… unfortunately, like
Paula Radcliffe and many a late-night reveller in a CCTV zone, it’s having your image captured whilst ‘going toilet’.
I’m John Soanes, and this has been your Sunday morning dose of sophistication. Coming up next, a CD of Parzifal which makes it look slightly as if the titular character has his winkie on show. Four years studying Law , and this is how I spend my time? Believe me, I too shake my head in despair.
(Click to enlarge as required)
Copyright Marvel Comics, obviously.
Interestingly, this semi-francophobia featuring one of American comics’ most patriotic characters was written by a Scotsman and drawn by a Brit. They clearly know how to please their audience.
Sometimes, US comic publishers do things which are designed to gain publicity or mainstream press coverage, and hopefully increase sales.
A recent example would be the way Marvel Comics put President Obama on the cover of an issue of ‘Amazing Spider-Man’. Any sales increases from this sort of thing tend to be pretty short-lived, rather akin to the effect of including a free gift with a magazine, but in the current financial climate, I guess publishers are probably willing to accept that.
However, one of the more questionable (if not downright risible) publicity stunts of recent months has been the announcement that the forthcoming Marvel comic Models Inc (pictured) will feature Tim Gunn of the reality TV show Project Runway. I can understand that he’s amused at the idea of being drawn into a comic – it’s kind of flattering, I guess – but I don’t really know how Marvel think that this slightly gimmicky thing will translate into publicity or sales.
The Marvel publicity stuff about it suggests he’s going to be in a story involving Iron Man’s armour, which for me seems to sum up the problem here; it falls between two stools. Tim Gunn in a story about Iron Man’s armour isn’t necessarily what fans of Project Runway are interested in seeing, and fans of Iron Man probably don’t want to see some chap off a TV show who doesn’t have any superpowers (as far as we know) in an Iron Man story . It’s neither fish nor fowl, as it were (though as a vegetarian, neither of those possibilities is quite my thing).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against Marvel (or anyone else in comics or any other medium) trying something to reach a new audience, and I’m not anti-Mr Gunn (not that I’ve ever watched Project Runway, of course, though he’s always polite and well-dressed on the show), but I just think this is the kind of publicity trick which someone thought of without then stopping to wonder if it was necessarily going to have any kind of useful effect. Because I can’t really see the Gunn/Iron Man crossover story making the headlines which, say, The Death Of Superman did in 1992, or leading to many new readers buying it out of curiosity.
That’s not because I think casual readers won’t be amused and lured in by the fake-magazine cover aspect of the presentation (though there is a ‘variant’ cover showing Messrs Gunn and Iron Man), but because I understand that, like the vast majority of US comics nowadays, Models Inc will only be sold in comic shops – what’s known as the ‘Direct Market’. So the only people who might see the comic are people who’ll be in a comic shop anyway, and I’m not too sure how many of them will be enticed by the cover depicted above, or the prospect of seeing a chap off the telly, into buying the comic.
Maybe I’ll be proven wrong, and this comic will exploit that valuable Iron Man/Project Runway demographic, but since that’s probably about fourteen people, they may not live close enough to comic shops to make this publicity stunt pay off.
I don’t often review single issues of comics here on’t blog – or collected comics, for that matter – but this is a good ‘un, and I thought it was worth drawing to your attention.
Unwritten is a new series published by Vertigo Comics (the ‘mature’ wing of DC Comics). It’s written by Mike Carey and drawn by Peter Gross, and tells the story of Tommy Taylor. Taylor’s father was a writer, and like A.A. Milne, wrote books featuring a character with the same name as his son. Taylor Senior has disappeared, leaving a legacy of books which bear a resemblance to – but, we are told, are more popular than – the Harry Potter series.
As the series opens, Tommy’s making a fairly unsuccessful living attending conventions and making personal appearances. It’s at one of these conventions that he’s asked some questions by an audience member which start to suggest that Tommy may, in a way, not be as real as he might believe. Things unravel pretty quickly from there, and the first issue sets things up very promisingly. The art’s good and clear, and flashy and impressive when needed, and the dialogue is – gasp – close to how people actually speak, which has to be a good thing.
