The Killer (review)

Today I went to the cinema, which is something I haven't done in quite a while. What tempted me back to the big screen? David Fincher's latest movie, The Killer. Was it worth seeing in a movie theatre? Not really. The action was fine, but would look just as good on a decent TV. Were the performances any good? Oh yes. Michael Fassbender is always great value. He should have been picked to play James Bond -- though admittedly he'd be too interesting an actor for the anodyne superhero that Bond has become. The scene with Tilda Swinton is worth the price of admission. But the plotting. Oh dear. 

I'll talk about it because somebody has to care whether stories make any sense. You must expect spoilers from this point on, OK?

The Killer is a seasoned professional hitman with a string of successful and lucrative assassinations behind him, but he misses a shot on his latest target. Which is inconvenient, as the target is now alerted and it will be a while before there’ll be any chance of a follow-up attempt.

Unknown to the Killer, his handler, Hodges, proposes to the client that he can have the Killer whacked for another 150k. Why kill the golden goose? Don’t know. Why would Hodges think that the Killer would blab after one slip-up? Don’t know. How would the client (just a rich business dude) ever know whether his 150k had actually been spent on rubbing out the Killer? He wouldn't, so why pay?

Hodges hires two other assassins, the Expert and the Brute. It looks like all you need to know is in the names, except (as we will find out) they are fairly useless, which makes it surprising that Hodges is so blasé about writing off his star performer. They also haven’t worked together before, which would be a danger signal in many professions where the stakes are considerably lower than in assassination.

Hodges sends them to the Killer’s isolated jungle home in the Dominican Republic, though he must realize the Killer won’t be back there yet. They find Magdala, the Killer’s girlfriend, and torture her for information. Why doesn’t Hodges just give them this information? Don’t know. Why not wait at the house to ambush the Killer when he comes back? Don’t know.

They leave Magdala alive. Why? Ah, this one I do know – it’s because otherwise the writer couldn’t give the Killer the clues he needs to find the assassins. He tracks them via the taxi company who took them to the house. Why didn’t they hire a car? Why did they leave the taxi driver alive? How did Magda get a look at the taxi from hundreds of yards away through a jungle? You got me.

The Killer now realizes Hodges hired the two assassins. He goes and kills him and gets info about the two assassins from Hodges’ secretary, whom he kills. (Unlike the Expert, he leaves no loose ends.) Meanwhile, you may ask, isn’t he in jeopardy from the Expert and the Brute, who have been hired to kill him? No, because having beaten up the Killer’s girlfriend and trashed his house, they went back to their homes and are now making no effort to look for him. This is convenient as it means that the Killer can track them down separately and kill them.

After some more shenanigans involving the client who hired him in the first place, the Killer retires with all the money he’s made in his long and lucrative career. Does he have to create a new identity and set up a new home in a distant corner of the world? Not a bit of it. He goes back to his house in the Dominican Republic, a place which has been compromised and might well now be known to other assassins, and relaxes on a sun lounger.

What might have happened after the missed shot: Hodges could say to the Killer that they either owed the client a hit and would have to follow-up despite the increased security, or they could hand the money back. The former would make a story, but it wouldn’t have the betrayal trope vital to lazy storytellers in this genre. If Hodges really decided that the Killer was now useless, he should have hired competent assassins, briefed them properly, and laid low till they reported the Killer was dealt with. It didn't matter to the client, certainly, who could have been told that the Killer had been iced and would have believed it.

Why was this plot such a mess? I suspect because it’s based on a graphic novel by a videogame writer, both mediums being stronger on style than on substance or on coherent storytelling. Why wasn’t the plotting fixed by Andrew Kevin Walker, a screenwriter with a number of hits to his name, and David Fincher, who ought to be able by now to tell if story elements make no sense? Don’t know, but it may be because they no longer expect audiences to bother to question what they’re seeing on screen. If plots are only going to be skin-deep, no wonder screenwriters are worried about being replaced by AI.

Showing not telling revisited

The recent announcement that the James Bond books are being reissued in versions edited by sensitivity readers provides us with a simple and striking example of the contrast between good and bad writing.

(By the way, we’re not concerned here with whether literature should be edited to reflect contemporary attitudes, just with the craft of storytelling. The debate about revising novels of the past will no doubt continue to rage on social media for a long while to come, so we don’t need to go into it here.)

The example is from Live & Let Die. Bond and Felix Leiter visit a strip club and are watching the action on stage as a girl performs an erotic dance.

Ian Fleming’s version reads:

“Bond could hear the audience panting and grunting like pigs at the trough. He felt his own hands gripping the tablecloth. His mouth was dry.”

And (allegedly) the new version:

“Bond could sense the electric tension in the room.”

If you ever need to explain the difference between showing and telling, you have it right there. The second version is a cliché, of course, and it’s also abstract and unspecific, which is always weaker writing.

More importantly (though for this you need to look at the story as a whole) a recurrent motif in Fleming’s novels is the way Bond projects his own self-disgust onto others. At the beginning of Goldfinger he devours (Fleming’s term) a banquet of stone crabs and toast washed down with pink champagne, only to be consumed by revulsion at the sight of his pudgy dinner companion wiping butter off his chin, and thereby revolted also by his own gorging indulgence.

Similarly, Bond’s attitude towards women is reflected in the way he regards the other men at the strip club as being “like pigs at the trough”. That is the writing. Start with Casino Royale:

“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling--a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension--becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.”

Fleming has a lot to teach you about storytelling, but it’s not a lesson his editors have learned, so be sure to study him in the original.

Join me, and together we can rule Croydon

Darth Vader did it. Then the Green Goblin. Now even Sauron has got in on the act. It’s one of the oldest tropes (or should that be clichés?) in the writers’ playbook: the bad guy inviting the hero to team up.

There are dozens of examples, and most of the time it’s entirely pointless. Nobody in the audience expects Spidey or Galadriel to suddenly abandon their principles, so the story spins its wheels to no purpose and then moves on.

