The Martyr

edited June 2012 in Work Logs
So one of the artists of the late, lamented Spinning to Infinity contacted me and asked me if I had anything for him to work on. He had some ideas of his own, but I didn't like any of 'em, so I wrote one up specifically for him.

The artist's name is Marco Magallanes, and his work is here:

http://www.dry-gulch.com/chapter/chapter-1/ 

I'm kind of getting a Charlie Adlard vibe from his material. What do you think of it?

When flying home from A-Kon, I got this scene in my head that I haven't been able to shake since. A guy sitting in an aisle seat of a plane burning up and in mid-crash. He's the only calm one, while the rest of the plane panics, and then the flames sweep over him...

Using that image as a starting point, I came up with this idea. Let me know if you think it's too derivative of stuff like SOURCE CODE, JOURNEYMAN, QUANTUM LEAP and BOURNE IDENTITY. I'm trying hard not to make it so. Marco likes it and I'm going to start scripting it this week. It'll be B&W for a change.

Working titles:
THE MARTYR
CAUSE DU JOUR

Cold Open:
An unassuming man sitting in the aisle seat of an airliner during the 9/11 plane crash into a Pennsylvania field. Everyone else is panicking but him. The terrorists lie dead in the aisles, throats slit with their own paper cutters. The plane is ablaze and about to strike the forest. The fire sweeps over him ...

Premise: 
A man appears in a new place in 21st century Earth in a new body and is compelled to help the people there, always dying in the process. As a martyr to his causes, he effects change for the good ... then starts over somewhere else. Like Quantum Leap or Journeyman with more death and space displacement but no time travel. Think of the anonymous Tank Man of the Tiananmen protests in 1989. 

He's been doing it for 12 years, as far as he knows -- ever since his personality was yanked from that plane during 9-11. His latest assignment is an ambiguous cause that he decides he doesn't believe in. He abandons this particular cause and hundreds die needlessly. Whoever has been using him is angry and soon he and a woman he meets are on the run.

He dies in the climax and is once again reborn as a new nationality with a new cause du jour. In a twist, he finds a way to solve this issue without dying, inadvertently releasing him from his contract (to his handlers' chagrin). He also discovers that 9-11 wasn't the beginning, and that he's been doing this for over a hundred years, his handlers being a secret society. He then tracks down the girl, convinces her that he is the same person in a new body, and they run off together...

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