I’m Working on…

“V is the story of a normal girl whose ghost brother grants her super powers and sends her off to battle evil, bizarre menaces in the name of shits, giggles, and responsibility.”

(it might need a new name)

Meanwhile, In The Future…

So, I was without internet for a while, which is bound to happen, I guess. I’ve seen Ponyo and Inglourious Basterds, both of which were competent movies that I can’t tell whether I liked or not. Other than that, I’ve played some video games, worked, worked, and worked some more at the post office, and really nothing else. Then, tonight, while I was listening to Malcolm in the Middle on my PSP, and sorting a bunch of mail for a bunch of activist groups and insurance companies, I suddenly had an Idea. As soon as I got home from work, I found myself too tired to write, and immediately went to bed. Then I woke up at 3:30 A.M. and wrote four pages of issue #2 of V, the superheroine comic I’m working on. These pages revolved around the aforementioned Idea.

I also expressed to John Amor my worry that in my writing, I would either disrespect my artists or find them disrespecting me, and asked him for advice on how to balance it. Right now, I feel about as insecure as a corndog at a five-star restaraunt. My pages have very detailed descriptions at times, and I’m worried about constricting artists, but at the same time, I’m concerned that the artist I hire might not see the page the way I do and try changing it (I’ve had a really bad experience in the past where an artist told me that he was changing the ethnicity of a character to that of a Jamaican king who lived on a yacht) to an extreme degree. I want to know how I can work to create an environment of mutual respect.

Of course, he, like everyone else I tried talking to this evening, was busy, so I didn’t really get an answer, but at least he had a good excuse. He’s working on Tres Komikeros, an awesome podcast that I really need to start listening to again now that my MP3 player is back from the shop.

Times like these I wish I had someone I could talk to about my writing, but, hey, when it’s 5 A.M. and the only guy awake is working on his podcast, it’s pretty hard to expect miracles. G’night, world. I’ll see you in the future.

A Moron Is You!

At some point, we’ve all come across this kind of post on a forum. It goes something like this:

“Just because YOU don’t like something doesn’t give you a right to insult it! Grow up!”

It sounds smart, at first. Hell, to you, it might even be an epiphany… but you can also see the flaw, right? See, the problem with this kind of post is that someone doesn’t like something that someone else said, so they’re insulting them for it. The problem is, the thing the other person said is something they didn’t like about something else. So the person making the above statement is, in fact, doing exactly what they’re bitching at the other person not to do. In this world where people think that the opinion is almighty, where there apparently are no absolute truths, and where everyone’s got a right to do as they believe, “logic” like this is common.

It ain’t logic, folks. Not everyone can have a valid point of view. Think of it like this:

Guy #1: “Everyone’s point of view is valid. We need to respect each others’ opinions.”
Guy #2: “Well, I believe that’s wrong.”

Oh shit.

What just happened?

By #1’s logic, #2 is right, except that #2’s logic contradict’s #1. Any logic that can be defeated so easily (especially by itself) is foolishness, and should be thrown out. I had an argument a few months ago with someone along similar lines. We were discussing Transmetropolitan. I, of course, was enthusiastically recommending the book to everyone who hadn’t read it, and he, on the other hand, believed it was ultimately flawed. Why? Because, as he said, “There is no Truth.” He assented that there were facts, but insisted that it all boiled down to point of view. Refusing to be swayed by my previous logic, he challenged me to do better. I asked him if what he was saying meant there were no absolutes. Before he could reply, people started making that knowing sound that people do when they see someone about to be pwned by srs logic!

“Yes,” he said. “There are no absolutes.”

“You’re absolutely positive?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“But that’s an absolute statement.”

Confused, he left the chat.