Those writers might think they’re paying homage to The Empire Strikes Back. After all, we don’t really expect Luke to turn evil either, do we, even though he has been tempted by the Dark Side? But that’s not what is really going on in this scene. The emotional impact is that we finally see what Vader wants – to have his son at his side. More than that, he genuinely believes that together they could rule well.

Most importantly, Vader’s offer sets up the denouement of Return of the Jedi. Luke doesn’t join Vader to overthrow the Emperor, instead it’s the other way round, completing the moral and emotional arc begun in that showdown on the gantry in the previous movie. Finally Vader realizes what really matters to him.

That’s why that scene is astonishingly powerful and has never been copied successfully. Accept no substitutes.

Stories and games

‘Awright, awright. So I killed an old couple for a can of beans. Still tucking in, though, right? Remorse didn’t spoil your appetite.’

My friend’s wife, passing the room, stepped back and looked in with an expression of maternal concern. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Sure, except that we’re now having to give away the last of our medicine to a beggar to stop these whiners from moping. Other than that, everything’s great.’

It was This War of Mine, a game in which you look after a household of refugees in the middle of a war zone. No death-or-glory shoot-‘em-up, this is a game where victory is keeping a tomato plant alive long enough to get a meal off it. Survival means hard choices. Selfishness. Robbery. Even murder.

Videogames, of course, are full of mayhem and murder. Many portray a mean world in which the enemies you blow away are so othered as to be mere objects. But tie the possibility of bloodshed to a life-or-death situation and things become interesting. It’s no longer the violence of the true sociopath or the zombie killer, so dreadfully boring, but the choice of ordinary human beings in extremis.

Injustice is a ripe subject for storytelling, and the most potent weapon to that end in traditional fiction’s arsenal is empathy. It’s hard not to feel a red fury of outrage at Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s full-sail arrogance, or choke with shame at Siegfried Sassoon’s contemptuous treatment of his aged semi-fictional aunt. On the other side of the coin, we can be made complicit in mankind’s least savoury urges and thereby feel a twinge of guilt at having rooted for a bad egg like Vic Mackey or Richard III. Yet it is only the guilt of having been their cheerleader. We don’t personally pull the trigger.

That’s one of many areas where interactivity can prove a useful storytelling tool. Interactivity opens up the possibility of taking and abusing power, the sort of thing that’s guaranteed to bring out the very worst in a person – my example at the head of this piece when playing This War of Mine, for instance. More generally, feelings are sharper at first hand. Literature uses as its paintbrush the human capacity for empathy, whereas interactive stories put your hand on the gun – or on the bandage, or the baby’s bottle. Being a player rather than a reader means no longer having to be content with the role of a Boswell.

In The Talos Principle, the player is an android who awakens to find its task in life is solving a series of logic problems. Too dry to try? You’d rather do your tax returns? Think again: we’re not talking about algebra or which shape fits in which hole. These are challenging environmental puzzles that call for ingenuity, reasoning and lateral thinking. Such things, along with a warm cave, a haunch of mammoth, and a mate, put the biggest grin on the face of our Palaeolithic forebears. And to give it all a narrative drive, we’re continually chivvied along by an entity calling himself Elohim who informs us that he has created this world for us, and these puzzles to test us, for we are his most favoured children who will inherit creation. Just so long as we don’t step outside the boundaries he has prescribed, that is.

In between Elohim’s puzzles, we come across antique computer terminals and graffiti through which we’re able to access messages left by other androids and even human antecedents. This has the nature of what is often called ergodic storytelling (and by the way it’s rare to come across a term that offends both the physicist and classicist in me) in that we are given the fragments and left to fit them together for ourselves.

That’s not what’s special. Twentieth century literature abounds in such narratives. Most game stories come in jigsaw form, too, from Dear Esther to Her Story. The Talos Principle is notable because the central story hook – that pompously nannying Elohim – informs every problem we solve. At the same time as experiencing the drive towards ‘Man’s first disobedience’ we are indulging our pride, trying to impress the creator who is already beginning to royally tick us off. Or maybe he isn’t. My own knee-jerk to moralizing deities is to plan rebellion. Others may be moved to reverence, and that’s interesting too. And so our actions even while playing the most logic- and plot-driven parts of the game are still all about the illumination of character.

You see that what we are talking about here are not those games where the story is all loaded into non-interactive cutscenes in between the running and the shooting. As Chris Crawford, the Captain Cook of the game/story littoral, says, ‘Merely to glue story onto game and then alternate between the two, that’s just a trick.’ For this fusion of media to be interesting, the story needs to arise out of and drive the gameplay. It is easy to force a reader or viewer to interact. The trick is in making them want to interact, and in letting the story unfold hand-in-hand with that. For a guideline from the non-interactive media, notice how narrative and action in Fury Road happen at the same time. The best game stories follow that principle.

“As more and more stories, IPs and universes are expressed through the means of interactivity and by playing, the new mantra for this era of storytelling could become ‘Play, don’t show’.”  -- Thomas Vigild

You may ask what has all this to do with books. The founders of Inkle, whose text engine I used to create my interactive re-envisioning of Frankenstein, have pointed out that when people are interacting they typically have little tolerance for prose. If forced to read, they skim. This is very different from the experience of reading a work of literature, where the mind is tuned to see the landscape and characters via the text as surely as Cypher in The Matrix reads a world of blondes, brunettes, and redheads in the fleeting strings of numbers on his screen. Then we don’t even see the prose. But when we’re invited to sit forward and actively engage, words become a forest through which we must machete our way impatiently to the next significant choice.

For that reason, and in spite of working as both a writer and a game designer with a particular interest in interactive storytelling, I tend to think that grafting game-like interactivity into novels is a dead end. I wrote Frankenstein to explore the possibility creating a fictional two-way relationship with a character (the reader acts as Victor’s confidant and advisor) but believe me I would much rather have used animation or live action video or even just audio if the publisher’s budget had stretched to it. Prose in this context simply has the virtue of being cheap enough for a publisher to afford.

