1908 No More Tears.

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I rewrote this page several times & am still not happy with it totally. That’s not uncommon, but I usually have a pretty clear way I want things to go and this time I didn’t. Some stuff happened while I was making this page that kind of threw me off my groove. Honestly not every interaction between the cast should be astoundingly meaningful, but usually I feel like I stick the landing a little better. I didn’t want to go from the last page directly into Jess digging into Jo’s past more. When I tried it the scene felt like it was turning to a new focus in a jarring way, so I tried a few more times to see what felt more natural to me. This is what I landed on. Jess is very smitten with Jo because she’s got a sort of natural wisdom to her that Jess doesn’t have. There’s deep pain and perspective in her that Jess is drawn to in the way that people often get obsessed with “fixing” a “broken” person. It’s not a one to one comparison, but it’s similar enough that you can understand the dynamic.

22 Comments

I see nothing wrong with it.
To me, this page flows perfectly from the last one.

I’m glad you appreciated my efforts. I guess since it didn’t match what I wanted in my head I felt like I failed.

Isn’t that the defining characteristic of any art, though? That the vision in your head is never quite translated to the page or the music or the whatever medium? Maybe Mozart could transcribe every note and nuance, but the rest of us capture what we can. It may not be the entirety of the vision, but it can still be something good.

“all humans feel music, even if we don’t understand the words”
as someone who listen to unhealthy amounts of j-pop, I can confirm lol

Foreign lyrics become just part of the music for me. At least one song I have actively avoided seeing a translation.

Gotta agree. I cannot imagine this page being any better than it is. Damn, but both Jo and Thomas can pull out lines from the heart in a way that I only wish I could.

I feel like the whole second panel was done in song. it just felt like they were singing to each other. I think you did alright.

How would a deaf person understand music? And I’m not talking about Beethoven, I’m talking about a born-deaf person

You can feel music through your skin. That’s how the deaf experience it even if they lack the organs to hear. It’s actually very interesting to learn how people who lack various senses experience the world. There are many videos about it if you’re interested.

There is a movie something opus. Had a music teacher witha deaf son use the bass to show the kid the music. Very beautiful.

You should watch the movie At First Sight with Val Kilmer in it. It’s a very good movie about how people without sight experience the world through sound (which is the opposite, but it’s still very relevant to the discussion).

Since Jo is a movie lover, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if she immediately thought of Red (Morgan Freeman) from “The Shawkshank Redemption” explaining how listening to Italian opera singers impacted him and the rest of the inmates in the yard. There are quite a number of really great moments in that movie, and that is one of the best.

Shawshank Redemption absolutely proves the genius of Stephen King.

Agreed, and the fact that they found the perfect director and cast to bring his story to the big screen was a minor miracle. It wasn’t until years after I’d seen the movie that I found it was a Stephen King story, at which point I had to reconsider my dislike for the man’s popular horror persona and appreciate his adept storytelling abilities. Then “The Green Mile” arrived and I had my second proof that his work could be used for something other than horror. Heck, I even enjoyed the recent TV series “Haven” and that’s based off one of his short stories/novellas, and the “Dark Tower” movie that came out a couple of years ago. It may not be my favorite of his work, but I have a much greater appreciation for his career arc; he wrote horror to pay the bills so he could afford to get his best work noticed. That’s true dedication to his craft.

Well, everyone in the judges booth, here, thinks that you “Nailed” a perfect 10 on that landing. The Colour Commentators are all a-twitter about this page, the perspective (emotionally) and how two-level the conversation is, and yet they are really discussing the same thing. They’re just at two different levels of depth of experience.
It became real for me when my Bestest-friend-Ever!® died. I didn’t understand Real until that happened, didn’t really understand the depth of loss. Because no one in my family that I was close to had died.
Man, does a close death ever make it real!
Jo’s level of Real is like a gravity well and Jess is, not very carefully, circling the event horizon. We all know she’s gonna tip in, we’re just waiting for it, and it’ll all be over for her heart, any minute now, … any minute now, … just, …
I dunno where your brain is, art wise, if you imagined something better than this page. I don’t know what that could possibly have been, but it is way past my imagining. And that might be a good thing. (For me, I mean. You already seem to be there.)

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