Talk about the art of storytelling here.
Storytelling: the neverending story
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Yeah, I think the appropriate gatekeepers are the readers. The people buying the comics or paying to see the shows. As well as the potential audience you want to spend their money on your stuff.
Anyone that wants to control content outside that intends to be a censor in action if not in name or position.
the real gatekeepers obviously are the publishers or studios or platforms, etc. except they are generally concerned about what makes them money or threatens their dominance (or even monopolies) of the markets. In that sense, I’m more irritated at their hiring and employment practices or unfair treatment of their outlets (like LCSs) or contractors (like independent producers or freelance talent).
leave the content to the tastes of the paying public but all that other stuff should be regulated.
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leave the content to the tastes of the paying public but all that other stuff should be regulated.
“Give the people what they want” really means “cater to the vocal majority”. When the paying public includes white supremacists, women, neo-Nazis, religious minorities, pedophiles, ethnic minorities, Conservative Christians the LGBTQ community, how does (and how should) the publisher or network or producers of content determine what the paying public wants?
One solution is to give the general majority what they want (e.g. a show about superheroes and supervillains), but try to expand the specific content to try to be inclusive toward the minority aspects of the paying public.
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The older storytellers borrowed from their childhoods some of which were over 70 years ago.
We all know pretty much that Bob Kane adapted Batman from Zorro.
Frank Miller said that some of Elektra’s character were from female characters he read of .
(He wasn’t that fond of Karen Page being with Murdoch, so he developed Elektra.)
With Claremont, there was a real life Hellfire Club and Jean Grey as the Black Queen and Jason Wyngarde:
Byrne in some interviews used some Superman from the 40’s serials to the
George Reeve show and the Christopher Reeves movies. Not to mention
some of Byrne’s own experiences being an immigrant in different countries.
It makes me wonder a little of the next generation of comic writers and creators what
they will use for material in their stories.
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It makes me wonder a little of the next generation of comic writers and creators what they will use for material in their stories
We’re already multiple generations into a cycle of comics creators who grew up on the same long-running series as they end up writing or drawing much further down the line.
It’s one of the reasons why the wider stories of these comics universes have become so circular and repetitive, as you see creators bring back favourite characters, concepts and status quos of the eras they grew up on.
(For example, Geoff Johns ended up bringing back loads of old favourites and rolling back lots of progress and developments at DC, seemingly largely because he wanted to see certain characters back in the spotlight.)
One of the great pieces of advice that Alan Moore gave comics creators is to have a much broader cultural experience that goes beyond comics – but it can often feel like modern-day takes on old properties are little more than officially sanctioned fan-fiction.
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how to talk Yorshire
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The only exception of recent times was having Alfred killed during
Tom King’s run.Do you really think Alfred’s death is permanent? I wonder…
The profits of the Big Two comics publishers depend on maintaining the status quo as much as possible. Thus Superman can be killed by Doomsday and be replaced by others, but eventually come back to life; Batman can have his back cracked by Bane and be replaced by others, but eventually heal; and Jean Grey can sacrifice herself to save the universe, but eventually return. Jean’s return, in particular, is galling because her death had been determined (by Jim Shooter and others at Marvel) to be the only appropriate response to her character, as Phoenix, killing so many innocent lives throughout the galaxy.
I dread the day when Mar-Vell, whose cancer death was beautifully told in “The Death of Captain Marvel”, is brought back for some corporate reason.
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Do you really think Alfred’s death is permanent?
No chance. Although it has stuck around longer than I would have imagined.
Especially as King didn’t really think he could do it, and planned it as a fakeout death, but was egged on by his editor to make it ‘real’.
An amusing thing with how long characters stay dead is Jean Grey’s first death in the classic Dark Phoenix story only last 6 years (1980 – 1986), her second death at the end of Morrison’s New X-Men lasted 14 years (2004 – 2018).
It’s a reflection of how the way we measure time changes as we get older. I like to bring that up when older comics fans now talk of creators switching books all the time with short runs, it really isn’t true. There are a handful of long runs in old comics but outside of the epic Claremont 16 year run on X-Men or David on Hulk most of the records are held more recently. Bendis did over 250 Avengers books and Dan Slott a similar number on Spider-Man.
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The only exception of recent times was having Alfred killed during
Tom King’s run.Do you really think Alfred’s death is permanent? I wonder…
The profits of the Big Two comics publishers depend on maintaining the status quo as much as possible. Thus Superman can be killed by Doomsday and be replaced by others, but eventually come back to life; Batman can have his back cracked by Bane and be replaced by others, but eventually heal; and Jean Grey can sacrifice herself to save the universe, but eventually return. Jean’s return, in particular, is galling because her death had been determined (by Jim Shooter and others at Marvel) to be the only appropriate response to her character, as Phoenix, killing so many innocent lives throughout the galaxy.
I dread the day when Mar-Vell, whose cancer death was beautifully told in “The Death of Captain Marvel”, is brought back for some corporate reason.
While it hasn’t yet been permanent, Mar-vell has made returns in various ways and forms over the years.
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njerry wrote: Do you really think Alfred’s death is permanent? No chance. Although it has stuck around longer than I would have imagined. Especially as King didn’t really think he could do it, and planned it as a fakeout death, but was egged on by his editor to make it ‘real’.
That was surprising to me. With a creator granted a given run, it is usually like a child being given
all these toys to play with and in the end,has to put them back where they were.So the next writer inherited a dead Alfred and had to go with the Fox character. Maybe a cosmic reset
down the road, ie. in some future epic, Batman gets a cosmic entity to do him a huge favor and he gets back
Alfred. Who knows.Obviously I have a vested interest in bringing back Alfred.
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The X-Men and the Fantastic Four Share This Unique Thematic Trait
Not that unique then, is it?
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Not that unique then, is it?
I remember getting a comment on a paper I wrote for an AP English class in high school; I had written the description “most unique”, and my teacher responded that such a phrase is an oxymoron, since unique means one-of-a-kind. Almost 50 years later, I still remember that lesson.