That’s not to say we should be aiming for a future in which novels come with animations and sound effects. Other media already deploy those tools to much better effect, and in any case there is no storytelling medium more immersive than pure prose. Have confidence in your strengths, dear writer, or give it all up now and create apps instead.

What, then, can novelists learn from games? Perhaps more from the way games are consumed than from the content itself. Consider how the narrative structure of the popular novel was shaped by magazine publication through the 19th and early 20th century. Games often take the form of a parallel reality into which the player can drop at any time. The story, as in life, is not necessarily on hold when you’re not there. Naturally, as with any other narrative technique, there are good and bad ways to tell a persistent story. Tamagotchi is much less irritating – or at any rate, its irritant value contrasts more interestingly with its emotional engagement – than something like the hectoring Majestic, a dead-end experiment in persistent narrative from the turn of the millennium that the games industry keeps reinventing like a lab rat that’s too dumb to learn from an electric shock. Give it a year or two, you’ll see what I mean.

Think instead of reality soaps, or theatre sports like TV wrestling, or even the drama of politics. The story runs alongside your daily life. You have the option when to drop in and how committed to be. The difference in gaming is that the community can feed back directly and immediately into the narrative that everybody else experiences. Might there be a takeaway here for novelists? Perhaps. Only bear in mind, I beg you: first do no harm. But with that caveat feel free to indulge in fleeting opportunity and perilous experiment, for the long evolution of literature is surely not over yet.

Tear jerkers

“Winning? Is that what you think it’s about? I’m not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone … or because I hate someone or because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun. God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works because it hardly ever does. I do what I do because it’s right. Because it’s decent. And above all, it’s kind. It’s just that. Just kind. If I run away today, good people will die. If I stand and fight, some of them might live … maybe not many, maybe not for long. Hey, maybe there’s no point in any of this at all, but it’s the best I can do, and I will stand here doing it until it kills me. You’re going to die, too, someday. When will that be? Have you thought about it? What would you die for? Who I am is where I stand. Where I stand is where I fall.”

That, right there, is why I can't sit through an episode of Doctor Who anymore. Because it’s become one long self-indulgent pantomime, all speeches to the audience about how special the character's feelings are. The show is like one of those manufactured glimpses of a celebrity's life that Hello thrives on, endlessly repeated in an increasingly overwrought tone.

Think back to Jon Pertwee's Doctor. Desperate to escape from Earth, often at loggerheads with his companions, he stood for decency too. But the story wasn't slipped in as a subtext to his angst. And he never needed to get up and tell us what he was all about. His actions showed us that.

The sensibilities of YA fiction have taken over a lot of stories today. In effect the characters are adolescents, with everything that happens in the story being about them personally. There was a point to that when it just applied to Buffy and Spider-Man. They were teenagers. But now, God help us, so are James Bond and Superman and the crew of the Enterprise. So we're going to hear a lot more speeches about how hard it is to be a hero, a lot more tear-jerking farewells as the music swells. Moments in which the show can run out in front of the fans and tell them its manifesto. None of it rings true because we know, don't we, that real heroes don't talk about their heroism. But with this storytelling style, truth is the first casualty. Cordelia would get nowhere. Can't heave your heart into your mouth? There’s no place for you in Doctor Who then, love. The paradigm of the hero now is Goneril and Regan, posturing and speechifying to set the lips aquiver and bring big rolling soap-opera tears to the eyes.

It's populism. Yes, that again. Bad enough that it's wrecking politics, now it's taken root in storytelling too. Every season of Doctor Who is like a barrage of self-congratulatory Trump tweets. The show isn't SF drama anymore, it's one extended marketing campaign for itself. “Maybe there's no point in any of this at all – ” Moffat is surely talking there about having to write the same emotional beats month after month. Endless regenerations eventually hitting the Hayflick limit.

The fans just lap this stuff up, of course. The more a show refers to itself, the more they love it. But nothing can thrive on fan support alone. So I'm hoping we'll see a swing towards richer stories that build quality and a sense of character over time. The Whovian equivalent of Breaking Bad. Not flashy and full of quotable fan faves, but a story that quietly reveals itself to be a modern classic. It could still happen.

The sleep of reason

Three years ago I rewrote Frankenstein as an interactive novel. Establishing a timeline was my first task; Mary Shelley didn’t tell us anything about the historical background to the story but I like to know that kind of detail even if it ends up in the part of the iceberg the reader doesn’t see. We know that Walton’s framing narrative is dated sometime in the eighteenth century, but presumably a reader in 1818 would feel the narrative lacking in impact if it all took place back in the days of Newton, Voltaire and Bach. So it seemed reasonable to opt for the 1790s, and I sketched out dates placing Victor Frankenstein’s story alongside the events of the French Revolution.

That was a gift. That great hopeful experiment of the Revolution, the epiphany of the Age of Reason, degenerating into unreason and terror, then into a backlash of conservatism and fear. How perfect a backdrop for what Victor is trying to achieve. You don’t need to know that the monster is murdering William Frankenstein just as Danton and Desmoulins are being guillotined, or that he is born just days after the start of the decimal calendar, but I found it added a little frisson to my imagination as I wrote.

If I were updating the Frankenstein story to the present day, I’d have a still better metaphor in the legacy of French colonial policy. Victor brings a man into being in the midst of our society only to leave him outcast, disadvantaged, alienated. The creature – in my interactive version it’s possible for Victor to name him Adom, but the story always works better if he isn’t granted even that much – attempts to learn from his neighbours, who profess high ideals, but when he puts their liberalism to the test they reject him just like everybody else he’s approached. And so he turns to killing as the only way to exercise any agency in the world.

Justifiably or not, many French citizens of Algerian origin apparently feel much the same way towards the republic as the monster to his creator. Crammed into banlieues, they get to watch the glittering life of Paris always at arm’s length, like the monster in his hovel adjoining the De Laceys’ home. They do not necessarily feel thankful for living in one of the richest and fairest civilizations in history.

