Pramit's Comics Dump

Life-Time Issue 2 Pg.2 by PramitLife-Time Issue 2 Pg.2 by Pramit

Oi, mate!

Pramit here. So, this week started rather strange. I got a review of Life-Time Issue 2 from a great comic reviewer Comic Bastards. I’ve even seen their comic reviews being counted on Mark Millar books, so I did submit issue 1 last time and issue 2 this time as well.

However, I learnt that the reviewer on site was more of a fun-fun guy. I don’t blame him. With all the madness in the world, everybody today reads comics or watches movies just to have fun.

Here’s the review- https://comicbastards.com/comics/review-life-time-2

Life-Time Issue 2 is rated 2/5. In a world where every Big 2/image comic is rated 9/10, 2/5 is actually low as hell.

So, I thought I should try to decipher my own dilemma with this. Comics, in general, are just like 10 minutes of a movie. A 20 pager comic is nothing for than 10-16  minutes of a film. In films, we take the first 10-20 minutes to introduce all the major characters, which is what I did in Life-Time issue 1. But also, we have a guideline to make every issue worth reading by making it look like a whole. If you’ve read Issue 1, you can tell that there’s a lot of data that is “seen and not told”- that’s another golden guideline in entertainment. I gave enough to a serious reader to see the story.

In Issue 2, I tried the same and retold the connection of Mariah and Frank. Technically, issue 2 is the minutes 10-20 of the film. In a film, the first 20-30 minutes is the first act. This is where the premise is set. Now, that is the problem of the reviewer. He simply doesn’t know what the premise is, what this act 1 is and says that I’m doing mass exposition. Exposition is something that villains or characters do in films to make people understand things clearly. But that doesn’t happen before the late Act 2 or in Act 3. Storytelling in Act 1 CANNOT be exposition, it’s the basic premise. Without the act set on, you can’t tell the story at all.

So, what do you say when someone accuses you of spilling all the beans in the 1st act of story? All the huge unnecessary captions do the exact same thing in comics from Pros. But just because my character said 2 lines to set the story, Act 1 premise becomes EXPOSITION? That is weird, the reviewer is surely confused here.

Now, let’s come to the story structure. Yeah, Life-Time happens to have a very rare structure. Something that’s rarely used in films and comics with average success. You must have seen such examples in movies before, they’re called Multiple story movies. A movie where you have multiple stories running in different places at a time and they all connect at the end. Well, that is the structure I followed in Life-time. It’s really nothing new. If you can’t understand it, you must haven’t seen a single multistory rom-com or a good Guy Ritchie movie in your entire life.

All this, I’m explaining, not to discredit the reviewer but to tell that all COMICS aren’t supposed to be the same single story with superhero cliches. Today, because of the amazingly stupid Marvel films, good films in Hollywood have become an endangered species. And regrettably, the same is true for comics. But still, we must try something that doesn’t fall into the same BS category. That’s one of the many reasons, why I’m drawing Life-Time.

On Amazon.com kindle-

On Amazon.in

Fuxcelsior!