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Not that unique then, is it?
I remember getting a comment on a paper I wrote for an AP English class in high school; I had written the description “most unique”, and my teacher responded that such a phrase is an oxymoron, since unique means one-of-a-kind. Almost 50 years later, I still remember that lesson.
There’s a similar exchange in an old Alan Partridge episode when he tells a young smart nine-year old guest that he is “very unique” and the kid says something like “one cannot have gradations of uniqueness, one either is or is not unique”, which has always stuck in my mind.
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Reading that Authority again just reminded me: Millar had that team handling a huge crisis every few weeks.
Doesn’t make for a stable world if you go from crisis to crisis. Almost as bad as Grant Morrison’s run on JLA.I assume that, in between story arcs, The Authority has a lot of down-time where non crisis is happening and they are spending their days taking down corrupt regimes, terra-farming the planet to eliminate starvation, and tackling climate change. But no one wants to pay $4 an issue to read about that boring shit.
The American TV series CRIMINAL MINDS featured a Behavioral Analysis Unit within the FBI that focused on identifying and capturing serial killers. Basically a different serial killer per episode, for a total of 324 episodes in 15 seasons. That’s an average of more than 21 serial killers in the US each year for 15 years, more than double the actual number of serial killers tracked by the FBI. But who wants to watch an episode of CRIMINAL MINDS where all they do is fill out paperwork and clean the staff kitchen?
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It is a feature of superhero comics that the basic nature of the world is so chaotic and catastrophic that normal authorities and human abilities could not handle it without the hero. Otherwise, the hero is a superfluous monstrosity or aberration. That was the interesting thing about the development of most of the Marvel heroes – they would be monsters if there weren’t much worse monsters in the world for them to stop.
True of most of the superhero type of characters as well. James Bond would just be another government assassin if not for the Blofelds, Goldfingers and Dr. No’s of the world justifying his murderous actions.
If you could see books like THE WATCHMEN as taking features of superheroes and inserting them into a realistic social and historical setting, THE AUTHORITY took features of the real world and real history and inserted them into the hyperbolic world of a superhero comic book. In comics, the problems of the world would manifest as supervillains that the heroes could punch out. So in Authority, terrorism, totalitarianism, the military-industrial complex, corporate corruption, runaway technology and even religion became comic book villains that could be solved with superhero action and violence.
I’m sure some nerd has read through all comics ever published with Spider-man in them, and noted the passage of time to calculate that Peter Parker is at least 126 years old.
Right – this is essentially the reason that Morrison’s argument about the reality of comic book stories is basically metaphorical conceit. There is just too much that is contradictory in the worlds of the comics to believe that they could exist in even an infinite multiverse.
The American TV series CRIMINAL MINDS featured a Behavioral Analysis Unit within the FBI that focused on identifying and capturing serial killers. Basically a different serial killer per episode, for a total of 324 episodes in 15 seasons. That’s an average of more than 21 serial killers in the US each year for 15 years, more than double the actual number of serial killers tracked by the FBI. But who wants to watch an episode of CRIMINAL MINDS where all they do is fill out paperwork and clean the staff kitchen?
Yeah, a realistic portrayal of law enforcement and even the criminals would be about as interesting as a show about the post office or road construction. Police work is a job first and foremost, and it has to be exaggerated to extremely unrealistic levels to be dramatic.
However, that is the point. There is absolutely no value to realism unless you are a journalist reporting on an actual criminal investigation in this case or you are making training films that the police would actually use in real life. There is no intrinsic artistic merit to realistic portrayals versus unrealistic ones.
However, you can see some differences in more involved fictional portrayals and those that are more tawdry or have less complexity. For example, Dostoevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT is very different from E.A. Poe’s MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE or Agatha Christie’s MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS. I wouldn’t say that CRIME AND PUNISHMENT is a murder mystery (though it may have had a lot of influence on a few works in the genre like COLUMBO), but it examines all the elements of murder mysteries in a much more comprehensively literary way than a whodunnit.
Sometimes, we’ll get something like that or close to it for a genre. In comic book superheroes, WATCHMEN will always be there in contrast to the more mainstream and popular traditional superhero stories where every conceivable problem can be punched into submission. In spy fiction, it is hard to say there is a great novel, but John Le Carre’s approach still remains in contrast to Ian Fleming or Tom Clancy.
In science fiction, horror and fantasy though, it is harder to find great works that contrast the mainstream pop novels and movies. Novels that approach the same elements of science fiction but also stand apart from the genre. I think there are plenty of novels that tend in that direction from people like George R.R. Martin, Philip K Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood. Even Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Ballard, Huxley and Orwell have produced books with elements of science fiction, and we’ve had plenty of hard SF attempts at realism like the Expanse. In film, there is 2001 and movies like SOLARIS or ARRIVAL. However, it is not realism that sets them apart from STAR WARS or INDEPENDENCE DAY but the depth of thought.
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I’m sure some nerd has read through all comics ever published with Spider-man in them, and noted the passage of time to calculate that Peter Parker is at least 126 years old.
Speaking of Spider-Man, am I the only one tired of Marvel constantly resetting him to be a loser? Even when Stan was writing, the “Parker luck” didn’t run as bad as it has been under current writers. The other heroes of the Marvel Universe hate Spidey–again. Peter’s friends and loved ones have turned their backs on him — again. Peter’s unemployed and broke — again.
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There was a show on British TV in the 80s called Bergerac, which was a police detective based in Jersey, one of the Channel Islands which is closest to France but a British Overseas Territory or something similar. Every week we got some exciting plot of murder or grand larceny.
In the 90s I worked for a bank and a group of my friends went to work in Jersey, it’s essentially a tax haven, they had to import workers as the population is tiny and the youngsters are all kids of millionaires so don’t actually want or need to work. My friend Claire loved reposting their police social media account because absolutely fuck all happened there.
