I don’t mean to be contrary, but it happens a lot

One common thing for quick celebrity interviews is to run down a list of either/or questions. Star Wars or Star Trek? Flowers or Candy? Beach or mountains? Some people will just never make the choice; it is always some completely different third thing. I find it irritating, possibly because I am usually neither/both. Maybe we just have the wrong choices.

Anyway, at dinner the other night, and I know I owe this largely to Big Bang Theory, which is the only reason that I was even asked to explain the two main superhero stables, I was finally asked that question I have seen so many others asked: DC or Marvel

I have been waiting for this. I have had my answer ready for years. It’s Dark Horse. And yes, my sisters looked at me with exactly the amount of frustration that I would have expected of anyone, but it just is. I truly drink neither coffee nor tea, but like hot chocolate. I truly enjoy both the beach and the mountains. And truly, if we are going into the realm of comic books, it’s Dark Horse for me.

Oh Gina, is this just more of your pro-Portland Metro area/Oregonian bias? Not exactly, but I think there is an indirect connection, and I will try and back up and get around to it.

The way that I see the DC-Marvel rivalry is that the DC stable is more powerful. Superman has so many different powers, where Spiderman is an awkward kid who is always struggling for money. Marvel has the vulnerability where DC, well, I guess they have the superiority, which annoys me though not in the case of Batman.

I guess that would make me lean more towards Marvel, but no, it’s still Dark Horse. Now, they have a lot of titles, I know, and so I am generalizing, but that was generalizing about Marvel and DC too. What I am saying is that for me Dark Horse represents the quirky, the offbeat, and the weird, and that’s what I love.

I have only read any Flaming Carrot recently, but I knew I wanted to for a long time. The way this happened was that I was looking up Mystery Men (the movie) on Wikipedia, and it linked to an article on the Carrot, because they came from his series. There were many intriguing things in the article, but this line is the one that totally stole my heart:

“Possessing no real super powers, the Carrot wins the day through sheer grit, raw determination, blinding stupidity, and bizarre luck. “

How could I not love that? I keep on possessing no real super powers over and over again! And what I lack in blinding stupidity and bizarre luck, I make up for in sheer grit and raw determination. And not every Flaming Carrot comic has been through Dark Horse, but a big chunk of it has, and yes, they are the ones publishing the Umbrella Academy and Danger Days. And Hellboy is from them, and he’s a great character.

Even look at the name—Dark Horse is not an exact synonym for underdog, but it’s sort of related and I love underdogs.

So I don’t like them because they are local, but at the same time, I think it might not be a coincidence that in this area they support the quirky and that I like it too. Maybe it’s a regional thing.

Let’s just take it one step further and say that when the time comes, Dark Horse is obviously the right publisher to do the Grimm comic books, and hey, both people from Dark Horse and from Grimm have worked with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It just works.

Finally, if anyone is wondering, I like candy but I prefer flowers.

Pros and Cons of the trade

Yesterday’s post was inspired not merely by familial frustration with a show, but also something I remember reading once where someone was pointing out where it would make sense for there to be areas of convergence between certain fandoms. I know soap operas and comic books were two, and I think the other was either romance novels or sci-fi/fantasy.

I remember the comic book/soap opera one because it made sense. In the comic book world, and I think they were referring more to superhero comics, and I am going to have that more in mind, you can have a very broad canvas with some main characters but other recurring characters, and cross overs, and continuing storylines that play out over a long time, and that is very much true of soap operas. It stands to reason that you are going to have some of the same advantages and disadvantages then.

First of all, as an advantage, you can add a lot of richness. You can have much more complex storylines and relationships because you have time to develop them. Because the pieces are doled out over time, you can build anticipation. It is exciting to get really into a novel and end up reading it late into the night because you can’t put it down, yes. Not having that option, but instead having to tune in tomorrow, or wait for the next month’s issue, is its own type of excitement. Add to that the relationship building up over time, and there is room for a seriously passionate relationship between the work and the fan.

Here’s the downside: you have to keep going. One of the primary reasons that for my own writing I am drawn more to movies than television is because I like to work out some complications, resolve them, and move on. Even when I am working on a series, I try and keep in mind a defined five-year arc. Some shoes can go on longer and be fine, but often things will just start getting stupid—even before five years.