Am I saying, “Muslims are monsters"? Of course not, but thank you for giving me the opportunity, so necessary in these dumbed-down days, of repudiating that. The term monster is used with some irony and ambiguity in the novel (in my version, anyway; who is the monster?) and in any case all labels are fluid. The lesson of the story is that you can soon turn others into Others if you treat them as such. Salman Rushdie recently pointed this out on Bill Maher’s Real Time show. Radical elements may whip up their followers to become matyrs, because the martyrs of one side in a struggle are the monsters of the other – and it’s that cycle of blood, fear and reprisal that fuels the maelstrom of unreason that some would like to see us sucked into.

Nor, when I evoke North African immigrant communities in France as a metaphor that could apply to a modern version of Frankenstein, do I trivialize the political situation that led to tragedies like the Charlie Hebdo murders. Transplanting a political idea into fictional form doesn’t trivialize it; it universalizes it. Social mobility even in modern Western societies is such that it can take many generations to break out of poverty. If the downtrodden class tends to be of a recognizable racial type, the injustices that invariably descend upon the poor will begin to look like prejudice. It could be Algerians in France, black people in the southern USA, Dalits in India. Simply legislating the caste/class boundaries away doesn’t solve the problem, as you will still have many generations who are left on the outside looking in. But if I tell the story of, say, an impoverished aborigine in 1960s Australia, then I am telling only that story, and there’s a risk that the reader’s existing preconceptions will turn it into simply a confirmation of what they already believe. Politicians do that every day. It’s up to writers to do something more. We need to challenge beliefs, unsettle people, shake them up, change them.

Literature’s strength is in provoking questions, not providing you with ready-made answers. If you read Frankenstein with the events of Paris, Syria, Ferguson, and Pakistan in your mind, you may see that Mary Shelley’s two-hundred-year-old story still resonates powerfully today. Which side you come out on – if indeed you think it helps anybody to pick a side – is entirely up to you.

Tall stories

I've blogged before about A J Alan, radio raconteur of '20s and '30s Britain. Think of an English Rod Serling, only on the wireless instead of the TV and with considerably less formulaic a cast to his storytelling.

That era was the Burgess Shale of broadcasting, when interesting experimentation trumped genre, ratings and tribally narrow tastes. A J Alan's tales of the odd, the quirky, the (mildly) racy and the (sometimes) supernatural were definitely perfect for long winter evenings by the fireside with tendrils of grimy London fog pressing up against the window panes. Not "the Twilight Zone" so much as "the Velvet Hour" - which, I know, some say is dawn, not dusk, but I think of it as the time when cocktails may be respectably mixed and drunk and one might start to think about dressing for dinner - at least, in the world that Mr Alan and his listeners inhabited.

I mention this now because Spark Furnace Books have just published a paperback edition of But That's A Detail, my collection of A J Alan stories. So if you want something different, and really rather good, I'd say it's an absolute snip at £3.99.

The Girl Who Took The Piss

Spoilers ahead? You bet.

Writers are very often sedentary, even intellectual types. If we didn’t like the world inside our heads better than the one out there, why would we write? Okay, there are notable exceptions. Hemingway liked to fish. Shakespeare preferred being on stage. But I’m just saying there’s a type. Jeans and a sports jacket. Whisky not brandy. Men (and women) of letters are a tribe apart.

This can cause problems, because obviously readers like stories they can believe in, but often writers have unrealistic and pretty unbelievable ideas about how the world works. For example, I was watching a movie based on a Stieg Larsson book. Let me tell you how I’d escape from Colditz if the rules of reality were like in the movie. First I’d attack a guard. He may shoot me a couple of times, but as long as it’s just a handgun I’m okay. Then the guards would carry me out to the cemetery. Maybe the officer even guesses I’m not dead (he’s used handguns before) but he goes ahead and has me buried alive. Maybe a shallow grave, just two or three feet, as it’s all I deserve. He thinks I’m done for. The fool. What he doesn’t know: I have the lid off a coffee tin in my pocket, and I can use that to dig my way to the surface.

It’s a story, you say? It doesn’t have to be realistic? Well, see, it does – realistic within the rules of the world you’ve set up in your story, at least. Road Runner physics is not kosher with Newton, but we understand and accept how the cartoon world works. In a thriller, if you have your hero shot and then buried, the reader is going to be on the edge of their seat. How the hell is she going to get out of this? Maybe her phone..? Her journalist friend could find her by ringing it, locating the sound, and digging her up. But no, the answer is simpler than that: she’s Supergirl. You sap, for ever supposing there would be a clever solution.

You may feel inclined to forgive the poor writer for not knowing about guns and burials and stuff. Again, I can’t agree. Here is a simple experiment that would have told him what he needed to know. Go to a garden centre (as the characters do in the movie at one point, funnily enough) and pick up a bag of soil. Man, that’s heavy, right? Now lie on the ground and get a friend to load a couple of those bags on your chest. Another couple on your head, your arms, your stomach, your thighs, your ankles. Now sit up. You see? You didn’t even have to leave the comfort of your chair; the thought experiment is enough on its own. (Einstein figured out the whole of relativity using thought experiments, so I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a thriller writer might give it a go for the sake of a story.)

Of course, in The Girl Who Played With Fire, the soil isn’t in bags. The character is actually buried in a grave with two or three feet of soil packed on top of her. But wait – she has a cigarette case, thoughtfully given to her, not by Q, but by her girlfriend. So naturally she digs herself out of the grave.

Right, thought experiment number two. Imagine yourself under those fourteen or so bags of soil. And let’s suppose you are equipped with an oxygen tank. And haven’t got any bullets in you, ‘cause after all it was just a revolver and they only do flesh wounds. Okay, you have a trowel in your hand. Now what? You can’t lift your arm. Ah, so you start with a kind of rotating motion of the wrist, working the trowel around. Visualize that. Close your eyes, smell the damp soil, feel the weight. Focus on that hand with the trowel. What’s happening as you work it around?

