Turnabout Seafarer
Drawn and written Christmas 2015
For Christmas, I’m casting one of my favorite plays, The Seafarer by Conor McPherson, in the Ace Attorney world, specifically mostly in the context of Apollo Justice. There are so many lines that could be said by/of these characters and so much in common with powerful themes of poker, alcoholism, the power of vision, and the devil.
I just love this play so much, it’s so Catholic, and such a Christmas story, with the element of, like Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and like the experience of Midnight Mass and Christmas morning, and like Bethlehem that night, that it’s like, if you can just get through this dark cold night, you’ll reach the morning and it will be allright, and joyful.
And it’s a thing about plays–if they haven’t been filmed, you can’t get the story on demand, which is a noteworthy thing in this civilization. I mean, you can read it, but that’s not the whole of it. I’ve been able to get it twice, once at the Alley Theater in Houston, and just recently at a nearby community theater at the nearest college. Each production was real good, and each had things that I thought better than the other. But what was really great this time was getting to see it actually at Christmastime.
I think I played Apollo Justice just a while before I first read the play, some years ago in college, and I had the idea for this picture very quickly. Now I finally got to do it!
So I’ve got Phoenix as Sharky – main character, with a drinking problem, seen as a failure, playing for the highest of stakes;
Godot as Richard – blind man who yells alot at the main character but ultimately there is understanding;
Larry as Nicky – rather shallow friend who makes trouble, fancies himself a ladies’ man;
Spoilers!
Kristoph as Mr. Lockhart – the last of the themes listed above;
Apollo as Ivan – friend in need, vision-impaired at the moment (bit of Dual Destinies there,) the one to defeat the devil in the end.
End of spoilers!
For the coloring, I was very inspired by the set design of the Alley production, which in turn was, according to the program, inspired by Newgrange, a 5000-year-old structure in Ireland, a narrow dark tunnel into a stone chamber in a hill, where on the winter solstice, the rising sun shines all the way in. And I’ve been in there, so.
Merry Christmas.