Obviously, when you have something that is on five days a week, weekly, for several years, there may be a tendency to recycle. You might think that if you have a magazine coming out every month, this would not be as much of a problem, but you might be surprised. What sort of things might happen then?

• You have someone come to grips with their identity and find their soul mate, and that’s great, but then you need to keep going, so they encounter an obstacle and break up, but then they realize how much they mean to each other and they get back together, and then she dies, and he moves on, but she comes back, and he thinks he has to choose, but actually she is a clone, or four clones.
• Or he is killed doing something heroic, but then someone mysterious shows up with amnesia, and then it’s him, but he’s evil now, but then he gets back in touch with his good side, but then he loses a hand and goes crazy, and then needs to get sane again.
• Or he loses his eye, and wears a patch, but then he gets a surgical implant, and it looks like he has two good eyes again, but it turns out that everyone liked the patch so he gets in a knife fight and loses the implant.

Do any of those sound soapy? Because only the last one is from a soap opera (in comics, you are more likely to lose a hand). In the other examples I am mixing a few characters, but each of those scenarios applies to multiple characters.

(And continuing with yesterday’s tale of ineffective PSAs, having Captain America killed as he goes to register as a superhero loses a little impact if he comes back to life.)

The other potential issue, and it applies to both media, is that when you go on forever you have changes behind the scenes too. So maybe you had great writers at one point, but then you get a hack, or you get someone who might be a good writer, but they have a totally different take on the character, and you don’t like it, though others might.

So that’s it in a nutshell. The same circumstances that can lead to real caring can lead to real frustration. There is one way in which you are better off with comic books though, in that it is easier for them to reboot. Most famously, nighttime soap Dallas had one entire season be a dream. What you may not know is that on Days of Our Lives, ten victims of a serial killer, including at least one whose organs were donated, turned up on an island with an exact replica of Salem built on it. And to give All My Children a happy ending, David turned out to have the ability to raise the dead! (Yes, it was more complicated than that, but not enough to make it plausible.)

If it was comic books, all you have to do is say that was Earth 2.

This is not beautiful

I am going to take some time today to rag on a soap opera. This will seem like a diversion from our regularly scheduled material, but it connects in its own way, which should become clear tomorrow.

I think I have mentioned before that The Bold and the Beautiful is kind of our family soap opera. My mother got into it when we were visiting her family, because not only did Elda (with whom we were staying) watch it, but all of her sisters watch it. They also all do the crossword puzzle, though Mom did not pick up this habit, and the brothers do the crossword too, but do not watch the soap.

I did watch “Beautiful” (as they call it, and no, they do not use the Italian word for “beautiful”—they all just call it “Beautiful”), but I was more into an Italian soap, Al Costa del Sol, and a game show, Alta Tensione. However, I was still a regular subscriber to Soap Opera Digest at this time, so it was easy to follow along, and eventually I did start watching. It was a family thing. Eventually my sisters got into it too.

I guess that started in 2006, the first time I went with Mom. Fast forward several years, and where there were once eleven daytime soaps between the three networks, there are now only four.

Some of this seems to be intentional on the part of the networks, especially with ABC, and some of it is just more competition with television, and maybe less people home during the day, but still, things got really annoying. With Soap Opera Digest, although there were times when I watched the shows and times when I didn’t, I had always found the magazine itself to be well written and interesting, and now they just had nothing to work with.

I am picking on BB not necessarily because it is worse than any of the others, but it’s the only one I still ever see. Even when I don’t see it I hear complaints about it, because Mom still watches, but she hates it; Maria will sometimes still watch, and hate herself for it; and although Julie watches pretty rarely, she still checks the messages boards, allowing her to hate the show and the fans (and herself for caring).

(I don’t know how my aunts feel about it now. They are six months behind, so those discussions could only go along the lines of, “You think you hate it now, but just wait.”)

Many times my mother has told me I need to write to the show, and straighten them out but I am confident that there would be no use. For one thing, it has been a remarkably successful show. It was number 2 for a long time, and may even have the top slot now. That’s not as impressive when it is out of 4 shows instead of 11, but still, on their terms it is successful, and there is no reason for them to care what I say. Also, until she gives up on watching it, they might have a point. Still, that does not mean I can’t criticize.

I’m going to try and illustrate the show’s shortcomings with two current storylines. One is their public service announcement storyline, where Marcus, who got addicted to texting, was texting and driving and hit a friend. The moral of the story: don’t text and drive!

