The author's promise to the reader

In the Best.Episode.Ever of The Simpsons, the Comic Book Guy is asked what right he has to complain about Itchy & Scratchy. “As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me,” he says, to which Bart replies: “They’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them.”

In most countries outside the UK you don’t have to actually pay for the mere right to have a television in your home. But even if you’re watching The Simpsons for free on Fox, you still get shown a bunch of commercials that aren't exactly an enrichment of your viewing experience. And then you give in and go and buy stuff you don't need and the advertisers give the network some money to thank them for bringing all those bees to the flower. So you did end up paying for that show, whatever the writers at Gracie Films may think. There are no free lunches, and no free TV dinners either.

The contract that exists between writer and audience is more complicated than that between a craftsman and his customer. The reader or viewer or player gives you their money, but on top of that they give you their undivided attention (the ones who keep up a running commentary all the way through a movie, please leave now). They are asking you to make them believe - and not only for the time it takes to watch the movie or read the book, but an enduring belief. That’s why I can’t abide plot holes. A story should bear scrutiny if it has any right to my time.

Neil Gaiman says that the reader’s contract when buying a book is for that book only; it’s not a mandate upon the author to deliver more in the series. The problem I have with that, as an author, is that I know the power of suspense. It’s the best trick I have in my writer’s toolbox to keep you reading. You want to find out what happens next - at least, I hope you do. And after all, I don’t have to promise a ten-book arc with a sweeping plot that hinges on many secrets with which I am enticing your attention. I could just tie up everything in the one book. If I choose not to, it’s because I’m trying to plant a compulsion in you to buy my next book - and in that case I'd feel under an obligation to deliver.

The corollary is that if I do start to weave a story around some far-reaching mystery, I’d better have in mind the real answer to that mystery. At the point when it because clear that Lost’s writers hadn't yet thought about why the polar bear was on the island (much less why it was also in a Green Lantern comic) and they were just going to figure out something later - at that point, the contract is broken. Why continue to pay their wages when you can make up your own ending and it’ll be just as good?

The flipside of all this, and just as undesirable, is when stories are spun out indefinitely. “A beginning, a middle and an end,” is what Aristotle stipulated, not “a beginning and then endless variations on the theme until you finally jump the shark.” Success is the usual culprit, as endings have to be left open enough to leave room for a sequel or a new season. Prison Break is a perfect example of the problem: what would have been a memorably taut, single-season narrative suddenly splurged into the diminishing returns of patched-on plot developments. And, although I realize this is heresy, maybe we could say the same of The Sopranos. I know we got six seasons of the best soap opera on TV, and thank you, David Chase - but what about the pitch-dark Greek (okay, Italian) tragedy that the first season was building up to? The network’s need for more of the same possibly deep-sixed a climax that, had they gone ahead and ended the show there, would be remembered now as the chilling, thrilling apotheosis of TV drama.

Any sense of obligation a writer may feel to his or her readers, beyond delivering the script or book that they actually paid for, is of course self-inflicted. George R R Martin and Neil Gaiman rightly take their own view on this. However, the writer’s duty is to the characters is not up for debate. You brought them to life, so it’s incumbent on you to give them a life. That means a proper story, not leaving them in limbo halfway through or dragging them into an endless and directionless existence where nothing is ever resolved.

Obviously I’m thinking now of Mirabilis. I can certainly promise that the story will not be spun out ad infinitum. Leo and I have one year of narrative, which we currently expect to take about 800 pages across four seasons. Then it’ll be January 1st 1902, the green comet will be gone, and all our loose ends will be tied up, leaving not a rack behind.

The harder promise to make is that the story will reach its conclusion. I would gladly swear to that right here and now, but it’s not just up me. Since the DFC folded, Leo and I have been continuing to finance the work at our own expense. At least in comics it's not too difficult to do that: digital publishing brings in a nicely regular if not (yet) huge revenue stream, and every time we sign to a print edition in a new territory, as with the upcoming Print Media hardcovers in the UK, that pays for a few more issues. Mirabilis #9 through #12 are already fully funded, and by the time we complete #12 we'll be able to say the same for the four issues that will tie up season two. A handful at a time moves the mountain.

