Page One;
To clarify for the letterer: Ali never speaks. He gives narration through caption boxes.
Panel 1;
Ali walks down the street in Baghdad. He’s sad, but it’s manifesting as distraction. He could easily be daydreaming and melancholy. But he’s thinking about his father, kidnapped and probably dead. The street looks similar to this one.
Silence
Panel 2;
Ali stops and watches as a half-transparent car stops in front of him. His first line of dialogue is at the top left of the panel. Several men with weapons approach the car.
Ali: I walk several blocks out of my way.
Panel 3;
Ali, wearing different clothes, sits in the front passenger seat. The gunmen are on the driver’s side, pulling his father out of the car.
Ali: To go past the place where my father was taken at gunpoint.
Panel 4;
Same as panel 2, only without the car, his father, or the gunmen, and Ali is no at the far right of the panel.
Ali: I sold the car we were riding in to pay his ransom, which is just as well.
Panel 5;
Ali turns round the corner, and into the swell of people. On the streets are dozens of citizens on foot, and he walks away into them.
Ali: Being on foot brings a safety borne of anonymity.
Page Two
Panel 1;
The throng of the crowd begins to flow away from the direction he’s walking.
Silence
Panel 2;
Ali is walking against an orderly stampede. A few people in the crowd weep, or look horrified, but most of them move with callous purpose.
Ali: For all their fear and excitement, they are orderly.
Panel 3;
Ali comes upon what they were all leaving for. A city bus was hit by a suicide bomber (1 2 3 4). The roof tilts up, the sides lilt away, and bits of cloth and liquefied remains spatter the street. Everyone, civilians and emergency responders, all stay away from the wreckage, in case there’s a secondary explosive meant to kill the responders. The responders have moved all the injured survivors out of the likely blast area of a secondary detonation.
Ali: It’s not the first time they have evacuated a street.
Panel 4;
Ali tries to walk softly, avoiding the human smears on the pavement as responders try to stop a man bleeding from a hole in his gut.
Silence
Page Three
The first four panels should take up roughly 50-60% of the page.
Panel 1;
Extreme close up on a flip phone. Ali’s finger presses down the redial button (at least enough of the button can be seen around his thumb to know what the button is.
Silence
Panel 2;
Ali listens intently to the phone.
Silence
Panel 3;
Same as last.
Ali: It rings.
Message: If you leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Sound Effect: <beep>
Panel 4;
Extreme Close Up as Ali closes the phone.
Ali: I stopped leaving new messages a week ago.
Panel 5;
Ali stops walking as he sees the trash can he left his father’s ransom in, looking at it like something dead or something vicious, not sure he wants to approach.
Silnece
Panel 6;
From inside the can, Ali peaks inside.
Ali: I peek inside the trash bin I left his ransom in…
Panel 7;
Ali walks away from the can, having found nothing, and somehow depressed by that fact.
Ali: uncertain what I’d hoped to find.
Page Four;
Panel 1;
Ali walks passed an intersection leading into homes. Half a block away, an officer is leaving his home in the morning, walking towards his car. It’s impossible to tell, from the neighborhood, from the uniform or the car he drives, whether he’s U.S. Army, Iraqi Defense or Police. A car stops in the street beside the car. It’s important, subtly in the center of the panel as Ali stands at the left.
Silence
Panel 2;
Two masked militiamen spring out of the car. The officer reacts too slowly, dropping his briefcase, and moving for his gun even as the men from the car are about to fire.
Silence
Panel 3;
The officer fires too late and too wide, and the bullet glances across the rear frame of the car. The militiamen fire AK-47s, and fire several rounds each in a burst. He’s falling under the fire already.
Silence
Panel 4;
The car is driving away down the street with the gunmen inside. The officer, running on instinct now, is on one knee, clawing at his car door to get inside.
Ali: No one comes out of their homes to help him.
Panel 5;
Ali starts to walk away, reaching for his cell phone as the officer falls down, dead.
Ali: They know too well the cost of being kind.
Panel 6;
Ali checks the window on his cell phone. He presses a button, and it flashes the message, “NO MISSED CALLS”.
Silence
Page Five
Panel 1;
ECU, Insert panel on the face of Ali’s watch, reading 10:06.
Silence
Panel 2;
Ali approaches the Baghdad morgue (3). There are twenty coffins stacked haphazardly against the side of the building. The coffins are very unfancy wooden numbers (1 2 3 4). There are two bodies on the street already, behind a police pick up truck, and two officers are working on moving a third out of the truck.
