This is a thread to talk about a storytelling
The Storytelling Thread
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Millar’s Authority run was good but this type of storytelling was finite imho.
Sort of like the candle that burns twice as bright going half as much in duration.
It had to come to an end. How many disasters can happen to the Earth all in a short
time?You last question has nothing to do with anything particular about Millar’s storytelling, though, it applies all super-hero comics. There’s nothing exceptional about the number of disasters in the Authority, Metropolis suffers a 9/11-scale disaster every other month and a world-threatening catastrophe twice a year.
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Just finished the fourth volume of The Wild Storm where Ellis reimagines the Wildstorm Universe in a way very similar to what he tried to do for Marvel’s defunct New Universe in New Universal (a mostly forgotten book like the Squadron Supreme follow up to Supreme Power).
In it, Ellis – like several British writers from Alan Moore to Garth Ennis to Mark Millar – takes concepts from the UFO conspiracy crowd and feeds them into his fiction. Particularly several theories around “breakaway civilizations.” What’s interesting is how science fiction and urban legend have constantly fed off each other for years. I read an article that traced the lineage of modern Ancient Astronaut theories from today’s History Channel show (whose motto should be “we don’t know, therefore… aliens.”) through Von Daniken to the editors of a French paranormal magazine in the 50’s who got their start reprinting French translations of H.P. Lovecraft stories where the modern ancient alien concept actually began with stories like AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS and THE CALL OF CTHULHU.
However, if you move on back into the past, Lovecraft, Howard and many of the pulp authors of the time were influenced by the paranormal theories of Blavatsky and the Atlantean histories of Lewis Spence. There is some evidence that Burroughs based his Barsoom societies on the strange fairies in Blavatsky’s spiritualism texts. One of the prototypes of the superhero and supervillain was Spring Heeled Jack a popular character (and monster) in English penny dreadfuls, the precursor to pulps, who began as an urban legend based on reported sightings and assaults.
What I find interesting is that often people will point out Universal’s Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde as precursors to Marvel’s Incredible Hulk, but no one points out the obvious connection to the movie THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN where a good-hearted Army officer is turned into a rampaging angry giant after being blasted by a new kind of nuclear bomb. The clearest antecedent to most of the Marvel heroes were the monster movies that people packed the theaters to see and the stories in the science fiction magazines at the time.
Marvel generally has been motivated by trends. Their monster series with Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night came out when Hammer films were coming to America. Son of Satan came out around the same time people were fascinated with Satanism on screen with movies like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist and in real life with the San Francisco Satanist Anton Levay. Ghost Rider combined that with motorcycle stunts while guys like Evel Knievel were crashing their bikes in front of Vegas casinos. Dazzler came to prominence when rock and roll light shows were the rage.
In a lot of ways, it is a little embarrassing how Marvel would jump into a fad with no hesitation, but it usually served them well. You see a lot of Cajun culture come to prominence and suddenly there is a cringeworthy Cajun superhero, BUT he’s also one of the most popular heroes of that decade. A lot of Australian movies and stars rise up in America and next thing you know, the X-men move to Australia.
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In a lot of ways, it is a little embarrassing how Marvel would jump into a fad with no hesitation, but it usually served them well. You see a lot of Cajun culture come to prominence and suddenly there is a cringeworthy Cajun superhero, BUT he’s also one of the most popular heroes of that decade. A lot of Australian movies and stars rise up in America and next thing you know, the X-men move to Australia.
Fun fact: Wolverine was almost an expatriate Australian, thus why he had an Aussie accent in “Pryde of the X-Men”.
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Marvel generally has been motivated by trends. Their monster series with Tomb of Dracula and Werewolf by Night came out when Hammer films were coming to America. Son of Satan came out around the same time people were fascinated with Satanism on screen with movies like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist and in real life with the San Francisco Satanist Anton Levay. Ghost Rider combined that with motorcycle stunts while guys like Evel Knievel were crashing their bikes in front of Vegas casinos. Dazzler came to prominence when rock and roll light shows were the rage.