That could be an okay message, but that’s not how it’s playing out. First of all, being hospitalized is getting Anthony’s lame foot fixed, so he will actually be better off. Secondly, he is being very vindictive and resentful about it, even though Marcus just married Anthony’s good friend Dayzee, and Anthony has always been portrayed as a calm and caring man, dealing patiently with his adversity (like being homeless). So Anthony is behaving out of character, and Marcus kind of is too because he never had a texting problem before that week. Maybe it was a new phone.

Beyond that, the damage to Marcus’s car exactly matches the damage to Thomas’s car from when he and Caroline hit the pothole in the spot just where Marcus hit Anthony, or did he? Did someone else hit Anthony? Did Anthony lie down in front of the car after it struck the pothole? Does that mean texting and driving is okay?

Furthermore, there are other things going on, like this fast scene where it seems like the judge is going to come down harder on Marcus to reinforce that his privileged upbringing will not protect him, but he did not have a privileged upbringing. He had a comfortable upbringing, but then when he went to find his birth mother, her wealthy husband adopted him, even though he was already an adult, and even though the marriage ended shortly after, and even though he was just meeting his biological father at the time, who is also there. That would make more sense to do with Thomas. Also Marcus and Thomas are best friends now? And Dayzee was upset enough about Thomas’s lies to break up with him, but it has never been an issue in their friendship? And Thomas really rebounds that quickly?

I’m not saying that there are not ludicrous plot twists, but what makes them more egregious is that everything happens so quickly, with so many points left out. At some point Marcus should really have been angry with Eric for choosing Stephanie over Donna, and you can get over things like that, but they just brush it aside. Also, it is hard not to feel like they rushed the Dayzee/Marcus relationship just so he could get arrested on his wedding day, which sounds dramatic, but if you did not have time to build up anticipation, and if a week later he is going to be exonerated, that seriously lessens the drama.

That leads us to the Triangle of Doom, as message board posters have been referring to Hope, Liam, and Steffy. It has a lot of the same problems as the texting while driving PSA: events are rushed without various emotional beats being played, and where the personalities of the players change constantly. Steffy actually told someone she was giving Liam space on the same day she showed up at his house. Also, she changed from acting helpful and supportive to being spiteful and conniving in that same span. I guess it could be that she was faking the one, but that was not clearly delineated.

Probably the worst thing about it, though, is that the whole story revolves around two women who should not have any trouble finding guys both pinning all of their hopes and dreams on one loser who can’t stop waffling between them and who has been turned into a loser after starting out as an interesting character because it is the only way to sustain this idiotic mess. Well, that plus a lot of manipulation by people who never seem to suffer from it. This is not exactly female fantasy.

(This is worse because Liam is played by Scott Clifton, whom I like, but this role sucks. He plays Liam as wishy-washy and constipated. The only other possible way to play this storyline is as a total sociopath, so it’s probably the right choice, but why? Why even go this way?)

Part of the problem is that the head of the show is trying to replicate the Brooke/Ridge/Taylor triangle, but again, that played out over decades, with other people playing roles, and it kind of sucks now anyway. Also, he has poor judgment and a weird fascination with incest, so that doesn’t help.

So the obvious question is why is anyone still watching at all? I won’t deny a lot of it is habit, but also, people get invested in their entertainment, and when it is something you can watch five days a week for years, where you watch them age and grow and develop, the degree of emotional investment can be that much higher, leading to real passion for the show. This is a wonderful opportunity for writers, actors, and networks, but years of goodwill can be squandered amazingly quickly, and not easily earned back. When you throw those relationships and those personalities out the window to move along plots, especially stupid plots, well, you see shows with rich histories go off the air at an amazing rate, and get frustrated fans who hate themselves.

How on earth can this relate to comic books?

Would I like comic books?

That’s a great question, and I will answer it by asking you three separate questions, and it’s a trick. Do you like books? Do you like movies? Do you like music?

For me, the initial answer to any of those questions would be yes. On further reflection though, well, not all of them.

There are more similarities to (non-pictorial) books, so let’s explore it from that point of view. I love Jane Austen novels, but I haven’t really enjoyed her short stories. I found Vanity Fair interesting, but I didn’t love it as much as I would have if the characters had been sympathetic. They were all kind of horrible, but because Thackeray is a good writer and the story itself was interesting, I kept reading. Dumas I find overly wordy and misogynistic from The Three Musketeers, but so many people say good things about The Count of Monte Cristo that I may still try it.

