The shows that rinse and repeat

Who watches the Watchmen? I will, but only if you can assure me that the story is properly wrapped up in one season. I've seen too many TV shows that throw a bunch of plates in the air, keep them spinning for a dozen episodes, adding more until it looks like they'll all come down either in a triumphant flourish or a crash of broken crockery -- only for the season finale to tie up no loose ends whatsoever; merely saying, in effect: "Come back next year for more of the same."

I know why writers do it. Well, yes, there's the lure of another payday, obviously. That's not nothing. But also it's because bringing a story together is hard. The job is so much easier in the early stages where you can throw everything in. The only limit is the writer's imagination. But then, around the midway point, the terrible hectoring inner voice can be heard that speaks up for the craft. Things that have been set up must pay off. Threats must be faced and dealt with. Promises that have been tacitly made with the viewer must be kept. If you're lazy, you tune that out and try to keep the throw-everything-in stage going forever.

Serious offenders include The Fall, whose first series followed a nail-biting cat-&-mouse between the detective heroine and a serial killer. How would she catch him? And what would the personal cost be? As it turned out, she wouldn't catch him. Rather than dream up a new adversary for season two, the writer just had him slip away so that the high jinks could resume next time. Nothing was resolved.

Likewise with Killing Eve, where after a season of queasy death-wish teasing between the antagonists, the psycho we're meant to like slips away with a knife-wound in her side. "Go after her!" I wanted to yell at the heroine (the eponymous Eve; the show's title was another promise never kept) who could even then have brought the story to a satisfying conclusion. "She's literally ten seconds ahead of you and she's bleeding out." But no. Somebody else comes in and says, "It's too late. She's gone." And you can almost hear Eve thinking it will go on and on, this chase, like the plot of The Worm Ouroboros, only in this case not because of an elegant reflection of the story's underlying themes but just to ensure ongoing pay packets for those concerned and an endlessly interrupted coitus of spy-porn wankery.

Oh, and Westworld. Great first season. But by the finale they clearly have nowhere interesting left to go, so it ends with the gnawing sense that new rails will be laid in front of the engine forever. It even looks like it's ending on a cliffhanger. That's the worst crime for any ongoing series, if the cliffhanger comes simply as a break in the ongoing plot rather than being a new threat emerging after old strands have been tied up. The show's writers are saying, in effect, that the whole season you thought was going to have a beginning, middle and end has in fact been just the bringing together of pieces so that the real party could begin in season two. Aristotle would punch 'em in the kisser.

But look. It can be done well. Vinyl built up over ten episodes as multiple narrative trains hurtled towards collision. The finale brought all the immediate threats to a conclusion while setting up the basis for another season. Instead of just breaking at the end of the season as though it were just another episode, there is closure there and in the closure the seeds of a new direction. Unfortunately Vinyl never got a second season while less carefully crafted shows hurtle on and on towards the eventual heat death of the medium.



A conscientious writer (Alan Garner, for example; or arguably J Michael Straczynski) won't start until they have the end of the story planned. As Andrew Stanton explains below, it's "knowing your punchline, making sure that everything... is leading to a singular goal". That's why I'd ask every show creator about their ending in the first pitch meeting. If you have a destination in mind, the journey will be much more enjoyable -- and, if the Fates are kind and it turns out the dollars are there for another trip, you'll have satisfied customers queuing up to go again.

Darkness is too easy

Back when I was working in games I saw a lot of concept pitches. If you’re picturing the likes of Pikmin or Ico or LittleBigPlanet – well, that would’ve been a job to get in early for. Instead, what actually seemed the most common effusion of the collective unconscious was a succession of dark, edgy takes on something like Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz.

In these pitches, Alice/Dorothy had usually gone psycho, confined to a mental asylum, her family dead or abducted by stark horrors that had pursued her from Wonderland/Oz. And from there it’s a paint-by-numbers to decide what had become of the Tin Man (cyborg), Cowardly Lion (serial killer), Scarecrow (cyborg serial killer) and so on. Those same writers would even have pitched Dark Pooh if Disney weren’t standing guard over Hundred Acre Wood with a very big stick indeed.

The reason why that’s such a heart-sink is not because I don’t like stories with a bit of darkness. More than a bit, in fact. My fave comic of all time is Sandman. No wait, it’s Watchmen. No, maybe it’s Swamp Thing. Whatever – all of those had darkness but they had light, beauty and humanity too. And, in the case of Sandman, real sweetness.

But plain unadorned darkness is just too facile. My wife Roz used to ghostwrite a middle-grade action-adventure series for a brand name author. The heroes were mid-teen crime fighters but the readership was centered on 10-12 year olds, meaning that sex and violence were mostly just hinted at. Over dinner one evening, for fun, Roz and I envisaged a YA version of the series, revisiting the characters a couple of years on and going right into the abyss with them. The kid whose obsession with computer hacking had given him a dangerously detached view of justice. The one who achieved his dream of joining the army but quickly became traumatized by the realities of modern warfare. The rich one, who had hardened and become arrogant working for her father…

In a dark pit struggling to reach the light. It almost writes itself. Trouble is, that’s so easy to do. And nothing good in writing is accomplished with ease.

