Unscripted, by Elayne Riggs

Elayne Riggs

Elayne Riggs is the creator of the popular blog Pen-Elayne on the Web. She was a founding member of Friends of Lulu, an organization dedicated to increasing the involvement of girls and women in comics, as readers and creators. She is married to inker Robin Riggs, with whom she shares two cats, and has odd love/hate relationship with Hillary Clinton.

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3 Responses

  1. Martha Thomases says:

    Events for the female gaze — two words: swimming, diving.

  2. Russ Rogers says:

    I don't write comics. I've written a few songs. Bizarro speak dialog sounds like "scratch lyrics" to me. Those are lyrics written to give a sense of meter and structure to a song in an early draft, when you know you are going to come back in and write better stuff later.Sometimes scratch lyrics can be like "La, la, la, la June. La, la, la, la, la, moon," pegging in some of the rhymes and giving some sense to the song. Sometimes the lyrics just fill up space. Paul McCartney's original lyric for "Yesterday," was, "Scrambled eggs, oh, my baby, how I love your legs."There's a line in "Hey Jude," The movement you need is on your shoulder, that was originally a scratch lyric. Paul said, "I was playing 'Hey Jude' when I got to the line 'The movement you need is on your shoulder' and I turned round to John and said: 'I'll fix that if you want.' And he said: 'You won't, you know, that's a great line, that's the best line in it.' Now that's the other side of a great collaborator – don't touch it, man, that's OK." I think Lennon found making logical sense in a lyric over-rated. Lennon wrote the best nonsense lyrics of all time. Better than Lewis Carrol, better than Dr. Suess. Robin Hitchcock comes close to Lennon's brilliance with lines that make no sense but still feel right.And did you notice those Equestrian Competitors in the Olympics? They aren't wearing much of anything at all! Sure, a saddle and some shoes. But that's like Joe Cocker extolling, "You can leave your hat on!" Ladies in riding gear are MOUNTING them! It's positively pornographic. When will decent society wake up and make those horses at least wear jockey shorts! Where are G. Clifford Prout and S.I.N.A. when we need them most!

  3. mike weber says:

    "…even scripts can have an improvised feel to them."Way Back When, when the reunited Monkees (minux Nez, except in L.A.) were touring, first wife Susan and i went to see them, and the show felt like three old buddies goofing together. saing whateve came to them, having a good time.I remarked to Susan that that was the sign of a tghtly-scripted, well-rehearsed show … featuring three guys who, even if they weren't actually buddies, knew each well enough and had worked together closely enough to *look* as if it was all just goofing.