By: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis
When the Twin Towers fell, all the mayor Comic Book companies started releasing comic books reacting to the terrorist attacks, apologizing for the fact a whole universe of superheroes could not prevent them from happening. The Amazing Spider-Man #36 comic (by Straczynski and Romita, Jr.), for instance, came out and saw the city’s premier superhero, Spider-Man, too late for any kind of saving. All he could do was sit and watch, be a witness in his failure. In any case, the only thing he could do was help the ‘real heroes’ of 9/11: the firefighter, the cop, the doctor, the nurse, the public servant. The same went with other stories collected in commemorative anthologies. Superman apologized for not being real in a Steven T. Seagle strip. Batman glided through a Gotham night where every household displayed an American flag in a single page illustration by Lee Bermejo, a sign of unity uncommon to the people of his city.
Superheroes were quite simply too late in these comics. But these books never showed or explained why their superheroes were late, oblivious even, to the attacks. Why they couldn’t prevent them. My comic book story will explore precisely those questions.
Tentatively titled
One Degree of Change, my story is about a superhero that was off saving the city, doing his job, while the Towers were attacked. He will not be able to prevent the attacks. But it will be because he was on another part of the city preventing another catastrophe. I want to develop a very unique approach to this story through panel structure. I want the superhero’s adventure to run parallel, simultaneously, with the events that led to the attacks (the plane’s hijacking and actual attack). For example, in one part of the story, our hero will crash through a window in order to get closer to the villain while in the panel running parallel to it the first plane will hit the first Tower. The panel with the superhero breaking through the window will bleed into the first Tower’s plane attack.
Alternately, this last scene can also be played out in a more indirect opposition, where panel 1 is of the plane nearing the Tower while the second panel is of a villain just crashing through a window, suggesting the hero launched him out through it. The first panel bleeds into the second, metaphorically suggesting the plane hit the Tower while continuing the superhero’s story, simultaneously. It’s that sense of both continuity and ubiquity that I want to capture. (
This take on the scene was suggested by a fellow classmate.)
In the end, the superhero will become another witness to the attacks, helpless. He will only be able to look up at the Towers and take in the damage, another victim amongst many. But we will know why he couldn’t stop them.
The following changes came out of class discussion:
I believe it will be extremely helpful to focus on two characters, one from each of the separate but simultaneous moments, the superhero and one of the terrorists on the plane. I think that a very mundane approach to both characters will actually play into the narrative better (thinking of Fraction’s and Ajá’s panel work in Hawkeye, in terms of their playfulness with the visual narrative). But having the terrorist character also go about preparing for his own ‘mission’ will bring it all down into a very human level and make the narrative all the more compelling. Still, the selling point to the comic book narrative will be the panelling structure and how both narratives intersect in it, building up into the final convergence of both stories into one.
