squidbunnies.com - Most Excellent Comic Psychonauts

Before sharing the skeletal synopses of the three potential Psychonauts comics Nich Maragos dreamed up while wracked with paroxysms of pleasure after finishing Tim Shafer's Most Excellent brainchild (ha), a word from me, Erin, your artist, webhost, property manager and psychopomp:

1) Most synopsis/character description text is Nich's -- about 5% of it is my rambling to fill gaps left by my shitty conversion of Nich's proposal into this web ... thing. The story ideas are Nich's. The script for the 5 sample pages of Psychonauts: For Art's Sake is Nich's. Nich, in case you haven't put this together, was the writer/ideas guy on this project. I just followed behind him getting hit in the face with the flowers and butterflies that are his eternal, ethereal retinue giddily drawing Psychonauts-related stuff.

2) THIS VENTURE WAS IN NO WAY ENDORSED BY OR AFFILIATED WITH DOUBLE FINE, AND PSYCHONAUTS AND ALL RELATED MATERIAL IS THEIRS, THEIRS, THEIRS. Except Andrea Heighton, Street Smart, Aron Dessicant, Phil Nance and the rest. They are ours. And the stories are Nich's. But we covered this. Originally this whole seething mass of material was put together as a pitch of sorts for Tim and Double Fine in the hopes that they would lend us the intellectual property to do a horrible, wonderful comic as we were obsessed. They passed, but that doesn't give you or us or anyone else the right to go infringing on copyrights. Don't be a dick.

3) If for some retarded reason you haven't played the Most Excellent Game Psychonauts but still plan on it (there's always room for salvation!) probably just get out of here. Two of the following storylines are sequels to the events of the game and the other is a prequel but they are still laced with spoilers and as much as I love our glorified fanfic with all my soul really. don't. ruin. Psychonauts. with this stuff. Play the game, and once bitten and rabid with Tim Shafer's evil magicks come back here as we will accept you when fear and intolerance have driven you from civilization.

4) If you're reading all this you're probably interested in Psychonauts and finished with the game, which is good, as pretty much all of this assumes familiarity with Psychonauts' premise and primary personages.

Anyway, the Most Excellent Comic Psychonauts!

PSYCHONAUTS: THE WILL TO POWER

This is one of two possible story directions for a miniseries exploring Raz's post-game adventures in the Psychonauts. There are two main routes that seem valid for a comic about the Psychonauts, mainly because it's never established in the game precisely what their mission statement and
function is.

On the one hand, it's possible that the Psychonauts are a strike force dispatched to contain powerful threats such as Oleander and his army of brain-tanks -- this is certainly what seemed to be suggested by in-game elements such as Milla's flashback vault, the psychic battle at the top of the asylum tower, and the ending gathering of the forces to save Truman Zanotto.

On the other hand, most of what Raz, a Psychonaut-in-training, actually does in the game is function as a psychic therapist, entering people's minds to work out their problems in the otherworldly theater of their mental landscapes. This wouldn't be a bad way to portray the Psychonauts, either, as the psychiatrists you call when there's a VIP with too many hang-ups to do his job. Imagine an alternate world where Psychonauts were called in to deal with President Clinton's sexual addiction, or Ken Lay's compulsive lying. (Though naturally, we'd use fictional characters -- one thing that became clear early on was the danger of using any real-world references that could upset the Psychonauts tone.)

A successful Psychonauts comic would include elements of both approaches, but one of them should be foregrounded, and for the purposes of this proposal, we'll take the "psychic strike force" as the main premise, with a villain to overthrow and most of the action coming through real-world psychic duels and combat. There'll still be mental landscapes, but they'll figure in a bit less prominently.

Razputin
CHARACTERS entry

Sawao Tanaka
Sawao is just getting into field work after a stint behind a desk in Psychonauts Central, where he worked in dispatching. His scores were among the top of his class at the academy, but when it came time for assignments, he was held back due to there not being any open field agent positions at the time.

Under normal circumstances, Sawao is a hard worker and devoted agent; he can be humorless when on the job, but in his off-hours, he's capable of relaxing a little and enjoys a few drinks as much as the next guy. He's a master of psi-kata, the telekinetic art of fighting, and can mentally manipulate up to eight weapons while standing perfectly still.