So, a good comic, and the final selling point is that this first issue, which contains 32 pages of story, is on sale at the lure-you-in price of $1 (or, here in Blighty, about 75p). You can spend that on a fizzy drink, which your system will just turn into wee, so why not give this comic a read instead ? You may have to go to an actual comic shop to get it, but it’s a very decent read. If nothing else, you can smile, as I did, at the opening pages and their similarity to events in the Potter books/films.
As you probably know, this film is the big-screen ‘reboot’ of the long-running series (though it’s possible to interpret it as an altered history thing, given the time-travel elements). It’s been getting very positive reviews, and there are all manner of background stories etc to be found elsewhere, so I won’t get into that sort of stuff here, I’ll just try to stick to giving you a mini-review.
Put simply, it’s a lot of fun, and I recommend it highly. I have mixed feelings about the Trek franchise, liking some bits, being left cold by others, and often being frightened by the passion of its fans, but this film has a decent story, solid acting, impressive special effects, and a good balance of action scenes and character interaction. I reckon you could see it with someone who’d never seen an episode or film or even heard the names of the characters before, and they’d still have fun.
For my money, the most impressive thing the film does – and I wouldn’t like to guess whether this was a conscious move away from the recent, less-successful films, but it would make sense if it was – is to invest enough time and effort into making the viewer give a damn about what’s happening, as opposed to leaning on the fact that these are well-known characters and therefore you’re supposed to have some pre-existing affection for them. As a result, when characters are in peril, it’s dramatic within the context of the film, and not because you’re expected to care because, hey, these are iconiccharacters.
So, a definite thumbs-up from me, and I’ve often been lukewarm about Trek.
You’ll no doubt have noticed that the picture accompanying this review isn’t of the film poster or the cast or whatever, but I wanted to draw a smidgin of attention to the fact that the current US Edition of Wired magazine is guest-edited by JJ Abrams, the director of the film. As well as having a number of interesting articles about mysteries and magic and the like, there’s a comic strip that leads into the film, drawn by well-respected comic artist Paul Pope, and written by the film’s screenwriters, which is worth a look as it provides a nice little bit of background. As I say, this is the USA edition (though the UK edition’s worth checking out as well), is labelled as such with a shiny gold sticker, and can be found on the shelves of slightly-larger newsagents.
This young chap may well be the owner of the coolest name ever.
Granted, it could well be a hoax (though maybe not), but if it’s for real, no wonder he’s smiling.
*I am such a geek.
I’ve been rather sceptical about the prospect of e-Readers (or electronic books, or whatever you want to call them) for a while, though I can see the fundamental appeal of being able to take loads of books with you on, say, a lengthy holiday.
My main concern is that they seem to have mutually exclusive operating and formatting systems and the like (what I believe is known as ‘proprietary software’), and I’m always rather concerned that that sort of thing usually leads to dwindling availability of content, no matter how good the actual kit might be (like the shelves of pre-recorded MiniDiscs not taking over your local HMV, if you see what I mean).
Anyway, there seems to have been a surge in development in this area; the frankly nice-looking item pictured here is the unfortunately named Cool-Er, which has the advantage of looking a lot like an iPod. Mind you, it doesn’t have the wireless capability of Amazon’s Kindle device (see John August’s report of buying a book wirelessly here – I can see why this would be a handy thing to have for those spur-of-the-moment purchases, though I can also see why that might leave me broke. I’m a sponzanyous kinda guy).
Magazines and newspapers are often cited as being the key items to get onto these devices to really get them to sell, and I can see why; a lot of the magazines I read aren’t worth me keeping after I’m done (oh, I used to do this, but space considerations and the question will I ever read these again? eventually led to a purge), and so being able to read the thing and then delete it – or keep a copy on the computer or even print off pages of particular note – would be something of a boon.