Getting into more contemporary books, I’ve written about this before, but trying to read Twilight gave me a headache. I then tried flipping ahead and it just kept disgusting me, as I discovered an ingrate who thought it was cool that she had a stalker. The Time Traveler’s Wife was too vulgar, and I gave up on it. Commercials for James Patterson books make me feel like I will never give him a chance. Finally, I remember reading several books by East Coasters (maybe all New Yorkers), and they were interesting but so neurotic that it lessened the enjoyment a little.

Let’s just say that there are several factors that contribute to your enjoyment of a book, including the plot, writing style, characters, quality of prose, and the voice of the author. Once you add graphics, an equal number of variables are thrown in. The quality of the words still matters, obviously the plot and characters matter, but you also have the aesthetic qualities of the art. Do you find it attractive or ugly? Do you like the color palette? If it is gory, is it too gory? I don’t imagine the lettering being a problem, but I suppose it could happen.

So the next thing to remember is that there is a remarkable amount of variety in what is out there for comic books, and unless you just hate having pictures with what you read, there is probably something that would suit your taste. I absolutely loved the first Persepolis book. It is an autobiographical book about a young girl in a repressive environment with an affinity for punk rock. Who could ever have predicted that would appeal to me?

I hated Ghost World. I was surprised by how much I hated it, because it is fairly well regarded, including by some people I really like. However, it is about some foul-mouthed young people who criticize everything and are really mean to each other, even though they are best friends. Really, that one didn’t do it for me? Hmm.

I don’t know how true this is for everyone, but I find that my own reading tastes are not bound as much by genre as other things. For example, I thought I hated mysteries, but really, there are just some that I can’t get into and others that I can.

Taking all of this into consideration, how do you find the right comic books for you? I don’t know, but probably the same way that you find books, except that there is the added graphic element so that if you find that the pictures are intriguing, you can consider it to be a good sign. If the cover makes you wrinkle your face in disgust, this may not be the best choice for you.

Friend recommendations may work or may not. One thing that I found with the ones Jennie recommended were that they were geared younger, and I found myself impatient with them. I told her this after reading them, and she admitted, and it made total sense, that they are usually reading them to the kids, so that’s intentional. Their exception is The Walking Dead, which they only pull out when the kids are not around. Since I hate zombies (though I may be getting past that), I will not be checking out that series.

And, even with that, while I did not think that I would read the rest of the Amulet series, when I went to Goodreads to post my review of Volume 1, I clicked around a little and there is the author, Kazu Kibuishi, saying that he feels with Volume 4 they have finally hit their stride, and he seems so young and earnest that maybe I should give it another chance. At the same time, with Rapunzel’s Revenge there would only be one other volume to read, but I hated it more, and I think it is because the Old West dialogue is triggering my anti-redneck sentiments, but that should be more of a problem with King of the Hill, which I love, so what do I know?

Incidentally I am reviewing everything on Goodreads, so ratings and comments can be seen there, and I inevitably feel guilty because maybe I am completely getting it wrong and doing a disservice to the fans, but I still post. I can only say what I feel.

Rules for being a dilettante

I remember once talking to a fellow student, and when he told me he was studying architecture, I asked him what his favorite style of house was. I think I was asking because I had just realized how in love I am with wraparound porches, though that did not really work with my admiration of Tudor cottages and hacienda style homes. Maybe, as I was at a university, I was just starting to realize how many different things there were in the world, which still fascinates me.

I don’t remember his exact words, but it was something to the effect that he was not going to answer because I did not know enough about the subject to really understand his response and he didn’t want me to feel like I knew anything by his treating the question with any respect.

That probably makes him sound like kind of a jerk, and there was other evidence for that, but there could also be a valuable point here. Out of all of the different disciplines, with all of the information in each one, there are going to be people who will pick an area and specialize and become experts in that area, which takes a lot of work and devotion, and it is fair for them to feel some sense of accomplishment, and fair for them to feel irritated with people who read one book and then feel like an expert.

