Page four is largely about the physical journey, the toll on Alida's body while she carries the burden of regret, stricken with powerlessness while somehow enduring more than any normal person would believe possible.
Akira Kurosawa was known for these long lens shots of action, often with that eastern sensibility that utilized depth over panning, with axial cuts during action to demonstrate longer passages of time. I thought about that, and his favoring of cutting from these long lens shots to aspect shots detailing some essential mechanism and back again. It gave a sense of time and scale to those beats that I enjoyed and really seemed to intuitively work for me.
With that in mind, I waded into page four with a long shot, Alida trudging through the forest. I had a western audience in mind, so the action progresses left to right instead of foreground to background.
The next set of three panels, I was trying to play with time again, buttressing the internal mechanics of her mind against the shots of her travels. The removal of the gutters is meant to be an indication that it's all happening now, but in her mind, done without the conventional cloudy word balloon, which is effective, but a bit hokey for this sort of story.
Alida is still moving, attacked by the weather, attacked by her memories, attacked by the infection growing within.
The last panel, after being mired in her own mind, oblivious to the physical struggles in the real world, she is suddenly compelled to stop, suddenly sure she has arrived at her destination. Two large oaks dwarf her, she looks up them as they reach like lovers for each other. This is the place.
Kurosawa also used weather a lot, sometimes as almost a character on it's own. I tried to push it a bit within the prologue as an antagonist, inspired by his work, but also trying not to over do it. I think M Night Shyamalan tried to make his film, "The Happening", in that same direction, maybe believing that combining Kurosawa's nature/weather sensibilities with his surprise twist ending formula would make his film work with the brainy crowd as well as the plebeians. I think all he wound up doing was proving you really can take a good technique or formula too far and thoroughly butcher a movie with heavy handedness. So, I try not hit the reader over the head with this, instead just quietly build the conflict.
Page Five:
That fight comes to a head on page five.
Right away, after arriving at the end of this odyssey, the moment she realizes
this is the place, she abruptly commits suicide. The protagonist dies on panel one.
In the book, she puts the gun to her temple and pulls the trigger, I picture a lot of angst and torment, maybe some screaming as she pushes hard to force her finger to pull the trigger, fighting the cold, fighting the infection, fighting her own survival instinct.
But I thought
that story had already been visually told with the previous four pages, so I made a minor change, Alida puts the gun to her heart instead, a choice suicidal women often make, and she quietly ends her own life. Less bang, more whimper. I decided that it would be more interesting if, after suffering the duplicity of her mind led by the influence of her infection, after domination by those paranoid inner voices caused by her parasitic invaders, she was able to hide something from them as well. Hidden was some untapped reservoir of strength and hope, powering an intent to foil the "triangles" by killing herself, their vessel, before they could do whatever it is that she was brought there to do.
The weather takes over, an incessant force of nature with endless patience, and with the passage of time, it washes away everything, Alida, the parasites, her tracks, any evidence of the struggle(minus a gunshot wound to the tree, which hold court above).
Did any of it even matter? She still dies, she still loses, but the conflict for control is more pronounced, maybe humanity has a shot, maybe not. Check out Scott Sigler's INFECTED if you want to know what happens next! Look him up on iTunes for the FREE audiobook or check out his site or your local book store for the print version. Or, stick around and find out more about the graphic novel!
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