You don’t need to be Einstein to figure out that you’ll dislodge a bit of soil and another bit will fall to take its place. On the surface, you wouldn’t even see the minute depression created as the soil settles in above where you’re moving the trowel. What you are actually doing here – the only thing you’ll be able to achieve – is shifting the soil so that it’s more compact than it was to begin with. And, without leverage, you’ll never get your arm to the point where you can actually dig upwards – never mind that the soil has nowhere to go, so you can’t create any kind of a hole anyway.

Moles do it? Yes they do. They take soil from in front of them and they pass it back and pack it behind them. They’ve had a few million years of evolution to help out with that, not only with body shape but with tolerance of carbon dioxide too. And that’s tunnelling. You take a mole, shoot it a couple of times, and bury it in your garden, and that sucker is not coming back.

Writers need to put some thought into their stories, because they are asking us to invest our time and our imagination in those stories, to believe what is happening to the characters and to care. Life and death decisions are made, for stakes higher than we see in everyday life, and for the story to thrill us the writer must keep the contract with the reader. They must play fair. Invent a Superman, but invent Kryptonite too – and then stick to your rules.

Here's William Goldman - a writer who always does the work so that his surprises and reversals suspend disbelief without actually burying it alive:

ANNIE

When I was growing up in Bakersfield, my favourite thing in the whole world was to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons for the Chapter Plays.

PAUL

Cliffhangers.

ANNIE

I know that, Mr. Man! They also called them serials. I'm not stupid ya know... Anyway, my favourite was Rocketman, and once it was a no-brakes chapter. The bad guy stuck him in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn't cheer. I stood right up and started shouting. This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! HE DIDN'T GET OUT OF THE COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!

Why we need comics we can care about

Tom Brevoort, who is Marvel’s Senior VP of Publishing, recently spoke about the fundamental difference between the DC universe and the Marvel universe. As he sees it, the former takes an optimistic view of the world, the latter a pessimistic one. “Even something like Dark Knight Returns, which is gritty as hell, is at its heart about a heroic ideal, a larger-than-life figure who rises up to champion the city in its time of need.”

I’m not sure about this assertion – though, to be fair to Mr Brevoort, he’s a very smart guy and he did open with the caveat that it was too big a subject to talk about in one short post. As a kid, I turned to Marvel, not for pessimism, but for a more believable idea of what a hero was. I could see that Peter Parker’s heroism cost him more than Clark Kent’s ever did. He was a bigger hero. I didn’t need Aunt May to die to prove that, I just needed to believe that Peter was afraid she would.

In the Lee-Kirby-Ditko era, Marvel stood out because the stories took a deeper, more nuanced view of what it meant to be a hero. The regular guy behind the mask had problems like the rest of us. Courage had a cost. The Marvel universe was a dramatic canvas of love, secrets, misunderstandings, shame, emotional dilemmas. I’m not sure I’d call that universe pessimistic, just indifferent to human affairs. Marvel heroes didn’t get any helping hands from the storytellers.

Are today’s comics (and I’m not specifically thinking of Marvel) rooted in pessimism? Maybe. I don’t really follow superhero comics much, but I see that where once the most extreme stakes for the heroes were life and death, now they’re more often things like disfigurement and brain damage. Action has often been replaced with brutality, personal problems with politics, characterization with a stance on thinly disguised current issues.

Dilemmas in many of today’s comic books are no longer emotional but intellectual. Mutants, that’s like racism, right? And superhero registration, that’s the war on terror. Yeah, we all get it. My blank look is boredom, not confusion.

As I said, I’m not talking about just Marvel here. Comics are a shrinking market and yet the superheroes of the Silver Age are entertaining bigger audiences than ever before. The movies are watched by seventy million people while the comic books’ readership has dwindled to a diehard band of collectors and fanboys. Why is that?

Bambos Georgiou talks on his blog about some of the things that may have gone wrong with the comics market. You would think, after all, that comics as a medium should appeal to both book readers and moviegoers. That’s a pretty wide demographic. The problem is not in the medium but in the content. And we need to qualify that by adding that it’s specifically the US and UK that is facing this problem.

It isn’t a question of whether today’s comics are darker – look how dark Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are. Comics are strangling themselves to death because most people don’t care a jot about the impersonal and somewhat abstract themes in these stories. Fanboys love that stuff but, thing is, fanboys are not really typical. And in a desperate attempt to inject the missing emotion, writers too often turn to sadism and plot complexity, delivering story punchlines that, if they arouse any emotion, deliver disgust and dismay rather than thrills.

Remember, I'm not saying all comic books are doing this. We still have some great ones that are about the people at the heart of the story. But overall it's a trend that has bedevilled the creators who grew up in the long shadow of Moore and Miller, who ape their style without getting even a hint of their substance. It's like a tyro novelist trying to be Hemingway without earning it. And it's a trend that's putting off new readers.

The majority of us connect with stories about characters whose concerns are personal, immediate, emotional, simple and relatable. Explore themes, sure – but personalize them. Blade Runner is not an issue-based examination of human identity; Roy Batty wants more life, fucker. And he ups and shows us what it is to be human.

I was in France recently. There you’ll see kids, teens and adults reading comics. The genres are as broad as in cinema or TV drama. The stories are gripping, and wildly popular like Harry Potter books or Sherlock Holmes movies. A ten-year-old picked up the first Mirabilis book. I thought it might be too old for her, but she read it through twice (the second time on her eleventh birthday, actually) and then demanded more. Teens and adults can enjoy that same story, perhaps seeing a little more in it than younger readers but without demanding characters’ eyes to be plucked out to make it “mature”.

I’ll give you a good analogy that shows how comic books could turn themselves around. A few years before J J Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, one of the show’s TV producers was talking about how maybe the ST franchise was just dying. And indeed it was dying – of worthiness, of sterility. Dying because it had made its issues bigger than its characters. To paraphrase The Onion, it was dying because of the heavy-handed messages about tolerance and the scenes set at long tables in which interstellar diplomacy is debated in endless detail.