I have a great deal of respect for experts, and I certainly don’t intend to annoy them, but I gravitate towards the other end of the spectrum, wanting to see how all of the different fields fit together. I remember in college thinking that I would be more likely to go for a second baccalaureate degree rather than a masters because (especially in history), postgraduate work is about becoming more and more specific.

For example, a doctoral thesis could be fabric use by haberdashers in northwest Seattle from 1935-1939, and that sounds like an exaggeration, but not as much as you might think. What I want to be doing is tracing the cyclical nature of empires or interpreting a century’s worth of history via pop culture, and that requires a broader base.

Part of why I have been thinking about this is the futility of trying to become educated on comic books. It’s not that it is impossible to learn, and I have learned. It’s just that the more you learn, the more you see there is to learn, until you have a never-ending task before you.

When I started out, I had in mind that I would definitely want to read Maus, and Persepolic, and The Umbrella Academy, and some Flaming Carrot and maybe some Elfquest and definitely some Harvey Pekar. Then, talking to one friend I remembered the existence of Ghost World and she handed me a Love and Rockets someone had given her. Then I talked to another friend who recommended the Amulet series and Rapunzel’s Revenge. Then I realized that I did not have any traditional superhero comics, so I checked out a Wolverine and The Complete Frank Miller Spiderman, which is great, because that gave me some exposure to Frank Miller, but then the Wolverine is Frank Miller too, and so my only exposure to traditional superhero comics is Marvel and is Frank Miller. And I still hadn’t read any Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman!

My point is that after reading fifteen books and a magazine, there is still a lot that I do not know and am loathe to comment on. Even with this round, I am not done. I can probably finish The Flaming Carrots Greatest Hits today and Watchmen in a couple of days, but Ultimate Sandman Volume One is mammoth, and is going to take at least a week.

Also, I realized that I really need to take a field trip to a comic book shop. With the exception of Flaming Carrot, which I bought, and Love and Rockets, which I borrowed, everything has come from the Washington County Library system, which is great, but that means these are bound, completed books. Going and seeing where they are sold in magazine form would be its own experience. The good news is that my sisters are in, and hey, if we go to Heroes and Hobbies we can go to Wunderland too, but is that enough? They’re completely nocturnal there, with a big focus on games. Is that typical? Can I work in trips to Awesome Card and Comics and Floating World Comics too? (And seriously, if anyone can provide feedback on any of these stores, or wants to come, let me know.)

So that’s the challenge, and one thing is, when I do my various history months, I always know that the next year will bring another month, and I am not trying to get everything done in a single month, and that is fine. Maybe I need to decide that at some point in the future I will read some DC comics, and some Marvel that does not have Frank Miller or Chris Claremont on it, so I have some balance. There are some things where I already know I will read more, and I will get more into that as I continue blogging. There is a lot I don’t know, but I still have thoughts.

If I end up annoying true comic experts, well, that is not my intent, but consider that I may be more accessible to some who are not currently interested in comics, but may end up becoming so. Unless you’re thriving on the isolation. Some people do.

I have heard dilettante used more as a pejorative, but the dictionary does not really back that up. Well, the second definition sort of does, which is “a person having a superficial interest in an art or branch of knowledge; a dabbler.” The use of the word superficial is a little negative, I suppose. The first definition, though, is “an admirer or lover of the arts.” I can live with that. You know how the root of “amateur” is love? For dilettante, it comes from delight. Yeah, that sums it up for me.

There are good guidelines, or rules, to keep in mind though. First, always respect the experts. Understand that there are things that you don’t know, and that other people do know. Really, humility is a good general rule for all aspects of life. Also, and yes, this is largely for the News Radio reference but is still totally true, if you are not actually a qualified surgeon you should not remove someone’s appendix, even if you do end up doing a good job.

Semantics

I know it is fashionable to make fun of political correctness, but I tend to err on its side, because I really don’t want to make anyone feel bad or disrespected, and I totally understand the power of language.

That being said, it is interesting how often the term that appears to be the correct one is one that is not used within the group. Therefore, during my Black History month reading I think I am reading about African Americans, but then I read about people who are of African descent, or residence, with no American to them, and the books keep saying black, and my friends who are black call themselves black, not African-American, and I start to wonder what the point is.

And during my Native American Heritage month reading, the books keep saying Indian, and in an essay I read in college Russell Means says that it is not even that Columbus thought that he was in India, but that he had encountered these people In Dios (with God), and basically what has happened in both of those cases that no matter which term I use, I feel gauche.

