HCC: HCC 36-1/2: One Minute Origin

Scott Eiler seiler at eilertech.com
Thu Apr 25 19:09:47 PDT 2013


On 4/25/2013 6:39 PM, Tom Russell wrote:

> I seem to have a knack for picking unappealing challenges (or perhaps
> to pick said challenges at times when real life-- with all its
> pleasure and misery-- intrudes). Part of it I think is I come up with
> concepts that are perhaps too precisely defined, that aren't open
> enough. As the guy who started the HCC, I'm not entirely comfortable
> with being the guy who killed it. So I thought I'd call a "mulligan"
> on my previous challenge and throw out one that might be a bit less
> limiting so that there's a chance there'll be a number thirty-seven.
> :-)

For my own part, I had a plan to respond to that challenge.  I'll still 
get that story out sometime soon, probably during the current Powernaut 
All-Star Break.  But I gave other things priority.

For the first High Concept Challenge, I wrote my first RACC story and 
made it entirely on topic.  But usually I responded to challenges by 
cramming them in with whatever else I was writing at the time. 
Justifiably, my stories usually lost.  So I've given that approach up. 
Now my stories have less room for the unpredictable, especially since I 
tend to plot them months in advance with rigid panel boundaries.

> Before every superhero got their own Year One miniseries, before they
> wrote for the trade, before even the fifteen-page epic that was
> Amazing Fantasy # 15's lead story... there was the two-page origin
> stories for Superman and Batman. Brief, primal, distilled, yet oddly
> powerful and resonant in ways that the long-form origin story, for
> all their merits, could not match.
>
> Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a brief
> and distilled origin story for a hero. I won't put a cap on the
> word-count, or limit what constitutes a "hero". It can be a new hero
> or an old one. It can be whatever the words "one minute origin story"
> move you to write.

I was going to refer everyone to Powernaut 1944 (Powernaut and the Power 
Stars, STARring...), which is almost origin stories which take about one 
minute to read.  Oh, why not write more of that?  I'm in the Powernaut 
All-Star Break, so my plans are open to change right now.  But the 
series needs new characters!

Who among RACC wants to bring forth a character who fought in World War 
2?  Your job is to explain why your character didn't win the war 
singlehandedly.  My job is to draw an episode of Powernaut 1944 with 
your character!  Or hey, if *you* want to draw it, so much the better! 
Or even just write it as text.  Or even not call it Powernaut and the 
Power Stars!

... So I guess there is at least one way we can all approach this 
challenge.  8{D>

-- 
(signed) Scott Eiler  8{D> -------- http://www.eilertech.com/ ---------

When you *are* the leader... whatever goes wrong... whether you did it
or not... *you* are held responsible. - Barack Obama

I know. - Archie Andrews

- from Archie #617, March 2011, scripted by Alex Simmons.


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