ONE PLUS ONE: I Want In, p. 1
Writing: Ron Edwards / Art: Manuela Soriani & Mattia Bulgarelli
Become a patron to see the story pages in colors / visit Adept Comics for more info
Bank robbery – the standby crime in comics, but one of the dumbest in actual application. Watch her do it right.
Posted on July 7, 2016, in Adept Comics, One Plus One and tagged I Want In. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
Comics Madness 
I like it! Good start.
I also like the Patreon mechanic where we can read it anyway, but choose to pay to read for color. Sounds smart and also especially adept (I swear I didn’t make that wordplay on purpose lol) for superhero comics. (I always thought American superhero comics had a weird relationship with color, compared to French/Belgian and Japanese ones: F/B use it aesthetically, J prefer to just give you a ton of black & white pages. In American comics it’s just there, always expected but usually not done well. So for me this mechanic is interesting in that in the same motion does away with the idea that it ought to be there, and at the same time puts it in a place of value.)
Hey. Back to the story, I just realized something. $190.000 at first sounded kinda lowish to me (then again who am I to talk, here in the “Third World” that amount of dollars would make you a millionaire lol). Then I felt fictional bank robberies had accostumed me to millions, and this was probably more “realistic” and smart: doing a bunch of $190.000, six minute robberies it’s a hell of a way of making a living.
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I love readers like you.
About color: I suffered greatly over this, as I love black-and-white comics dearly. We took some time to make sure that the black-and-white was not merely “uncolored,” but had a readable quality that derived from its own properties. When the story is concluded, you’ll see the collected PDF with the high-res black-and-white too. I would like to claim that the “subscribe for color” idea was in place from the start, but the fact is, I only figured that out and decided to do it quite recently.
Manuela specializes in brilliant, beautiful colors, so it took a while to find a good way to combine her strengths with my preference for spotting blacks and naturalistic colors. I think we hit upon the perfect complement which will make the powers in action especially fun. I also didn’t want to take the comic into monochrome “gloomy” colors which is kind of where most “serious grim supers/villains” books go.
About the story: I learned that bank robberies in the U.S. take an average of about $50,000. It really is a stupid crime – the stacks of cash in a bank vault are literally laid out as bait for these robberies and won’t enter circulation otherwise, and sometimes they’re loaded with explosive dye charges. Catching bank robbers is usually a matter of a single phone call.
You’ll glimpse on page 2 what Topaz actually took; it wasn’t cash. Also, no one keeps “millions” in a bank in cash, because anyone who measures money in “millions” never sees or thinks about cash anyway. That whole construct is a movie thing based on the typical citizen’s (literal) worship of cash, as if it were in fact money or wealth.
You’re right that she’s doing this as basic income, and there’s more to come about how she manages it. It strikes me too that $190,000, say, once a year, debt-free, would keep me and my family nicely situated indefinitely.
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Thanks a lot!
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Also, this music fits: Goliath, Hot Rock and Thunder, We’re Not Afraid
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