The Idea Double-Sized Annual Spectacular

PAGE ONE (6 panels)

Panel 1. The news offices of the Metroville Herald. Rows of empty desks. There is a desk in the foreground. On it, there's half-eaten doughnut centered on a paper napkin and a full coffee cup. There's a cardboard ring around the paper cup, with the image of a costumed man. The man has a large "I" on his chest. He's got blonde hair and a square jaw. There's a comic-book style word balloon to the left of the man's head. "Caution," he says. "I'm immune to the effects of heat, but you'll need to be careful. Get The Idea? Stay safe." In the background, a woman approaches the desk. She's wearing business formal. We can not see her face.

CAP:
There will never be a new poem.

Panel 2. The same room, same desk. The woman is closer. Her clothes are stylish, but, perhaps, trying too hard. She worries that she's no longer the youngest woman at the Herald. Her stories still regularly grab inches on the front page. Front page, above the fold. 

But there are some new kids on staff. They manage to grab inches without The Idea. She worries, more and more each time she files a story, that her success is really just the reflected glory of The Idea.

Could she grab the front page without him? If there were no more alien invasions, if the Society of Crime stopped trying to destroy Metroville, or Dr. Malevolent no longer needed human victims for his experiments, if The Idea hung up the cape, where would she be?

These thoughts might furrow her brow with worry, but we don’t' know because her face is still off panel.

Panel 3. The woman grabs the coffee cup and . . . 

Panel 4. Lifts it up to her face. It's the face of Herald star reporter Gina Garland. She smells the coffee.

Panel 5. She holds the coffee cup away from her face and lightly submerges her index finger the coffee.

CAP:
Three weeks ago, somebody wrote the last letter that will ever profess a new love. It will never happen again. We missed it.

Panel 6: She stares at the blankly confident face of The Idea on the heat guard.

GARLAND (thought):
It's still hot. But this cup of coffee has been on White's desk for . . .

PAGE TWO (4 panels)

Panel 1. The Idea sits next to the Deathdealer. They are sitting on the curb in front of the First Metroville Bank. The Deathdealer is tossing cards from his infamous Deck of Death into his top hat, which rests on the ground a few feet in front of him. Mostly he makes it, but a few cards have landed on the street next to his hat.

THE IDEA: 
We could fight anyway? Mix it up a bit.

DEATHDEALER: 
No, I just . . . It isn't there. Not anymore.

Panel 2. They sit quietly.

CAP:
Hit the dirt. Kiss sand. Bellies down.

Panel 3. The Idea bends slightly to look at the ground he's sitting on.

THE IDEA: 
You're smart. Never using a cape.

DEATHDEALER: 
The Guerrilla Gorilla, Sonic Doom, Jailbreaker, all of them. They say they're not even going to try to break out of jail. They just don't want to. Guerrilla Gorilla said he couldn't bring himself to want it.

Panel 4. Deathdealer holds up one of his cards and examines the design on the back: ornate cross-hatching, a delicate spider-web design radiating from an almost absurdly Victorian looking magician figure. A guy in Kansas custom-makes them for the Deathdealer. The super-villain has never noticed before, but the cards are actually quite beautiful.

The Idea looks down the block, as if there is something interesting there, but he knows, even with eyes that can see insects crawling across the surfaces of as yet unnamed planets light years away, that he won't see a thing.

THE IDEA: 
Really?

DEATHDEALER: 
Yeah . . . What's wrong with the cape? It looked good when you were flying.

THE IDEA: 
Yeah, but I'm always sitting on it and it get's filthy . . . How can the Jailbreaker not want to break out of jail?

PAGE THREE (6 panels)

Panel 1 Ace reporter Gina Garland sits on the edge of the desk of her editor and chief, the heavy-set, balding Herald Scott. Scott stands at a window, looking out on the city.

GARLAND: 
There will never be a new book. There will never a new movie.

SCOTT: 
There were hundreds of them back then. Generic guys, no names, all looked the same.

Panel 2 Explosion as three soldiers falling into a crater created by a previous blast. It is during the war. North Africa, Europe. It was never clear. They were wherever the war needed them to be to tell the war through them. French farm houses next to seemingly endless deserts. Russian partisans burning tsarist-era portraits for warmth. An empty helmet. An American nurse's smile. It was a war of instances. Short stories.

SFX:
KA-BOOM!!!

CAP:
"Sarge got us to a foxhole in time."

SARGE: Bury them buttons!

