The DFC Library

The first three books in the DFC Library have been announced: Good Dog, Bad Dog on 4 March 2010, then Mezolith on 1 April, and The Spider Moon on 29 April. Yes, I know we already blew the lid off that one, but now the books are officially up on Amazon for pre-order. Read more on the Super Comics Adventure Squad blog.

Pet hates

In Britain we have a TV show called Room 101. (Or maybe we used to have it and now it’s gone; I don’t know, I don’t watch broadcast television.) Anyway, the idea of the show is to pick the things you really can’t stand to go into your personal Room 101, on the principle that “The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.”

From comics, my 101s are:

• Lots of different fonts on one page. Noisy. Extra aggravation points for multiple fonts in one word balloon.
• Motion lines. Sometimes unavoidable, but mostly just crass. Like sticking on a caption saying, "Look, children! See Ben Grimm clobber the bad man!"
• Talk scenes. Again, sometimes you just have to. But do the work, daddy-o, have something else going on while they gab.
• Big eyes, small mouth. I don't find this cute, I just want to punch their faces to beefsteak.
• Dandy, Beano, Viz - all those Brit comics. Apologies if they're your thing, but to me: wet chalk on a blackboard.
• Solipsistic comics about splitting up with the person who was never quite your girlfriend. This is over. Next.
• Stories about the mutant menace, superhero registration, etc. Metaphors are fine, but they have no power when they're that obvious.
• Wolverine. He's so grumpy. Shoulda been stuffed in a sack and thrown in the river years ago.

Lock me in a room with the above and I’ll say anything to get out. But Room 101 is all about the personal. What are your comic hates?

"Just a story" is no excuse

When you have characters in a story taking action that’s out of proportion to the emotion you’ve built up, that’s melodrama. When you have something happen that doesn’t make any logical sense, that’s hokum.

Now, I loved loved loved the new Star Trek movie. Ordered the special edition on DVD, can’t wait. But there is that one little bit that I just have to put mental blinkers on for, and that’s where Spock decides to stick Kirk in an escape pod and blast him off the ship on account of he’s been a very bad boy and the brig just won’t do.

Maybe you’re saying, “Don’t you see? That shows how upset Spock was!” Nah, that’s a lame excuse. People show more restraint than that every day, and they don’t even have the advantage of being half Vulcan. The writers needed Kirk in that pod to keep the plot moving, so they just hoped we’d accept the idea of Spock being so worked up into a lather that he’d behave like a little kid whose toy got broke.

And why did they need Kirk in that pod? So he could land on a deserted planet and meet up with Spock’s future self and get told some important plot stuff. So that’s piling hokum onto melodrama.

Now, remember this is a movie I adore. You know that Yeats quote, “Tread softly because you tread upon my dreams”? This movie decidedly did not tread on them. It took them and it made them into something brilliant. It made Star Trek as great as it always should have been – as great, I mean, as it was in my 11-year-old imagination. I’m going to keep saying that so you know this is criticism of a loved one.

But that bit with the escape pod is still melodrama and hokum. And what’s more, the writers knew it.

In a recent interview, J J Abrams mentions a deleted scene:

"In the scene, Spock explains that [the encounter of Kirk and Spock Prime] is a result of the universe trying to restore balance after the time line is changed. They acknowledged the coincidence as a function of the universe to heal itself."

Abrams was right to drop that scene in favour of keeping the mystery, because a mystery is always going to be preferable to a really dumb bit of blather like that. That’s the writer’s equivalent of covering the bad brickwork with a coat of plaster. But if they had wanted an honest logical explanation, older Spock could simply have said he planted the idea in young Spock’s mind. That reincorporates the Vulcan mind-meld, so we know it wasn’t cooked up just for the sake of this one plot point. Doesn’t normally work over hundreds of thousands of miles, sure – but who knows the range of contact between two near-identical minds? And it explains both young Spock’s crazy overreaction and the apparent fluke of Kirk and old Spock’s meeting.

If I get a meal cooked by Raymond Blanc and he burns the steak then I’m going to send it back. Literature and cuisine – they’re both crafts. I want to believe good stories, but I don’t see why I should make allowances. The better the story, the more it’s important to get every detail right. Seduce my disbelief, don’t just count on it to tie itself up. And if you see me cutting corners and sticking on plot patches in Mirabilis or Sweet or anything else, shout it out loud and clear.

Oh, and go and buy the Star Trek DVD right now because it was the best movie of 2009 by several parsecs.

The idiocy of the system

At the height of its early-70s success, with millions tuning in every week to watch first Jon Pertwee and then Tom Baker at the hexagonal console, Doctor Who was nonetheless facing a budget squeeze. At the time, a BBC executive was rolled out sometime between lunch and the cocktail hour to explain that, although Doctor Who was a drama series, it was paid for by the Light Entertainment department, don't you see, so really it's a bit of a drain on resources and all that. Oh go on, then, just a small one.

I remember thinking, “Why don’t you just pay for it out of the drama budget, then?” How naïve I was. As if that simple solution wouldn’t have occurred to the big swinging dickheads at the Beeb. The problem was that nobody actually had the ability or the will to make it so. The system had defeated them, the BBC corporate structure itself, like one of those huge computers from old sci-fi pictures that takes over the world and nobody can shut it down.