Here’s the deal. There are absolutes. There are facts. There are Truths. Some people are right, and some people are wrong. Few people, if any, are right or wrong about everything, and only an idiot or someone who isn’t paying attention could allow themselves to be taken in by this nonsense. Someone who doesn’t believe in absolutes has a right to his opinion, but it doesn’t make him any less WRONG. Someone who disagrees with anyone on anything has a right to their opinion, so long as it doesn’t harm anyone. If you feel like telling them they shouldn’t knock other peoples’ opinions, understand that you’re being hypocritical. You can’t tell someone to believe something that you yourself don’t, not if you’re honest. If you believe that people have a right to their beliefs, then you have no right telling someone that they haven’t got a right to express their beliefs–even if their beliefs are that not everybody has a right to their beliefs. Doing so throws what you have to say out the window and makes your words utterly pointless.

If someone sincerely likes child pornography, I don’t mind beating the shit out of them. When what they believe takes advantage of an innocent little kid, they’ve crossed the line. I’ve been that kid. I’ve been there. No kid should have to take that shit, and no matter what anyone says, no matter how wise or intelligent they may be, some things are wrong, and some things are right, and fuck you if you insist on anything different.

Am I rambling? Probably. It’s 3 AM. Good night, world.

With Writers Like These…

“Because he’s Warren Motherfucking Ellis, Motherfucker!”

Time was, I said stuff like that as a compliment. That time is past now. It’s difficult, in fact, to offer the man any praise. If he, or any of his fans, reads this, and takes offense, well, I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do about that. After all, what I say here, I say with the utmost respect, and while it may not be nice, respect doesn’t automatically translate to nonstop praise. It is because of this respect for Ellis, as a writer, that I now offer this criticism.

That pen is capable of things you never dreamed. So is the beard.

A couple years ago, when I was reading the occasional manga on the internet so I could do some forum roleplaying, a friend messaged me on IM, out of the blue. “Doc,” she said, “you motherfucker. You’re trying to be Warren Ellis!*” Not really having read that many comic books, I wasn’t particularly sure who Warren Ellis was, nor was I sure I cared. That said, I had been called out for writing like someone I’d never heard of, so I thought I’d better check him out and see what I could do to distance myself from him. For her part, my friend was pretty confused that I’d never heard of the guy, and pointed me to Desolation Jones.

Desolation Jones is, and will forever be, the most important comic book I have ever read.

Entirely devoid of superheroes, mecha, or shounen material, the book was a revelation to me. I’d always known that there were other comics out there, sure, but I’d never read any of them. For one thing, the artwork was phenomenal. I still consider J. H. Williams III to be one of the best artists in the industry. The dialogue was often intelligent and occasionally hilarious. The cast of characters, wow, it was astonishing. There was a punk girl who made bombs and a genetic experiment who rarely needs to eat (but when he does, it’s cow mutilation). The book was about a man who felt pain differently than the average person. It was about a city within a city, a secret world for all those in the intelligence community once they were all used up.

It'd be kinda cool if Tony Moore got to draw an arc of Jones.

In all, it was oddly similar to my own writing, with the diverse characters and the interesting dialogue and odd settings. Hell, the artwork was exactly what I’d always wanted to see in a comic, even if I hadn’t entirely realized it yet. Then I got to issue seven. The art changed, but that was alright. It was still brilliant. Then I got to issue 8, and it was over. I found this rather odd. Here it was, six months after the latest issue had been published, and there were no new issues. I found it unsettling, but, hey, I rather liked the writer, so I picked up every issue of Planetary I could find, quickly followed by Fell.

Planetary was odd, because when I finished issue 26, I thought it was over. Sure, it seemed kind of weird that he hadn’t really dealt with the return of Chase, but The Four were defeated and all was well and good, right? When I learned that there was an issue 27, and it might not be coming out, well… that odd feeling inside me grew. Fell was quick, smart, and good, until you got to issue #8 and realized that nothing new had come out in a while and wouldn’t be coming out any time soon. Issue 9 finally made it in January 2008, I believe. By now, I was really into comics, and it was in no small part due to the writing of Warren Ellis. He’d made me realize that there was indeed a market for the stories I wanted to tell, and this was a great feeling.

John Cassaday is brilliant.

…then came the Avatar books.

