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Winnie and the lamp

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Here is a progress report on Free Spirit. As you can see, the sketch-pencil art style has been refined and now looks more polished and detailed. In the beginning I was using the same pencil brush I use to rough out things I go over with ink later. That was fine for that purpose, but not for this one.

You all have no idea what you're in for. Over the past two months of brainstorming, this project has continually surprised me with the twists and turns it's taken, and it's grown to become my favorite cartoon series since Electric Wonderland. I'm impatiently anxious to share all this material, but it's all going to have to wait until January, when the first issue is currently scheduled to run. I figured this page would be safe since it's a bit you've already seen.

I wish I could skip the whole origin story and get things running faster, but there are several important things to establish that can only be effectively done so if I rewrite the events of the pilot. At this point it's been pretty heavily rewritten -- only the skeletal framework is left, and besides, I feel dirty whenever I actually lift something from it. But I did like Winnie reaching over and turning on the light -- it was a great "screw you" gag and it was needed. It's the first time we see her do anything. As Winnie's preparing, the viewer is already anticipating something to go wrong with her spell. By bypassing that guess entirely, and thereby robbing the audience of their first glimpse of Winnie's magic, they're caught off-guard, so that when it DOES happen moments later, the tension is diffused and a laugh is more likely. I doubt whoever made this was thinking this hard about it, but it was a good accident.

On the show this is followed by Gene giving her a dirty look and Winnie saying, "Just an old witch joke." Not only does this line put a damper on the humor we just got by "apologizing" for it, an "old witch joke" for someone with Winnie's longevity would have to go back millennia, and the light bulb was only a hundred years old.

When I had fleshed out the characters, come up with a sufficient back story for Winnie, and then revisited the scene for my own adaption, something new happened: after Winnie botches the light trick, she says to Gene, "You're not mad?" It revealed that, up to that point, Winnie was used to suffering for being herself, and meeting the Harpers was the first time she was not only allowed to, but encouraged to.
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