As I recall, the reason Marvel began publishing horror books in the ’70s was that in 1971 the Comics Code Authority relaxed their rules regarding the portrayal of werewolves, vampires and similar staples of horror books, as long as such characters were presented in a vein similar to the early Universal Studios monster movies (as opposed to the Hammer films, which were comparatively more gruesome). Marvel’s first horror comics were Tomb of Dracula, featuring a well-dressed Count, and Werewolf By Night with fangs and claws but not much blood. When those books and others found an audience, Marvel began publishing a line of black-n-white horror magazines (Tales of the Zombie,Monsters Unleashed, Vampire Tales) that were not subject to CCA regulations; that’s when we started seeing more outrageous and blood-soaked stories featuring Dracula and other monsters.
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Fun fact: Wolverine was almost an expatriate Australian, thus why he had an Aussie accent in “Pryde of the X-Men”.
He was pretty firmly established as Canadian though long before that cartoon was made. They were a bit slow on the uptake to have notice that happened around 14 years earlier.
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Of course, he was also made famous by an Australian actor, too. To the point I don’t think most people know that Wolverine is Canadian.
Scott McNeil didn’t start voicing Wolverine till X-Men Evolution though…
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It’s more a point of view difference.
Batman’s strategy is based on the point of view that everyone he encounters is a potential criminal mastermind.
Wonder Woman is based on the point of view that everyone she encounters is potentially a hero who just needs to be corrected to see the right way.
Superman thinks of everyone like they are all abandoned puppies to be rescued.
Martian Manhunter literally knows who everyone truly is.
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He’ll be out of the team once they discover Zoom.
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The idea usually is that few people are willing to actually kill and even fewer are willing to risk their lives for anything. So if you are willing to kill and die, no one will step up.
In the real old west, vigilance committees – posses – would form up and pretty quickly deal with any dangerous people quite conclusively, along with any natives, African Americans, Mexicans or Chinese workers they didn’t like. Also, almost every town did not allow people to openly carry firearms in city limits. The Old West had significant gun control in reality, and there really were no actual gunslingers. There were no cownboys and Indian battles either. It was the US Cavalry vs the Native tribes – a determined armed military offensive.
Interestingly, the term Buckaroo to mean cowhand actually was a mispronunciation of vaquero, the Mexican cowhands who taught the immigrants from the East before they were driven back to Mexico. In Spanish (at least in Mexico), V sounds like a B, so it was like Bah-kay-row which quickly became buckaroo.
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Yeah maybe the short timeframe was as much to blame as anything else. Either way, it wasn’t on a par with the first movie.
The Matrix took quite a few years to get made – including getting Geof Darrow to create a complete storyboard even before it was greenlit
Steve Skroce wasn’t it? I know Darrow did some of the designs but if he did a full storyboard I think we’d still be waiting for it now!
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In Space: 1999, they were scientists and not military.
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Also the missions won’t be just to study rock samples and nebula but adventure…
Well, I think they are studying a lot of rock samples in Star Trek between the scenes. I mean, there is a lot of that kind of stuff being mentioned, I think, but no episode devoted to Data staring at a rock for forty-five minutes, for some reason.
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Although Picard came close.
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In Alien the Nostromo is basically a haulage vessel. And in Red Dwarf they’re miners. I always enjoy these kind of blue-collar-workers-in-space setups.
In the late 80s and early 90s, the SF writer Allen Steele wrote a bunch of novels about blue-collar workers in space and they were one of my first exposures to Hard SF. They did get a bit exciting at times – one of them is about a mining outpost on the moon and when the workers go on strike the US government sends the marines in to bust it up, and another is about a sheriff on an orbital colony having to deal with a mob assassin sent to kill a witness who’s fled into space, but they were all very grounded and “normal” stories that happened to be in space.
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What was that movie where Sean Connery played a space sheriff in a mining colony?
Ah, yeah, Outland. I really liked that one, back then.
The recent Prospect was a lot like that, too.
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I always enjoy these kind of blue-collar-workers-in-space setups, unless it’s Michael Bay’s Armageddon.
Fixed that for you, Dave. :)
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I didn’t realise until this time that it was directed by Peter Hayams, who also did 2010.
And the terrible End of Days. And Time Cop. Peter Hyams has had a weird career.
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Interestingly, in Big, one character had this proposal of a robot turning into a building
and the Tom Hanks character said it could be more and unknowingly started the Transformers.Not only does Big post-date Transformers, Tom Hanks is actually reading an issue of the Transformers comic in one scene.
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Crossovers
With comics going down due to the pandemic, a sensational crossover between the big 2 may come to boost the industry.