That's why I'm glad I'm not doing this for television. Joss Whedon would love to have had enough viewers to make Firefly and Dollhouse viable; same goes for David Milch and Deadwood. My heart skips a beat every time Fringe's ratings are mentioned. Since they announced the season four renewal, the heart in question is looking healthy at the moment, and thank you for asking, but if I had to find $1 million per episode of Mirabilis then I'd be in cardiac arrest in a month.

If Mirabilis continues to build an e-readership as it has been doing since Christmas, and if we keep on picking up print publishers in the US and Europe - in short, if enough people care about Jack and Estelle to want to find out what happens to them - then we promise on bended knee at any altar you like to take this story right through to the end. We’ve planned out an epic with some really big surprises that we think you’re going to enjoy. Hope you can join the ride all the way to the end.

London Calling

My wife Roz, in addition to being a million-selling ghostwriter, runs a thriving blog called Nail Your Novel, where she dispenses advice on the craft of writing. Most of the discussion there is about novels and screenplays, so I thought it might be interesting to see what Roz makes of a comic book. She certainly fits my definition of a casual reader of the medium as, while she might accompany me to the local comics store, she couldn’t find her own way there without a map and she won’t actually cross the threshold unless I drag her inside, preferring to poke around in the dress agency down the road while I’m sorting through the latest Dark Horse and Vertigo titles. Anyway, without further ado or indeed any ado whatsoever, here is what she made of London Calling by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page:

In a London flooded so deeply that nothing below the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral is showing, a woman paddles a boat. She tells her three child passengers a story about Charlotte Corday, a French psychic agent who was sent to London on a secret mission. And so we flash back to the meat of the story. It’s the 1950s. Corday is newly arrived in London, waiting for further orders about her mission and avoiding a number of unsavoury folk who seem to know more about why she’s there than she does herself.

Ultimately the mystery is about vampires, which I thought was a pity. Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t find vampires as interesting or original as many of the other ideas that were casually slipped in just for atmosphere.

But the strength of London Calling is not the story. The real fun is the richness of the world, drawn in a boldly inked black and white style with plenty of retro drama.

It seems to have diverged from ours around the Second World War, when Winston Churchill used psychics to tell him what Hitler was thinking before he thought it himself. Walsh and Page have had a lot of fun taking recognisable elements of London - both fictional and factual - and reweaving them into a punkish world of their own. Many ideas are used as throwaway textures in the background - for instance, Quatermass’s alien discovery is fact and Martians stride around central London against recognisable buildings such as the BBC headquarters in Bush House. Charlotte gets some of her orders when a TV puppet called Dennis the Donkey speaks to her from her landlady’s TV set (and, with fairytale humour, tells her switch off and to go to bed).

Charlotte herself is a likable and distinctive guide to this world, alienated by her Frenchness and harbouring a breezy disdain for the foes she meets. Her superiority and plain speaking in the midst of the madness is reminiscent of Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

Despite the slightly pedestrian vampires, it’s a charming and likable romp. London Calling is published by Time Bomb Comics. Walsh and Page have continued the adventures of agent Charlotte Corday in The Iron Moon published by Print Media Productions.

London Calling doesn't seem to be available on Amazon, but you can buy it direct from Time Bomb Comics. For comics cognoscenti, there's a longer review on the Forbidden Planet blog, and you can find out what artist Keith Page is up to (The Soho Devil with Christopher Fowler - looks intriguing) over on his blog. The Iron Moon is on Amazon (UK only) with the further - or earlier, or parallel - adventures of Charlotte Corday:

A face of beauty, a mind for adventure

Here's the trailer for Luc Besson's upcoming movie The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec. I found this on the Forbidden Planet Blog and I'm very glad I did, as the official English language trailer has a dumb-ass, gravelly-voiced narration that will make you want to punch a hole in your PC monitor. This trailer, though, is the real deal, and if it doesn't make you immediately resolve to catch up on all of Jacques Tardi's brilliant graphic novels then you're obviously one of those casual readers we were talking about recently.

