Issue 04 · Print view
22 pages · 83 panels
Recap Splash · 1 panel
Layout — Recap splash
[art pending]
The DeciCorp Spire at dawn. White light hitting the apex. The closed-mouth logo above the city. Below, a tiny figure walking toward the building — Jesse, on his way to work, jacket and Beat Pad, dwarfed by the building. Alex Ross / Allred Cosmic register — let the Spire dominate the page as it dominates the city.
Page · 5 panels
Layout — 5 panels
[art pending]
The cubicle floor. Mid-morning. Jesse at his desk. The screen in front of him: a queue, longer than yesterday. New flags. New harmonic events. Allred — pan past his shoulder so we can see the queue but not him. We're inside his head this issue; let the camera stay close.
[art pending]
The supervisor — a beige, untextured man in a beige, untextured suit, SUPERVISOR HOLT — walks the floor. He passes Jesse's cubicle. He stops. He looks at Jesse.
[art pending]
HOLT crouches a little to put himself at Jesse's eye level. The body language of a man who has trained extensively in non-threatening menace.
[art pending]
Jesse, very still.
[art pending]
Holt straightens. Pats Jesse twice on the shoulder. The pat is the most threatening gesture in the issue. Walks on. Jesse does not breathe for a full panel.
No copy.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Jesse stands. He walks toward the bathroom. He walks the way a man walks when he is trying very hard to look like he is not running.
No copy.
[art pending]
The bathroom door. He pushes it open. He goes in.
No copy.
[art pending]
He is alone. He goes to the sink. He pulls off the Beat Pad and sets it on the basin. The pad pulses.
No copy.
[art pending]
He grips the basin. He stares at himself in the mirror. The fluorescent light overhead is steady. The wave stencil is on the tile behind him. He is breathing too fast.
Splash · 1 panel
Layout — Splash
[art pending]
The earthquake. The bathroom warps. The floor tiles buckle in a circular pattern radiating outward from a single point — the spot directly in front of Jesse. The mirror cracks down the center. The fluorescent light overhead detonates in a shower of glass and a brief, violent flash. Jesse is thrown backward, hitting the stall doors with a crunch. The basin tears free of the wall and falls. The Beat Pad slides across the floor. In the center of the panel — radiating outward like the eye of the explosion — a circular distortion. Inside the distortion, a man-shape is forming. Glitchy. Jittery. Edges torn into RGB-split static. Allred — Cosmic register, full color holds. Krackle. Op-art. This is the Silver Surfer arrival panel. Make it the panel a kid tears out of the comic and pins to a wall.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Jesse on the floor, half-buried under the fallen basin. Blood from a small cut at his temple. Dazed. Looking up.
No copy.
[art pending]
Standing in front of him — half-formed, half-there — ALEJANDRO "ALEX" CRUZ. Dad. Workshop apron over a faded t-shirt. A guitar pick behind one ear. He is glitching — his outline jitters and tears into RGB static when he moves. His feet do not quite touch the floor. Allred — give us the moment a son sees his dead father standing in front of him for the first time in sixteen years. The dad's face is gentle. The son's face has not yet caught up to what he is seeing.
[art pending]
Jesse, on the floor, mouth open.
[art pending]
Close on Alex. He smiles. The smile is the same as the one in the photograph on the garage wall.
Page · 5 panels
Layout — 5 panels
[art pending]
Jesse, slowly, pushes the basin off and sits up. Hand to his head. Blood on his fingers.
[art pending]
Alex crouches in front of him. He extends a hand — but does not, cannot, touch his son. His hand passes through Jesse's shoulder in a wash of static. Allred — let this be heartbreaking. The dad reaching for the kid. The reach not landing.
[art pending]
Jesse, staring at the hand that passed through him.
[art pending]
Jesse, voice breaking.
[art pending]
Alex, gentle.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Jesse, processing.
[art pending]
Alex straightens. Looks around the wrecked bathroom. His outline glitches.
[art pending]
Jesse pushes himself up to standing. Wincing. Hand still to his head. He stands in front of his dad. He is finally, almost, at the same eye level.
