Issue 05 · Print view
18 pages · 58 panels
Recap Splash · 1 panel
Layout — Recap splash
[art pending]
The garage from above, like Issue 3's last splash. Same composition, different content. The case is open on the workbench. The green guitar is in it. The USB is in Dev's hand, held up to the work-light, glinting green. Jesse beside Dev, looking up at the USB. Marisol in the open garage doorway, watching from outside. The Simulated Guitar still on its stand in the corner — its last full issue alive.
Page · 5 panels
Layout — 5 panels
[art pending]
Workbench. Dev examines the USB under a magnifier. He is in his element — engineer mode, calm, fascinated. He turns the chip over and over.
[art pending]
Jesse, holding Alex's chord diagram, looking at Dev.
[art pending]
Marisol from the doorway.
[art pending]
Dev, grinning despite himself, plugs the USB into the side of the Amp-Sim Box.
[art pending]
A beat. The Amp-Sim Box's LED — which has been green for the entire series — turns deep, saturated, gem-green. The hum of the box drops half an octave. Allred — give us a small color hold on the LED. The box has just woken up.
Page · 5 panels
Layout — 5 panels
[art pending]
Jesse strapping on the green guitar. The strap is canvas, old, dark. It fits him.
No copy.
[art pending]
Plug-in. The cable from the guitar into the Amp-Sim Box. The moment the jack seats — the green guitar's pickup covers begin to glow, faintly, the same gem-green as the LED.
No copy.
[art pending]
A pop. A small bright spark. From across the garage — the Simulated Guitar, on its stand, throws a single arc of electricity from its pickup. The instrument was not plugged in. Allred — small panel, but a flash of light.
[art pending]
Jesse turns to look at the Simulated Guitar. The pickup is smoking — a thin curl of grey from the bridge. The Frankenstein's eyes have closed.
[art pending]
Close on the Simulated Guitar. Smoke trailing up. The instrument that Jesse made with his own hands when there was no other way to make music — fried by the proximity of the real thing waking up.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Jesse crosses to the Simulated Guitar. He picks it up. He cradles it. The neck wood under his fingers. Allred — let this moment land. Slow it.
No copy.
[art pending]
He sets it back on the stand. Gently. Like setting a body down.
[art pending]
He turns back to the workbench. The green guitar plugged in and ready. The chord diagram on the bench. Dev at the kit.
No copy.
[art pending]
Marisol, in the garage now, having come the rest of the way in. She crosses to Jesse. Puts both hands on his face.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
She does not let go of his face.
[art pending]
She turns to Dev. He has come over. She puts one hand on his face too.
[art pending]
She steps back. She puts her hands on her hips. She wipes her eyes with the back of her wrist.
[art pending]
She walks out of the garage. She does not look back. Allred — her exit. Worth a full panel. The shoulders. The not-looking-back.
No copy.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
The garage. Just the brothers now. Jesse at the workbench, green guitar on, USB plugged into the Amp-Sim Box. Dev at the industrial kit. The chord diagram propped on a music stand Dev welded from rebar.
[art pending]
Jesse positions his left hand on the fretboard. The chord. Allred — close on Jesse's hand finding the shape. It's a complex shape — five-finger, an inversion of a minor 11 with the root on the sixth string. The hand is doing math in real time.
No copy.
[art pending]
Dev counts in. He taps the count on the rim of the snare-bucket — click click click click click click click. Seven over four. Jesse breathes. The hand is ready.
[art pending]
Jesse closes his eyes. Inhale. The frame is held.
No copy.
Splash · 1 panel
Layout — Splash
[art pending]
The chord. Wider, louder, deeper than Issue 2's chord. The green guitar detonates. A column of green light shoots up from the body of the instrument and through the ceiling — through the roof — into the sky over New Vegas. The wall of the garage warps outward. The air ripples. The portal opens — not in front of Jesse this time but around him. The doorway is everywhere; it encloses both brothers, and Dev keeps drumming the shuffle inside it, and Jesse stands in the middle of it, eyes closed, hand still on the chord, and the wave-symbol on his mother's tile glows for the briefest fraction of a second. Allred — Cosmic register at maximum. Color hold the portal green; everything else flat. Kirby krackle. This is the moment Scouter goes time-traveling.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
The garage interior — or what is left of it. The portal has collapsed inward. Jesse and Dev are gone. The green guitar is gone. The USB is gone. The Amp-Sim Box, scorched, half-melted, is still on the bench. The Simulated Guitar is on its stand, untouched, a witness.