One, and I am not kidding, reported a man got blown off his bike because of a gust of wind, police attended and he had a twisted ankle but was okay after a little rest to ride home.
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For the majority of their time, detectives spend their time investigating burglaries, robberies, and other crimes. When you look at actual homicide rates, they are far less than what TV shows would have you believe.
Yeah and for every 5 murders about 3 of them are cleared which just means that a suspect was turned over to the DA to prosecute. So you actually have close to a 50% chance of getting away with murder if you combine the likelihood of an arrest and the likelihood of a conviction.
And murder, of course, has the most resources available for an investigation. So if you had a car stolen or someone broke into your house and took your television, you can pretty much bet they won’t catch the culprit any time soon or recover your stuff. Even if they do, it is such a headache to get it back.
Jonathan Hickman described it as ongoing comics never have a 3rd act. I think soap operas and now the MCU as ongoing narratives are a little different because the actors change physically so you can’t get away with the same ‘illusion of change’. It’s hard to revert to Tony Stark being the footloose playboy again because the actor is 15 years older. The idea of comics characters in the big 2 actually evolving died in 1991 when Chris Claremont was forced off the X-Men because the editor wanted a status quo reset and the writer wanted to retire out characters and move on.
Also, there is an odd relationship between the audience and the material. Before the 80’s, comic book readers had generational changeover. When readers hit their 20’s, they would stop reading comics and be replaced by children reading them again. That stopped happening for a while from the 90’s to today, but the comics were designed for a cyclic narrative where the same sorts of stories would be successful over and over as the audience had a great deal of changeover so it was always new and reliably entertaining to the readership.
I think Marvel is starting to at least consider moving in a direction toward capturing the younger or YA reader. It is interesting to watch the level of the movies change as well. IRON MAN the movie was essentially an action movie set in the post 9-11 world. Now though, from a geopolitical perspective after Civil War and Endgame, it more resembles the version of the world that you’d see in a GI Joe cartoon or Roger Moore Bond movie. Again, the classic rather than modern comic book superhero approach where any problem in the world can be solved with a punch from the hero. It’s becoming more complicated and, at the same time, even less complex.
I mean, maybe after the first or second Avengers, you might ask “what was Wakanda doing during the Anglo-Zulu war? Or all during African colonization?” since it was still essentially based in our world, but now it is a world filled with English-speaking extraterrestrials, multiple and often weird alternate universes, various superhuman races that have existed in the world for thousands of years and maybe even the Fantastic Four and X-gene mutants will turn out to have been around all this time as well. It’s looking to sell popcorn entertainment, so serious critical considerations are a little irrelevant now.
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Speaking of Spider-Man, am I the only one tired of Marvel constantly resetting him to be a loser? Even when Stan was writing, the “Parker luck” didn’t run as bad as it has been under current writers.
Stan Lee had Peter’s uncle get shot, had him play a part in his girlfriend’s dad getting killed, had his best mate lose his mind to drugs, his best mate’s dad go insane and attack his loved ones, then the immediate aftermath of Stan’s run had Pete accidentally kill his own girlfriend and then straight afterwards get into a fight with his best mate’s dad that killed him too.
Compared to that, the latest version of Pete is living a charmed life.
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Before the 80’s, comic book readers had generational changeover. When readers hit their 20’s, they would stop reading comics and be replaced by children reading them again.
I’d argue it was the 1960s when that generational changeover started to wane. Marvel Comics were read by soldiers and uni students rather than just kids and proper continuity appeared. Guys like Roy Thomas started writing and controlling the comics because they were fans, there wasn’t actually total illusion of change, it was slowed but Peter Parker did graduate school and college and get married. Sue and Reed married and had a kid who aged, slowly. He no longer ages.
It was around the late 80s and early 90s they started to roll back on that idea. That character A has to be like this or that and by the 2000s went into overdrive as the likes of Quesada and Johns decided the status quo they wanted was best. Now it is truly the illusion of change, even with the radical ideas Hickman put into X-Men there’s a running theme in the background this will not last, that immortality for the characters is a phase that will pass and they went in knowing that.
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Stan Lee had Peter’s uncle get shot, had him play a part in his girlfriend’s dad getting killed, had his best mate lose his mind to drugs, his best mate’s dad go insane and attack his loved ones, then the immediate aftermath of Stan’s run had Pete accidentally kill his own girlfriend and then straight afterwards get into a fight with his best mate’s dad that killed him too.
But ‘ee were happy! Kids these days, they don’t know they’re born.
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The Reason All Modern Movie Protagonists Have To Be ‘Likable’
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Why All Movies And Shows Follow A Three-Act Structure
The origin of the three-act structure is a matter of some debate. It’s commonly attributed to screenwriting guru Syd Field’s 1979 book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, but that’s obviously BS because Joseph Campbell identified a recurring three-act structure across ancient myths in 1949. Some people also cite Aristotle as the originator of the three-act structure, except this is also BS because Aristotle supported a two-act structure (Tangling and Untangling). So where did the three-act come from? Why does it have such staying power? Will it still be relevant in the future of a rapidly changing market?
I have mentioned this before, but in the 19th century German theorist Gustav Freytag described typical theatre plays as using a 5-act-structure and the model he gives is also pretty much the one still being used today in books that teach how to write a screenplay.
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Reading some titles and: All these men like Stark, Reed, Doom, Forge though it is his mutant talent. They all see this advanced futuristic technology/power and try to build a device to either steal, contain, harness, or reverse engineer it. Doom with the Silver Surfer way back when, another time stealing the Beyonder’s powers, always up to something. Stark wanting to build a device to capture the Phoenix Force. It is Forge’s power, but otherwise, how does a 20th/21st century scientist even approach technology or cosmic power so far ahead of his own time? It should be so far beyond him.
Not exactly storytelling, but more about mythmaking, there is a lot of that in UFOology.
