Winding your way down Yancy Street

I’ve never been to New York in the summer. And in particular I’ve never been to the Lower East Side in summer in the early 20th century. Yet I know the place like home. I can smell the fruit and cabbages that have rolled from barrows to get trodden underfoot. The stink of livestock and automobiles. The tobacco and stale sweat on the clothes of passers-by. The cheerfully rude street banter. The delighted shouts of kids running wild. The hissing gush of fire hydrants and the petrichor rising from the heat-stifled dust of the sidewalk.

How did that become a familiar place in my childhood memory? Not from movies like Dead End (1937), much as I love them. They can show you a photographic record, but they can never depict the way it felt. For that you need a guide like Jack Kirby.

A time machine could drop you in Lower Manhattan, but it couldn’t find you Yancy Street, though you’d recognize the hard-as-nails stare of Yancy Streeters in the neighbourhood kids – among them, back then, the young Jacob Kurtzberg. Wikipedia credits the invention of Yancy Street to Jack and Stan Lee, but if any such claim stretched credibility it’s that one. Stan grew up ninety blocks away in the Upper West Side. If he ever saw a street gang it would most likely have been up on the movie screen. He never lived that life and breathed that air as Jack did.

There’s been a lot of water under the Williamsburg Bridge since the Silver Age. Revisionists got their hands on the FF and soft-soaped everything for a more sentimental generation. So Ben Grimm became a former Yancy Streeter, Aunt Petunia a young medic, the gang itself openly reconciled with the hero they loved to hate – or hated to love. I’ll have none of it, and I don’t believe Jack would either. He could be big-hearted without getting schmaltzy. He could depict affection without corniness. He was a no-nonsense, stogie-chomping guy, just like his big orange creation, and his comic book New York was real in a way that nothing in Marvel’s universe feels these days.

And that’s why it matters. Because when we see the Surfer soaring over the skyscrapers of Manhattan, we also know the bustle of the ordinary folk way down there on the street. Jack shows us that so as to make the cosmic adventures real. When Galactus arrives, he doesn’t just come to chow down on concrete and girders. There are living, breathing people at threat, and the genius of Jack Kirby is to make them a richly contrary variety of types – not the nice, carefully set-up-for-sympathy cast of relatable bystanders that a modern comics writer would assemble, but real New Yorkers, warts ‘n all, many of whom might resent the high-handed experts like Reed Richards, the liberated women like Sue Storm, the loudmouth kids like her brother, and even be jealous of a rocky-skinned, two-fisted clobberin’ monster like Ben Grimm.

The people who inhabit Jack Kirby’s New York – a place he evoked more expressively than any other comics artist, even Ditko – reflect the ambiguity the Fantastic Four themselves feel about their role as heroes. His New Yorkers are maddening, loud, ungrateful, fickle, adoring, demanding, vibrant, scrappy and fun. When the FF step forward to protect mankind, they stand as champions of the good, the bad, and the majority who are just in between.

In such a mix, the Yancy Street gang stand out as the most constant of the lot. Whenever the Thing’s self-pity inflates to grandly indulgent proportions, he can count on a snappy put-down from the Yancy Streeters to bring him back to Earth. He might go into space, fight alien empires and demi-gods, and save the whole furshlugginer galaxy, but when he’s back and takes a stroll past Yancy Street, it’s their jeers and catcalls that comprise the most sincere welcome home. It’s fitting that, with Ben Grimm’s self-loathing simmering just under the surface, the nearest he’d have to a fan club would be a bunch of hard-boiled, blue-collar guys who send him exploding cigars and pelt him with rotten tomatoes. And you get the feeling he wouldn’t have it any other way.

* * *

This essay originally appeared in Jack Kirby: Variations On A Theme, edited by Glenn B Fleming, who knew Jack Kirby personally. You need the whole book, true believer.

A far cry from cave paintings

Following on from last time's discussion of AI artwork in comics, there is the question of copyright. US law allows AI-generated art to be copyrighted if it involved a significant input from human beings. I don't know what they're going to do when we have AGI, but that's going to be a legal headache across the board.

It doesn't necessarily matter anyway if you're not able to claim copyright in your comic book's art. The text will be your copyright, so nobody can republish your story as is. I guess they could strip out the text and come up with a new story to go with the images, the way Eric Thompson wrote The Magic Roundabout, but if the underlying material is at all original that wouldn't be easy. (And in any case, what writer worth their salt would want to wear another's clothes that way?)

