So what do most comicbooks have in common?
Major cites.
Every big superhero book takes place in some kind of big city. Now why is this? Well its quite hard for Peter Parker to swing from building to building when he lives in rural Wisconsin. Cites can provide more than than just pretty backdrops, to me, cites are places of adventure. Any and everything can happen in a major city like New York or Chicago. For a group of 14-15 year olds who've never really experienced a big city this can also give the Saviors a place to find themselves.
And that's where the Satellite came from. Now I've never actually been to New York (despite living right by it) or Chicago so I couldn't use them as my setting. I wanted a setting that I knew so much about I could recite facts about it off the top of my head. Instead of spending weeks studying a memorizing information I decided to create my own city.
Boy was that a mistake.
Okay first hurdle in this marathon of a setting, population. I'm not good with numbers, I forget how old I am on a constant basis and I'm really bad at math so coming up with a believable city is kinda hard. The impression of the city I had when I made it was that it was a major city on par with New York. Now New York's population is around 8.406 million while my first guess of a population for Satellite's 10,000. Obviously I had to change that to something new and eventually I came up with 90,000,000.
Second problem, what to do with it. New York I assume is filled with things going on, street performers, sports games, crazy pedestrians. I've never experienced any of that where I lived and the way I write is focused on real life experiences. Without having seen any of this I can't give a good description of the sights and sounds of a major city. If I tried then it would come off hollow and boring. So instead of trying my best or watching a video of these things I took the easy way out and opted to do nothing with the streets itself and instead did more of a big picture thing.
Third and final problem. World building, see all good comics have some level of world building. Hell all good forms of media have levels of world building in it. Think of Batman, the comics or the games or even the shows wouldn't be as enjoyable to watch, read and play without Gotham. Gotham is as essential to the caped crusader as Alfred or Robin is. So for the Saviors I should do something simaler, I should make the city influence who they are and what motivates them. By the time I realized this however I was already 13 chapters in. Now I did find a way to make a city reflect a character it just wasn't the Satellite, it was Adali and Lottwell.
But all these problems with the city remind me to improve on them. I'm too far into the first arc of the Saviors to do things now but arc two is still in the planning stages. There's still room for me to include and expand on things there.
All in all the Satellite is an amazing idea with poor execution that shows I still have a ways to go with my writing.
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