“post cyber punk noir crime fiction webcomic”

Now, the noir part of that literally means “dark” and refers to a certain style of film from the 1940s, often a crime drama with lots of shady characters. Batman is kind of noir. If you still don’t know the kind of film I’m talking about, a picture is worth a thousand words.

That kind of film. In its purest form, we’ve got stark lighting, a classy but somewhat cynical detective protagonist having a smoke, a femme fatale hottie with a 50% chance of betraying the hero later. Noir stories often have a lot of amoral characters and the absence of a truly noble and virtuous hero.

I don’t necessarily want all those elements. In fact, pure noir stories have pretty much come and gone, and by now there are probably more parodies of the genre than serious attempts. You can’t even get away with making something noir-style without at least occasionally using meta-humor to poke fun at yourself.

What I’d like to capture about noir for Minerva Covenant is the scale and the mood. There is a place for epic stories, but I like street-level stories, where things are dramatic because they are mysterious and personal.

What I like most about noir is the moody visuals. The shot above might be cliched, but that’s because it’s classic, and it’s classic because, even having no idea what’s going on, the shot is dripping with style. Drama. Secrecy. Ambiguity. The stark lighting also draws your attention to every detail by a sort of minimalism; there are no elaborate backgrounds or overabundance of objects in the shot. Your eye instead moves along with great interest at each piece: the hat, the thoughtful expression on the man’s face, the cigarette in his hand, the sexy woman in background, the gun in her hand dipping into the shadows.

But Minerva Covenant is a comic, not a film, so how do those visual elements come across in a drawing, where its perhaps more difficult to get the lighting right? One way is to use black as the default background color rather than white, and use rather high contrast, even if it’s not as subtle as film. Batman: The Animated Series was drawn on a black background, meaning everything you see that’s black was simply left blank. Behold:

My favorite comic is x-factor, which is kind of the street-level noir-influenced offshoot of x-men (that is, it revolves around mutants in the same universe, but they aren’t the x-men and they don’t save the world).

Below you can see this comic invokes a similar style. Notice how in many of these panels there’s a window (the light source) a table, the characters, and not much else. In the last panel, there is no background, period. They just omit drawing the unimportant details of the room at all. Not only is it easier to draw, but it looks great. Less is more.

By the way, here’s what that would look like in grayscale. This is mostly for Bret’s reference, as he won’t be drawing in color.

I still prefer the one on the right. I like the somewhat wider proportions of the face and the long eyes. Although, I do like the eyes in both pictures. The one on the right seems more feminine and all around more attractive.

What I like about the one on the left is the way the hair curls at the ends. I’d be interested to see what a somewhat neater version of this looks like, perhaps with more uniform curly locks that hang just above the shoulder. Just an idea. A stronger indication of the nose (left) might be better than the almost non-existent nose on the right. However, the nose on the left still strikes me as a bit flat.

I’m nitpicking, but only because Bret wants me to. I’m glad he’s drawing this and not me. It’s partly up to him, though. It’s got to be a face he likes if he’s going to draw it a billion times.

Dr. Angela Frey is a genius neurocyberneticist hired as a consultant for the MCVIA to work with Adrian Brick.

Frey has a stark white overall appearance with fair skin, shoulder-length blonde hair, blue eyes, and white clothes. She has a unique and attractive face, and she is short with an all-around small figure that’s appealing but not voluptuous.

Frey has a doctorate in neurocybernetics, a subfield a bioengineering. She is an expert in the brain and nerves and how to intergrate technology with them. She also has extensive general knowledge of medicine and computers.

Frey is highly observant of small details and has impeccable memory for technical things, although she is not especially observant of body language or more personal details about people.

Posessing wealth, intelligence and beauty, she is often wined and dined by rich and powerful people for either romantic or business reasons, or both. She tends to reject them.

Frey is a snob. She is a connosseur of art, wine, and other fine things. Although her life has not been easy, it has been insolated from commoners, and she’s low on street smarts with regard to the city’s underbelly. She is however very savvy about the politics and social etiquette of the rich and powerful, and can be witty, tactful and manipulative when it’s to her advantage.

However, when she’s not playing that game, she can be cold and curt, as she does not care for small talk. She has hidden sides that can be both playful and vulnerable, but she easily hides that until she likes and trusts a person, and she does not like or trust people easily due to a mixture of snobbishness and fear of revealing her vulnerabilities. She does not have any true friends.

