RUCKA * FERNANDEZ » MIWA > WYNNE THE OLD GUARD ISSUE IaThis is a fairy tale of blood and bullets. It is the story of two women and three men who cannot die. Mostly. Their names are Andy, Nicky, Yoe, Booker, and Nile. Nile is learning the job. Andy is learning that nothing is abandoned, only forgotten. And Booker just made a new friend. THE OLD GUARD FORCE MULTIPLIED “EVERY SAINT HAS A PAST, AND EVERY SINNER HAS A FUTURE.” -Oscar Wilde written sy GREG RUCKA arr an covers sy LEANDRO FERNANDEZ coors ay DANIELA MIWA cetrers x JOD] WYNNE PUBLICATION DEsIGN BY ERIC TRAUTMANN epirep ay ALEJANDRO ARBONA mace comics, mc. ‘THEOLD GUARD: FORCE MULTIPLIED #2, Jmuary 3030 ‘inerrant peng ear = retention oar Publ by Inge Com, In ‘eos ernest ‘Mare vette ci Or (Ofc ofan 4709 NW Vaughn Sc, Sake 7, Pordand, OR 730. ‘Servo venPresot Gopreighe © ‘Greg Racka and SLesndro Ferindee. 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KA S Then youll be oy dead, ard youl YY stay that way. 2 Uf A nothing but dying. and believe me, T know how much it hurts.=m eS a IN hiiDT’ Ove eae wy? > 5 o-F i> Ar. = = Ll 4 ee: be Uta: 7 ee Al mN Yagi ‘ % eS ee ee) ec 2 Mo re eae ye See WAZ E By *ple ( 4 NG re To | See ws ~ Z 7 aa mS ey Tel i 7 oS Se=—*RETURNING meses “THERE IS A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ADAPTING A WORK FROM ONE MEDIUM TO ANOTHER AND TRANSLATING THE SAME. ‘THINK OF IT LIKE THIS—yOU HAVE A HOUSE you love, and you have to move. An adaptation would be finding a new house in the new location, one that preserves, as much as it can, the things you loved about your old home. A translation would undertake to move the old house, foundations and all, to the new location. Some things take the move well. Some things don’t, Different media demand change. ‘What a comic does well in a panel may take five minutes on a screen, large or small. What a novel can do in a page can be conveyed as effectively in an actor’s expression. You work with the strengths of the medium at any given time, ‘There’s a great story, probably apocryphal, about a reporter who went to visit Raymond Chandler at his home in La Jolla after the Howard Hawks film of The Big Sleep, with Bogart and Bacall, had been released. Story goes that Chandler invites the reporter into his study, they get to talking, and the reporter begins asking what Chandler thought of the movie. “They ruined your novel,” the reporter says. “They just destroyed your book.” And after the third or fourth or fifth time the reporter says this, Chandler turns in his chair and reaches up to one of the shelves and pulls down his copy of The Big Sleep. He looks at the book, he looks at the reporter, and he says, “No. The novel’s fine. See?” T don’t really write team books, odd as that may sound given what you're holding in your hands right now. I lean to writing about individuals, and my desire as a writer is to drill down on a character, to attempt to understand them so fully chat I know what they will say and do in any given situation, and then put them into situations where I test that. At its best, I get surprised. When it goes wrong, I get a mess. But trying to provide that for multiple characters at the same time is, at the least, a far greater technical challenge, and so I tend to avoid it.Comics suit my style in this very well, much as novels do, though with comics it’s more a demand of economy than preference, There is not a lot of room in a comic book, frankly, and it goes quickly. I tend to think of scripting a comic as an exercise in economics —what does each page buy me, how much does it cast, and will Ibe able to purchase what I need later? When you examine comics, when you look at the way we tell stories, almost every writer and artist ends up taking shortcuts. That’s part of the strength of the medium, in fact: we leave most of the heavy lifting to you. IF we're very clever, you never even realize how hard we've made you work in that little whitespace gutter between the panels. We've provided enough that you, as audience and—this is what makes comics so brilliant as a narrative form, by the way—as participant, can provide everything 1g ‘A well-crafted comic makes you complicit that’s miss in the telling of the tale, Ie is a unique, and rather beautiful, collaboration, If we're on our game, Leo and I will give you just enough so you can do the rest That doesn’t work when adapting a comic to film. For lack of a better way to put it, when you're writing a screenplay or a teleplay, you cannot cheat, or at least, you cannot cheat that way. Every character needs to be fully realized, fully developed, fully drawn. There are going to be actors saying those lines. They will need to know why they are saying those lines. “Because plot” is not a good answer to that question, otherwise you end up with the worst of Nigel Bruce’s Watson to Basil Rathbone’s Holmes—caricature without inner life, existing only to serve another character. Which brings me to Nile Freeman. In the first series of The Old Guard, Nile’s purpose was driven almost entirely by the requirements of the story, as opposed to the needs of her character. Authorially, I needed someone on the outside to come into Andy, Nicky, Joe, and Booker’s world, to see it as the reader was experiencing it, for the first time. I needed an excuse, so to speak, for exposition — the four originals already knew their situation, they knew what they were, and insomuch as they understood why, those were questions of little interest to them. On a thematic level, my intent had been that, through Nile, Andy would find her will to live again, so to speak. But in the main, as much as I loved the character and as much as I knew about her, much of that never reached the page—Nile was the vessel for the reader first, her own woman second. Which absolutely isn’t fair to Nile. If Opening Fire was—in whatever part, large or small—about Andy, chen a lot of this story is me trying to figure out how to write that team book P’ve been avoiding for so long. It is also an attempt to give Nile her due, to acknowledge her own complexity, and t well, I don’t want to say more. This is only issue two, after all. See you next month! Gree Portland, Oregon December 20195“Lev’s do it.” RATED M/ MATURE