Silence
Panel 3;
A busload of women shrouded in black (1 2 3 4 5) pulls up, and they depart, wailing and rending their garments, and doing what they can to try and console one another.
Silence
Panel 4;
The officers drop their last body onto the street, on top of the others. An overworked porter struggles to lift one of the corpses onto a wheeled stretcher. He’s struggling under the weight, and sweating profusely, obviously very tired.
Silence
Panel 5;
Ali bends over to help with the man’s legs. He’s halfway there, enough that we all know what he’s about to do, but he hasn’t touched the body, he hasn’t fully committed.
Silence
Panel 6;
One of the shrouded women throws herself on one of the corpses on the ground. It’s her husband, and she claws at him, unable to accept that he’s dead.
Silence
Panel 7;
Ali, looking embarrassed and ashamed, walks away from the porter and the woman, towards the front gates.
Silence
Page Six;
Panel 1;
Ali pulls out a white handkerchief from his pocket and shakes it out.
Silence
Panel 2;
Insert panel, close in, as Ali uses the handkerchief to cover his nose.
Silence
Panel 3;
He’s approaching the entrance to the morgue, guarded by a policeman armed with a small rifle, standing in front of a concrete pillar on the left side of the iron gate (1). The guard is eyeing him.
Silence
Panel 4;
Ali lets down the cloth from his face, and gives the guard a look of recognition; this isn’t the first time they’ve met here.
Silence
Panel 5;
The guard recognizes him, and is slightly shamed by the fact that he didn’t recognize him from the first moment, and waves him in.
Silence
Panel 6;
Ali steps into the courtyard (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9). Its footpath is lined with honeycomb stones of alternating colors. The courtyard is lined with bodies.
Silence
Page Seven;
Panel 1;
Lining one wall are metal bunk beds (1). Two fresh bodies are on the nearest bed, mostly covered by blue tarps, but slightly exposed. On the top is a Baathist, cloaked in white as part of the Fedayeen Saddam, splotched with red from his wounds (1).
Ali: Some of them are Saddam’s Baathist allies.
Panel 2;
The arm of the man in white hangs down in front of the man on the bottom bunk; the shoulder of the Baathist has a patch belonging declaring his allegiance to the party (1).
Ali: Some Dawa loyalists.
Panel 3;
Near the opposite wall are corpses that have yet to be placed on the metal bunks, and are spread on the ground, covered in pink tarps. The caption boxes appear in opposing corners of the panel.
Ali: Sunni…
Ali: and Shia.
Panel 4;
One man on the ground is still handcuffed with drill holes in his hands, with tape over his mouth and his eyes, and a bullet in his head. His feet show burn marks (1). Not far from where he lies is the darkened doorway into the morgue.
Ali: Many are bound and bear evidence of torture.
Panel 5;
Ali walks through a hallway inside the morgue, past a shower area, where a fresh coffin sits (1).
Silence
Panel 6;
Ali enters a large room, half-dark, as people gather around a projection screen, watching a slide show of digital photos showing dead people (to get the point across, perhaps the entrance is on the same wall as the screen, so we see the audience’s back, the screen, and Ali at once).
Silence
Page Eight;
Panel 1;
Ali stands amongst the crowd now, watching the screen, sickly lit by the light of the projection.
Silence
Panel 2;
A woman in the front row points at the screen, howling and weeping, and those around her, everyone in the entire room, shows her sympathy. Ali reaches a hand through the crowd to touch her shoulder.
Silence
Panel 3;
Several members of the crowd leave the room with the woman.
Silence
Panel 4;
Some of those who left with the woman straggle back in.
Ali: After some time, I think I recognize the faces,
Ali: and realize the pictures have restarted the cycle.
Panel 5;
Ali exits the morgue. It’s already receding in the distance, a block or more away, but he still has up his handkerchief. The smell, the feel of the place, won’t leave him.
Silence
Panel 6;
Insert panel as Ali looks up (he’s reading the road sign in panel 7). His expression is said, but somehow resigned to that fate.
Silence
Panel 7;
The road sign, green and white, stating simply that this is Baghdad (the photo reference, given the subject, is a bit ironic- the painful, bitter kind, not the slightly fun in a snobby way kind), and in case it’s hard to read from the sign, it should be: بغداد
Ali: The sign tells me I’m home, but I know it's a lie.
Caption: end.
