Loud & clear - but case not proven

I see a lot about “show don’t tell” on the Internet. Suddenly everybody has writing advice to offer, and the trouble is that most of it is wrong. Here’s an example of would-be show-not-tell from Age of Ultron - a movie that I’ve already been thoroughly unkind about but its carcass is still twitching and my blood is up, so here goes.

Spoilers ahead, by the way.

You know the scene I really liked? Thor puts Mjölnir on the coffee table and everybody has a go at lifting it. In the comics (I’m sure you know this; I’ll say it anyway) there’s an inscription on the side of the hammer: "Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor.”


Even before making the attempt, Tony Stark proves himself unworthy with his crack about reinstating jus primae noctis. And there’s a lovely character bit a little further on. You know the moment I mean. Anyway, nobody gets to wield the hammer and that’s that. Nice moment in between all the surround-sound action. Except, this isn’t just a character scene, it’s the set-up for something that comes later:


Now then. The Vision gives Thor his hammer back. (Yeah, I did mention spoilers, didn’t I.) You know why that's there. Because Joss Whedon has a dump truck full of characters to cram into this movie. Even worse, the Vision has been created in almost the exact same circumstances as Ultron, and he’s the reason everyone is running about and shouting jokes at each other. So how do we show that the Vision is worthy? Why, by having him pick up Thor’s hammer.

Except – that doesn’t show us, it tells us. When Cap budges the hammer slightly, that draws on many scenes from earlier movies where we’ve seen that he’s just about as decent a human being as you're ever going to meet. (Steve Rogers don't break no bad guys' necks.) There's another one of those scenes later in the movie, when Cap refuses to evacuate Laputa or whatever it's called and leave thousands to die. But the Vision – well sure, I know he’s worthy ‘cause I’ve read the comics. But in the context of this movie, all we see is that he is able to pick up an item that we’ve been told detects a character’s moral goodness. It’s second hand. We don’t see him do anything to earn it. We shouldn’t feel something just because Mjölnir tells us it’s so. Show us the thing itself, Joss, not the label.

There was no other way to do it, of course. The finale was roaring in like a juggernaut (but not the Juggernaut, which would have been fun) and we already know the whole team will have a big CGI fight with lots of jokes and then kill Ultron. So we just need to get rid of the annoying inner voice that’s saying, “What, you’re going to trust this red robot? Sorry, synthezoid. You just met him!” So it’s: look, he can pick up Thor’s hammer. So shut up and eat your popcorn.

As we left he cinema, my friend Rob Rackstraw said, “A movie like that is a hell of a thing to land safely.” And indeed it is. But a dog walking on its hind legs is also doing something pretty tricky, and there I’m with Dr Johnson.

i-Magery: Mark Waid on the digital reinvention of comics

When cinema was first invented, plenty of people thought it would just be like pointing a camera at a play. Television? Oh sure, that's radio you can see. And again when videogames came along: all those wannabe-movie cut scenes with bits of shooting and platform jumping between. I'm sure I've said this all before. It sounds like the kind of thing I would say.

A new medium always has a period when it is struggling inside the confining box of an earlier medium. You don't get The Unfinished Swan or Shadow of the Colossus or even Telltale's Walking Dead until you've sat through the long linear infodumps of something like Metal Gear Solid. You can't arrive at the end of Tony Soprano's driveway without passing through Peyton Place.

I talked a while back about how digital reading platforms can change comics. For "change" read "liberate" - from the tyranny of the page, from having to hit a reveal on just the right panel, from having to take a machete to the dialogue (a particular bugbear for a word nerd like me) because it takes up too much space.

Comics have always been storyboards. In the absence of today's tech, writers and artists had to find ways to nudge the reader's attention to the right word balloon, to make them parse and run the images cinematically in their mind without the intrusion of a storyboard's zoom lines and motion arrows.

I've never minded doing that work. Captain Kirk said problems give him a bellyache, but I thrive on 'em. That said, if a new technology solves the problem, I'm not going to be a Luddite about it. There are plenty of other exciting things about visual storytelling to get my motor started in the mornings. This business is Ready Brek for problem solvers.

To be clear, I'm not talking about motion comics here. Motion comics are just cheap animation. Very cheap animation. And I like animation, almost as much as I like comics, but I'm not rushing to pay out for a cheap, bastardized form of both. When Porter Anderson, publishing industry scrutineer and a stalwart champion of serious literature, originally told me about Malk Waid's talk at the Tools of Change conference, I feared that's what it was about. I should have had more faith in the author of Irredeemable.