Due to his work situation, however, he's even more resentful of Raz than most -- Sawao is several years older than Raz and graduated about six months prior to the Oleander case. Assigned Raz as a partner on his first case, Sawao sees it as an opportunity to prove not only how good an agent he can be, but how much better he is than Raz.

Hakress
A cult leader who's been brainwashing his victims and performing experiments on them. Acting on the principle that the average human uses only about 10% of the brain, Hakress has been working on expanding that statistic until he achieves full mental mastery.

Each member of his flock has been treated to open up new areas of the brain, which serves a dual purpose for Hakress: in the first place, his cult members double as a psycho-powered force of his own to take care of anyone like Raz who comes snooping around. Secondly, each new cultist has a different area of the brain optimal for development, and every new area Hakress discovers and cultivates in his flock is an area he can then safely optimize in his own mind, to eventually become the ultimate psychic on Earth.

Issue 1
This is where we reintroduce the slightly older Raz: an after-action report on his last Psychonauts mission, serves as a flashback over a few pages that establishes who Raz is and what Psychonauts do. Zanotto congratulates him on another job well done, and introduces Sawao, his new partner.

Following this, some background on Sawao, in a flashback on his last mission: filing papers. Sawao and Raz have an uncomfortable lunch, when Lili joins them, Raz finds his explanation of how he's not that close to the Zanottos even more awkward.

The two partners/rivals proceed to mission briefing, where we learn about the Hakress Cult, which has been operating for a while but recently claimed its first Psychonaut as a member. Raz and Sawao are assigned to investigate the cult, to make sure the agency's secrets are safe.

Issue 2
Raz and Sawao spend the issue infiltrating the Hakress cult, which has higher security than they expected -- their first clue as to Hakress' nefarious intentions. They eventually push through and find the brainwashed Psychonaut in Hakress' labs, but they're caught there by Hakress himself. They barely escape, but upon regrouping, Sawao knocks Raz out and goes back into the compound to prove he can get the captive agent out alone.

Raz, now without a partner or backup, has to get back into the cult compound and find where Sawao is being kept, while Sawao undergoes psychic conditioning. Discovering that things aren't nearly as easy without Tanaka around, Raz fails to find where Sawao is being kept -- but the point becomes moot when a brainwashed Sawao is waiting back at their campground, ready to take Raz out and bring him to Hakress....

PSYCHONAUTS: MENTIS MATER

The Hakress story was all about action, so this is the one that's more about imaginative mental worlds and super-psychiatry.

Razputin
CHARACTERS entry

Alex
A painfully withdrawn and shy son of a senator, Alex becomes Raz's first friend after he arrives, because he's the only one who'll have anything to do with an oddity like Raz. Alex spends all his time alone in his room, trying to maintain some shred of peace in the face of his social butterfly roommate.

Shelley
A snooty transfer student from Britain, whose family moved to America when her father accepted the ambassadorship, Shelley likes to tell people how much better things are across the pond. It doesn't ingratiate her with everyone, but there's a small clique of devotees who hang on her every accented word.

Ray
Ray, the son of a tech CEO, is the swimming champion of the school, and his star athlete status is being challenged by Raz's acrobatic prowess. He himself doesn't have a real beef against Raz, and in fact they have something in common in that they're both attending the school on sports scholarships, and their grades aren't the best. If the rest of the school wasn't so eager to see a showdown, there wouldn't be one -- but they are, and there will be.

Matt
Matt is King Nerd. He’s a 3.8 student who who founded the anime club, and is an officer in the computer science club on top. When not huddling together with others of his kind -- which, he's unaccountably convinced, includes Raz -- he stinks up his wing of the dorm with the glues and paints used for his extensive collection of model ships and planes.

Issue 1
Start the issue off with Raz eating with a group of other Psychonauts, sharing stories of recent missions as they eat. The age disparity becomes clearer when one of the other agents is reluctant to share some of the more risque features of a mental landscape.

Raz is called to the dispatch room where he's briefed on his next mission: to go undercover at a boarding school. One of the teachers is under suspicion of using psychic powers to pry important secrets out of one of the students, but no one knows which student or how it's being done. Raz's mission will be to covertly poke around in the students' minds to see if he can figure out which of the four most likely candidates is the victim.

