This is the post about the latest Secret Knots comic called “Quinton Page eats a sandwich”. You can read it here.
1. Inspiration
The theme that inspired the story is present on the youtuber clickbaity headline: the media spotlight on body or weight alterations by movie stars, and all the exotic hollywood stunts attached to big names and blockbusters. Remember the Oscars? Now it may feel like it happened quite some time ago, but it was around those days that I was thinking more than ever about acting, and some of the legends around it, so I finally decided to pin down this story through a Headlines format.
I read some reactions to the comic noting how it goes through more than what is initially expected, and I really like that it’s perceived like that. Something I’m constantly aspiring to is telling stories with strange waves, and try to find interesting twists in this medium-length format, particularly now that most comics seem to aim for either short jokes or the long, decompressed graphic novel format. The short story length may be more of a rarity these days in online comics, and I keep coming back to it to see where else can we go with it. I tend to think that there’s a place right now for a reading experience that ask for a bit more than a quick glance on the phone screen, of course the only way I have to measure this is through the feedback I get, which in this case has been pretty positive.
2. References
There’s a couple of memes referenced in the comic, one of course is the “sad Keanu” and the other one, this less known Andrei Tarkovski reaction screen:
which seemed fun to use because the body language is so great and the panel in the comic wants to express exactly that.
For some panels I was loosely imitating the layout of real film-centric blogs, in this case Filmschoolrejects and Vanityfair.
The psychophonic Oscar acceptance speech reminds me a lot of the creepy Zod video messages in Man of Steel. Although I didn’t looked it out to make the drawing, I think it was in my mind all the while.
Just like with the extremely thin version of the actor I was thinking about Christian Bale in the Machinist, but I didn’t want the comic to be a specific parody of someone in particular, so I didn’t look for images, even if it was probably the example I had in mind.
3. Head Canon
Where we speculate about further things that may be going on in here.
Not so much head canon as scrapped version: The original script for the comic ended up with Quinton lost in the beyond instead of reincarnated, looking for new venues and ways to put his talent to use, with a fake classic comic headline that read: “The Secret Knots presents: The Adventures of Quinton Page, movie star in another dimension” or something like that.
This comic was way weirder in the beginning.
The childhood of Mikkel Kvint must have been very special, slowly coming to conscious terms with his old self coming back. Moreso: depending on when and how it happened, we could even say he was a bit of a jerk to show off in school plays along with shyer, adorable kids playing inanimate roles as trees and the moon, right?
I hope you have enjoyed this extras! If you got this far, as they say on Youtube: please give it a like, and feel free to comment, add to or contradict the head canon as you wish. Work on the Take Me There portraits has been slower than expected, but if you haven’t received yours yet, is coming your way soon.
See you soon with more stories.
Thanks,
Juan
