Export thread

Recently, I watched "Through a Scanner Darkly", and I was amazed to see Fade--or at least his namesake "superpower" --very similar to the way I had written it down some years ago. I wrote the first stories circa 1998, long before I heard of the movie. Now, I've read a lot of books in my day, and now I'm not so sure I didn't pull something of it from the book, which I'm not sure if I've read or not. I didn't think I had, but it's quite the coincidence.

I'm talking about the scramble suit. When I first set out writing about a superhero, I actually had a whole set of heroes in mind. All of which had intentionally minor versions of more common superpowers. I had a speedster with a top speed of 35 mph. A superhumanly strong character who probably couldn't outpress a bodybuilder, though he was slight in build. And then there was Fade, who had a sort of reduced invisibility. Anonymity would work, I thought. He wouldn't be invisible per se, but you wouldn't be able to recall him with any detail. His video image and his fingerprints would be indistinct, etc. Then I added the science fantasy aspect and the multidimensionality of string theory, and I decided that the anonymity would basically come from a confused jumble of the various people Holt could/should/might be. I sketched out this nasty conglomerate of shifting body bits. Compare this to Dick's description of the scramble suit.

The scramble suit was an invention of the Bell laboratories, conjured up by accident by an employee named S. A. Powers... Basically, his design consisted of a multifaceted quartz lens hooked up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human.
As the computer looped through its banks, it projected every conceivable eye color, hair color, shape and type of nose, formation of teeth, configuration of facial bone structure - the entire shroudlike membrane took on whatever physical characteristics were projected at any nanosecond, then switched to the next...

In any case, the wearer of a scramble suit was Everyman and in every combination (up to combinations of a million and a half sub-bits) during the course of each hour. Hence, any description of him - or her - was meaningless.

Click to expand...

Compare also to the movie imagery, and you can see my dismay. By no means is this the end of Fade. He's grown beyond just this one trick pony anyway. But it will certainly play a role. It already has, in issue 1, last page.

This has come back up, because I'm attempting to draw the next page, wherein the power debuts (note that Nachtmann does not recognize Holt), and I'm drawing out designs that are at least visual distinct from the film.