Digitopia – page 11
Hi there, welcome to page 11 of the comic book, when writing this page I was really interested in exploring the concept of how politicians can play the media.
Spin doctors playing the media game
In this page Yale discovers that his Chancellor Milburn has been secretly smuggling Digitopian refugees to safety within the city perimeters.
I love the way in which both of these panels we have Yale looking directly into the screens, it’s almost as if he’s looking in the mirror, in the first instance he sees Milburn who is very much the opposite of Yale
It’s actually a two way street – the politicians play the media as much as the media play the politicians.
I wanted to mirror the way in which modern day spin doctors think about how the media angle will play when they make their decisions.
Here in this story, while the media thinks it’s free (something that we’ll touch more on in issue 2), it’s actually been carefully cultivated to do Yale’s bidding.
In this panel Yale has already plotted out how Laika Live will play out his narrative for him, especially since Milburn is Laika’s father (more on that in the coming pages).
As he moves closer in this panel, he sees Laika who is a child of his empire, he’s influenced her thought patterns and now she plays out his narrative without even knowing that she’s doing it.
Going against orders
The second concept I wanted to explore was that of going against orders, it’s a theme that I’ve explored with the soldiers in earlier pages – what do you do in the situation when the when the instruction given is wrong?
It’s easy to sit here far away from hostile situations and think that we’d all be noble and principled and not do what we’re told when we don’t believe in it – but in practice it’s not that easy.
Kluseller does try to put forward her own point of view, but she’s quickly shut down, her ideas are dismissed – he’s not interested in hearing other ideas
If you think it is easy, have a think about a time when your boss told you to do something that you didn’t want to do. We all do it unfortunately, I think the reason is because our own well being is linked to keeping our jobs and making sure we have money.
Though we can delude ourselves and think we are paid for the value of our ideas, the unfortunate truth is that many of the jobs that we have in 2020 are still linked to the notion that you get paid for following instructions and typically that means appeasing those in higher authority positions to ourselves.
Kluseller tries to stand up to him, but here she’s intimidated, she has a lot to lose if she does not do her master’s bidding, reluctantly she follows instructions and does what she’s told.
Reluctantly, like so many of us, she ‘has’ to follow orders.
I have planned out content for each page based on the themes the pages deal with, I wanted to try this format and do a page breakdown.
I’d love to know how you find these types of breakdowns, in this one I’ve focused specifically on the story beats, let me know in the comment’s section whether you did and if there are other aspects that you’d like posts to be about, e.g. an art or colour breakdown of the page.
Thanks for your support, see you on the next page.
Farhan
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