So, when I started reading graphic novels, I thought that’s what you were supposed to call them, as a sign of respect, because there was serious artwork and effort put into them and there were serious themes, and people were not taking them seriously. This also appears to be wrong.

I guess I first started wondering because Big Bang Theory never uses the term graphic novel, and they are at the comic book shop a lot. I thought, well, they do seem to be sticking to the serial superhero genre though, so maybe those are still comic books, but if you have something that is one-off, or where no one wears capes, or I don’t know. That’s when I turned to Wikipedia.

I found some interesting quotes:

Alan Moore: "It's a marketing term... that I never had any sympathy with. The term 'comic' does just as well for me... The problem is that 'graphic novel' just came to mean 'expensive comic book' and so what you'd get is people like DC Comics or Marvel Comics—because 'graphic novels' were getting some attention, they'd stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel.”

Daniel Raeburn: “"I snicker at the neologism first for its insecure pretension — the literary equivalent of calling a garbage man a 'sanitation engineer' — and second because a 'graphic novel' is in fact the very thing it is ashamed to admit: a comic book, rather than a comic pamphlet or comic magazine."

Neal Gaiman: (on someone saying that he wrote graphic novels, not comic books) “meant it as a compliment, I suppose. But all of a sudden I felt like someone who'd been informed that she wasn't actually a hooker; that in fact she was a lady of the evening."

There are some differences that you could use. For example, you could call the monthly issues comic magazines, and then call them a book when bound. You could draw a line between those that are comic and those that aren’t, or you could call it a novel when it is one defined story arc (whether episodic or not) rather than a continuous series. However, the term seems to be unnecessary. Some of the biggest names in comic books are fine with the term “comic book”, so I guess I am too.

The fact that if you walk into a comic book shop and pick up that month’s issue of Adventures in Darkness, that it is neither comic nor a book, appears to be irrelevant, along with international terms. For example, “manga” apparently means random pictures. I put to you that those pictures do not tend to be random.

So, since April I have been reading many comic books, and writing one too.

Task: Scriva a la famiglia! (phase 2)

Now we’ve got an imperative. I suppose I could keep writing updates and using different grammatical forms: scrivo, ho scritto, scrivendo, but I don’t know that it will require a blog post every month. Still, one follow-up seemed reasonable.

So I did write last month, and I heard back from one of my cousins, which is fine. I did not really write anything requiring a response, and again, I think this will take some getting used to for them. If nothing else, it makes Zia Elda really happy, and it is her 90th birthday this weekend, so all the more reason.

I realized that I probably need to do more to make this reciprocal. One thing should be asking my brother and sisters if they want to be copied on the messages. It feels like a hassle, because then do I provide the English version, or not? Does it make my writing about them more awkward? Still, it seems to be the right thing to do.

The other thing though, is I realize that I need to do more to bring in the older half of the family. My younger sisters and I have all been there, even though at different times, so we have met everyone. Technically my older brother and sister did go, but they were respectively two years old and eight months, so their only memories are of when Elda came to visit, and that has been quite a while. The last time she was here was ‘85 or ’86.

I think the way to deal with this is to send them a monthly e-mail where I go over some cousins and give a little information about them and attach pictures. If I cover all of them at once, it is information overload. My grandparents had six children who survived to adulthood, and all of them married. From them I have seven cousins with four spouses, and two more first cousins once removed. Also, there are names that repeat, because we have two Lucianas and two Robertos.

Plus, even though Zia Elda does not have children of her own, she lives in her in-laws house. They divided it into three apartments, and one of her nephews by marriage and his wife have taken me on most of the sightseeing I have done. Technically they are not our family, but they kind of are too. That adds an additional ten people even if we don’t count any step-relatives. Breaking it down is just the responsible thing to do.

Lance and Lynn should be there at the end of April, which is a reasonable amount of time to cover everyone, and they could probably even learn a little Italian maybe. So, we shall see.

It’s a short post today. What should be coming up next are some posts reporting on my graphic novel reading, and then we will move into the graphic novel writing, and then into music, all of which will blend together quite a bit. There may be some other task posts if I accomplish anything else, ever, and I can’t guarantee no political posts or annoyed rants won’t sneak in. They have a way of doing that.

