless– she was the one who figured out why the Fans had jumped dimensions. remember– but she struggled like no other cast memberHere we establish her desire to prove herself not a traitor… to prove that betraying Rikk’s trust was not an illustration of who she is. This will be important later.
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Dexter’s more than just evil laughs and failed schemes. It’s nice to establish that.
I kinda forgot that Head Alien comes pretty close to actually succeeding in his plans sometimes.
I had assumed the visions were of folks Meighan knew, at the time, but this makes more sense.
They probably are, to an extent. She’s equating the voice (tone, etc.) to people in her mind, and she has to be drawing the images from somewhere, even if they end up being mixes.
That last example looks like Normal 60’s TV Dad, for example.
We always knew Mike’s dad was secretly up to no good. He had to learn from somewhere, after all.
Originally Posted:
May 4, 2003
Just a safety note: Being a ‘friend’ of Head Alien is not automatically a healthy thing!
The single little piece of duct tape on her hair makes me giggle a lot.
The High Concept worked in my experience the previous go-thru. It being a color strip helped immensely.
I’m reading this for the first time and also got the “high concept” that this was supposed to show what she imagines the person she hears speaking to look like just fine. No rippoff of Daredevil visual style needed for that.
And I never saw Daredevil, in any format. I know who he is, blind lawyer, heightened other senses, fights crime, but nothing more.This strip works for me without even that “in”.
Yeah, it worked for me. I think HA’s distinctive style of word balloons helps the reader understand what’s going on while the sequence sells Meighan’s confusion.
A year late, but – agreed. I never had any trouble understanding what was going on here. High Concept worked fine.
If nobody else has said it yet (here), I will:
“Your faaace!”
There.
I had no trouble getting what was going on in this comic, though the revelation from a few strips back that HA apparently sounds like a munchkin doesn’t quite jibe with Meighan thinking she’s hearing a soldier.
I think that was a joke about his height
Interestingly, I remember assuming that HA had managed some kind of hypnosis or hallucination tech or something. Like he was giving Meighan familiar but vague authority figures to make her feel safer to talk freely. The basic idea definitely reads, I think.