Certainly the way I envisage using AI art there'd need to be a lot of human input. As prompts I'd be using not only text but my own thumbnail panel layouts and Leo's rough pencils. How we make a comic is quite an involved process. All the AI would be handling is the embellishments: the inks, flats and final colouring that are fairly arduous work for the artist.

Writer Steve Coulson is way ahead of where I thought the technology was now. He's already producing a range of comic books using art by Midjourney. You can download them and take a look. Midjourney hasn't got anything like the charm of Leo's art, as you can see from the quite similar scene below from Mirabilis season 2. But while AI artwork wouldn't yet do for Mirabilis, it's already fine for something like B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth. Watch this space.

The power loom approach to illustration

The other day I was adding some notes to my Mirabilis plot summary. I have a good 15,000 words now, as well as the full scripts for the first half of the Spring book. 

Could I even write it today? Certainly it was far easier to contemplate when Leo and I were on a roll. We had little luck with publishers (variously uninterested or unable to get the books out) and the obstacle to going it alone was the cost of all the artwork.

These days Leo is busy with some interesting but very different projects. I could complete the story as a novel (if talk is cheap, prose isn't that much more costly) but it really feels like it should be a comic. What about using AI? Not a popular choice, I know, but it's not like I'd be doing a human artist out of a job, seeing as I can't afford a human artist in the first place.

The AI isn't there yet, as these samples show. I'd need the characters to look like themselves and remain consistent from panel to panel. Also to have the right number of fingers (human artists have the edge there) and not to come out with two left hands (a mistake the robots have picked up from people).

First above is an image by Nightcafe. I don't mind the style but it hasn't got Jack and Estelle right. Still, it did better than Bing Image Creator, which first got Jack mixed up with Harry Potter and then with John Constantine. It did have a crack at lettering, though. Next is Wombo Dream's attempt at a whole page, which looks like a comic you might find in the Dreaming. Trying to redeem itself, it next goes too manga and lovey-dovey for my tastes, and gives us two Jacks into the bargain. Back to Bing (below) for what could be from a future season of Doctor Who. And at the bottom another Bing image that's either channeling Barry Windsor-Smith or trying to look like an actual Edwardian drawing. Or I guess it could be a Steeleye Span album.

What I haven't tried yet is Midjourney, the crème de la crème of generative art models. With AI advancing as it is, it might be ready within a year or two to take my thumbnail layouts and descriptions and turn those into something halfway decent. Then the only question is whether I still have those characters and stories in me. 

According to the mighty working

In Bright Young Things (Stephen Fry’s adaptation of Vile Bodies), the protagonist Adam arrives at Dover and in a scene played for broad farce (‘I know filth when I see it, and this is filth!’) has his novel manuscript taken away for burning by Customs. This triggers a whole series of misadventures as Adam needed the book to raise money to get married.

The trouble lies in making it completely arbitrary. It’s as if Fry was saying, ‘Look, I’m not even bothering to explain this because we all know it just has to happen for the sake of the plot.’ Audiences are willing to collude in that kind of thing but you do at least have to give them some kind of rationale, however flimsy.

In the novel, Waugh has the Customs officer look through the manuscript and become increasingly appalled by what he reads. The movie doesn’t have time for that, but it should at least have him light on one line – something read out of context that sounds subversive or obscene. Anything, however spurious, would do. In fact the more absurd, the better; it makes us take Adam’s side. And that line out of context could be funny, too, which would recruit our sympathy even more strongly. But to have no reason given at all leaves the audience no reason to connect with the character and buy in.

It’s an abstract injustice and thus a failed opportunity. Blake Synder would never have let that pass. Do watch the movie, it's a lot of fun and I wish Fry wrote & directed more movies, but read the novel first. Waugh tells a tougher and truer story throughout than the one the filmmakers have put on screen.

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.

Aliens with jugs

"Right from the beginning I said, 'She's got to have tits,' even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na'vi, aren't placental mammals." - James Cameron

Science fiction is stuffed with "insectoid" or "reptilian" aliens, and interstellar fungi, even though those are all Terran families of life. The creatures we encounter out there won't fit into any Earthly taxonomy. Nor will they have the musculature and skeletal structure of mammals, but most of the aliens we see in movies do because the animators trained on the principles of human anatomy and movement.