No copy.
[art pending]
Through the open garage door — Marisol, who has heard everything from the kitchen, walks out into the yard. She stops at the threshold of the garage. She looks at the empty space where her boys were.
No copy.
[art pending]
Close on Marisol. She is smiling. She is crying. She is both.
[art pending]
She steps into the garage. She picks up the Simulated Guitar from its stand. She holds it the way Jesse held it on page 4. She is going to keep it safe until her boys come back. She is not assuming that they will.
No copy.
Splash · 1 panel
Layout — Splash
[art pending]
Inside the portal. A long widescreen panel — almost a full-page splash but oriented horizontally. Jesse and Dev, in the portal, mid-jump. Time stretches around them — visualized as a tunnel of green light, edges traced with Kirby krackle. The two of them suspended in the middle, weightless, the green guitar still strapped to Jesse, Dev still mid-tap. Behind them, in receding waves, glimpses of every time period the chord is passing through — quick flashes of unfamiliar streets, jazz clubs, ancient marketplaces, fields, oceans, deserts, all rendered in a quick layered montage. Allred — this is your best Toriyama-meets-Steranko panel. The kinetics of falling through time. Let it be beautiful. Let it be incomprehensible. Let it be one page.
Page · 5 panels
Layout — 5 panels — small grid
[art pending]
Inside the portal. Close on Jesse. His eyes are open now. He is looking at his hand. His hand is passing through itself — translucent, layered with iterations of itself.
[art pending]
Close on Dev. Same effect. He is laughing — disbelieving, electric.
[art pending]
Looking past them — through the wall of the tunnel — they see another, smaller portal opening parallel to theirs. A second tunnel. Someone else is jumping at the same time.
[art pending]
The second tunnel has a figure in it. Tall, lean, matte-white, single horizontal LED band across the face. DeciBot. It is in mid-jump too, on a parallel trajectory.
[art pending]
Close on Jesse. His face. The dread.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
The two tunnels begin to diverge — Jesse and Dev's tunnel banking left, DeciBot's tunnel banking right. The destinations are not the same. But they are close.
No copy.
[art pending]
Jesse, in the tunnel, screaming over the noise:
[art pending]
The chord begins to fade. The tunnel begins to thin. Daylight, somewhere ahead, blooming through.
No copy.
[art pending]
A glimpse — through the thinning tunnel wall — of brick, of crowds, of a neon sign. THE DOM. The bar from Issue 2's portal vision.
Splash · 1 panel
Layout — Splash
[art pending]
Landing. Jesse and Dev burst out of the air in the middle of an alley in 1966 Manhattan. They fall — six feet — and hit a stack of cardboard boxes in front of a Chinese laundry. The boxes collapse. A cat yowls and scrambles up a fire escape. The portal closes behind them with a quiet plip. They are in a 1960s New York City alley. The afternoon sun. The fire escapes. The graffiti. A radio playing somewhere upstairs — a real radio, playing a real song, distantly. The wave-symbol stencil from their bathroom is, impossibly, sprayed in pink chalk on the alley wall. Jesse on his back in the boxes, green guitar across his chest, blinking at the sky. Dev sitting up beside him, still holding his sticks. Allred — Romantic register. The 1960s NYC chapters of this book are your album. Let this panel be beautiful. The light. The bricks. The dirt. The cat.
Page · 5 panels
Layout — 5 panels
[art pending]
Jesse, slowly, sits up. The green guitar across his lap. He brushes cardboard from his jacket. He listens to the distant radio.
No copy.
[art pending]
Dev gets to his feet. He picks up his sticks. He looks down the alley toward the street.