The reboot made Star Trek once more about characters on a journey. We were with people we cared about as they faced huge challenges, They had to reach inside and discover the part of themselves that could meet such challenges. We saw them grow and change.

You tell a story like that, in any medium you like, and they will come.

Writing with pictures

When early filmgoers saw the first close-ups on there on the big screen, many were baffled. “What is this giant face?” they wondered. And, “Why did you show a man looking horrified and then cut to a new image of a baby's pram bouncing down some steps? Is there supposed to be a connection?”

Cinematic storytelling. The grammar of moving images. It didn’t take long for audiences to learn the rules. Or to discover how they work, I should say, because visual grammar, like linguistic grammar, is wired into us as the way we process the world. The mark of good cinematic storytelling is that the meaning comes from the whole sequence of images. There is no “telling”. Each image is a single brick; it’s only the whole that has to look like a house.

One hundred and ten years on from the birth of cinema, everyone on the planet understands how to read a montage of images. So it surprises me that many people are unable to extract meaning from a comic story unless there are plenty of captions and word balloons (lots of text, in other words) to carry them along. Yet you can perfectly well read a classic sequence like the opening five pages of Spider-man #33 without looking at the words. Or look at this page of the Tintin story Black Island (analysed in depth here on Peter Richardson’s excellent Cloud 109 blog). You don’t need to speak one word of French to understand what’s going on.

Comics are not movies. But their great strength is that they can use visual grammar as well as linguistic grammar. The reason many people find it difficult to read a comic visually is, I think, because of the way they see comics. Rather than taking the comic as a montage of images and words combined to tell a story, those people think of the comic as a kind of illustrated novel. In books at primary school, you might have an image of a big guy in chains rising up from behind a gravestone to terrify a little kid, and the caption would read, “Magwitch surprises Pip in the churchyard”. If you come to a comic with that preconception, you won’t expect the pictures to tell the story, you’ll just expect them to illustrate what the words have already told you.

This may be a particular problem in the UK, where we have no mainstream tradition of comics storytelling and our movies are mostly like television drama (70% words, 30% images according to McKee) rather than cinema (vice versa). So British audiences are accustomed to having the words carry the story, and any images are just there as eye candy. Well, Britain is just one island (actually it’s around a thousand, including the Outer Hebrides, but only one and a half big ones) so it wouldn't matter that much if the British never get hip to comics. Europe, India, the USA, Japan and Korea add up to a pretty fair market to be going on with. Yet I do find it a shame that most of my British friends, unless they were reared on American comic books as I was, are not able to appreciate le neuvième art. So I can’t share my love of Sandman or Watchmen or B.P.R.D. with them, much less get their feedback on Mirabilis. Somehow I don’t see any UK government putting comics on the national curriculum, so homegrown comics may face the same kind of future as the UK film industry. Which would be a great pity.

Storytelling with pictures

Still on writing tips today, but this time specifically how to tell a story with just pictures. The starting point, surprise surprise, is no different from prose: you need to make an emotional connection with the reader. In novels we have voice as the primary and most powerful tool for this. British publisher David Fickling, creator of The DFC in which Mirabilis first appeared as well as the upcoming Phoenix comic, talks about a warmth that is to be found, in various guises, in the voice of all great kids' writers.

Not just kids' writers, in fact. Even when a writer like Graham Greene tells a story of corruption and genocide, or Nabokov invites us to share the viewpoint of a paedophile, what comes across in the narrative voice above all is humanity. Contrast that with supermarket crime novels, where brutal events are described with no trace of human feeling, like a sales rep describing the Holocaust. If the emotional connection between writer and reader is missing, the novel loses its grip. It becomes a mere Powerpoint presentation of plot. The author's voice is what encourages us to strip off the armour of disbelief, expose ourselves to the dangers of the journey, and come away changed by the experience.

In movies, the writer doesn't have that option. You can have tone (often emphasized by a narrator's voiceover) which quickly serves to assure us that Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, say, is not going to be The Salton Sea. Compare the original Blade Runner with the Director's Cut; simply by removing Deckard's voiceover, the tone is altered completely. But tone in a movie is not the same as voice in prose, and in the gap between the two you'll find the reason why movies must have their heroes saving cats and taking care to hit all the beats of the monomyth.

Comics, of course, are not a purely visual medium. The writer is typically more present in the finished work than any director in his movie. Look at Sandman or Swamp Thing. Those are literary works that strongly give the sense that Gaiman and Moore are storytellers speaking directly into our ear. Still more so in the Marvel comics of the Silver Age, where Stan Lee's voice ushered his readers through stories like the patter of a circus ringmaster.

That's not the only way to tell a story in comics, of course. I use no captions in Mirabilis except for Jack's inner thoughts, and those sparingly. I almost never use thought bubbles (unless projected by telepathic brains in jars) because I want the reader to come to these characters as in life or in a long-running TV show: befriending them over time. Still, the author's touch is not and should never be invisible; Hitchcock observes murders in a very different way from Carol Reed. Compare the first ten minutes of The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich. Both were scripted by Launder & Gilliat, both feature Charters and Caldicott as key supporting characters, yet only the former has the warmth that David Fickling spoke of.

Stories are made up of scenes, and the same rules apply at every level. So let's look at an example of how to establish emotional connection using a series of images. This is cinema in its purest form: a sequence of uninflected images that acquire meaning through juxtaposition. And ironically, that pure visual storytelling is best seen these days in commercials. They're selling a product, sure, but they still need to make that direct emotional circuit into the audience's brains. It's all about story.

Take a look at the Virgin Atlantic commercial above. This has a group of Virgin's female cabin crew walking through the terminal attracting gawping looks from men. We see a guy dripping hot dog sauce on his shirt; another forgets all about his videogame. But notice that the commercial doesn’t open on a shot of the stewardesses. Instead, we see a man arriving at the airport. He gets out of the taxi talking on a mobile phone. He looks up, gradually loses interest in the call. The phone slips from his fingers. He sees something that's grabbed his attention, but what? Cut to a reverse shot, past his legs, as the phone breaks on the floor and we get glimpses of the stewardesses walking into shot – and only after that do we get a clear view of them walking towards us, a riot of colour and glamour amid the drab greys of the 1980s.