The basic idea is that in the pre-modern era, encounters with unexplainable phenomena were attributed to magic and the supernatural – spirits, demons, fairies, angels and gods. UFO enthusiasts — or fantasists — would like to claim these were actually close encounters with extraterrestrial advanced technologies similar to when natives of various continents encountered the advanced technology of guns, ships, and other manufactured industrial products from clothing to tools. Or Coca Cola bottles in the movie THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY.
However, the stories and ideas of alien encounters in the end are no more plausible than fairy tales and often have the same narrative structure with an entire pandemonium or Divine Comedy of beings and locations associated with the grays and nordics and other kinds of aliens and their crafts and the planets (Niburu) from where they originate.
Arthur C. Clarke would say that a sufficiently advanced technology would appear to be magic to a sufficiently primitive intelligent species, but on the reverse, magic would be explained as an advanced technology to a technologically dependent species. In comics, all superpowers from precognition to super-strength are essentially magical — but the origins are almost always pseudoscientific — came from another planet or bitten by a radioactive spider, radiation in general or genetic engineering.
Except, of course, for the many heroes that are still basically magical — and they have been in comics even before Superman. In fact, around the same time they created Superman, Siegel and Shuster also published Doctor Occult, a magical detective, for DC. In Marvel comics, there is a kind of interplay between magic and advanced science with both looking a lot like each other in the cosmic realm. Warren Ellis would play with this idea a lot. In his IRON MAN run (that inspired some of the elements of the movies), a character suggests that the Iron Man armor and similar tech was actually a kind of heironymous machine that only worked for its creator, Stark, which is why no one can really replicate it.
So, essentially, it is magic. In contrast to that, his old run on Thor had the idea that the magic of the Asgardians was actually an ancient technology left behind either by a powerful but extinct race or by the Asgardian ancestors that is so user-friendly later generations of Norse Gods decayed culturally and only know how to use it but do not really know how it works or how it was created. Like an Amazonian primitive that finds a loaded gun and figures out how to shoot it, but doesn’t realize that it will eventually run out of bullets and need to be reloaded.
Lev Grossman uses this idea for his series of THE MAGICIANS novels where magic is essentially a set of glitches left behind by some inexplicably advanced race that created the various universes.
More interesting, though, is how people naturally think magically. Intuitive thinking, or holistic thinking, comes very natural to most people and is similar to the idea of sympathetic magic. Mircea Eliade, one of the early investigators of myths and folktales, recounts a story in one of his books about researching a folktale in Eastern Europe about a fairy that lured a man to his death with her singing. The man would travel through a mountain pass to meet his fiancée and the fairy saw him and eventually fell in love so one night as he was returning home, she sang to him. As he followed the magical, hypnotic sound, he stepped off a cliff and died and the fairy swooped in to capture his soul to take to fairyland.
Eliade and his fellow researchers thought that, of course, the myth was probably centuries old, but when they went to the villages, they discovered that the man’s fiancée was still alive and actually managed to find her. She explained that the mountains where they lived were always treacherous and people fell to their deaths many times during her life, but because the man was young and engaged to be married, people started telling stories about it until it became a folktale. So, almost immediately myths — like jokes — arise naturally, unconsciously and very, very quickly around any event. We see it today from conspiracy theories, Satanic panic, urban legends and often UFO stories. The original “flying saucer” sightings actually weren’t described as saucers by the first to report them but looked more like flying manta rays. Not exactly airplanes, but closer to airplanes that discs. However, the witness did report them as somewhat “disc-shaped” and the newspapers started calling them saucers because that was much easier to communicate than the actual report. After that, people started seeing “flying saucers” that looked like the classic discs in science fiction movies and magazine covers.
From a storytelling perspective, technology is often anthropomorphized – especially in robots, clones, androids and aliens – and/or used to represent the way our characters today engage with our world. Even outright magical characters eventually have something like a technical explanation or rules to the use of their powers that resembles a technological approach. Even actual magical practices — especially the Alchemy — in history were basically early attempts at scientific experimentation and development based on what turned out to be eventually incorrect philosophies on nature and the material world. The theory of humours, for example, dominated medicine throughout our history and would sound like magic today, but were taken as seriously as any medical practice today, but at the same time, the practices eventually led to an actually more scientific approach. When Newton explained his laws of motion to Edmond Halley, he used it to determine the course of a comet and that comet became known as Halley’s Comet. Back then, it would have seemed magical that someone could do that, but eventually that got us to the moon (and to the brink of nuclear war).
We still have essentially magical ideas about where technology will eventually take us — immortality, other dimensions, teleportation, ESP, etc.
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Something like recovering a crashed alien spaceship and trying to reverse engineer everything. Area 51 allegedly… Or some time ago, this advanced fighter crashed in China and…
There is a deleted scene in INDEPENDENCE DAY where one character (probably Goldblum) asks how in the world they are going to be able to hack a ship with a laptop computer. One of the Area 51 scientists (probably Spiner) explains that all digital technology on Earth is based on the technology they got from the alien craft that crashed back in the 40’s. That is a common part of UFOology. Even though we can literally trace the development of electronics from vacuum tubes to transistors to chips and all the principles behind them going back to the 19th century, they still think there is no way we just invented it, just like most of them think there was no way ancient Egyptians could build the pyramids without extraterrestrial instructions.
Maybe it should be like a sports team with players on the roster sidelined with injuries and have to sit out the next few go arounds
Grant Morrison did a quick classification of the three major marvel teams one time – and it is essentially based on adolescent concepts:
Fantastic Four – Family
X-Men – School
Avengers – Sports team
When readers were kids – especially in the 60’s and 70’s, those were the essential elements of their lives – family, school and sports.
When it is a team like The Avengers or The Defenders, it is more like a sports club recruiting top players, BUT each player has his own title as well. A lot of family teams though can grow. Like the Bat-Family, for example. Though some are more like a circle of friends – like the Spider-Family in Spider-Man. Spider-Man is not the father figure, but the leader of the pack.