I'm often asked if the pteranodon perching on the Eiffel Tower in Mirabilis #3 is our hommage to the Adèle Blanc-Sec books. Fact is, I'm very happy to let it stand as hommage because we certainly owe Monsieur Tardi a creative debt, but it didn't actually come about that way. Originally the pteranodon was atop Nelson's Column (above) as illustrated by Martin McKenna. That was part of our pitch to David Fickling years ago, and at that stage it was a nod to the pterosaur that escapes over London at the end of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World.

Later, in writing the comic, we reached a screne where Jack has traveled to Paris to board the Orient Express. That was the perfect place to work the pteranodon into the story, so it hopped over from Trafalgar Square to the Parc du Champ de Mars - becoming, in one fell swoop, a gestue of tribute to both Conan Doyle and Jacques Tardi.

And that's more than doubly appropriate, as I've always thought that if Estelle Meadowvane and Adèle Blanc-Sec were to meet ten years after the events of Mirabilis - well, they couldn't, of course, because the post-comet Mirabilis universe is our real world, meaning no pteranodons or pterodactyls. But if they did, I'm sure they'd be friends. It'd mean twice the trouble for poor old Jack, of course.

Just browsing: why should comics have to be "an art"?

I started off this week talking about the two ways of reading comics: as an aficionado appreciating an art form, or as a casual reader looking to while away a half hour. But what is a casual reader? These days, with the comics ecosystem looking like a rapidly drying waterhole, pretty much the only people reading comics are those who know their local hobby store like the back of their hand. In comics, the nearest equivalent to a casual reader in other media would be somebody who is picking up a comic for the first time.

Does that describe you? You don’t know where your local comic store is? You'd feel uncomfortable reading a comic book in public? You really never heard any name in comics other than Posy Simmonds and Hergé - and you don’t actually read even them?

Okay, let's say you answer yes. So you're a reader who might possibly pick up a comic with mild interest, but you're a long way from being the kind of comic reader who scurries home with the week's latest issues in mylar bags. As you're a casual reader, I've got a couple of scenarios to tell you about that might sound familiar. When Leo showed some pages of his comic art to a family member (most certainly not someone who has any affinity for comics) she angrily demanded: “All these panels on a page - how do you know which you’re supposed to read first?” A friend of mine, less emphatically, complained: “The characters were in one scene, then I turned the page and it was a different bunch of characters somewhere else.”

If those are your first hurdles, it’s simple. Read left to right, top to bottom. Most comics are not tricksy about this. You wouldn't hold a novel at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger and ask which end of this curious beast is its head. Fine, just read a comic the same way you would any book. And addressing the second point: yes, there will be cuts between different scenes. In the same way that movies have largely dispensed with intertitles in the last, oh, eighty years, so comics nowadays don’t often feel the need to flag the scene change with a big explicatory caption. You’ve seen a movie? You’ve watched television dramas? Know what a turtle is, Leon? Same thing.

For that relative of Leo’s, comics will always be disreputable and incomprehensible. This is quite a common attitude in Britain, at least if the comic is aimed at readers over eight years old, though it is possible to break through those prejudices. My friend persevered. Snowed in at Moscow airport over Christmas, he downloaded all eight issues of Mirabilis to his iPad and surprised himself by reading the whole story, understanding it, and most importantly eager for more. But that disqualifies him from reading today’s post, I’m afraid. He’s crossed the border country. He’s a comics reader now; even if he never looks at another comic, his sensibilities have been wakened. Remember we are just talking to the purest comics innocent here.

How should you read a comic? Just think of it as a movie storyboard. (Your hackles are rising at that? Then you’re in the wrong class. You’re one of them ay-ficky-oh-nadoes. Get outta here, this is 101.) A storyboard, I say. And as you are used to visual stories in the form of movies, TV and game cutscenes, which are all sit-back media that must resort to dramatic emphasis to engage the viewer’s attention, chances are you will prefer this:

over something like this:
You could almost call those the movie and TV version of the shot. And the casual comics reader is likely to respond more positively to the former. Which begs the question why the other style exists at all. Is it just the lazy or low-budget option? Like in Deadwood, say. If we are just given a straight two-shot of Al Swearengen berating some poor sap in language of the most baroque profanity, is that because the director didn’t have the time to mount the camera on a rail on the underside of the bar so we could get a low-angle tracking shot instead?

