Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Too Long A Sacrifice #1 hits your local comic shop July 15, but thanks to IDW Publishing, Monkeys Fighting Robots has an exclusive conversation with the writers of the series, Scott Tipton and David Tipton as they breakdown four pages from the first issue.
Greg Scott is the artist on the book, Felipe Sobreiro dropped some color, and you will read Neil Uyetake’s letter work. The cover featured above is the retailer incentive by J.K. Woodward, and Cover A is by Ricardo Drumond.
About Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Too Long A Sacrifice #1:
Death casts its shadow as Constable Odo searches for truth amid a web of treachery and lies. Everyone on the Promanade has a motive for this murder, be it vengeance, justice… or old-fashioned greed.
Enjoy the commentary by Scott Tipton and David Tipton
Page 3
SCOTT TIPTON: I’ve always liked the friendship between Bashir and Garak on DS9, and that was something we definitely wanted to touch on when we knew we were coming back. I always liked that mixture of the genuine affection Garak seemed to have for Bashir, along with the sense that Garak always knew more than he was telling you.
DAVID TIPTON: One of Garak’s favorite rhetorical tricks is to ask a question even though he already knows the answer so he can draw out even more information. Here he does that, then he hints he knows even more, and finally he backpedals, keeping Bashir in the dark. Garak’s use of words is precise and strategic even though it’s often couched in obsequiously friendly tones. It’s more likely than not that had this conversation continued, Garak would have walked away with some helpful new nuggets of information about the war, while Bashir would have learned nothing new (except those few scraps Garak chose to divulge).
Pages 4-5
DAVID TIPTON: Two-page spreads are tricky. You’re using up a lot of storytelling space, so you have to make the most of them. In this case, I love when a story moves forward dramatically in panels without word balloons. I don’t want to rely too much on word balloons to talk you through a scene like this; I want the reader to see this story, and Greg Scott’s art here is fantastic, conveying the violence and chaos of the explosion.
SCOTT TIPTON: I love this double-page spread, a bit of storytelling that we don’t utilize very often.
Greg Scott did a great job here getting across the sudden unexpected nature of the bombing, as well as subtly showing how Garak tried to protect Bashir, a surprisingly heroic move that might surprise someone who didn’t know Garak well.
Page 6
SCOTT TIPTON: Colors are great here, with the muted yet still vibrant images of Odo, Dax and O’Brien against the bombed-out gray of the destroyed restaurant Especially here where we have a lot of information we need to communicate to the reader, Greg and our colorist Felipe Sobreiro manage to convey the degree of damage done to the station.
DAVID TIPTON: That bottom panel of page 6 has very nice work by Greg and Felipe showing the significant damage to the station, with walls and arches slightly askew and Dax, Odo, and O’Brien in silhouette in the middle of it all. I like the way they’ve done a great job of showing how this destruction would affect Deep Space Nine’s asymmetric, angular, and uniquely Cardassian style of architecture and design.
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