The commercial is constructed to use both suspense ("What is the man reacting to?") and empathy/identification ("See him? That's how you are meant to feel."). Starting on the stewardesses themselves would give us something to react to, but no viewpoint character to bring us within the story. Of course, we only specifically identify with the man on the phone for a few seconds, then we’re on to a series of loose identifications that gradually diffuse our point of view into the crowd. But in order to place us there as an onlooker in the crowd, the commercial starts off with a perfect little mini-story, complete with lead character, in order to corral our emotional response.

I feel I almost ought to apologize for using a commercial with such an egregious instance of the Male Gaze. There is undeniably a tone in this work, and it is nearer to the sales rep than to Graham Greene. But we can assume that it's male airline passengers whom the ad agency were targeting (apart from the little girl who sadly aspires only to be a honey in a tight red skirt) and, as an example of the visual storytelling craft, this shows perfect construction. But me, I still prefer Air Canada.

Stories are gardens

Stories are organic, but they're not single organisms like a tree, say. A story is more like a garden. You plant seeds and then as you walk through the garden those seeds are sprouting and growing and flowering all around - at, you hope, just the right moment.

One of the most obvious kinds of story seed is when you embed the germ of a plot idea early on so that the reader is prepped for it later. Ever seen a movie where the characters get bogged down in exposition in the last fifteen minutes? That's because the writer failed to plant all the seeds. At the end of a story you need to be thinking, "Oh my God, this is happening!" not "Wait - what's happening and why?"

A seed can also be planted to carry the burden of complex discussion of a theme that would interrupt the story if it had to be fully elaborated in dialogue. For example, in the Buffy episode "Crush" (ep 5:14) very early on we hear Willow explaining to Buffy and Tara that Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame wasn't really a hero because his decisions were not taken as part of a moral compass: “He did good things for love of Esmerelda, but that doesn’t make a hero”. Later in the story, Buffy is arguing with Dawn about hanging out with a dangerous vampire like Spike. Dawn says, “You used to date Angel,” and Buffy says that’s different, Angel had a soul. To which Dawn replies: “And Spike has a chip. Same difference.”

Because of these seeds, when the climax arrives we’ve already covered the thematic question of what makes a hero: doing good things, or having good motives?

There are two kinds of story seeds. The first is at the basic level of craft. At the risk of mixing metaphors, those are the screws and washers that hold your story together. The second is a more subtle foreshadowing of things to come.

The two types are used well by Edna O’Brien in her BBC adaptation of her own short story Mrs Reinhardt. The main character, who is staying at a French rural hotel, has a valuable emerald necklace that she wears most of the time. She meets an American whom we suspect of stealing the necklace. However, at the end of the story we learn that it was not the American who took it, but one of the hotel maids.

There are two scenes that demonstrate the basic level of seed-planting. The first is in Mrs Reinhardt's bedroom where she is delightedly swinging a pillow, letting off steam because she thinks she's alone, when the maid comes in with breakfast and surprises her. Later, Mrs Reinhardt strays into the kitchen to find the maid and the other serving staff fooling around until the chef brings them to order.

So those two scenes do the basic craftwork: they tell us (1) that the maid has a key and could enter the room at any time, and also (2) that the maid may act all serious and deferential when on duty, but she is an individual who in private is frivolous and playful like any young girl.

But that's not all. In the second scene, O’Brien goes further and plants the higher level of seed. As the maid is going past her out of the kitchen, Mrs Reinhardt points at a plate of fruit and says, “May I?” and the maid says, “Of course, madame; they’re all hanging out there in the garden to be picked.” So that introduces, very subtly and in retrospect, the notion that the maid might regard things that are lying around as there for the taking.

Now, having pointed out how the story mechanism works there, I'm going to add a caveat. Analysis is not the same as synthesis. All these patterns, where to put the plot points... well, knowing the paradigm of a Mozart concerto, say, wouldn't mean that you or I could write one. Storytelling has to get into the bones, to the point that you do this kind of thing without thinking. You only notice it after you've done it. When Garth Marenghi says, "I often re-read my own stories to learn from them" it's intended as a joke. But so you should. It's analysis of your own work, even more than that of the masters, that will guide you in planting the seeds to make your story grow.

Walking on air

A red letter day today because I just packaged up the script and layouts for the first episode of Mirabilis season two and sent them winging their way over to Leo. In amongst readying all of our digital channels and getting the 200 pages of Mirabilis: Winter proofed for the imminent hardcover release, I haven't had a chance to put pen to paper (that is, fingers to keyboard) and actually do any new writing for months. And that's what I've been bursting to get on with more than anything else, because the ideas are flying thick and fast and you get to the point where you feel your head might just explode if you don't let them out!

Not to give any spoilers, but those of you who've already read season one will know that it ends with quite a cliffhanger, leaving a couple of our main characters in pretty deep water if not dead. The story picks up two months later, on the morning of the spring equinox, and nothing has been heard from those characters in all that time. So I'm starting out by exploring how the world has changed now that the green comet is getting nearer and magic is weaving its way into the fabric of daily life, and then I'm focusing in on the sharper and deeper impact that the disappearance of those two (whew - nearly gave their names away!) has had on those left behind. As Jack is fond of saying, "Everything changes," and in the episode I've just finished writing there are several OMG moments that are guaranteed to leave regular Mirabilis readers stunned. They even shocked me, and I wrote 'em!

We've got the whole eight issues of Spring pretty much mapped out now. So I know we're going to meet some new characters who are destined to be major players - some nice, some not so, some downright horrid. I know we'll be going to India, Atlantis, Valhalla, Shangri-La, Bloomsbury and Dorking. I know that relationships are going to get shuffled like cards, hearts will be broken, and at least two lead characters are facing tragic ends. I'm at that happy stage for a writer when the characters have taken over and all I have to do now is listen to what they're saying to me and get it on the page.