As the sophisticated comics reader knows, sometimes less is more. (And when I say “sophisticated” by the way, I just mean anybody who’s read enough comics to know their way around a thought balloon.) Consider the range of styles an artist might use for his comic book characters. Leaving off the extremes of realism and pure cartoon, we’ve got a spectrum a bit like this:
The novice, the which-way-do-I-read-this guy, will probably start off preferring one of the faces in the middle somewhere. Realism can easily end up looking stiff and spooky on the page, while the more stylized faces are more approachable but, as regular characters that we’re going to invest in, they still take some getting used to. So again: why would an artist deliberately choose to draw his character with stylized features? Well, think about a classic Disney movie like Snow White & the Seven Dwarves. Is it the normal human characters like the traditional prince and princess you most readily connect to - or is it the warm, daffy, rambunctious cartoony characters? See, realism isn't everything.

The dramatic, cinematic composition and the midway-realistic facial features are both designed to appeal to a sit-back reader. These style choices aim to push the story at us. Any of those big amazing splash panels that make you sit back in awe – think about it, unless those are intended as point-of-view shots to put us in the lead character’s shoes, they’re actually encouraging you to see the story from the outside. You are amazed by the spectacle, not seduced by the personalities.

And that’s what a casual reader wants. But as you read more comics, you’ll most likely start to get under the skin of the characters. Dramatic compositions then can seem distancing, and you want to see them sparingly if at all. The artist knows to save them up for when a zombie with a machete comes blundering through your French windows, not for a scene where two guys in an office are having an argument over the week’s payroll.

Characters too. The stylized character is closer to our own vague sense of how our face appears to others. The simplicity allows us to pour our own identity in. That, of course, is no longer a sit-back response to a story, which is why it’s not the casual reader’s choice. An airport thriller or a blockbuster don’t expect us to engage as an active process, they just want us to open our minds and let the story blow through. This is not to disparage the casual reader. People have a perfect right to experience stories however they like, and if you’re a busy man like, say, Barack Obama or Steve Jobs, I doubt if you want to have to make the degree of commitment to a story that the sit-forward approach demands.

We could look at content too, but I figured on leaving that out of this discussion just to save it from ballooning into an entire book. I will just point out that when fans say that the next Iron Man movie should follow some obscure and immensely detailed story that's been running in the comic book sometime in the last few years, they're missing the whole point. The most successful superhero movies are the ones that hark back to the simple, arresting, broadly accessible plots of the mid-'60s. Lost brought SF to millions who would never watch or read hardcore sci-fi. Phantom of the Opera appeals to a much bigger audience than are ever going to roll up for Rigoletto. It's not just the readers of superhero comics who've taped their heads inside a genre box - though look at their frankly ridiculous suggestions every time a new superhero movie is announced and you'll grasp the stratospheric disconnect from commercial reality that has had comics sluicing down a narrowcasting sinkhole for the last decade.

To attract a new, large, casual readership to story-based comics, I'm saying it helps to have bold, dramatic staging of action. Characters need to be not too cartoony (the masking effect, as Scott McCloud terms it) because to lock in on the empathic effectiveness of that first requires the reader to have developed a sophisticated approach to the material. The content needs to be pitched at "network" rather than "cable" as far as genre flavor and audience commitment are concerned. Don't rely on people becoming fans, in other words, because most people are not by nature fannish. And most of all the characters need to be relatable, not merely aspirational - with problems, failings, and character flaws that let us root for them to grow into believable heroes.

And you know what's ironic about this? None of it is new. It's exactly what Stan Lee and the guys at Marvel were doing with such phenomenal success through the '60s and early '70s. It worked precisely because they were just trying to entertain. The Bullpen approach didn't see anything wrong with comics being "low culture". They weren't out to make the "Ninth Art" equivalent of Last Year at Marienbad. Personally I love Mr Punch (Gaiman & McKean) and it's a book I'll read many more times. But it would be no use giving it to a casual reader. Something like The Clockwork Girl, that ticks the boxes I'm talking about here.

