(Meta) The Long Way Home - annotated

Since I've now finished this project, I thought it would be a good idea to make this summary post with links to all four parts, so that I can link to this summary and put it in Memories.

The Long Way Home - Act 1

The Long Way Home - Act 2

The Long Way Home - Act 3

The Long Way Home - Act 4

I wrote up the transcripts in the form of a shooting script, both for fun and out of familiarity with that form, but also because it helps to set out exactly who's speaking and where each scene is taking place - something that a few people have complained was difficult to follow in the comics format. For that reason, I did make more use of time indications in scene changes - the original Mutant Enemy scripts for the TV show sometimes include notifications like "TWO DAYS LATER" or "MEANWHILE", but more often they omit them. I was more conscientious in adding them because a big rason for writing these was to help people follow the action.

Secondly, my actual annotations also included recaps and summaries of the story, as well as reminders of plot points, who characters are, and so on. I even tried to explain back-references to events on the TV show when they cropped up. Secondly, I tried to point out the cultural references, in-jokes, and so forth - the one I'm most proud of was identifying Satsu's '"Speed Racer' lunchbox with only the letters "Sp- Rac-" and an outline drawing of a car to go on: that took a lot of Google Image Searching and a fair bit of trial and error before I identified the source!

I sometimes wondered if I was stating the obvious or even being patronising in some of the references I made - I means, does anybody not know that a "Get out of jail free" card is a reference to Monopoly, that piña colada includes pineapple juice, or that Ethan Rayne last appeared in 'A New Man' in season 4? But then I thought that everybody knew what "five by five" means too, and that turned out not to be the case; so I erred on the side of inclusivity and completeness in my annotations...