I can’t get this idea out of my head, so I’m putting it here as a form of exorcism.
For reasons that I honestly can’t explain beyond simple accidental masochism, I’ve been re-reading a bunch of Geoff Johns comics lately; you know this if you look at my lists of the comics I’ve been reading every month. One of the things I’ve noticed that he unfailingly does is concentrate on making the subtext text in almost everything he writes, but in a very specific format. It isn’t just that he’ll make sure that the subtext is made very, very clear to everyone reading the comic, but that he’ll almost certainly have a character say the subtext out loud in such a way that is, almost without fail, either a complaint or a wistful comment about a problem that doesn’t really exist.
I was re-reading The Flash: Rebirth the other week — a comic where the first issue is just filled with characters essentially looking out at the reader and saying, and this is my relationship with the Flash before he shows up and also looks out at the reader to say, and here is my dilemma that I will be addressing throughout this series, and this is how it connects to the readers’ own feelings about me as a fictional construct — and my brain went, ‘I wonder if someone who can do such a thing could create a Geoff Johns mad-libs where an entire comic could be constructed basically by filling in some well-paced gaps?’
This thought then immediately switched to, imagine if Geoff Johns was writing a reboot of The Flintstones and I could see the first page horrifically clearly without any further thought.
It would be essentially one big image of the town of Bedrock, with an all-too-detailed, quasi-realistic bird-like dinosaur squawking in the foreground, against a backdrop of cavemen moving things out of huts. The dinosaur, an update of the idea of dinosaur-as-radio or whatever, would be talking about how Bedrock has been hit by a wave of layoffs and everyone is being forced to move out of the city because of impending meteor warnings. Everything would be in muted, dull colors, and look very depressing.
A relatively small panel is inset into the bottom of the page, showing the tired, downset eyes of Fred Flintstone — again, far too realistic in terms of depiction — as he looks off-panel. A caption, relaying Fred’s innermost thoughts, is at the bottom right of the panel. It simply reads, “It’s hard being a modern stone-age family.”