Yes, all the above are sweeping generalizations and are fuelled by egregious assumptions on my part. You will no doubt be itching to point out exceptions to every "rule" listed here. So leave a comment. I'm just getting the discussion started. And it's a discussion we need to have if comics are to break the stifling label of being "a worthy art form" that the fans would inflict upon it.

Two ways of reading comics

What I thought I'd do today is return to the subject I touched on with the Tintin post - only from a slightly less controversial angle. Put another way: comics don't have a broad readership anymore in the US or UK. In the Silver Age, a top comic could nudge a third of a million copies a month, and most of those readers were casual and uncommitted. Definitely not hardcore fans. I say we need to invite more readers in - not necessarily to become tomorrow's hardcore, or even tomorrow's regular readers, but because any artistic medium can only sustain its devotees if they are floating on a sea of casual and occasional buyers.

Leaving aside the question of content and retail outlets, both of which have slid comics across into their current niche state (or been slid themselves, it's a feedback loop) there's also the whole question of form. How are comics perceived by different kinds of readers, and are there lessons we could learn about how to give those casual readers who currently dismiss comics an easy way in? I picked on Tintin before, but I could just as easily have highlighted the transition from Ditko to Romita Sr on Spider-Man, or how Dr Who went from being a fanboys' favorite to family fare. What one person calls dumbing down, another sees as broadening the appeal.

And incidentally, even restricting the discussion to just form, we're hardly going to scratch the surface in a few posts, so think of this as just a preamble to getting a debate going.

In Bali (bear with me, this is going somewhere!) you can see some of the most exquisite woodcarving you’d find anywhere in the world. Craftsmen typically spend five years as an apprentice, five more as a journeyman, and only then qualify to call themselves masters of the art. Among aficionados, the market price of a master craftsman’s carvings reflects all that hard-earned skill.

Which is fine as long as the people buying the works belong to a culture for which woodcarving is an esteemed and deeply appreciated art. But now introduce tourists into the mix. On the lookout for something to put on the mantelpiece back home, they don’t look at woodcarving from a long artistic tradition. They can see that a journeyman’s work is better than an apprentice’s, but they don’t perceive the distinctive élan, that final five percent leap towards perfection, that hoists a master’s work up into the genius bracket. And they certainly won’t fork out the extra $100 that’s demanded for a finely carved cheek, the precise angle of a finger, the delicate lips that smile just so.

And so it is that the journeymen get rich while the masters can settle for pride or a living wage, but not both. The latter choice means turning their backs on what they’ve learned, eschewing the extra time and tears required to produce a masterpiece. They may as well just produce journeyman-quality works, that being what the market has chosen as the maximum value of the utility function.

All art is like this. At college, I had two friends who were really into classical music. They would laugh in delight at what seemed to me to be random notes in a piece, saying, “Did you hear what he did there?” Not me. I just wanted to crank up the volume and listen to “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes”. You have the refined form, the high art, the medium in which the cognoscenti are tuned to detect every nuance. And then you have the guy who just came in to while away a half hour.

To talk about reading comics, we need to think about what kind of reader we mean. Comics have become such a niche interest, like crystal radio sets or the Japanese tea ceremony, that almost everyone who reads comics does so as a connoisseur. If that describes you, pop back next week. But if you’re honestly just a casual reader – maybe you enjoyed the Iron Man movie or From Hell, and you’re curious to see if the medium from which they sprang has anything to offer – then you need to pick the other box, opening here on Friday.

Interview on We Do Write

I've just been interviewed by Dorothy Dreyer for her We Do Write blog. If you're at all interested in the writing process, Dorothy's blog is a luxuriant oasis of insights that can easily eat up an hour or two as you have to read "just one more" author's answers to some fundamental creative questions. I don't know if I'm the first comic book writer to feature, but it's certainly flattering to be included in such august company. Thanks for the invite, Dorothy!