It's going to be great seeing the new issues going through the production line. Leo's pencils are a delight; I don't know whether it's because that's when the events of the story first come alive, or simply because loose sketches are so full of energy, but that's almost my favorite part of the process. Then my other favorite part is when the inks go on and everything acquires a real weight and luxurious detail. And then there's my equally favorite bit, when Nikos and his assistant Mike put the colors on and the whole story goes from being my script to a cinematically vibrant work of art. For a writer, there's nothing to equal it.

So when will you get to see the new issues? We're planning on #9 being ready by the middle of May, and therefore on Graphicly, Comics+ and our own Mirabilis iPad app by June 1st. Then we're going to aim to stick to a bimonthly schedule, meaning that the first half of season two will be reaching a climax at the end of November. (Seems a long way off? When you have 120 pages of a comic book like Mirabilis to create and publish, trust me, that's the blink of an eye.) Anyway, it's going to be a blast for us working on these new issues and bringing all those amazing story developments to life, and I think you're going to have even more fun reading them. In the meantime, there are eight issues to collect digitally for iPad, iPhone, Android and PC/Mac - so don't be shy, jump right in!

Top tips by comic book masters

You probably never thought to see the big blue boy at the top of a Mirabilis post. (Though indeed, why not? He's a mythological figure too.) This image by Dan Scott heads up a list of useful tips by comic book artists. My favorites:

"It’s a lot more to do with the storytelling than just pretty art. I see a lot of up and comers that get into comics in the same position I was in, and I see them focusing very heavily on the way they draw and doing covers and pin-ups and things like that. I don’t see a lot of focus on storytelling, which is something I’ve really tried to focus on in the last few years. I think if anyone can learn from my experience, focus on that just as much as focussing on your art."
- Mark Brooks

"There were all of these little nuances of line readings, acting, reacting, interpretation, layers of character personality, integrity, etc, people bouncing off each other. That was suddenly very grown-up, as opposed to the slam-bang. It was a whole new ballgame, and it forced me to really pay attention, and look, learn and listen."
- Alex Toth on the lessons he took from romance comics

"In the past I’ve overworked my pencils in order to make them as ‘good’ as possible, whereas I now believe it’s best to adopt a looser approach and perhaps to have more self-belief in your own personal style. I was given the same advice in 1982 by Steve Dillon, who I think believes that being a perfectionist can take the ‘fun’ out of drawing comics."
- Tony O'Donnell on not chasing the "in" style

Fact is, they're all great lessons from comics legends. And not a grain of red kryptonite among 'em. Well worth a look.

Dancing with light

To fulfil David Mamet’s main criterion for storytelling, which is to make the audience wonder what happens next, the writer has to do more than just cook up an unpredictable plot. You have to make the reader care about your characters. That comes before anything else.

I was reading a pretty famous comic recently. It’s another one that is supposedly going to get turned into a movie. It starts with two characters talking about some item that’s been stolen, the whole world is in peril if it isn’t found, yada yada. Yet I don’t know who these characters are. The writer does nothing to establish them as individual personalities that I should find uniquely interesting and engaging. They aren’t talking as people really do, they’re just holding up placards that explain the plot.

Who gets it right? Not that many writers in any medium, fewer still in comics. It’s a difficult job and I’m constantly having to chuck out pages I’ve written because this simple truth is elusive. Characters who come to life will make a story come to life. The audience takes them to their hearts and will follow them through all kinds of scrapes. We just enjoy (I’ve said it before) hanging out with them.

This is the beating heart of Garen Ewing’s brilliant and charming adventure series The Rainbow Orchid. It stands out from other comics because you feel like you are joining an extended family of well-rounded characters. They’re your mates and you’re rooting for them all the way. In an epic plot involving family fortunes, life-or-death wagers, ancient secrets, skulduggery, cults, myths, loyalty and betrayal, Garen never loses sight of the importance of grounding us in the characters’ reactions to all these events in which they’re embroiled.

In this second volume, Julius Chancer and his friends arrive in India in their quest for the fabled rainbow orchid, hotly pursued by sexy bad girl Evelyn Crow and her henchmen. Without giving any spoilers, I just want to point out the richness and depth of the story. There’s plenty of thrilling action, but there’s also room to stop and marvel at the sights. Garen evokes his locations so wonderfully that you almost smell the spices in the marketplace, feel the hard seats of the railway carriage, sense the nip in the air as our heroes’ journey takes them up into the hills.

There’s a quiet, moving campfire moment that rounds out Julius’s backstory and develops his relationship with Lily. A dream sequence depicts in just a handful of panels everything about his self-doubt and desires. A betrayal that we see coming carries a poignant sting. Watch characters’ reactions – for example, Lily’s surge of emotions in the last three panels. That’s what makes them feel like real people. This is a book worth a million dumbly hip, smart-aleck zombie-killer comics. Because the author takes the trouble to make his characters live and breathe, we connect with them and so we care what happens next.

Other episodes make us laugh or shudder, a reminder that all the best stories, from Chaucer on, have plenty of room for the whole gamut of human emotions. But these aren’t just peppered in willy-nilly. Garen shows mastery of his craft in where he places every sequence. Look at the final pages. Don’t worry, I’m not going to give anything away, but see how he juxtaposes danger, violence and (maybe) death with a breathtaking moment of wonder at the whole of life and creation. You’ll know what I mean when you see it. Buy the book now (and Volume One as well if you don’t have it) because this is a ride that you simply have to go on.

I realize I’ve talked all about the story and hardly at all about the art. Garen is using a ligne claire style that both suits the meticulous detail of vehicles and locations and that creates a great sense of warmth with the characters. The cover is a great example, but if you’re still not sold then head over to the Rainbow Orchid blog where you can feast your eyes on more excerpts. I just yearn for the day that a British director could get behind a movie of this true homegrown work of UK comics genius.