As well as being the lazy writer’s option, a story of unremitting darkness is tonally boring. It’s way harder to write hope and humor and humanity alongside the horrors – which is why I value TV shows like Buffy, Fringe and Doctor Who. Yet in comics these days we so often see the stories copying the least original videogames, with heroes constantly being maimed or disfigured or driven mad. And, trust me, relentless twentysomething angst is not the way for comics to tap back into a broad market.

The best of the horror comics have heroes who are surrounded by darkness but who haven’t got darkness in their souls: Hellboy, B.P.R.D., even (believe it or not) John Constantine. And the authors of those books don’t gratuitously wallow in the darkness of their stories; they remember they are telling underworld myths that must lead the heroes back to the surface world. Like Alice, emerging from the rabbit hole disturbed, enchanted, altered – a far more interesting fate than simply being forever scarred.

Stories - how long is too long?

How do you know when it’s time to bring the curtain down on your characters? I got to thinking about this because Kevin McGill of the edutainingly brilliant Guys Can Read was lamenting this week what a damp squib the Smallville finale turned out to be.

I haven’t seen many episodes of Smallville, but after ten seasons there are only two places a show can end up. Two different kinds of whimper that can supplant the bang of a timely end. One is when the show runs out of steam. You keep tuning in because you care about those characters, but you know they’re not going to be hitting balls out of the park ever again. Case in point: the final season of Babylon 5. That wasn’t Mr Straczynski’s fault, but it was still an exhausted winding down, best forgotten, of what had been at times the most exciting SF show on television.

Or the show can spiral into the sucking singularity that is narrowcasting. I’m a devoted Buffy fan, but I’m not sure that anyone could pick it up at the start of season seven and have any idea what was going on. I began to get a whiff of the narrowcasting bouquet this week with the Doctor Who fan discussions (in which I took part, got to admit that) about whether or not Rory is still an Auton. And if that means nothing to you – okay, you got it; that’s narrowcasting.

Stories have an end, even when they’re about characters we really love. You may not want to admit it, but your parents’ story ends when you leave home. After that it’s all reunion shows – usually “The One with the Cranberry Sauce”. And endless reunion shows are fine for real people whom you love, but in the case of fictional characters then it really is time to boot them off Reichenbach Falls.

The Norse gods had Ragnarok. The British Empire had World War Two. Beowulf had his dragon. The end dignifies what came before, and sometimes redeems it. Stories need endings. At the close of a well-crafted tale you should be sad to leave the characters – even the bad ‘uns – but you know it’s right. Their story is over. “I feel… cold,” says Captain Barbossa, and it’s such a brilliant culmination of everything that’s gone before that it ought to be the end. Only the magical might of Calypso and the million-dollar demands of Disney could undo so absolutely essential a demise.

Ongoing comic book sagas risk the calamity of too long a life more than most. Sandman is great because it built to a definite conclusion. If we properly cherish what we were given in Watchmen, we won't ask to read the ongoing adventures of Nite Owl and Silk Spectre. Conversely, at a full century of issues, even the freshness of 100 Bullets was starting to feel more than a little stretched out. Knowing when to take a last bow is the mark of an effective performer.

Because of this, Leo and I are resolved that Mirabilis will run to issue #40 and sufficit. After the green comet has gone and normal service is resumed with the beginning of the real year 1901, whatever happens to our characters after that is up to you. Gentle breath of yours must fill their sails - Shakespeare thereby acknowledging, as he threw aside his pen for good, that ultimately all great stories are merely enablers for the reader’s own imagination.

The real measure of success

The girl came over because somebody at the bar told her I’d sold a million books that year. “Is that true?” she asked.

I nodded.

“So you’re a success?”

“I guess I am.” (I could have added, “This year.”)

She slid into the next seat with a sudden smile. “I admire success,” she said significantly.

This for me was a moment of real interest. (The only one in that conversation, actually; she worked in marketing.) It was the moment that I realized I don’t admire success. I admire talent, I admire craft, and I admire achievement. They don’t always come with success as a package deal. Just ask Van Gogh – or Dan Brown.

So when a publisher pressed me recently to say what I thought about Mirabilis, it was hard to give an answer. The publisher meant: did I think it would be a success. But all that matters to me, really, is have we been successful at what we set out to do.

And that we have. I am always praising Leo’s and Nikos’s and Martin's work, but in this instance I’m not too shy about praising my own either. I wanted Mirabilis to be “a modern Tintin” in the sense of an adventure with a family of characters who you feel warmly towards. I’m very happy with how it turned out. If it were a movie, it would be what Tarantino calls a hang-out movie. You keep coming back to it because it’s fun hanging out with these characters. “Only connect!” - that’s what I’m proud of. The achievement is what matters.