Ellis had been working pretty closely with Avatar for some time, at least as far back as 1999. I’ve never been a fan of the publisher, as all their artists are easily distinguishable as being Avatar artists. It’s kind of hard for me to put into words the way I feel about them. Their art can be brilliantly detailed at times (especially that of Ryp and Pagliarani), but the people look bad, and I’m not talking Frank Quitely bad either. I mean that they’re the “they’re not stylistically bad, they’re just generally bad” kind of bad. The faces are usually the worst–they’re all glorpy. It’s sad, especially given how utterly AMAZING some of the backgrounds are, but when Anna Mercury looks like seven different people over the course of one issue, and Gravel looks like he belongs in a webcomic somewhere, it’s kind of hard to like the comics. After all, comics are 50% art, 50% writing, right? It’s only when both are good that you get a truly good comic book.

But hey, I’m going off on a tangent. Back to Warren. His comics at Avatar have never been spectacular. In fact, half the time it seems like he is really bored with what he’s doing, as if he’s merely trying to write the things in his head. Don’t get me wrong, the ideas behind some of his stuff are amazing, be it the Lovecraftian-slash-scifi Doktor Sleepless or the multiverse-traveling, wig-wearing Anna Mercury. His two superhero stories, Black Summer and No Hero (both with Ryp) have some interesting ideas behind them as well… but then… that’s really all his stories seem to have any more. Good ideas. Back at Marvel, his Astonishing X-Men hasn’t been particularly spectacular, but his Thunderbolts (and, before that, Nextwave), was phenomenal.

Ryp is undoubtedly Avatar's best artist.

His characters all sound like the same person, whether they’re Emma Frost or Beast or William Gravel or Anna Mercury or really any character that Ellis has written post-Fell #9. Hell, to an extent, you could even spot traces of that same voice in Norman Osborn back in Thunderbolts or Elsa Bloodstone in Nextwave. Everyone seemed to be sounding like Spider Jersualem, except stiffer and grumpier. Jerusalem’s words were always stacatto. Sure, he was as angry at the world as a guy could be, it seemed, but he was unique and often intelligent. Now, all the characters read as though they’re the exact some person, who also happens to have alzheimers. I mean, geez. I feel like I’m reading the same stuff in Astonishing X-Men (about mutants and multiple universes) that I am in Ignition City (about all the pulp space heroes having grown old and sour).

The passion is gone, and all that remains is anger. This is a guy who wrote a bunch of shitty comics like Blackgas and Wolfskin because he apparently made a bet with Avatar’s publisher that he could somehow reinvent the genres or something. What the fuck? Woo, he wrote a book about zombies that aren’t dead and are really just people made aggressive by some subterranian gas! I’m so excited. Even though he hasn’t finished Doktor Sleepless, he’s started up Anna Mercury. Sure, in spite of the fact that Anna Mercury isn’t done, he feels the need to get No Hero published. The lack of focus shows.

Hard to believe the first comic book I read from beginning to end had the best art I would ever see in a comic book.

So. Here’s the problem. Warren Ellis has a lot of good ideas–perhaps he’s got too many, so he’s trying to write them all at once. It’s burning him out. Currently, there are, what, eleven Warren Ellis-penned comic books/series he’s either writing or has published this year, possibly more. Sadly, only one of these is going to be a finale, and that’ll be Planetary. That’s right. Desolation Jones, which Ellis said back in the winter/spring of 2008 would be out before the end of last year, never came. Fell #10-16 haven’t been out, even though he’s apparently written some/all of them. Instead of finishing what he’s already started, the man continues to write more and more books, like Ignition City and Frankeinstein’s Womb and Supergod, and most of the time these books aren’t even coming out at regular inteverals. Hell, I read Doktor Sleepless #13 today, and I can’t actually remember when I read #12. I’m thinking it was in the beginning of the summer.

This is a guy with a lot of good ideas that he is unable to execute.

