Athena #2 - Atop the Fourth Wall

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• published: 29 Feb 2016
• views: 242

Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. In this episode, Linkara looks at the second issue of Athena! http://atopthefourthwall.com Originally uploaded April 21st, 2014. ORIGINAL INFO: Place your bets! Which will there be more of: Athena’s ass or her talking? RUMINATIONS: And so begins the last major story arc before the movie – the Machinations of Worms! The one that’s being written and started at the time of this writing, “The Sleepwalker,” is intended to be a BIG storyline, with lots of major issues and character stuff and visual effects that I want to have happen and need to be planned and yadda yadda yadda. But at the same time, I was also starting to put my foot in the water for the movie – writing it, revising it, and seeing about getting the actors and crew that I wanted. Some of those crew did not end up working on the film and the script did indeed go through a lot of changes, but the point was that I was not ready to do the Sleepwalker at this point. And so I took an idea that I had tossed in at kind of the last second as a red herring in “Ghost of the Machine” – the King of Worms. Much like the storylines of old, I had a general idea of where it was going, but nothing solid planned out. I did still write a lot of stuff in advance and get ideas here and there, but stuff like what the King would actually look like ended up being done at the absolute last minute. Besides, the idea of the “Machinations” was that the King himself was not actively involved in the events, but rather operating through proxies and plans. In this case, it was the cybermats. I have always loved cybermats, ever since I first learned about them as a young Doctor Who fan. Even back when I was a kid I tried to build one with the assistance of my mom, some thin cardboard, some aluminum foil, and a lot of patience. Unfortunately, the thing was so fragile you couldn’t really play with it, so it just sat and was eventually forgotten and thrown away. As an adult and someone who has SLIGHTLY more experience prop-building now, I’ve made several of them with limited success (the one built by featherweight is MUCH better, with enhancement made by a fan who I paid to add a better remote control section for it plus lights), but I loved the idea that the tiny little things that I loved and everyone thought were cute and mostly just served as background fodder… had been co-opted by evil and were ready to serve the King’s wishes. For what was essentially a filler arc, I had a blast writing and filming a lot of it. However, it was also quite a bit stressful as time went on and I got closer to the end point and needing to rush a lot of stuff. Fortunately, I was able to turn small ideas into much bigger story points, but that’s for another time. For this episode, though, I knew what was going to be happening for the 300th episode, so I wanted to both establish the Megaforce morpher for that as well as start the storyline off in a humorous fashion, let things gradually grow more and more menacing. This also introduced the whiteboard in the background. I had gotten it the summer before to try to get myself to work more efficiently, listing off projects that needed to be done by a certain time, but since that purpose had passed, I felt I could use it for foreshadowing. In case you’re wondering, the three phrases on it are: “Who is Fat Grandma,” “Caelestis Mission,” and “Where is Lord Vyce?” The Fat Grandma one was to establish the simple reality that, well, Fat Grandma is not a character on my show, the Vyce one was to establish the subplot, and finally the Caelestis mission was to drop the first hint for the movie. Since this was shortly after the SCI-Spy #5 incident, I decided to try a little test with this one, too. By this point in time, people had readily accepted storylines as a part of the show and many were even demanding more of them, so I wanted to see if letting people know it was a storyline episode (since I usually kept it secret to have people keep watching a video to the end) would result in a higher viewcount for an episode that would otherwise only get average view since it was an independent comic. Sadly, I saw no noticeable change in viewing figures.