It is changing a little as we’ve grown more militaristic. The Avengers acts more like a special forces unit than a sports team, and all through the 90’s a lot of the teams like WildC.A.T.s, Cyber-Force, etc. were covert agencies or mercenaries. So I think the military squad/covert action team is another category to add to that.
As far as superhero school teams, I think a lot of titles have tried to replicate the success of the X-men. FF did the Future Foundation and Dr. Strange has Strange Academy. Teen Titans and Legion of Superheroes certainly have the same feeling, and are pretty successful relatively, but really the X-men is the best example while most times it doesn’t really work.
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As far as storytelling, I think one of the biggest challenges for a writer is to create truly believable but extremely unlikable characters. Often, villains are charming even when they do extremely evil things. I think most people want to be liked and often writers find things that they like even about their villains.
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I have mentioned this before, but in the 19th century German theorist Gustav Freytag described typical theatre plays as using a 5-act-structure and the model he gives is also pretty much the one still being used today in books that teach how to write a screenplay.
Yes, that one was very influential.
Most of these theories put the cart before the horse. From Aristotle’s poetics to Syd Field’s Screenplay, most of the method described actually applies to critical analysis more than practical advise on how to write a story. It’s useful to understand a particular play, novel or any other kind of story after it has been written or produced, but it is not very useful or practical in actually creating a story.
Gore Vidal makes a similar point in his essay on novelists and critics in the 40s where he mentions that whatever deducible principles could be discovered governing the execution of Austen’s EMMA would not be very relevant to Dostoevsky’s THE IDIOT. When you read Syd Field, it is really a long critical analysis of CHINATOWN disguised as an instruction manual. If it came out today, it might have a title like “How to write Chinatown without being Robert Towne.” Same for STORY by McKee or any other book claiming to have discovered the essence of stories in general or specific terms. They are mostly intelligent critics explaining what they like in stories, or in some cases like Blake Snyder or Corey Mandell they are how they personally write stories which is only moderately of use – mostly to film school or theatre students who really haven’t had enough experience to write anything original.
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I also wanted to mention in DC that the JLA are supposed to be (as Grant Morrison stated) a pantheon of gods.
Wizard magazine had a spread on which god they corresponded to. The Flash and Aquaman were no brainers but a few of the others…
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I was going through Amazon Prime streaming and I saw their Chris Claremont documentary. ( I am going to check out the 3 part documentary on superheroes)
The things he got done, what he wanted to do but the higher ups did not, the editorial interference, sales pressure, what was forced on him and his close collaborators. Oh the politics.
I get it, but sometimes what a writer wants to conclude may not be for the best overall.
There was a snippet with Jason Aaron (who I have very mixed feelings because of his Heroes Reborn and Avengers material). He said that like it or not, those characters are on loan like toys for a kid to play with under certain conditions. The kid can do what he wants within reason and not break them. In the end, the kid has to return them back to their original place for the next kid. So don’t get too attached…
The late Mark Gruenwald likened taking over a book to playing in a sandbox. When you’re in the sandbox playing, you can do whatever you want. But when it’s time to leave, you should clean and straighten everything up so the next person can have a tidy play area from which they can play and do what they want.
Sometimes, that doesn’t happen for a variety of reasons but the writer should make a good faith effort to clean up what messes they can.
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when it’s time to leave, you should clean and straighten everything up so the next person can have a tidy play area from which they can play and do what they want.
This is the essence of why I no longer buy or read Marvel or DC Universe books. There are some great writers and artists working on some of those books, but in the end none of the scenes they create have any lasting consequence. Every major “event” promises real change, but they never really deliver on that. I don’t fault those writers and artists, I certainly get why fans of the Big Two continue to read the adventures of characters they enjoy following, and I understand why the publishers and editorial staffs feel the need to maintain the status quo; but I prefer to read stories that evolve, where actions have consequences, and where the death of a character means that they won’t return in a year.
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when it’s time to leave, you should clean and straighten everything up so the next person can have a tidy play area from which they can play and do what they want.
This is the essence of why I no longer buy or read Marvel or DC Universe books. There are some great writers and artists working on some of those books, but in the end none of the scenes they create have any lasting consequence. Every major “event” promises real change, but they never really deliver on that. I don’t fault those writers and artists, I certainly get why fans of the Big Two continue to read the adventures of characters they enjoy following, and I understand why the publishers and editorial staffs feel the need to maintain the status quo; but I prefer to read stories that evolve, where actions have consequences, and where the death of a character means that they won’t return in a year.
I think if you look at the history of the Big Two, there really were very few lasting changes. Even with changes that have lasted (deaths of Uncle Ben and Mar-Vell), there have been”untold stories”, alternate versions, and other workarounds.
Due to the nature of being corporate-owned characters, changing markets, trying to keep the balance of maintaining older readers and atracting new one, lasting changes are hard to keep. New generations of talent who, when given the shot at working on their favorite characters, want to undo changes to revert them back to “their” character. You also have editorial turnover that cause changes to be undone. I think it was Jim O’Hara who posited that Big Two comics have about a 10-year cycle where things happen but are reset at the end. (I think that cycle has gotten a lot shorter.) I think the constant relaunches with new #1s and constant crossovers reduce a lot of momentum that help build good stories.
The problem with so many “gimmicks” is that everyone knows that the stunts will be undone. There is no element of risk involved. A major character gets killed off, only to be replaced by someone else taking up the mantle. But after a period of time, the original wil return. There is also the classic “everything you know is WRONG!” story that recons an older tale. It lasts until someone decides to retcon the retcon. There are other things but this kind of stuff has been going on for decades.
Years ago, I came to the conclusion that it’s me, not the Big Two. I have changed while they cannot. And that’s okay. They still have their readers and many people seem to enjoy what’s being produced. Good for them! I enjoy other things, so I’m happy as well. While I do have occassional flashes of nostalgia, they pass and I move on. That’s all we can do.
