Let’s Review: Danica and Dr. Brightman

It’s time for another Let’s Review blog entry, where I look back on pages from our Archive and talk about the process behind their creation or the stories surrounding their production!

LET’S REVIEW:  DANICA & DR. BRIGHTMAN

Danica and Dr. Brightman have had several memorable moments over the course of STAR POWER, but today I’m going to focus on their wordless scene at the conclusion of Star Power & The Lonely War.  This scene is probably my favorite between these two because it really shows the growing bond between them without having to say anything about it.

Scenes where you “show and don’t tell” are important.  It’s a show of trust between author and audience, where a creator says “you can figure this out” and they trust their readers to do so.  It can be especially hard in comics.  Despite the visual nature of the medium, sometimes outlandish ideas need explanation and sometimes villains are going to monologue.  So when you decide to put a page down where two main characters don’t say a word to each other, you hope you can get your point across.

This page may make my job as the writer seem easy, since there’s not a word of dialogue, but the script for each panel was filled with description, intent, and emotion.  Scriptwriting a scene with no words means you have to tell your artist everything.  “This is meant to illustrate” and “this should make it clear that” were common phrases throughout this page of the script.  Collaboration means your partner needs to know everything.  Garth nailed this page and made my job look easy.  (And if you’d like to see that script, Patreon patrons at $10+/month get full access to the scripts for each chapter long before those pages are produced!  Spoilers!)

Did I spoil this wordless moment with Danica’s recent acknowledgment of it to Burke?  Maybe.  But I felt that scene only further strengthened the bond between these two characters, and restated what had already been said between them, albeit wordlessly.