And the same for a lot of comics I read – I’m much inclined nowadays to buy single issues and then ditch them and buy collected editions (assuming that it’s something I’d see myself reading repeatedly), so being able to buy e-comics of the individual issues and then read them away from the computer would be pretty neat. Though of course, a lot of US comics are printed in colour, and no colour readers are available… yet.
One concern I have, especially with books or comics which might demand a bit of work from the reader, would be the ability to flip back a page or two to re-read a paragraph or panel which has, now you’ve read a little further, come to have a possible double meaning or heightened relevance. If it’s as easy as the manufacturers suggest to turn the page, then that’s fine, but if not… well, I’m going to take a bit more convincing before thinking about shifting to the electronic form, especially as paper never has battery issues or suffers data crashes. Well, apart from dropping it in the bath or a puddle.
All that said, though, I like the look of the Cool-Er. But with my backlog of books in the ‘to be read’ pile (well, on a shelf, but you know what I mean), I doubt I should really be thinking about new ways in which to get hold of books, should I ? Although one might make the argument that holding them electronically would take up less room… hmm.
The photo above is by Jon Snyder from the Wired.com site. No copyright infringement is intended.
Strangely enough, the older I get, the less certain I get about many things, but I often find myself getting more and more convinced (some might say dogmatic) about aspects of the whole business of storytelling (and from that, writing).
One such conviction relates to the notion of ‘playing fair’ with the audience, especially in tales involving a mystery or last-minute twist revelation. This isn’t a new notion by any means – S.S.Van Dine wrote about it over 80 years ago – but I think it’s one that remains key, especially as we reach a stage where ever more complicated and convoluted layers of bluff and misdirection are required to surprise an audience.
In murder mysteries, it’s pretty poor form to reveal that the killer was someone who we’ve never met before the final page; for this reason, due to only partly paying attention, I thought that the end of Jagged Edge was a cheat, as I thought it was revealing the killer to be a minor background character – not the case, but that’s the kind of thing I’m driving at.
Interestingly, I think that this is an expectation which audiences have carried over into general expectations of narrative, and I’d say that this is why hardly any (I’d go out on a limb and say none, but there’s almost inevitably an exception or two on a global scale) of the people who are voted winners of Big Brother are contestants who came into the house towards the end of the show’s run: you shouldn’t be able to win the game with a piece which hasn’t been on the board for the duration. For this reason, if you’re doing an exam which features a scenario with characters called A, B and C and you have to write about the scenario, you tend to get pretty short shrift (or, as it’s known in academic terms, crappy marks) if you introduce characters D and E and take the story in a direction more in line with the areas you’ve revised.
Also in murder mysteries, there’s pretty much a tacit rule that you will, at some stage, reveal the identity of the murderer (or murderers). It’s rare to have a story where you can get away with hooking the reader in with a ‘whodunnit?’ mystery and then get away with not stating who the killer is because another, more compelling storyline intervenes. David Lynch apparently didn’t want to reveal who the killer of Laura Palmer was in Twin Peaks, and as much as I love that show, I’d have felt rather cheated if the mystery hadn’t been resolved; similarly, the opening scene of The Wire sets up a murder scene, and whilst I haven’t watched enough of the show to know if we find out who killed the delightfully-named Snot Boogie, I rather hope so, though I guess one might argue that in the more naturalistic vein of that show, an unsolved murder may be more part of the setting than a narrative thread in its own right.
In fact, now I muse upon it, I can’t think of any entirely satisfying stories that end with a murder left unresolved; I’m perhaps being stupid, but I was left uncertain as to the killer’s identity at the end of Grant Morrison and Jon J Muth’s The Mystery Play, and so for me the story – unfortunately given its themes – ended without the appropriate Revelation. I have a feeling that the end of the Polanski film The Ninth Gate may have ended with some of its plot threads left dangling, though that might just be my memory playing tricks; I have a vague recollection of it ending with the protagonist standing before the place he’s been seeking, and the film just rather ending. On the other hand, that in itself is rather like the end of Browning’s poem Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came, which ends in a similarly ‘sudden’ fashion; no wonder Stephen King was inspired to write about what happened when Roland arrived at The Dark Tower.