Predator and Alien were basically just humans with funny heads, but to be fair the film makers did originally have to put actors inside those costumes. Nowadays CGI means we ought to be freer to get creative. We can push through to the basics in order to create genuinely original creatures, starting with non-Terran musculoskeletal structures (like the Kzin skeleton below, for example) and working up from there.

I'm not saying film makers have to be scientifically precise. SF writers never are. Some hand-wavy xenobiology speculation can be fun and fruitful. The concept artists could start by looking at zoologist Dougal Dixon’s seminal book After Man, in which he speculates on how Earth creatures might evolve if humans were no longer on the scene. Or take a look at Dixon's Greenworld project -- still looking for a publisher, which is a scandal in a world where Malcolm Gladwell and Yuval Noah Harari are million-selling pop "science" authors -- or the impressively imaginative Epona.

That's SF. In fantasy theoretically anything goes, and that’s fine when an author is just telling a story – Eddison in The Worm Ouroboros has goblins on the planet Mercury quoting Shakespeare at each other. It's a classic novel that sits at the dreamlike let's-pretend end of fantasy. But if you turned Ouroboros into a game so that players could explore the setting they'd start looking at all the bonkers inconsistencies and ask what they all meant. They’ll look for patterns and rules to exploit because that’s what humans are. They do science. So throw-it-at-the-wall fantasy doesn't always get a pass these days.

Where you draw the line is also different for prose (smaller audience, more discerning, requires imagination, benefits from interiority) and cinema (immediate emotional impact, less depth, more visual). And it's interesting that Cameron specifically identifies Avatar as science fantasy (a tradition dating back to Planet Stories and earlier pulps) rather than science fiction. In that genre, breasts on an alien aren't necessarily a boo-boo.

A funny way to tell a story

There’s been a lot of talk lately of MCU style writing, meaning the kind of quip-filled dialogue which doesn’t take the story seriously. Characters behaving like high schoolers made sense in Buffy, where they actually were high schoolers, but is a lot less effective when the mighty Thor says lines that you’d expect from Xander Harris.

Good writers know that their writing must be true, and thus it must include humour because humour is a part of life. Also that the humour must be in-character, not any old joke that will raise a laugh – then it’s not cinema, it’s panto. Thor’s comments in the first movie are funny because they are how an arrogant Asgardian god might see our world. But six years later: ‘He’s a friend from work,’ is the director* sneering at you for taking superhero movies seriously.

That’s the lazy way to get a laugh, which is just to have characters in a fantasy setting use slangy modern idioms. But the writers who began the trend did it with serious intent; they still wanted you to believe in and care about their story. They were looking for ways to make the audience relate to the characters, and clearly lots of ‘Prithee, varlet’ dialogue wasn’t going to do it. There is plenty of humour (I hope you will agree) in Mirabilis, but Leo and I try never to put a line in a character’s mouth if it isn’t true to the moment and spoken in their voice.

Undercutting tension with humour can be very effective if it’s true to character. Look at Steed and Mrs Peel, most especially in the scene at the end of “The House That Jack Built” when the defence mechanism of their insouciance almost breaks down. But for the writer who doesn’t care, it’s a short step from there to having every character reach for the glib line that will get a laugh.

It is unjust to call this MCU writing. The entire Captain America trilogy managed to include humour in a way that rang true. The Russo brothers’ Avengers movies likewise. And in any case, Marvel didn’t invent the trend. Look at the Universal monster series. They start off selling us the story straight with Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy. Four years on, The Bride of Frankenstein is most definitely Whedonesque – or perhaps we should say that Joss Whedon’s writing is Hurlbutian. It took Universal a bit longer to get into their non-stop gag phase but Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein could easily match Thor: Love and Thunder or Willow for hey-it’s-all-a-joke silliness.

And, as a writer, how do you know when that funny line you’ve thought of serves the story and when it’s going to kill immersion? Well, that’s the job, isn’t it? But if you need some pointers, this video by author Brandon McNulty is an 8-minute masterclass in the use of humour:

* Yes, we all know that particular line was suggested by a kid who was visiting the set. But it's the director's choice whether to include it, and it fit in with the tone he decided on for the whole movie.