While I’d like to think Minerva Covenant does have some original elements, I’m sure it wouldn’t take long for someone to point at elements of it and say “hey! I’ve seen that before. You mean your story is just copying off [insert title]? In a sense they’re right, but the way they say it often reveals that they aren’t aware that every author steals from his favorite authors, or that the convention they’ve spotted does not belong to that one movie, but rather it’s more likely a staple of an entire genre or sub-genre encompassing hundreds of other works.

I’m so over it. I hope to make Minerva Covenant awesome because of its subtleties and its unique combination of narrative voice, style, and complex characters. As a way of just showing my cards and making no claim to originality, here is a far from complete list of tropes (writing conventions) present to some degree in Minerva Covenant that have been present in countless other stories.

Post Cyber Punk

Hardboiled Detective

Hot Scientist

They Fight Crime

Clingy costume / clothes make the superman

MegaCorp and Corrupt Corporate Executive

Tech noir

Rediculously Human Robot

Nanomachines

Cyborgs

Brain Computer Interface

I think it’s by far the best. I really like the expressions on both faces here. The face shape on the left, especially, captures the mixture of delicate and intelligent/sensible that would suit Frey. She’s not a fragile princess, but she’s not some kind of aggressive spirited action-girl, either.

In the one on the left she looks like she’s making some sort of astute observation, which she’ll be making often in the story. I think the elongated eyes really work. Knowing Bret, no doubt he’s just experimenting and will come up with more variations and ideas, but I like what I’m seeing here, especially in expressions of the eyes and mouth.

• Rise with the sun
• Drink a tall glass of water
• Mark accountability log
• Run outside and pray
• Check email
• Mark tasks: work, personal, creative
• Shower, shave, get dressed
• Eat breakfast
• 4 Pomodoros: Work
• Break (30-45 mins)
• 4 Pomodoros: Work
• Break (40-45 mins)
• 4 Pomodoros: Personal or Creative
• Love someone
• Evening prayer
• Go to bed when tired

Here’s the deal. It’s a given that I will often fail at doing any number of these things. That’s okay. I’m considering the day a success (in a sense) if I manage to fill out the checklist and mark the things I did as I go along, regardless of which things I succeed at. I need to establish a better rhythm of the day, and until I get there, the best thing I can do is to keep that goal in front of me consistently.

1. Love God with heart, soul and mind
2. Love people
3. Make ends meet
4. Create beautiful things

Aside from resting to recharge, I don’t want to spend any significant effort doing anything that does not contribute to one of those goals.

A lot of people criticize video games for being mindless wastes of time. But that criticism is a bit disingenuous, and seems to (for some reason) come from people who watch sitcoms and read celebrity gossip blogs. When I was a kid, my dad used to say in the evenings, “Turn off your video games so I can watch the news.” Which is fair enough, but even as a kid I felt that it didn’t seem to serve any purpose beyond entertainment to hear some newscaster reciting the dry details of about how another person was murdered in another alley. As I’ve gotten older, I’m only more convinced of that. “The news” is mostly pointless, monotonous, gruesome, and sedentary–the same criticisms leveled at games.

It seems obvious to me that video games can be an artistic medium like any other. I think the monotony of video games is what really gets me.  Some games are built like a skinner box – built to keep you playing, to reward you for a string of mundane tasks. The natural drive to accomplish things, to overcome obstacles to achieve goals, is harnessed by video games instead of real life. The downside is it prevents you from putting that effort into real life.

But… let’s not draw too much artificial separation between video games as a medium and other forms of entertainment. Chess players are always respected as sophisticated and intelligent people. But it would be hard to argue that chess is really less wasteful than, say, Starcraft–a video game that’s all about strategy, tactics, reading your opponent’s actions and thinking on your feet.

After a long while away from videogames, I find myself enjoying a newer one: Portal 2. There is no monotony. Every second of the game is interesting and uniquely challenging. None of the obstacles are boring because you almost never do the exact same thing, and every obstacle requires a fresh approach and nonlinear thinking. The atmosphere is unique, the characters memorable, the puzzles are mind-bending and awesome. My brain is probably growing new pathways as I play it.

So, maybe I’ll never be done with video games, but I think I’m done with 99% of them. It’s only a rare gem that gets my attention. I don’t just mean games that are good with respect to their genres — I mean games that offer a worthwhile experience, where afterward I’m glad I have played them, instead of regretting the time wasted on them.

Oh, and here’s some more of Bret’s concepts for Angela Frey. I’m not sold on any of them yet, but it’s hard to decide exactly what I like and don’t like about each face.