From there, Raz goes to the school and meets a few of the students, including the four possible victims: Alex, Matt, Shelley, and Ray. He contrives to get into Alex's mind, which is as active and hyperkinetic as Alex is outwardly quiet. After pulling a few strings to get assigned as Alex's roommate, Raz settles into dorm life.

Issue 2
Partially devoted to Raz's misadventures around regular students and discovering how helpful the judicious application of psychic powers can be in faking your way past physics lab, issue 2 also gets Raz alone time with another of the possible students: Shelley, the recently transferred daughter of the British ambassador.

Her attempts to seem sophisticated and cosmopolitan to the other students don't hold up to mental scrutiny when Raz dives into her mind, and discovers that she was an average student and unpopular back home. What he doesn't discover is anything that might be of use to the spy on the faculty, so he pops back out and continues the search....

PSYCHONAUTS: FOR ART'S SAKE

(Note: this is by far the most "finished" of these - the sample pages are a rough beginning to For Art's Sake's first issue)

The way to do this would be to play up the contrast between agents Nein and Vodello as they go on an assignment: Sasha as consummate planner, Milla as the more flexible type, and the conflicts between them as they try to thwart a Psychic Criminal Mastermind (which seemed to be the sort of mission they accepted, based on Milla's flashback.)

Of course, that's just the cliched surface level. One thing I'd like to do with this plot idea is go deeper into each agent's character, show more individual characteristics and flesh them out past their respective character types. Their hidden pasts unlocked in the game's vaults did a pretty great job of this, but I think we could go further without rehashing Sasha's mom or Milla's kids.

I'd like to focus the storyline for the series around art -- art, after all, is a way of externalizing one's mental states, which is what Psychonauts is all about. One idea would be to have a jealous failed artist (more about him later) draining the creativity of world-renowned artists in several media, hoping to kidnap their muses for himself. Painting and theater were covered in Psychonauts, but there are plenty of avenues left: dance, poetry, prose, film, and comic books themselves are all goldmines of story potential.

Furthermore, having the two heroes' reaction to various forms and examples of art would provide a way to get that deeper characterization I mentioned before. For instance, one of my favorite gags for Sasha in the game was using the Tiffany lamps as dummies for Raz's marksmanship training. Going deeper with that, though, it hints at an unspoken appreciation for more subtle and interesting art, and a side of his personality that you wouldn't guess at from his right-angled, left-brained mental space explored within the game. Giving him a love of poetry would be a good fit for the character; it can be beautiful, but the best poetry also takes careful planning and follows a tightly defined meter, qualities he'd appreciate.

So that's a thumbnail sketch of the premise. Now for the characters. Here's my take on Sasha, Milla, and our villain, who'll be the three main characters in the series. (We'll also deal with the psyches and characterization of the individual artists under attack, but I'll get to those when talking about the issue synopses.)

Sasha Nein
CHARACTERS entry

Milla Vodello
CHARACTERS entry

Aron Dessicant
CHARACTERS entry

Issue 1
sample pages
This is the setup issue, which establishes not just the story of the series, but the principle behind the Psychonauts and the concept of a "mental world" for people who haven't played the game. Since it's got to be fun, too, to hook people trying out the first issue of a new miniseries, this will be a trip through the mind of a big-budget action film director along the lines of Michael Bay.

(Aron's first target would have been the biggest moneymaker in the most moneyed industry -- he would have later realized there's no profit in stealing a filmmaker's talent without a cast and crew to go along with it, but the director's mind is worth a visit anyway to get clues on Aron's whereabouts and plan.)

Inside the mind of a Bay-alike, the agents discover an exaggeratedly robust self-image, a worldview that breaks everyone down into leading men, love interests, comic relief, and cackling villains, and an understanding of physics that involves things blowing up at the slightest provocation. They'll have to navigate an illogical world of fast-paced action to get to the mental crime scene, and then get out before the whole place blows!!!

Issue 2
This is where we get into some material more directly relevant to our cast, as the agents travel into the mind of a rapper. A mental landscape based around freestyle music would give Milla a chance to shine, without the danger of repeating either the dance party level or the theater level (which a ballet performance or something would be similar to) from the game. Exploring the insecurities of an artist who's afraid of being shot on the one hand and exploited on the other would provide the necessary "emotional problem" hook to hang a psychological story on, too.