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But… was there ever a story of him capturing or salvaging advanced tech/power and trying to assimilate it against Superman?
All the time. The most famous is probably the ancient technology of the planet Lexor, which he first uses in Superman #164 (Hamilton/Swan) and then later used to build his first armoured suit in Action Comics #544 (Bates/Swan).
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Thinking about it some more, the lack of continuity in the Gold and Silver Ages meant that their were no real changes to characters that lasted. It was rare if it did. You look at those old stories and something fantastic would happen to the main character, they would have an adventure, and everything would go back to normal. It would all happen within the course of a single issue and not be referenced to again. Different stories would even contradict each other. Back then, it was all about telling an entertaining story.
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Thinking about it some more, the lack of continuity in the Gold and Silver Ages meant that their were no real changes to characters that lasted. It was rare if it did. You look at those old stories and something fantastic would happen to the main character, they would have an adventure, and everything would go back to normal.
This is why The Super Moby Dick of Space is objectively and indisputably the greatest comic story of the Silver Age. Lightning Lad lost his arm, and it stayed that way for for three decades, only being undone by a complete continuity reboot.
Close behind we have: Triplicate Girl losing one of her three bodies, Bouncing Boy losing his powers (though that only lasted about a decade), and Ferro Lad’s death.
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when it’s time to leave, you should clean and straighten everything up so the next person can have a tidy play area from which they can play and do what they want.
This is the essence of why I no longer buy or read Marvel or DC Universe books. There are some great writers and artists working on some of those books, but in the end none of the scenes they create have any lasting consequence. Every major “event” promises real change, but they never really deliver on that. I don’t fault those writers and artists, I certainly get why fans of the Big Two continue to read the adventures of characters they enjoy following, and I understand why the publishers and editorial staffs feel the need to maintain the status quo; but I prefer to read stories that evolve, where actions have consequences, and where the death of a character means that they won’t return in a year.
I think if you look at the history of the Big Two, there really were very few lasting changes. Even with changes that have lasted (deaths of Uncle Ben and Mar-Vell), there have been”untold stories”, alternate versions, and other workarounds.
Due to the nature of being corporate-owned characters, changing markets, trying to keep the balance of maintaining older readers and atracting new one, lasting changes are hard to keep. New generations of talent who, when given the shot at working on their favorite characters, want to undo changes to revert them back to “their” character. You also have editorial turnover that cause changes to be undone. I think it was Jim O’Hara who posited that Big Two comics have about a 10-year cycle where things happen but are reset at the end. (I think that cycle has gotten a lot shorter.) I think the constant relaunches with new #1s and constant crossovers reduce a lot of momentum that help build good stories.
The problem with so many “gimmicks” is that everyone knows that the stunts will be undone. There is no element of risk involved. A major character gets killed off, only to be replaced by someone else taking up the mantle. But after a period of time, the original wil return. There is also the classic “everything you know is WRONG!” story that recons an older tale. It lasts until someone decides to retcon the retcon. There are other things but this kind of stuff has been going on for decades.
Years ago, I came to the conclusion that it’s me, not the Big Two. I have changed while they cannot. And that’s okay. They still have their readers and many people seem to enjoy what’s being produced. Good for them! I enjoy other things, so I’m happy as well. While I do have occassional flashes of nostalgia, they pass and I move on. That’s all we can do.
The interesting thing is how fundamental elements of characters actually were changes from what the original author intended. Kryptonite was an invention of the Superman radio show rather than Siegel and Shuster’s comics. Then decades later, there was an issue where all the kryptonite was turned into lead. Naturally, that didn’t last and we got it all back including red kryptonite.
Batman doesn’t kill. Well… originally he did.
it isn’t that change is bad, but I haven’t seen a good argument made that change is good in itself. The change has to be something both substantial and sustainable to the characters’ fundamental dramatic situations. Changes done for show or to surprise people but otherwise are not crucial to the larger nature of the ongoing story of that character certainly won’t last and have killed books.
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This is why The Super Moby Dick of Space is objectively and indisputably the greatest comic story of the Silver Age. Lightning Lad lost his arm, and it stayed that way for for three decades, only being undone by a complete continuity reboot.
Interesting… Like Aquaman lost his hand and lived with an interchangeable wrist thing that he could insert a hook or a spear device… Barbara Gordon being crippled since the gratuitous Killing Joke and then reality was all rebooted. I guess Alfred will stay dead until either Batman either makes a deal with an entity, the entity does him a favor, or DC reality reboots again.
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In sports especially in the NFL, teams have to go on for weeks with a player being sidelined from an injury. Last time I saw that in comics was in the Mutant Massacre, Colossus was paralyzed, Kitty got stuck in her phase state, and Angel was tortured and pinned to the wall before he was saved by Thor. All those characters had to sit out for a while. Usually you have in a major brawl, the same hero team comes back next issue and never having to lick their wounds
Never mind some characters that get conveniently sidelined like Tigra in Byrne’s West Coast Avengers. He had no use for her so he had her as a little crazy from her animal side and out of the issue. Or in Kingdom Come, Martian Manhunter was rendered mentally crushed, leaving only the two most powerful characters in the final showdown.
Actually, I like the idea that characters in teams can be sidelined by injury, but the tendency is to make it something dramatic. Maybe they just broke an arm and have to spend a few weeks out of action. Imagine Daredevil breaks a leg and asks Spider-Man to spend some extra time covering Hell’s Kitchen while Matt Murdoch actually spends more time in the law office and realizes that being Daredevil actually has let his work as an attorney suffer. Spider-Man also learns that it’s not so fun when he has to deal with some deep poverty, organized crime and streets where even the people you rescue will pull a knife on you and spit in your face.