[art pending]
Alex. The most important panel of the issue. Allred — staging is everything. Dad and son in a half-destroyed bathroom on the 47th floor of the building that killed the dad. Closed-mouth logo visible through the cracked window behind them. Father about to tell son the thing that will define the rest of the boy's life.
Page · 5 panels
Layout — 5 panels
[art pending]
Jesse, deadpan, dazed.
[art pending]
Alex, gesturing. His hand passes through a flickering shape — a small holographic projection of the green guitar's road case, lid open. He's drawing in the air.
[art pending]
Close on Alex. He smiles — proud, a small sad pride.
[art pending]
Jesse, staring at the projected hologram.
[art pending]
The projection fades. Alex is starting to lose stability — his outline tears harder.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Jesse, head spinning.
[art pending]
Alex, quieter now. His outline glitches harder.
[art pending]
Jesse.
[art pending]
Alex. Devastated. Allred — give us the panel where the dad tells the son the size of the stakes and we believe it.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Jesse, very quiet.
[art pending]
Jesse looks at his father. He is trying not to cry. He is failing.
[art pending]
Alex, his outline beginning to disintegrate. He cannot reach across to hold his son. He tries anyway.
[art pending]
Close. Alex.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Alex, glitching badly now. The four minutes are up. Reality is reclaiming the bathroom.
[art pending]
Jesse.
[art pending]
Alex starts to break apart. RGB static eating his form. His smile, still the same smile, dissolving into pixels.
[art pending]
Splash-adjacent — Alex is gone. Jesse is alone in the wrecked bathroom. The fluorescent light overhead is dark. The mirror is cracked. The basin is on the floor. The Beat Pad pulses faintly on the tile.
No copy.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Jesse, alone, on the floor. He has not moved. His eyes are wet.
No copy.
[art pending]
The bathroom door swings open. A janitor — middle-aged, Beat Pad on, blank face — stops in the doorway. Stares at the destruction.
[art pending]
Jesse, slowly, gets to his feet. He picks up the Beat Pad. He pockets it instead of putting it on.
[art pending]
Jesse walks past the janitor and out of the bathroom.
No copy.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
The cubicle floor. Jesse walks across it. The whole floor is buzzing — coworkers standing up, looking around, asking each other if they felt it. Holt is across the room, on his comms.
No copy.
[art pending]
Jesse keeps walking. Past his desk. Past his cubicle. Past the partition. Toward the elevator.
No copy.
[art pending]
Holt's eyes find him. Holt starts walking after him.
[art pending]
Jesse, not turning. Walking faster. The elevator doors open.
No copy.
Page · 3 panels
Layout — 3 panels — widescreens
[art pending]
The elevator doors close as Holt arrives at them. Holt's hand reaches in, half a second too late. The doors slide shut.
No copy.
[art pending]
Jesse alone in the descending elevator. The mirrored walls reflect him from a hundred angles. He looks at himself.
No copy.
[art pending]
Close on Jesse in the mirror. His face has changed since the last time we saw it in a bathroom mirror. He looks like he might be about to laugh and he looks like he might be about to throw up and his hands are shaking and his eyes are alive.
Page · 5 panels
Layout — 5 panels
[art pending]
The lobby of the Spire. Jesse pushes through the revolving door. Out onto the Strip. Bright sun. He starts walking — not running, walking fast, walking with purpose. He pulls the Beat Pad out of his pocket and drops it in a trash receptacle as he passes. Allred — frame this like a man casting off a wedding ring.
No copy.
[art pending]
He breaks into a run.
No copy.
[art pending]
A wide of the Strip. Jesse, running. The Spire receding behind him. The other commuters on the sidewalk parting around him, mildly confused — nobody runs in New Vegas. There is nowhere to run to.
No copy.
[art pending]
Tram station. Jesse leaps onto the eastbound tram seconds before the doors close.
No copy.