CAP:
"Sarge had a thousand ways to say hit the dirt. Scratch dirt. Flatten. Face to the dust."

Panel 3 All three huddle on the edge of the crater.

GENERIC: 
Not again. Stay in the panels. Stay in the panels.

CAP:
"I thought the guy had lost it."

Panel 4 Sarge grabs the generic soldier by the collar of his fatigues. It is the sort of things sergeants are supposed to do, but one look at this guy and Sarge can tell. The war makes these guys for the sole purpose of catching blood death. Some monstrous and vile creature that secrets its own food, eats its own shit – war births these nameless and faceless men so it can devour them.

SARGE: 
Keep it together, soldier. Keep it together.

Panel 5 Close up on Sarge's face. A look of shock.

SARGE: 
Soldier, why aren't you still dead?

Panel 6 Gina still sits on Scott's desk. Scott puffs on a pipe.

GINA: 
There will never be a new joke.

PAGE FOUR (Splash panel)

The Idea stands on top of a skyscraper, the city stretches out in behind him. He's holding his cape in his hands, inspecting it.

THE IDEA (Thought):
I've got eyes that can see the fracture lines clouds make when they collide with one another, and I can't tell if this is paint or ketchup. Or blood, maybe.

THE IDEA (Thought):
How could it be blood? Have I ever bled?

CAP:
People will read the same stories, over and over again.

PAGE FIVE (6 panels)

Panel 1. Daniel White, mild-mannered reporter for the Metroville Herald and alter-ego of The Idea sits at his desk. His clothes are neat, too neat. Oddly finicky in an adult man. The sort of cleanliness that spiteful widows use as the excuse for their bitterness or lonely compulsive shut-ins pretend is a sign of anchorite-like moral purity.

Gina Garland sits on his desk. She hangs her legs off the side. Force of habit. Her legs are still shapely, but she isn't young any more and the entire posture, while still being physically arousing, immediately reminds the reader that she's too old to pretend to this naïve sensuality. It has gone from a gesture of seemingly innocent seductiveness to the default pose of a tired schemer. She's holding the coffee cup from page 1.

WHITE:
The Deconstructivor says he noticed it after the first month passed – no fires, no alien invasions, no girlfriends in refrigerators. It was a clear cycle. Every month, there was a disaster. Then The Idea came and saved us all. It was set. Simple and complete and fatal as a mouse trap.

GARLAND:
No. It was different. There was. There were. I had things still. Things I had to say.

Panel 2. Close up of White's glasses, Gina is reflected there. She's standing now and placing the coffee cup on White's desk.

GARLAND:
There will be no more confessions. Is this Hell? Or absolution?

Panel 3. White stands up quickly, sending his chair tumbling to the ground. He grabs Gina by both shoulders. He seems panicked and angry, but not at her. All his sense fail him, he can't fight it.

WHITE:
Gina, dammit. It is done. All of it. And all it did was show us that we never lived. This will be the same thing. A trap. Little square cages.

Panel 4. Gina turns her face away from White. There's a single track of tear down her face. To The Idea, a tear is a monstrous thing. He can see the thick, membrane-like outline. The blue tint of tears is, The Idea knows, a mad illusion. The tear is a moving white nothingness that strips away the colors of the world revealing a strange pattern of dark and light blue dots. It is as if the material of tears stretched infinitely behind the seen, waiting for some human's sorrow to unlock it. 

Then there's the meaty crashing, the rending and slopping sound tears make as they cascade down the rough landscape of scars and wrinkles that make up the human face.

There are moments when then strange defender of mankind, this adopted alien son, looks at the human face and thinks to himself that he is glad he's not human. Though the idea was not his*, it is why he adopted the name The Idea. The real is, in its particulars, somewhat repulsive to him.

CAP:
* for the full fantastic fable of The Idea's marvelous moniker, see ish. #23 – Ed.

Panel 5. White's arms drop to his side. In the foreground, his shape is a rough, dark outline. Gina, in the background and detailed, holds herself. Maybe she's rubbing her arms were White, perhaps with a bit too much super strength squeezed. Maybe she just needs the sensation of being held. The coffee cup sits on the desk between them.

GARLAND:
There's things I wanted to tell you. Does it feel like you can't breath anymore? I guess these things don't matter.

Panel 6. Close up of the cartoonish The Idea on the coffee cup heat guard.

CAP:
"Gina, this changes nothing. Life is a story. And stories cannot be told except when we're safely locked behind four sturdy walls."