BMA115, Drawing, comic writing, 16 July

There is still A LOT to work on in this script, but I finally have the story beats charted and I can now move myself forward by drawing.  As I draw, I'll have new ideas and things will get moved around and refined.  I hope to have enough done for Wednesday.  Our old syllabus says that 8 pages of pencils are due Wednesday.  Our new tutor David says he will have a look at where we're at then.    

1.  Opening image:  A woman stares moodily at the first rays of the sun as it rises over a futuristic and disintegrating cityscape.  Her digital and analogue readers flicker back and forth by a few seconds.  The battery gauge is reading nearly empty.  Tempus Agent M. M. Macintosh has pushed herself to the edge of her 21^st century time limit in a self-indulgent attempt to get to the North Pole to stop “The Machine” without the aid of a Geo-ambulator agent.   

2.  Theme stated:  Time and Space cannot work without each other. 

 3.  Set-up: The Time Window that allowed her to enter 2099 has shut and the automaton systems that have extended her life will go into torpor unless she makes it to another Window that will be opening overland.

4.  Catalyst:   While debating how to get overland in time, her Geo-chronometer registers readings that indicate the presence of someone who has an unusually high number of latitudinal and longitudinal incursion markers in their bloodstream.   If she can find the source, she can “piggy back” on his stored travel experience to get them back to the Chrono Hub to reboot her systems.  From there, she could send herself through time to a place that’s close to her mark.  Her readings lead her to a freshly dead body that is the source of the irregular incursion energy signatures.  Before his executor can start on her, she does a little short term time jump circuits to circle back. 

5.  Debate:  The now live body belongs to F. Scott McMurdo, who is attempting to illegally enter the Federated Scandi-EuroZone for the 5^th time.  Series of shots from M3’s perspective where she attempts to rescue McMurdo with him refusing her help.   Finally he says something that helps her realize that he’s under a narcotic delusion.  She cycles back one last time.     

(image: F. Scott McMurdo dressed like Rick at the Cafe Americain' in "Casablanca".   He has a blindfold over his eyes and a cigarette dangling from his lips.  A bright light is trained on him as a shadowy figure sorts through papers on a desk. )

 6. Act Two Plot Point:    McMurdo is not where he thinks he is.  This whole time, we've seen him as he sees himself: in a dashing spy outfit, blindfolded and cigaretted in a film nourish interrogation room.  Mary Marie McMurdo thwhips him in the nose, hard.  As his eyes water and he reacts in pain, the scene changes.  They're in an abandoned industrial zone, overgrown with weeds, and instead of a bespectacled bureaucrat looking through papers, IKE the automated sentry squats.  McMurdo is wearing a grubby utility suit.  The "cigarette" is a stick lozenge with drugs in it that change his perceptions and keep him calm.

McMurdo’s argument with M3 is interrupted by IKE the automated sentry that did, and still might, execute him.  When challenged, she gives IKE blood for identification purposes and the automaton systems in her blood disable the Security Robot.   

7.  B Story:  Tempus Agent convinces McMurdo to come with her by proving that the FUSEZ is actually empty- the people have been killed off by a variety of automated systems and starvation.  Refugees like McMurdo keep coming because the “Join us in FUSEZ” ad/propaganda campaign is also automated.  The retrovirus was created to make populations amenable to "proper" government but will make the people so passive in 200 years that they just die off because they can't be bothered to do ANYTHING.  Robots have been programmed to do stuff for them and they listen to their programming first and keep going, even though nobody's around anymore.

McMurdo could help prevent this tragedy, if he comes and works with her for The Agency, a shadowy organization tasked with subtly influencing world events with careful “asset placement” (DNA and babies) through Epochs and Empires.  The Agency seeks to level the playing field by introducing intelligence, strength, artistic and empathic traits to populations in need of leadership from within.  Macintosh can travel through the 19^th, 20^th and 21^st centuries but she can’t travel outside of where she’s physically been without a Geo-Ambulator, somebody who’s crossed all latitude and longitudinal lines.

   

8. Fun and Games:  She takes McMurdo to the Chrono Hub for his time-travel shots (bio-automaton systems and Vitamin D) and to meet the Boss, Section Chief William S. Pearce.  Meet the vampire Librarian?  Look at a series of portraits of other section chiefs C. Septimus Philopator, Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios Ponte y Blanco, Elvis Presley and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi?     

9.  Midpoint:  Then treks with him through her homeland towards the North Pole.  Macintyre and McMurdo follow the Aurora borealis (which looks at times like a DNA strand) North to the pole where The Machine is pumping out the retrovirus into the atmosphere.  :  M3 and McMurdo try to sneak up on The Machine’s camp but are blocked by a polar bear, an animal that McMurdo considers to mythical, but in the past that they’re operating in is very much alive.  “No, it can’t be!  You’re… DEAD!” 

 

10.  Bad Guys Close In:  Men appear from nowhere.   They have been sent by The Machine to bring the agents in.  They turn their rifles on the polar bear.  McMurdo screams “No!” and jumps in front of the bear.  He explains that he couldn’t let an animal that he had only read about in books, like a unicorn, die.  Gut shot, he collapses into a snowdrift.   The polar bear falls dead nearby. 

   

11.  All is Lost:  Their would-be saviours are men hired by The Machine.  They truss M3 up and drag her off.  Amelia Earhart is The Machine.  A rogue agent from The Agency, she resents their leaving her on that island in the Pacific to be “discovered by history”.  Earhart was lost trying to Geo-ambulate without a Tempus agent.  Her attempt to circumnavigate the globe was a dry run for spreading the retrovirus by means of “crop dusting”.    

 

12.  Dark Night of the Soul: M3 and Amelia Earhart trade barbs and argue over independence as the dirty bomb ticks down to release.  They had previously been Time and Space agents together and M3 had bailed when realised what Earhart was up to.  

13.  Act Three Plot Point: McMurdo is alive!  (And 20 years older.)  And so is the polar bear.  And they’re pissed!  The shots at the Chronohub have done their work: the freezing temperatures put McMurdo into a suspended status until the automaton’s could fix him up.  He and the bear collapsed in a heap and the automatons in the blood on the ground went searching for the nearest biological signature, which in many cases, was the polar bear.    

14.  Finale:  Polar bear and McMurdo save M3.  The Machine falls into a crevasse on an ice cap.      

15.  Final Image:  M3 looks out at the same futuristic cityscape from the opening.  Instead of the ice cold disintegrating buildings of the beginning, she sees a metropolis teeming with life.  The rays of the sunrise of 2099 fall across her and McMurdo’s faces.