[art pending]
On the tram. Jesse, panting, leans his forehead against the window. The salvage yard slides into view. Dev is on the containers, at the kit, mid-fill, body in motion.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Tram exit, residential platform. Jesse pushes off the train and runs — full sprint — toward the salvage yard.
No copy.
[art pending]
Through the yard. He vaults a low pile of scrap. Allred — physicality. He has never moved like this in the book before.
No copy.
[art pending]
Up the containers. Dev is mid-pattern at the kit. Dev sees Jesse coming. He stops drumming.
[art pending]
Jesse arrives at the top. Out of breath. Hand on his knees. He looks up at Dev. His face is the face he had in the elevator.
Page · 5 panels
Layout — 5 panels
[art pending]
Dev. Sitting at his kit on the top of a stack of shipping containers. Sticks in his hand. Hearing this. He does not stand. He does not speak. He just looks at Jesse.
No copy.
[art pending]
Jesse, sitting down hard on a crate next to the kit. Talking fast.
[art pending]
Long beat. Dev, on the kit, processing all of that. His face — Allred, slow the reader down here. We need to see Dev decide.
No copy.
[art pending]
Dev, very quietly.
[art pending]
Dev wipes his eyes with the back of his sleeve. He pretends he is not doing it. He stands up from the kit. He tucks his sticks into his belt.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
The walk home. The brothers in motion across the salvage yard. Allred — pacing panel. Iconic two-shot, side by side, jackets blowing.
No copy.
[art pending]
The kitchen. They burst in. Marisol at the table.
[art pending]
Close on Marisol. Allred — the panel where the wife hears a message from her dead husband. Her face does the entire arc in one frame.
No copy.
[art pending]
Marisol — eyes wet, smiling, furious, terrified, all at once.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Marisol stands. She walks to the kitchen drawer. She pulls out a small wrapped bundle — fabric, tied with twine — and sets it on the table.
[art pending]
Dev sits at the table. Jesse beside him. Marisol passes the bundle to Jesse.
[art pending]
Jesse unties the twine. Unwraps the fabric. Inside: a small piece of paper, folded twice. A chord diagram in Alex's handwriting — a complex jazz-influenced chord, fingers numbered, root note labeled. Underneath, in Alex's hand: THE CHORD THAT GOES HOME. And at the bottom: DEV — TAP A SHUFFLE IN SEVEN OVER FOUR. JESSE — STRIKE HARD. I LOVE YOU BOTH. — DAD
No copy.
[art pending]
The three of them at the kitchen table, looking at the paper. Allred — composition. Three faces, one piece of paper, the entire weight of the volume sitting between them.
No copy.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Marisol. Hands on the table. She is making a decision she made years ago and that she has only now run out of room to avoid.
[art pending]
Jesse.
[art pending]
Close on Marisol. Allred — her best panel of the volume. The mother who gives her children permission.
[art pending]
She stands. She crosses to the door. She hands Jesse the garage key — the one Dev built the lock for.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
The brothers, crossing the yard to the garage in the late afternoon light. Marisol stands in the doorway of the house, watching them go.
No copy.
[art pending]
Garage door. Code in. Door slides up.
No copy.
[art pending]
They cross to the trap door. They move the crate. Together they lift the hatch. The green light from the case glows up onto their faces.
No copy.
[art pending]
They lift the case out and set it on the workbench. Jesse looks at Dev. Dev nods. Jesse undoes the clasps.
No copy.
Splash · 1 panel
Layout — Splash — final page
[art pending]
Jesse, lifting the lid of the case. Inside the lid — sewn into the velvet behind where the headstock rests — a small green USB stick about the size of a poker chip. The exact green of the guitar. The exact green of the portal. Behind Jesse, Dev. Behind Dev, through the open garage door, Marisol in the doorway of the house, silhouetted against the kitchen light, watching her boys. Behind the kitchen — the city. Behind the city — the Spire. The closed-mouth logo glowing at the apex. The musical-staff motif in the margin: the staff is empty but a single chord is drawn in pencil across it — Alex's hand-drawn chord diagram from the kitchen. Allred — staging. The USB is the smallest object on the page and the largest in the story.