The movie question was what the publisher was really fishing for an answer to. Did I think Mirabilis would join the long stream of graphic novels getting turned into films? I might have said there are an awful lot of graphic novels that don’t. I might have said that most graphic novels that get turned into movies should never have been. But what can you answer, when your own criterion for success is personal, a measure of craft, and theirs is financial? The languages are too different.

You’ve got to have at least a sprinkling of the second kind of success, otherwise the first is unobtainable. Can’t paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling if the Pope never heard your name. But how much success do you want? Well now, there’s a question.

“Just enough,” I’d say. If twenty people grok your comic – well, you’re going to have to fit it in around your day job. If twenty thousand people love it, then it can be your day job. If two million people like it, though – well, bask in that, but it’s probably not your comic anymore.

Take Watchmen, ticking over pretty nicely with a hundred thousand fans for a couple of decades. The movie comes out and suddenly a million copies of the graphic novel are sold. Twenty million people pay to see the movie. Is that a good thing? Only if you sell action figures; I don’t think it meant a jot to Alan Moore. If he enjoys meeting interesting Watchmen fans, I’ll bet he found far more of them among that original core group. All success did was to dilute the people who appreciated Watchmen the way Moore intended in a vast ocean of casual browsers who didn’t really get it. That’s fashion, not passion.

Elitist, you say? Gimme a break, I’m a comics fan. I’m not talking about the poems of Rilke here. I’m speaking as an artist, not a critic. You create a work of art to communicate something. And what you want is for the people to whom that something has meaning to come across your work and be moved by it. And the people who find some other reason to like it – well, good luck to them. They should have a nice life. But you have no investment in them. They admired your garden as they walked by, that's all.

Being true to your own vision doesn't have to mean starving in a garret. The choice isn't necessarily personal success or financial success. Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books come in for some flak because most reviewers find them tame. And that may be true; her brew of teen alienation is administered in a very weak dilution compared to, say, Kate Thompson's Creature of the Night, or Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin. I've only read the first book in the series and, while I don't share the opinion of those who think it's badly written, still it doesn't have anything like the subtle emotional insights of an author like Jill Chaney in her book Angel Face. But my point is that the Twilight books are genuine. Ms Meyer is writing what she wants to write. This is her version of vampires, and you may not care for it but at least you can't say it's manufactured to find an audience. That it did find quite a big audience is the icing on the cake for Ms Meyer, and I hope she enjoys talking to all the fans. I suspect she probably does. But her real achievement is that she had a vision and she put it on paper.

Francis Ford Coppola said recently, “The bigger the budget, the stupider [the movie] has to be, because it has to appeal to everyone. The smaller the budget, the freer you can be.” Another wise gentleman spoke to me the other day of having “a keen eye for volumes brimming with tone, atmosphere, character, and individuality - the comic book version of the great film producers of early Hollywood.”

And between those two statements I realized that’s where we want to be with Mirabilis. This is a labor of love. We do want it to make money. I think it will. We need it to make enough to pay our grocery bills, at least, so that we can go on with it and tell the whole story. But we don’t have to chase success – we must not – at the expense of the story and the characters and the soul of the thing. God forbid it turns into Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3. (Comparisons with PotC 1, you will notice, I find perfectly acceptable.)

All our experiences with Mirabilis over the last year or so have led us to this point. Like any revelation, it makes life so much simpler. We now know what we have to do: just be true to the work, make it available to those who want it, forget about anything that doesn’t serve the creative honesty of the project. Yes, it should be obvious. What can I say? Sometimes you have to go on a journey to arrive where you started and know the place for the first time.

That’s why Mirabilis will stay in our control, and no offer of movie millions (or even television thousands) will take it away from us. Because then it wouldn’t be Mirabilis, it would just be the latest corporate pod-product pretending to have a heart. It would risk becoming the awful zombie parody of itself which all wildly successful franchises eventually fall prey to.

You may now be saying, “Dream on, buddy. Your little comic strip would never get as big as something like Star Wars anyway.” And I agree. I hope it’s too personal for that. As big as Stardust would suit us just fine.

Quoted in The Guardian, Ricky Gervais says that the secret is to care about the project, not the money or the accolades: "I went into every meeting [about The Invention of Lying] with one great strength - I was always ready to walk away. I don't care if they say no and that makes me bulletproof. They don't know what to say when I say I don't care about the money. The room literally goes quiet." He adds: "If you want to make a good film, try to make your film for £40." (Note that laser-focussing on the quality of the work itself has not meant that the other kind of success eluded Mr Gervais - far from it.)

The satisfaction of a craftsman, the pride of a creator, the rapture of an artist. Those are the true measures of success. Accept no substitutes.