[art pending]
Jesse, half-smile, getting to his feet.
[art pending]
They walk toward the mouth of the alley. The bricks. The sun. The sounds of cars and horns and voices and music.
No copy.
[art pending]
They reach the mouth of the alley. They look out. They stop. They cannot move.
No copy.
Splash · 1 panel
Layout — Splash
[art pending]
The street. A full-page reveal of a 1960s East Village street. Cars from the era. Pedestrians in 1960s clothes, talking to each other, gesturing, laughing. Newspapers under arms. A woman pushing a baby carriage and singing to the baby. Two old men arguing on a stoop. A street musician on the corner with an acoustic guitar, hat out. A radio in an open window. A car radio playing a Beach Boys song. Two teenagers necking against a parked car. A dog. A pigeon. A crossing guard. A nun. The world. Allred — this is the page that breaks Jesse's heart open for the first time in the book. Compose it as a love letter. Every face is a character. Every face is a person. The musical-staff motif in the margin: every line of the staff is full of notes — overlapping, layered, chaotic, every melody in the world playing at once.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Close on Jesse. He is crying. He does not know he is crying. His mouth is open. His face — Allred, please, give us the moment a man with armor on for his entire life accidentally takes the helmet off.
No copy.
[art pending]
Dev, beside him. Quiet. He does not look at Jesse. He gives him the moment.
[art pending]
Jesse, finally, in a small voice:
[art pending]
Dev, half a smile.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
A street musician walking past with an acoustic guitar slung over his back glances at the green guitar in Jesse's hand. Stops. Nods.
[art pending]
Jesse, dazed, smiling.
[art pending]
Dev, jumping in.
[art pending]
He walks off, whistling. Jesse and Dev stand on the corner. The green guitar in Jesse's hand. The wave-symbol stencil on the brick behind them. The 1960s street unfurling in every direction.
Page · 4 panels
Layout — 4 panels
[art pending]
Around the corner — a small portal, much smaller than theirs, rips open in mid-air over a trash bin. A figure steps out. Matte-white shell. Single horizontal LED band. DeciBot. It looks around the alley. It checks its arm-mounted display. Allred — Brutal register. Clean, crisp menace. The robot is alone in a 1966 alley. The reader feels the wrongness. DECIBOT'S ARM SCREEN (lettered like a vintage CRT): TARGET LOCK: J. CRUZ, D. CRUZ-PAPPAGEORGE LAST KNOWN POSITION: 0.3 KM MISSION: RECOVER (PRIMARY) / NEUTRALIZE (SECONDARY)
[art pending]
The DeciBot scans the alley. It sees a fedora on top of a wooden hat-rack outside a coat-check. It pauses. It tilts its head. Its threat-assessment subroutine processes. DECIBOT'S ARM SCREEN: LOCAL ATTIRE PROTOCOL: INVESTIGATOR / DETECTIVE — HEADWEAR: FEDORA (P. 0.71)
[art pending]
The DeciBot picks up the fedora. Tries it on. Adjusts the brim. Allred — this panel is a sincere joke. Stage it with the dignity of a robot doing market research.
No copy.
[art pending]
The DeciBot, now wearing the fedora, walks out of the alley in pursuit. Allred — silhouette. Six feet of matte-white killer in a noir hat, on a 1966 New York sidewalk. The contrast is the comedy and the dread.
No copy.
Splash · 1 panel
Layout — Splash — final page
[art pending]
Outside The Dom. The Dom, East Village, 1966. Neon sign glowing in the afternoon shadow. A line forming for the evening show. Posters in 60s typography. The smell — somehow conveyed in art — of cigarettes and beer and rain on hot pavement. Jesse and Dev approaching the entrance, the green guitar over Jesse's shoulder, his sticks tucked in Dev's belt. Both brothers looking up at the sign with the expression of pilgrims arriving at the temple. In the deep background, one block away, the silhouette of the fedora-DeciBot, just visible at the far end of the street, walking toward us. Allred — Romantic register for Jesse and Dev. Brutal register for the DeciBot. Both in the same panel. You can do both.