Prof Thomas Schatz wrote a book, The Genius of the System, in which he argued that Hollywood in its heyday benefited from a structure that allowed commercial creativity to thrive. And it makes sense. Corporations are like artificial intelligences. They have directives, criteria for selecting goals, and protocols for how to achieve them.

More often than genius, though, we get to experience the idiocy of the system. A petrochemicals company dumps waste into the ocean despite a daily fine of $1 million, and everybody says that’s stupid, that’s evil. Well, the company is just an AI. It calculates the cost of refining the waste and weighs that against the fine. $1m is small change, so sploosh.

Paul Mason (whose wife Keiko is currently preparing the Japanese version of Mirabilis episode one; thank you, Keiko) mentioned something in an email that gives a perfect illustration of the idiocy of a system:

“Our television is network-capable, but I can't see any point in connecting as all the technological effort seems to have gone into the DRM preventing the network connection being used to show free content. Which is easy to show by simply connecting a computer up to the TV.”

Likewise, book publishers are expending effort on DRM and going to expensive junkets – er, conferences - on “the digital future” and they aren’t getting the point either. It’s not a digital future, it’s a digital now. They are trying to figure out ways to slot electronic publishing alongside print, or use it as a kind of lead-in to print. Bzz – WRONG. Now, okay, print isn’t dead, whatever you’ve heard to the contrary, but it’s just one part of the whole and it’s going to be at the prestige end at that. The publishers need to get to grips with electronic “books” (in many forms) as the broad and overwhelming majority of what their business will be - and to understand that any attempt you make at imposing artificial controls on content will simply drive the market elsewhere.

The media are changing. But the systems are all old and stupid. They were built for a different world – the world of bookshops and DVD stores and broadcast television. They don’t know how to cope when content can be delivered digitally across an international network. The necessary change cannot come at the lower levels: the individual nationally-based networks or publishers. It has to come right from the top, from the media conglomerates that bought up all these pieces and now need to break them down and rebuild them into a completely new structure.

Oh for a Tardis to show them all this. But would it make a difference? There are plenty of clever people in TV and book publishing and games. They all know about the meteor that’s about to hit the media industries. But the companies themselves only have dinosaur brains. Can they adapt, or will they have to undergo the most drastic motor of evolution we know of: extinction?

Sweet concept art

It's very early days yet, but here's some concept art for Sweet, our rom-com graphic novel. I just wrote the final art and color notes for Mirabilis so, although it'll still be a month or so before we can put that to bed, my writing time is pretty much freed up over the next few weeks to start sketching out a story structure for the new project.

Unlike Mirabilis, we're going to get Sweet onto iPhone as soon as possible (probably while we're still writing it) so you may even see episodes of that a while before Jack and Estelle and co finally appear in print.

The lowdown on Sweet

Leo and I were talkling more about our "rom-comic" idea today and we're getting amped about it to the extent that we're going to take a trip to Brighton, where the story is set, to charge up on the local vibe. Not that we don't both know Brighton very well indeed. Leo lived there for years, I used to be a regular customer at the Rodeo Steak Bar throughout the summer vac, always ordering the J.R. Texas Special (the name dates it) which was a 14oz steak, fries and two fried eggs with onion rings and a salad. Mmm... if only I had a Tardis.

Anyway, we need a working title for this thing. I can't use its actual title because that would be a total giveaway. Like My Best Friend's Wedding or Knocked Up, it does exactly what it says on the tin. So for now we're going to be calling it Sweet. That's not the real title, just a placeholder. So we're clear on that.

I don't know if we'll change the name of the blog. We'll still be talking about Mirabilis, of course, but I anticipate we'll be putting more emphasis on Sweet as we develop it - and then other projects after that. We could keep the name for historical reasons, of course, the way that - oh, say, the way that Dickens kept the title Master Humphrey's Clock long after his eponymous narrator had dropped out of the story. (Hmm, I think I still haven't quite got the hang of these Whedonesque pop culture references.)

New direction

"If you liked that then you'll like this." Except... not necessarily. For me, Buffy is the masterwork of television drama. I buy everything Joss Whedon does on DVD because he and his team have earned it ten times over just for those seven glorious seasons. And Dollhouse and Dr Horrible too - fabulous. But I keep on trying and I just can't get into Firefly. I admire it, but how faint is that praise? "Don't you find me attractive?" "Well, I do admire you..." Ulp!

Leo and I have been talking about what we should work on next. Front runner among a whole bunch of notions is a graphic novel rom-com. See what I mean? If you were hoping for cyborg dinosaurs you're going to be bitterly disappointed now. I often hear from Dragon Warriors and Fabled Lands fans who are usually bewildered to see what I'm doing these days because they perceive little overlap between those old sword-n-sorcery adventures and the richer character-driven stories in Mirabilis. I feel like I've matured, the fans just wonder when I'm going to get back on track: "We enjoy your films. Particularly the early, funny ones." So to speak.

The Glass Half Full is that, because we are self-funded, we can work on whatever we like without publisher interference. Frankly, I doubt if any book publisher would commission us to do a rom-com graphic novel anyway. We need to do it first, then go looking for a publisher. I'm approaching it like we're making a rom-com movie that we would actually pay to see ourselves - and hopefully one that will be laugh-out-loud funny in places. It may not appeal to everybody who likes Mirabilis, but take a look anyhow. You might be pleasantly surprised.