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An opinion piece on what’s referred to as the “racism episode” of A Different World:
https://shadowandact.com/a-different-world-anniversary-racism-episode
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I had forgotten that A Different World was a spin-off of the Cosby show. The writer of the article also has her own bias on it, but it does reflect a lot of the controversy that Cosby himself would stir up at the time as he took a conservative turn after the Cosby show. However, most of his generation of African Americans shared that same perspective and the idea that many of the problems African American communities have faced since the 80’s originated internally rather than from any external oppressive force. Guys like Cosby, Armond White and Thomas Sowell all have much the same perspective and disdain for the idea that there is any white preference or white supremacy still active on black communities.
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But it brings up a point: does a movie or book need to spell out every tiny detail, or should it assume that the viewer can apply common sense and fill in the blanks?
Infinity War could have spent several minutes with Thanos thinking “ok gauntlet, remove 50% of all life from the cosmos, choose the 50% randomly but make sure it’s spead evenly across all species, I mean don’t remove 95% of spiders and 5% of flies, remove 50% of each, but I don’t care which specific individuals, except me: make sure you don’t remove me because I need to survive to destroy you when it’s finished. Also, alter the DNA of every survivor so that the birth rate is reduced to maintain this equilibrium for eternity, while adjusting for probable predation and so forth.”
It could have done that, but it would have made a rubbish scene.
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but if you hold up a kitchen match or a lighter, he falls apart.
Ehhh… no worse than being weak to the color yellow… or wood… or a green rock… old-school DC was funky like that
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but if you hold up a kitchen match or a lighter, he falls apart.
Ehhh… no worse than being weak to the color yellow… or wood… or a green rock… old-school DC was funky like that
Aren’t most of those weaknesses gone though?
The wood weakness was from a different ring. The yellow has been corrected.
Don’t know how much Kryptonite still affects Kal-el … But why is Jonnz still so messed up by fire?
DC might be scared he would dominate everything and outshine you know who.
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If I remember my SFL images correctly Green Lantern was knocked out by a can of baked beans chucked at his head.
We all have a weakness Al.
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What’s crazy is not that GL has a weakness to yellow, but that all the street-level heroes have a weakness to bullets. Why doesn’t DC make them all bulletproof?
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But why is Jonnz still so messed up by fire?
I don’t think he is… or well, I suppose that depends on whichever reboot we’re currently in…
But I’m pretty sure he’s gotten over it a couple of times… I mean, it’s a fear of fire more than a physical weakness to it, IIRC and I know I’ve read a couple of comicbooks where he just powers through it, but again, I guess it all depends on what the story needs, as these things usually go.
At any rate, sure, MM is quite powerful, but my understanding is he’s overall powerful, but he ain’t as strong as Superman, probably not even as strong as WW, and he’s not like a massively powerful telepath either… like he’s got a lot of abilities but is outclassed by the stronger characters… jack of all trades and all that.
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I was thinking about the concept of teen sidekicks the other day.
That really is a fucked up concept when you think about it.
In many cases, these kids had a normal life until a “tragic event” put them in custody of a costumed adult. Then, the adult in a costume puts the minor in a costume and takes them out to fight violent and dangerous criminals. This child is regularly beaten and subjected to death traps and various forms of assault that adults can barely withstand. The child’s “friends” are other sidekicks and costumed adults. They are basically homeschooled by their costumed adult. Then there is the underlying expectation that they will grow up and either be an adult costumed hero or take over the mantle of their adult partner when they die or are incapacitated.
Realistically, these kids would have fucked up minds and social skills. They have been groomed and manipulated into becoming sociopaths. The level of physical abuse has probably given them permanent brain damage and can look forward to a life of chronic pain and arthritis.
And the wild thing is, it’s the GOOD GUYS that are engaging in child endangerment. What the adults, who typically are wealthy, should be doing is getting that child therapy and paying for a proper education so they can grow up to help society in more sustainable ways.
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I did like that Frank Miller basically made the point that Robin is a child soldier in ALL STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN. Same mentality and conditioning (at least he didn’t use drugs and alcohol like they do in real life as I recall).
The original idea of the sidekick was most likely for marketing. Kids were reading the comics so they needed a kid in the comic for the readers to identify with. You’re not just reading about the story – you’re in the story. The death of the parents was mainly just a reason for the kid to get involved with the hero – it wasn’t a significant part of the character development.
I think that was a lot of the reason that Captain Marvel (Shazam!) was more popular than Superman and Batman. Not only was the hero the mightiest mortal, he was also really a little kid AND he had two friends/sidekicks who were also kids.
Still, the whole sidekick type has changed significantly. Many of the Robins no longer required traumatic backstories. My favorite version is Carrie Kelly from the Dark Knight Returns (though not from the sequels), and she just grew up and lived in a tough neighborhood. Her only traumatic experience was that she was saved by the Batman from an assault one night. Not exactly positive, but not that negative either.
Yeah, on the whole though, there is pretty much nothing sane about what superheroes do.
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So basically… Who is a great young storyteller/creator working now that you like and recommend?
Daniel Warren Johnson is a creator who I think has huge potential in comics. I loved his creator-owned Extremity and Murder Falcon series from Image, his Wonder Woman: Dead Earth is fantastic, and his current series, Do A Powerbomb is shaping up very well so far.
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Realistically, these kids would have fucked up minds and social skills.
Which is possibly why, back in the 70s, Green Arrow’s sidekick Speedy developed a heroin addiction and, in the 90s, Namor’s cousin Namorita had an alcohol problem during her run in THE NEW WARRIORS
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Was just looking up Zack Kaplan, enjoyed a good few stories by him, but his bio has him studying in the early noughties, teaching screenwriting. So yeah, not young.
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I was thinking about the concept of teen sidekicks the other day.
That really is a fucked up concept when you think about it.
In many cases, these kids had a normal life until a “tragic event” put them in custody of a costumed adult. Then, the adult in a costume puts the minor in a costume and takes them out to fight violent and dangerous criminals. This child is regularly beaten and subjected to death traps and various forms of assault that adults can barely withstand. The child’s “friends” are other sidekicks and costumed adults. They are basically homeschooled by their costumed adult. Then there is the underlying expectation that they will grow up and either be an adult costumed hero or take over the mantle of their adult partner when they die or are incapacitated.