I liked crossovers back in the day with the X-Men/Titans 38 years ago. Crossovers work when they try not to do too much and just tell a good story.
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I think it’s rarely a good reason to remake something. I can’t think of a modern remake that succeeded just because the visuals were nicer, I think the reason why the new BSG got traction was less about the CGI spaceships and more about what they brought to the story in terms of depth and complexity and the interesting characters and situations they created. If anything, that’s what you should be trying to improve on with a remake.
I don’t think fans of old shows with more primitive effects care about that stuff enough to want to remake it just for that reason – and there are occasions where going back and including those kind of ‘upgrades’ has actively hurt the show, like when they went back to old Red Dwarf and replaced all the beautiful model shots with shoddy CGI.
Having said that, there are ways of doing it sympathetically too – the new CGI changes to the HD versions of Star Trek TNG are mostly handled pretty well from what I’ve seen.
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“There is a willful, lemming-like persistence in remaking past successes time after time. They can’t make them as good as they are in our memories, but they go on doing them and each time it’s a disaster. Why don’t we remake some of our bad pictures… and make them good?”
– John Huston, Director2 users thanked author for this post.
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I am struggling to think of a movie. Something with a cool setting or concept that just wasn’t good enough. Um.
Man of Steel.
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It is also interesting to look at movies and see that maybe there was another story being told that we were unaware of. Like the idea that Halloween 3 actually explains Halloween. In Halloween 3, a mask company Silver Shamrock is actually run by witches and warlocks and produces cursed masks that will kill children on Halloween.
However, what if they’ve been doing this for a long time? In the first Halloween, Michael Myers puts on a mask as a young boy and kills his much older sister and her boyfriend. Then, he spends 18 years in a mental institution where his psychiatrist inexplicably believes that he is evil incarnate. Really, Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Loomis seems more unhinged than his patient actually. Michael goes to a store and steals a Halloween mask and then goes on a nigh unstoppable rampage of murder.
Now, what if Michael really was simply a normal kid and later traumatized young man, and he was just unlucky enough to put on a cursed mask produced by the Silver Shamrock company? What if it was the mask responsible for murder?
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They should bag Burton and Cage and force them to do Superman Lives.
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They should bag Burton and Cage and force them to do Superman Lives.
I don’t think you would have to force Cage to do it. I get the impression he’d do it for $50 and complete access to the craft services table.
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Frank Miller should have had someone else to balance him out in writing
Robocop 2….Looks good to me.
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and complete access to the craft services table.
…which is why it would not be a good idea to put 56-year-old Mr. Cage in a spandex Superman costume…
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Basically what I was saying about Frank Miller
was that some creators can go overboard in their
ideas and could use another set of eyes and opinion
as a complement to balance their ideas.Grant Morrison for example, goes overboard off the
deep end in some of his material imho like Miller
has in the past.In movies, Tarantino, even Michael Bay, goes
overboard… George Lucas.Just saying.
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Grant Morrison for example, goes overboard off the deep end
Up his own arse, more like. Same with Tarantino.
I think it’s something that happens to most creators. Most of the overboard stuff don’t see publication or for movie-makers it’ll end up either not getting filmed or on the cutting floor.
I think Nemesis is a good example of ye olde Mark Millar going a little over board. I know it sold like hell (and so did the Star Wars prequels), I’m just saying it hasn’t aged quite as well as it sold and it’s a little over the top compared to his other stuff….
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Is Man of Steel a remake of Superman 1&2 (The Donner cut)? It has the childhood origin in Smallville, Lois is a big factor, it has Zod being the ultimate villain imprisoned and returning (it ends with killing zod in both instances), the fortress of solitude is in all of them, so is the machine-ghost of Jor-El…
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I reject this idea of one thing “taking away” from another. I am a loyalist to original Star Trek, but I don’t think the reimagining takes anything away from it. The original is still there, unchanged. People who think something new takes away from something old need to learn how to ignore the new thing. It’s actually pretty easy
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Well, yes. But isn’t “a different Superman movie” the same as “remake Man of Steel” in the context of this discussion?
A remake of Superman IV would be interesting. The essential premise is that Superman tells the world he is going to personally and unilaterally eliminate all nuclear weapons since they are a threat to the entire human race.
Take that premise seriously and it opens up a lot of dramatic possibilities.