Actually, the execution could best be described as an attempt at beheading someone with a hammer, and not one of those big war hammers either, but rather a little rubber mallet. Instead of a nice clean cut that kills instantly, we’ve got a half-drunk, angry executioner pounding his stories with a rubber mallet and crushing our spines and ultimately making them suffer slow, agonizing deaths that aren’t as fun as a normal beheading. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. Yes, I know that in 2008 or 2007, his computer crashed and took all of his scripts with it, and I know how painful it is to rewrite something you’ve just finished doing (it’s usually never as good as the original), but it’s been a while, and all he’s doing is announcing more and more books with Avatar press and its terrible artists. To a degree, I can sympathize. Right now, I have nearly sixty different story ideas I want to write, but I’m only trying to focus on two at once, maximum. So I can understand the desire to write every idea that comes to your head, I really can. But still… I just want him to finish the comics that gained him my respect in the first place.

tl;dr version: Ellis needs to get down and focus on finishing a few books before he gets started on new books. He needs to start getting passionate about his characters and stories again, and those characters need to regain their uniqueness. Also, the books should be coming out in some sort of timely manner. Otherwise, “Congratulations, Mister Ellis, you’re this generation’s Chris Claremont!”

*Now, apparently, I am Grant Morrison. Whether that is because I am losing all of my hair or because I like to occasionally write metatextually, I’m not sure.

F*ck Thursday

http://fckthursday.wordpress.com/

This is my lucid dream, my nightmare, and my brain wandering to and fro on the subconscious plane. This is me, a new writer, writing what comes to my head and trying to make sense of it all. This is the Anthem of the Apocalypse, and it is Mine.

Superman Should Be Good!

Superman.

Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He’s the world’s first superhero, the father of all that came after him. His set of powers, such as flight, invulnerability, and super strength, are some of the most commonly used powers out there. His outfit is as iconic as it is influential; capes and tights are the norm now, and quite a bit of that influence comes directly from Superman. Sure, scholars can point out other characters that came before him, but they’re obscure nobodies that most of us have never heard of or care about. Face it: the modern superhero owes more to Superman than any other superhero out there. But not all is well in Super-land; he’s an odd character, often poorly used as either some sort of deus ex machina or as an example of old-fashioned ideals that no one cares about.

I’ve always found it odd that many writers attempt to paint Superman as naive. As a Pulitzer-winning journalist in the prime of his life, Clark Kent (and he is Clark Kent) would constantly be faced with the horror and the happiness that life has to offer. In fact, it would be more likely that Kent’s experiences as a journalist, reporting on all-sorts of stories, would lead him to have a much better-rounded view of the world than those around him. While Wonder Woman spent her formative years growing up on an island where everything was perfect and there were no natural enemies, and Bruce Wayne grew up as rich kid/orphan raised by a butler, Clark Kent was raised in the real world. The city of Metropolis was never far away, and small-town Kansas isn’t that much different from any place else, be it Denver, Colorado or Springfield, Missouri or Little Deer Isle, Maine or Washington, D.C. If any member of DC Comics’ trinity should have any sort of genuine connection with the average human being, it’s Superman. Yet, for some reason, Wonder Woman is the one who wrote the super-influential book “Reflections,” and Batman’s usually the one portrayed as streetwise, and Superman’s the guy who abandoned earth to live on New Krypton. Yes, they pointed out in Supergirl (wait… what? not Action Comics or something?) that he did it to keep an eye on Zod, but he still left earth.

Superman's workplace.

There’s an odd prejudice that’s quite common among my friends in big coastal cities such as New York or Los Angeles. Apparently, anyone in a town with a population of, oh, I don’t know, less than a few million, lives in a town full of ignorant idiots who don’t really know much about the “real world.” I’m not particularly sure why they think that a city’s population (Wichita, KS has a higher population density than New York City) has any bearing on the naivete and intelligence of people, but apparently they do. This sentiment is reflected in characters like Superman: some guy born in a small-town moves to the big city and

Of course, since Supes has spent his entire adult life in Metropolis, one of the larger cities in the United States in the DCU, (and he’s a Pulitzer-winning journalist too, remember?) one would expect that  he’s been around the block a few times and knows how life works far more than some foreign girl-goddess from an island paradise or a billionaire genius scientist who beats up psychopaths daily and has a pathological fear of guns. Superman should be the healthy one, the normal one, the rational one. Wonder Woman and Batman should be fare more naive than Superman. He’s had a normal life, has had loving parents, a few girlfriends, was intelligent and athletic enough to get through school, and has had a great job that he’s been quite successful at. If anything, Clark Kent should be the most well-adjusted superhero out there.