Is Hergé’s art holding the boy reporter back?

I admire Tintin. What comics creator could fail to? Charming, well-rounded characters in inventive plots, driven by storytelling that gracefully swoops from humor to suspense to danger and back again. Yep, Hergé is undeniably one of the great talents of the 20th century. I often describe Mirabilis as "Tintin with fantasy" and I'm always conscious of doing my best to live up to that.

But for all that, and even with the involvement of Spielberg and Jackson, the prospect of the upcoming movie hadn’t motivated me to dig out any Tintin books and re-read them. It’s the way many British people feel about cricket. Nice to know that it’s still played. What’s on the other channel?

Until this week, that is, when I caught up on Hero Complex with what Steven Spielberg has to say about the first movie, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.

“It just seemed that live action would be too stylized for an audience to relate to. You’d have to have costumes that are a little outrageous when you see actors wearing them. The costumes seem to fit better when the medium chosen is a digital one.”

It’s not so much what he said about the movie, interesting as that is. It’s the screenshots that have me really stoked. And those images have been on the web since last November, so why hadn't I even bothered to take a look before? Well, what did we know about the Tintin movie? At least it wasn’t going to be 2D. Gotta love those Studio Ghibli movies but it’s love with a shrug, admit it. And as for mo-capped 3D? If you see me shiver, that's the grisly memories of Polar Express that won't stay buried.

Instead of either of those extremes, Spielberg and Jackson have picked a very slightly cartoonish 3D styling. It’s a look that’s grounded in realism but with just enough Disneyesque stylization to nudge the characters safely away from Auton spookiness and into warm relatability. Of course. Should’ve figured that Steven Spielberg isn’t the sort of man who’d get trapped under a boulder in the Uncanny Valley and have to saw his own arm off.
So here’s the thing. Up until this week I could’ve waited for the DVD. Now I’m really keen to see the movie in theatrical release. But in the meantime, if I do happen to look at any of the original albums (European for “graphic novels”) it’ll only be one or two of them, and the reaction they’ll evoke will be a sort of kept-your-dinner-warm admiration. A rich glow of nice. Nobody is going to be devouring those old Tintin stories in a fever pitch of tunnel-visioned excitement as if the sun might go out at any moment…

And why not? That crazed all-consuming zeal is what I feel when I’m reading The Walking Dead or Irredeemable. You want the truth? The world moved on. The art in those Tintin books now, it’s been damned with the label of “classic”. Like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Vampyr, even Battleship Potemkin – sure, you and I and Martin Scorsese watch those movies. No, we don't; we study them. They’re what the vintners drink.

Tintin books shift, at best, two or three thousand copies a year in the UK. I doubt if it’s even as many as that in the US. Yet a movie can exponentially boost the sales of an attached comic. What’s the use of getting the Tintin books in front of the wider, non-fan market if they can’t see past the quaint old wrapping to enjoy the stories?

You know what I’m going to say. And you know I’m right, even if you don’t want to hear it. It’s time to modernize. Comics can be reinterpreted as movies, as TV, even as Broadway musicals, so why not as new comics too?

They need to remake the original Tintin books using the art style of the movies.

An expensive undertaking? Not when you have a crack at selling north of half a million copies of each of twenty-four books. And that’s just the English language editions.
I don’t say this to court controversy, whip up a fake debate, or take a potshot at a beloved and brilliant comics creator. In the English speaking world, Hergé’s stories are fading away into obscurity. They deserve a wide audience but, just like those classic old silent movies I cited, fewer and fewer people are going to seek them out in their current form. Do we want Tintin to be known only as a series of movies, or would it be a good thing if the movies drove people to read the stories as comics too?

If all this sets your blood to boiling, remember I’m not the one stopping people from reading Tintin. If it was up to me, the series would be taught in schools. And remakes wouldn’t invalidate the original albums. They’d still be there, and maybe the newer versions would provide readers with a stepping stone (a Rosetta Stone?) to real appreciation of Hergé’s work as a storyteller. And surely that can only be a good thing.