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Now they are making a series out of LotR and I don’t know if that will hit it big. Jut because GoT was great doesn’t mean that every medieval fantasy story will work out. Just like the Sopranos worked but how can you expect another mob drama to work after it?
Best bet is just give up I think. Doesn’t seem much point in trying now you point it out that way.
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DEADWOOD had an interesting origin. Originally, they were going to pitch a series set in Ancient Rome about two public guards who were like an early form of police detectives. They wanted to show how law and order developed in a place that really didn’t have it.
HBO liked the idea, but they already had an expensive ROME series in preproduction. So the writers reworked their idea into a settlement in the Old West.
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Rumor has it that Frank Herbert’s Dune will hit. I say it will be a tough sell, because it is complicated storytelling, with huge worms and a quest for water. It might not go over well unless there are strong and attractive leads. Not every sophisticated novel translates well to the screen.
Well, I still think making a Dune movie is a mistake these days… an HBO-style TV show would be the best medium for the type of story. Buuut the story itself has a couple of advantages compared to others, which is: while it’s true that Dune’s been stripmined for its ideas here and there through the years, there hasn’t been anything quite like it, so it has a better chance of picking up the interest of newer generations of cinema goers.
Of course everything depends on how well it’s made, but with this director in charge, it should at least be decent enough… =P
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Well, I still think making a Dune movie is a mistake these days…
That’s a case where being faithful might doom it. However, Game of Thrones does indicate people are able to accept a serious approach to fantasy and that also applies to space opera. Dune the novel is science fiction, but at the same time, a lot of it corresponds to romantic fantasy with Guild navigators, Mentats and Bene Gesserit standing in for wizards and witches. Just as you could set Moby Dick in space, you could tell the Dune story set in a world like Conan or Lord of the Rings.
But Dune isn’t really as well written or mature as Game of Thrones. Dune the novel was really meant for readers who are around the same age as Paul at the beginning of the story – 15 to 17. I imagine the movie will be PG 13 and the studio and filmmakers probably intend it to be more like Star Wars or The Hunger Games than Game of Thrones or even Blade Runner 2049.
Nope. That’s not the main difference.
It is an interesting question. Brian Michael Bendis likely was a fan of Frank Miller’s Daredevil so when he wrote the book years later for the Marvel Knights line, you could say it kinda was fan fiction. Or when Mark Millar did the same for Spider-Man in the same line. Both books pretty much ignored or sidelined the previous works on the character and took them back to the way they were when they were reading them.
So, you could say that there is “professional” fan fiction and “amateur” fan fiction, but the main difference is manifold and the same as the difference between professional writing and amateur writing.Even professionals use crossovers, gimmicks and storylines or scenes that don’t have an underlying structure. But professionals seem to have a sense when that works for the audience they’re writing for and when it doesn’t. Amateurs don’t seem to care or they rationalize it, but at the same time, it doesn’t necessarily mean that amateur writing is always terrible.
So, obviously, the difference between professional and amateur writing is that professionals get paid for what they write and amateurs do not.
What’s interesting in regard to fans writing fiction – whether they get paid or not – is that I suspect the percentage of writings that are entertaining to read versus those that are not worth reading is probably the same. Whether it’s movies, books, comics or music, only a minority of them are going to be really good. However, with amateur fan fiction, there is just a lot more of it, and there is going to be a lot more at the very bottom of the stack. Though, some of the worst fan fiction is extremely entertaining because you rarely get something that incredibly poorly written in the professional realm. It’s why The Room is such a cult hit movie.
I’m a bit of a fan of creepypastas, too, and even though there is a lot of poor writing involved in those, many of them are quite good horror stories that could easily be reworked into something professional with editing and rewriting. I think many of the fanfic writers improve quite quickly because they are able to churn these stories out so many times and get a lot of immediate feedback from the multiple forums where you find them.
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Or when Mark Millar did the same for Spider-Man in the same line. Both books pretty much ignored or sidelined the previous works on the character and took them back to the way they were when they were reading them.
Millar actually never read any Marvel books as a kid, or so he claims. It always surprised me a little bit as Marvel had loads of reprints in the UK and DC didn’t (and US comics that came over always had hugely random and sketchy distribution). To be fair he consistently only reminisces over old DC books. So maybe he did a re-read or selected highlights and looked at the bits he liked best and included those.