Porter described the attentive silence in the room as Mark demonstrated the comics that his company Thrillbent are producing. And this at TOC, where awe is awful hard to earn. So maybe that's another way that new technology can liberate comics - it can liberate the medium from the stigma of pulpy trash that so many people in publishing attach to it.

I'll close with the two key takeaways from Mark's talk: "This is using digital storytelling tools to do things you cannot do in print," and yet: "Like any other form of reading, you are in control of the pace at which you absorb the story." See, there's nothing to be afraid of. For all the glitzy new tech, right at the heart it's still comics. 

Simply Irredeemable

Capes and cowls had lost their luster, and I was thinking it was me. Apart from Bendis’s run on Daredevil and Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men, I haven’t been reading superhero books regularly for years. Oh, okay, there was Ed Brubaker’s Sleeper – good hard-boiled fun, but I’d trade all of those for one issue of Criminal.

My must-have titles these days: B.P.R.D., Hellboy, Buffy, Hellblazer, Criminal… Some have their roots in superherodom, but they’ve mostly looped the loop to the days when Kirby argued for heroes to wear utilitarian uniforms. Look at the way the Batman’s togged out in Joker – it’s not really a costume at all, a detail that tacitly acknowledged how tights and underwear would have blunted the hard edge of Azzarello’s and Bermejo’s story.

So I was down on superheroes, and I don’t seem to be the only one. My local comic store (Avalon Comics on Lavender Hill – hi, Bruce and Mark!) is sadly closing its doors after two decades. The kids aren’t coming in any more, and the increasingly long-in-the-tooth fanboys are getting distracted by wife and family.

Is narrowcasting reaching its logical conclusion, the collapse of the market to a singularity? The reasons for the decline in popular comic book readership, and what might be done to address that, is a big topic to chew. It would be the height of arrogance for me to lecture Marvel on ways to turn it around, so I’ll save that for next week. What I want to share today is my eureka moment, the comic that showed me superheroes can still enthrall and excite. That comic is Irredeemable.

You know how long it can take for a new thing to permeate through all the background noise? I must have been gazing blankly at ads for Irredeemable for almost two years, but it took a review on Guys Can Read to make me actually buy a few issues to see what all the fuss was about.

All the fuss? There hasn’t been nearly enough fuss. You want pace, inventiveness, rich characterization and sheer bravura storytelling? There's very little in either comics or prose fiction that can hold a candle to Mark Waid's Superman-goes-bad saga. I'm finding it hard to remember the last time I came across such a must-read story. After two issues, I bought the whole run to date. Sleep and eating were out of the question; each plot twist was more compelling than the last. There hasn't been a story this gripping since the second season of Fringe.
In a nutshell: what if Superman wasn’t brought up by Jonathan and Martha Kent? Without a stable, happy home life, he isn’t equipped emotionally to cope with the strain of being the Earth’s mightiest hero. And when he snaps it’s not at all pretty. Batman (his stand-in, that is, in Waid’s universe) dies after seeing his wife and kid vaporized by heat vision. The surrogates of Hawkman and Jimmy Olsen suffer much worse fates.

“I will do such things,” said Lear. “What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth!” So wait till you see what someone like Superman might do if he turns evil. It gets grisly. It will make your blood run cold.

What I particularly like: Waid’s story is completely driven by character. As a writer, I know the temptation to just block out a plot and make your characters run it. But when it's done properly, the plot is just something that arises from the character's lies, decisions, revelations, secrets, aspirations and actions. The characters live their lives and a story arises. This is how Waid does it in Irredeemable - and on an ongoing title it's incredibly brave, because you could be painting yourself into a corner. And you need to keep tossing another couple of plates up to be ready to replace earlier ones when they finally stop spinning. It could all go so horribly wrong, and there’s no going back to fix it.

To corral such a breathtaking narrative and still be able to keep the surprises coming, that’s the sign of a master at work. And the surprises Waid throws at us are rarely coming out of the blue. The most effective ones are blindingly obvious – after they’ve happened. “Surprising yet inevitable” is every writer’s goal, yet not easy to pull off. And Mark Waid keeps on doing it. Hmm, I can see how admiration can start to turn into hatred.

So, if you are rash enough to think that superhero comics have no power to impress you, and if you don’t mind starting on a story that will have you ignoring family emergencies, urgent calls and house fires for the next few hours, get the whole set of Irredeemable (twenty-three issues so far) and plunge right in. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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Irredeemable Vol 1 on Amazon.com
Irredeemable Vol 1 on Amazon.co.uk