…of course, he’s an adoptee, which means he’s some sort of screw-up, right? Wrong.

Clark’s birth-parents died years ago, and in the current canon, he’s considered to have been born on earth. From early childhood, Clark was raised by a loving couple of parents who did their best to help him with his powers and teach him to be a good human being. Okay, yeah, you got me: Clark’s a Kryptonian and his name’s really Kal-El. But… is it really that common for an adopted kid to take on the name his birth parents gave him, much less feel lonely and out of sorts because he’s got no “family?” I’ve know a couple who have adopted some girls born in China; I don’t think the girls will ever feel the constant, overwhelming “oh god I miss my real family so much that I’m taking on their name” feeling that Clark seems to have.

He's the goddamn Superman!

In the modern comics, Clark’s the secret identity, Superman’s the superhero, and Kal-El is his real name. That’s what the League calls him. Kal. It’s not even his name! Yes, I know that that’s the name his birth-parents gave him, but they’re dead. They’re irrelevant. The people who loved Clark and raised him and gave him a life worth having were the Kents, and they gave him the name Clark. That’s who he is. That’s who he lived his entire life as, from childhood to adulthood. Screw Quentin Tarantino. That bullshit speech in Kill Bill about Clark Kent being a cover for Superman is all wrong. Sure, his real self only shines through when he’s wearing the costume, but can anyone seriously think that that honest, hard-working, and loyal guy is Superman by nature! No!

The Kents raised Clark.

The Kents. Not the Kryptonians.

Nearly every Kryptonian in every comic ever is a bit of a douchebag, with the exception of Superman. Being a douchebag is the norm for Kryptonians. They think they’re better than everyone else and do random things like breaking villains out of jail so they can punish them on their own terms, or yelling things like “Kneel before ZOD!” They’re assholes. They’re dicks. They don’t feel they owe anything to anyone… with the exception of Superman. What sets him apart from the Kryptonians? How he was raised and who he was raised by.

Your biology doesn’t define who you are, not completely. Yes, studies have shown at times that twins are often alike, which probably means that their biology has an effect on their personality, but at the same time, a kid raised by two loving parents who teach him to respect and care for others isn’t going to be the same kid raised by a bunch of godlike aliens who think they’re better than everyone. Parents are vitally important to a child’s development, and good parents usually raise good children, and Clark’s a good person. A lot of the goodness that defines Superman is because of the Kents.

Superman, seen leaping over several tall buildings.

Having him take on the name Kal, or use “Rao!” as an exclamation, in spite of the fact that he’s spent his entire life living on the planet earth makes no sense.

Having him be an ignorant, kind-hearted soul who doesn’t understand how, say, Wonder Woman could allow herself to kill Max Lord makes no sense.

The biggest problems with Superman currently are his odd adoptee portrayal, his naivete, and his modern-day godhood. The Superheroes-as-gods discussion will have to wait until another day. Some could say that Superman is a Mary Sue character, and that his perfection colors how he sees the world around him. Others could say that he is a modern-day god (I’m looking at you, Alan Moore), and that his obsession with being Kryptonian comes from the loneliness he feels from being the only one with his remarkable power. Garth Ennis isn’t a superhero writer; in fact, given his treatment of them in the past, I’d be willing to bet that he hates them almost as much as I do. That said, he also wrote one of the best personifications of Superman ever in his comic Hitman, which really sums up everything I believe about Supes quite well. Yes, Superman is powerful–perhaps more powerful than any other hero in the DC Universe–but those powers don’t make him less human any more than a terrific athlete or actor. Biologically, he might not be a homo sapiens, but that person behind the S… he’s definitely human.

I Can See The Future From Here

I’m restarting my blog.

Why? Because my posts weren’t great, the content wasn’t necessarily worth anyone’s while, and ultimately, nothing I said was terribly interesting. Now, I am going to try again, mostly because I am a persistent bastard.