Realistically, these kids would have fucked up minds and social skills. They have been groomed and manipulated into becoming sociopaths. The level of physical abuse has probably given them permanent brain damage and can look forward to a life of chronic pain and arthritis.
And the wild thing is, it’s the GOOD GUYS that are engaging in child endangerment. What the adults, who typically are wealthy, should be doing is getting that child therapy and paying for a proper education so they can grow up to help society in more sustainable ways.
That’s basically what Brat Pack by Rick Veitch is all about
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To be fair the sidekick thing is from a different time in comics where they were aimed at 8-12 year olds. Robin and the rest are simply just in there as the surrogate reader and nothing more. When Russell T Davies relaunched Doctor Who he used the same logic for a wider and a bit older audience, Rose was the viewer surrogate.
It’s fun to analyse how weird it all is in a real life scenario but be warned that’s also the thinking that drove Frederick Wertham to ban a load of shit, that he couldn’t take the simple face value concept of the kids reading Batman to want to be Robin and go on adventures so instead they must have been underage fucking.
Veitch was one of the first to deconstruct superheroes and how bizarre the whole idea is, and sidekicks are ripe for that, but logically for Bruce Wayne to have a sidekick you need his parents to die because no other scenario makes sense as to why he’s living with him and not them.
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Veitch was one of the first to deconstruct superheroes and how bizarre the whole idea is, and sidekicks are ripe for that, but logically for Bruce Wayne to have a sidekick you need his parents to die because no other scenario makes sense as to why he’s living with him and not them.
Yeah, kid sidekicks wouldn’t really work in movies or television which is why they are usually young adults on screen. Even Robin in the Batman television show was well out of high school. It would be a little weird to have a teenage Robin show up in Matt Reeves Batman, for example. Technically, Dick Grayson was a teen crimefighter in Titans, but the show starts well after that.
Bucky Barnes was a kid in the comics fighting alongside Captain America, but the movies made him at least the same age as Steve when he joined the army. Though a child fighting in a war is not a crazy idea as almost all of the combatants were just kids. It’s interesting, but Bucky did not have a special name like Kid America or anything, right? He was just Bucky. I mean, imagine if Batman’s sidekick just used his name. The Adventures of Batman and Dick.
It would be an interesting idea for a Robin-like character to grow up, leave that life and then deal with the trauma of having been a sidekick.
At the same time, though, kids being involved in superhero activities is just as common. Spider-Man, Captain Marvel, the Power Rangers, Superboy, Batgirl and so on. I wonder why that seems more acceptable.
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As for sidekicks, IIRC original 40s Batman was getting a little too dark and brooding as a lone crusader, so Robin was developed with his costume, youth and all to lighten things up a little.
Robin was introduced 11 issues after Batman, and they were anthology issues where the Batman story ran about 8 pages. There’s no way Batman had enough time to become too dark and brooding.
Also, Bruce Wayne is quite a jolly socialite in those issues. We don’t even know he’s an orphan yet, let alone a dark and brooding one.
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I saw the latest season of Cobra Kai which brings me to another trope:
All these Far East words of wisdom spoken by someone Asian in broken English
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All these reboots/re imagining of old shows ie. Star Trek (especially SNW), the streaming Star Wars, Quantum Leap,
Cobra Kai, old soundtracks on Stranger Things and Euphoria, and it goes on and on.I get it that the nostalgia and the familiarity gets to the viewer reminiscing about the glory days… and it means
ratings and millions too.———————
David is right.The Wikipedia file says Robin was brought to bring in more young readers and sales actually doubled. The file says that Kane and Finger borrowed from Robin Hood for the name and the original costume.
Well, Kane did borrow from Zorro…
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One more throw in: I forgot to mention that MM can also become invisible, so you can add in a little of Sue Storm in his listing of powers.
Still, if he wasn’t so vulnerable to fire, he would be a superhero in god mode.
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A lot of these movies and shows from decades ago are now being reviewed online in today’s eyes.
A lot of paradoxes in the storytelling, bad judgement and faux pas:Devil Wears Prada: The guy Nigel did Ok in helping the intern fit in more
and really learn. In the end though, Nigel thought that his being so loyal
and paying his dues for so long would mean that he was going to advance.
Wrong. In the end, Miranda (Meryl Streep) in her self preservation, arranged
for his new job opportunity to be given to someone else. She also didn’t take
the other loyal assistant Emily to Paris. Cold.Smallville was just Dawson’s Creek with super powers.
We already know Back to the Future as in the attempted rape car scene,
attempted murder on Marty on the skateboard. Many debates on the paradoxes
of his time travel ie. Marty just replaced/took over the life of the other Marty
that he saw leave, so he got into the upper middle class McFly family with
the SUV etc.James Bond: Roger Moore’s first movie “”Live and Let Die” where he stacked the
deck against the fortune teller and took her virginity. (Too many scenes in those
old Bond movies to get into…)Purple Rain: The Kid was such a d*ck to everyone, didn’t want to play the music
from the band members. How was such a polished band like that seriously be on the
chopping block? Their music and chords was clearly better than Morris and the Time
and we barely saw the other band. The girl group really dressed like the
Hellfire Club in comics and just danced around in lingerie. The Kid only met
Apollonia a few nights ago, wore sunglasses nighttime in a dark club, had this
deep love for her, took her to lonely lakes in the countryside, she jumps into
the “wrong” lake naked, was so abusive to her and she still took it!The music performances saved the movie, because Prince overwhelmed it, like Elvis,
Sting, the Beatles, Bowie, Jagger, did in their movies. -
Yeah Purple Rain was never winning any awards for the screenplay. That film was a hit because the performances on stage are incredible. It’s an okay story that provides a framing device for the songs and in that context does it much better than most.
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