Introduction to the Script

This is the story of Irene (Greek for “peace”), a Greek woman who becomes an iconic being, more a force than a character. She is Jinx from Larry Hama’s G.I. Joe, Elektra from Frank Miller’s Daredevil, and Shado from Mike Grell’s Green Arrow. She is both Shi and Kabuki.

The first issue is 48 pages. The second and third are 50. The fourth is 44. The total is thus 192 pages, or 200 with two pages before each chapter in a trade paperback. This is essentially as long as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, The Books of Magic (mini-series), Marvels (without the zero issue), or Kingdom Come.

Whoever illustrates this has to be able to draw beautiful women, and not in a cheesecake fashion. There’ll be no big eyes here, no Japanese distorted figures, and no dumb looks. I think Chuck Austen’s art on Marvel’s present Elektra series has been very good and would be appropriate.

Though I’d been planning to invent this archetypical character for years, I started writing this story in summer of 2001. It took me quite some time given how long I’d been planning it and how much I’d scripted, though not formally written. I finished it in September of 2001. It wasn’t so much that it was hard to write as that it was taxing to do so. I knew perfectly well where each scene was going, but by the time I got through it I just wanted to sleep. This story has this kind of power: it taxes you, challenges you. There’s an edge to it that is beautiful, but by the time you’d admired its beauty, you notice you’ve not a smooth cut right through you. I only hope readers are brave enough to keep coming back and to actually have the guts to admire that beauty.

Some miscellaneous notes. The pun with the title is certainly intended, but the story is indeed philosophical, if not spiritual. The use of black panels is a running symbol, and they’re used more as the story goes on. Larger panels and faster pacing (i.e. less events per page) increase in usage as the story progresses and the main character gains more peace, as it were. The opposite is a 16-panel page in issue 1 -- fragmentation [1 | 2] expressed on the page with smaller panels and slower pacing (i.e. it takes one longer to get through a single page).

A note on chronology. The script establishes that she lost her husband in 1974 after six months or so of marriage. She was 16 or perhaps 17 when she married, sometime around late 1973. This means she was born in 1957 or 1956 and completed her training in 1977 or 1978. This would make her 25 or perhaps 26 in 1982, when the main section of Miller’s use of (a living) Elektra occurred in Daredevil. She’d have turned thirty in 1987 or 1986. She’d never have made it to forty.

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