I suppose the most famous example of a story finishing with a murder left unsolved would be The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, wherein the death of the chauffeur Owen Taylor isn’t solved. Legend has it that when they were making the film version, the screenwriters realised that this wasn’t explained in the novel, and sent a telegram to Chandler asking who had killed Taylor… only to receive the reply that he didn’t know either.
Anyway, all this sort of thing has been on my mind lately because it seems that the good people behind Emmerdale appear to have decided to just let the Who Killed Tom King? storyline drop away, despite the fact that the murderer has not been brought to justice. Granted, the audience knows who killed him (unsurprisingly, one of his family), but given the publicity that surrounded the murder itself when it was screened in December 2006, it feels a little like a joke without a punchline for there not to have been some equivalent narrative closure, to my mind. In the same way that I as an audience member didn’t feel raging hysteria when John Hannah’s character recited Monty Python lines in Sliding Doors, for me as an audience member it doesn’t quite ring true that people who live in such a small village would be content to go about their lives in the pretty certain knowledge that a killer still walks amongst them.
It’s often said – again, I refer you to Mr Van Dine’s article linked above – that in a mystery story it’s only right that the audience is at an level of knowledge equivalent to that of the detective; that seems fair to me, as it allows you to play along and try to solve it, which adds to the enjoyment and involvement. However, it occurs to me that it’s not just that the characters shouldn’t be privy to facts which the reader is excluded from, but that the reverse is equally true; unless you’re seeking to display the disparity between what characters in a story believe to be true, and the actual situation (as in, say, Peep Show), you probably don’t want the audience to be privy to knowledge which, if the characters were aware of it, would make them see things in a very different way. Or, at least, not for a sustained period of time.
It may well be that there’s a plan to bring some proper in-world resolution to the Tom King murder storyline in Emmerdale – though I have to hope they’re not going to wait until the traditional big-story time of Christmas to wheel it out, as that would make it two years since its inception, including many months where it’s not been given much airtime – because at the moment it means that I’m watching the programme with a feeling that something major’s going unresolved.
Whilst it’s established to the viewer that the death was an accident, a crime of passion unlikely to happen again, the characters living in the village don’t know that, and so within the reality of the show it’s something that would cast a shadow over their daily lives. What it does, more than anything, is remind me of the artifice of the programme, as if I’m constantly able to see the strings and hear the plot levers moving things, whilst a elephantine item in the middle of the room goes ignored.
And one of the things I’ve always been sure about, when it comes to the telling of stories, is that you want to utterly absorb your audience in the story; if you’re going to tell a tale of events which never happened to people who don’t exist in a made-up situation, you want avoid reminding your audience of this by jolting them out of the story, especially on something avoidable and fundamental.
Am I over-thinking this? Very possibly, but I wanted to provide a bit more of a meaty post today by way of balancing out the recent tendency towards just supplying you with links, and it was either this or a rather more facile post about the way that EastEnders seems to want to present the Mitchell sisters as alluring sex kittens but completely blows it by having them spend most of their time either shouting angrily or crying. Perhaps I’ve got strange tastes, but I don’t find that particularly appealing, on my TV screen or in real life.
An interesting event if you’re a fan of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, though I can’t make it (grr)…
Creators Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill will be signing the first volume of the new series, Century: 1910 at Gosh!, my favoured comic shop in London, next Saturday (2nd May), from 2pm-5pm.
More intriguingly, as the book doesn’t come out until the end of May, 500 copies are apparently being specially air-freighted over for this event. Unfortunately for those of us who can’t make it, they’re not takng reservations for signed copies of the book – the advance copies are going to be available exclusively on the day of the signing, and they’ll be limited to two copies per customer.
If you can make it, it’s obviously a rare chance to get the book signed by both creators, but if not… well like me, you’ll have to wait until the end of May.
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