Jonathan Hickman’s FF run is interesting in that regard. He seemed to be a really focused reader as a youngster, a massive fan of the Legion and X-Men but had never read a single FF issue when he got given the gig. Apparently he read it from start to finish from various omnibuses and trades Marvel sent him and picked the bits he liked to use.
So reading it you are tempted to think ‘ah yes he must have taken that from being a fan of the Byrne run’ but he’d actually read it for the first time a couple of months before. I suppose it’s much the same thing in a way, just without the time gap and nostalgia factor.
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Millar actually never read any Marvel books as a kid, or so he claims. It always surprised me a little bit as Marvel had loads of reprints in the UK and DC didn’t (and US comics that came over always had hugely random and sketchy distribution). To be fair he consistently only reminisces over old DC books. So maybe he did a re-read or selected highlights and looked at the bits he liked best and included those.
Honestly, the world in his Spider-Man title felt closer to the various cartoon series than the comics.
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Which could very well be the case. He would almost certainly have seen Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. Mark is 3 or 4 years older than me but that was a very prominent show on the BBC kids slot when he would have been about 12 or so.
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Finally, fan fiction is sensational storytelling with gimmicks, crossovers, etc. devoid of underlying storylines to give it structure. That is the difference between the professionals and the amateurs.
Uh… yes. Because professionals like Marvel or DC for example would never rely on gimmicks or crossovers to sell books
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Ok then, Lorcan.
You guys win…
It’s worth noting as well that elements of A Song of Ice and Fire were written explicitly to make people think the story was going to be like Dune, in order to pull the rug out form under later. the most obvious, which GRRM has stated repeatedly is Robb Stark. When Ned is killed you’re meant to see Robb as a Paul Atredies-style figure, so it comes as a shock when he’s killed later.
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I don’t know about that really… Dune can get complicated and do viewers really want to get into another world again? GoT caught on for a number of reasons – sex, cgi dragons, intrigue, suspense, overall storyline, characterization. Does Dune have all that? They can do it but my question is whether it will catch on with viewers and be as big as GoT. Just saying…
Well, the point is moot, because it’s not a TV show… Now, if it were a TV show, with the same production values as GoT had (meaning same budget, same cast quality, costumes, FX, etc…) yes it would catch on… Dune has pretty much all of the elements that GoT has, and then some… sure Dune ain’t as focused as GoT, but you gotta take into account that Dune’s “main story” is one book with 2 other books before it starts getting really weird and possibly unfilmable… whereas GoT ain’t even finished yet, but should end up with what, 7-8 books that deal only with its “main story”?
I’m assuming you’ve read Dune Al, but how far did you get into the series?
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Honestly, though, I think Dune’s reputation as being mature and advanced is not really earned when you read the original novel, the (written much later) follow up novels by Frank Herbert, and the later psuedo-prequel/sequel series by Brian Herbert and Kevin Anderson. I think the Frank Herbert novels are much better, but honestly they are not really more sophisticated or mature than the Star Wars series of novels (some that Kevin Anderson also wrote). It’s not like Dune is to Star Wars what the Song of Ice and Fire is to Lord of the Rings. Dune is much closer to Lord of the Rings in space in that comparison. Its innovation is that it deals with politics (but a very primitive feudal system, even so) and, like most science fiction of that period, it builds up from interesting ideas on the manipulation of ecology and mythology, but those ideas aren’t translated to the characters the way George R.R. Martin builds his series. A better comparison would be to say that Dune is to Flash Gordon much more like the way Elric is to Conan – a contemporary comparison.
Dune is still a book very much meant to appeal mostly to teen and college age nerds. I really doubt the majority of readers or especially viewers of Game of Thrones (or The Hunger Games, even) would find the story very appealing unless the filmmakers manage to give it an edge it doesn’t really possess in print.
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Dune’s politics aren’t really around the noble houses or the balance between them, CHOAM and the Spacing Guild, but really Herbert’s statements in the book about the idea of the messiah, of prophecy, and how elevating one person to a position of absolute power are bad. Dune Messiah and Children of Dune are basically saying “you thought Paul was the hero? sucker“
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Reading Dune also makes you to think, as all good Science Fiction does. It’s not constant adventure, there is a lot of philosophy, existensialism and deconstruction of ideologies built into it. It’s not a deep dive, but I can imagine a fair few young adults getting hooked on existensialism from reading it.
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