Okay, finished reading issue one, and I gotta say, I’m (re)hooked.
“Powering cat,” Robyn said. Jack’s adrenaline level and heart rate was rising, but Robyn sounded bored. Jack knew her well enough to know she was as excited as he was, but military pilots had a tradition going back to the dawn of the jet age of keeping their cool. If they didn’t sound like they were about to fall asleep, they weren’t pilots.
Jack felt an increase in vibration as the catapult holding the dropship powered up, building and holding enough power to fling the massive armored craft out of the Envoy and into space.
“Launch in five,” Robyn said.
“Four, Three, Two…”
Jack felt a sharp build in power. Here it came…
“One.”
With a jolt, the dropship plunged out of the drop bay and into the open space beyond. The exploration of humanity’s first extrasolar colony world had begun.
Something else I’ve noticed in going over this again is the detail. I’ve never been big on backgrounds. One of the reasons I wasn’t much of a comics artist was that I tended to mail in the backgrounds. Once I got done drawing the characters, I was ready for the next panel and most of the stories seemed to take place in empty, sterile rooms. With prose I get off a little easier in that the reader is expected to shoulder some of the visualization chores, but I have to give them a good starting point.
One of the things I’ve noticed so far in UC and that I’m recommiting myself to continue is a solid attention to detail and enough of the not only visual but auditory and tactile cues around the characters to give a sense of place, to make UC seem like takes place in the real world. I don’t want to slow down the pace of the story, and I’m not going to spend too much time expounding on the scenery (this balance was part of what made writing issue 6, “Embedded”, so damn hard), but a solid sense of setting lends weight to the characters and what they do.
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