Broken Frontier

With 80+ pages of story on DC's Zuda webcomics site Road has proved a real hit with readers. As part of Broken Frontier's Inside Look series Road creators Eddie Sharam and Jamie Woodhead give BF a three-part "creator's commentary" on the strip this week. Check back tomorrow and Friday for the next two installments of this exclusive behind-the-scenes analysis... 

Series Premise

Felix is a 'Pilgrim of the Road'. In this world there is one road grander than all others and it runs possibly forever in length. No one knows if the Earth is no longer a sphere, or if it has just increased massively in size. All that is known is that there is a road with populated cities and settlements along it that you can travel down your whole life and it will never end or repeat. Once there was no road like this and the world was a nice manageable place.

The Pilgrims of the Road are a group devoted to finding the Source or Terminus of the Road, and they travel down the Road for their entire lives. When they die, each Pilgrim passes the task on to one of their sons or daughters and then they travel the Road. Chosen Pilgrim families have the knowledge of their ancestors stored in an AI implanted into their skulls. These are ancient artifacts passed through the generations, designed to accumulate knowledge of the Road and aid the current Pilgrim's progress by supplying information from past experiences.

We join Felix as he's readying to leave a city to join the Road again, but this time he's cutting all ties with the Pilgrims. He is one of the Chosen with an AI in his forehead. The Pilgrims are unlikely to let him leave freely without his obedience to their cause assured. Felix is on the run from his fellow Pilgrims and assorted city low-lives while trying to get out of the city and further down the Road.

Page 1

The narrative structure we try and follow for Road is to make it like a series of close-ups that never pull back to reveal the whole scene. This gives Road a disjointed, surrealist quality which sets it apart from a lot of comics.

There was a review of William Gibson’s Neuromancer somewhere which said it reads like the author has his finger jittering on the Fast-Forward button, and that seems to be a good analogy for how Road reads too.

Page 1 is really like a cover or chapter page. Felix and Miah, two of the main characters are shown, as well as other important elements like his parrot, car and the city, Kaiden's Rift. The image also gives a nice mise-en-scene and sets the tone for a lot of the pages to come. There's also hints of upcoming story points, like the skull he's holding. This page is useful for inspiration as it acts as a kind of mood-board for the series. Some little previously overlooked detail always seems to catch your eye and provide inspiration at a critical moment.

Pages 15 and 17

These pages are interesting from a character development point of view as we start to get a taste of the double dealings and back-stabbings which pervade the Road universe. We also see the introduction of two important people, Kyde and the Mother Superior of the Sisterhood.

Road has a fairly large main cast of characters and none of them could be said to be completely good or evil. All have complex inter-character relationships with a fair amount of subterfuge and betrayal going on. Writing characters in this way is kind of like playing chess against yourself, planning several moves ahead for one side, then trying to plan countermoves pretending you don’t know the other’s strategy. We do keep notes on character development and sub-plots, but nothing in Road is set in stone. Working in this format gives us chance to tweak the course of the story and keep it interesting.

Writing chunks of plot into conversations between characters isn’t something we enjoy. So we tend to avoid it whenever possible. This is lucky because it fits into the structure of the story. Most of the plot points are buried in throw-away lines or broken up over a series of un-connected pages, such as the development of the Dark Arms, or Felix’s connection with the extinct line of Pilgrim Chosen AI. It would be tempting to stop and explain in a large chunk of text the background to these objects, but we find that 70s style of ‘classic’ Sci-Fi very dull, so the details are left to the reader’s imagination and the plot advances.

Page 21

This page is interesting as it marks a turning point in Felix and Miah's relationship; self-interested co-operation instead of hostility and Felix being on the defensive for a change.

Page 28

This page is good for its panel flow and badass action. We enjoyed the feedback we got for this page when it went up on Zuda. That's the great thing about webcomics, almost instant feedback from the readers! We do read it all and enjoy the interaction on the comments thread about the latest pages.

Check out Road at the Zuda website here. To be continued tomorrow...