Task: Bigg City Heroes

I like crossing items off my to-do list.

Technology was a big influence on this one as well. The first screenplay I wrote was in Word. I had tried Screenwriter, and all the automated things it was doing were driving me nuts. So I finished Jade Mask, and then I went through and applied the formatting. That was such a pain that when I tried Final Draft, the automatic stuff did not bother me. I can’t say that the two programs are significantly different—I just had a better understanding when I tried the second one.

The point of that is, when I was told, “You need to write this!” and I knew that there was no way I was ready to take on the art side of a comic, I realized that I could do it as a screenplay, and it would work.

That original conversation happened at the workplace one night when I was talking with a coworker, and we deemed one person’s annoying trait as what would be their superpower if they were super. Then we started coming up with the others, and pretty soon it was “You have to write this!”

Now, my only concern in doing so was that so many powers were based on annoying traits, not good qualities. Surely that would end up being very offensive. He assured me that they would not see it that way. He was right. Here was our crew, with no real names included:

Heroes

Null Boy: Able to harness his extreme apathy to suck the force out of evil efforts.
Gun Girl: Bulletproof
The Vampire: self-explanatory
Zen Master Bacon Boy: Able to heat things with his mind. Part of becoming a hero is learning to apply this to things that are not bacon.
BoxMan: Able to fold things into boxes
The Genius: No actual powers, but uses her advanced mental abilities to research, strategize, and invent things for the team.

They were financially supported by the Big B, and politically supported by Bigg City’s Anglophile Mayor.

Villains

The Queen: Able to prevent cameras from recording (and she later discovers she can cause other visual aids like glasses to shatter), she is also a natural leader and quite the metal smith.
The Siren: Able to talk endlessly, causing extreme mental anguish to the listener.
Amber Alert: Looking like she’s pregnant, rubbing her stomach causes a mental fog in those nearby, leaving them unable to think at the time or remember what happened later.
The Sylph: Her hugs render others unconscious.

The first story, “Bigg City Heroes” was about heroes fighting villains led by the Queen in Bigg City. She actually turns to good by then end, having bonded with Gun Girl during a smoking break that they agree to while battling, but her minions escape, and are co-opted by other villains in “Back and Bigg”, “Bigger and Better”, and “Bigg Trouble in Bigg City”.

As we got closer to my trip to Australia, I had to hurry and wrap up some storylines, but I sent out a goodbye email with things that might happen, including possible explanations for the Genius’s disappearance.

Well, I got back, and the world economy collapsed, and I was unemployed, but I would still talk to friends from work, and boy, crazy things started happening there. I thought about doing a new installment, and I started to write one, but there kept being more people to kill off. New characters were introduced, and as soon as that happened, they needed to be killed off. It just wasn’t stable.

Still, I had put it on my list of things to finish, and I had been revisiting my superhero past, and it was just time to wrap things up. If I waited a little bit longer, there would probably be another death, but all I could do was foreshadow it. I have to say though, killing people off was fun.

Obviously, this is another project with no commercial value. First of all, it is based on real people, many of whom would eventually figure out that their depictions are not flattering. Also, I was remembering it as all inside jokes.

It was fun to see that was not completely true. Yes, a lot of things were put in there specifically because of things that actually happened, and so knowing the source increases the humor, but they also stand on their own. Also, to keep anyone from feeling bad, and to incorporate more of Null Boy’s issues, I made the Genius (who was me) take the fall on a lot of the jokes. For example, I had completely forgotten about when her kickboxing classes were turning her into a rageaholic.

Anyway, it is done. I have sent the completed pdf to Gun Girl and the Queen, and they can share with whom they wish, after having read it.

There is some residual sadness, because there are things I wanted to do that will never happen. For example, that time when Gun Girl and the Queen were going to quit smoking, and the frustration caused them to battle in the air, even though neither of them had previously demonstrated flying ability, and the others set a tobacco field ablaze to calm them down? I think I could have had a lot of fun writing that.

Initially I thought it was okay that we will not get to when the Mayor uses redcoats in tunnels to try and restore Bigg City to British rule, because while it would be easy to redeem him emotionally, getting him out of the legal and political trouble such an undertaking entails would be hard, but then I think I figured out a way to do it.

Also, we never got to explore Cryo-Man’s back-story, so it has become his story moving forward instead. At least I didn’t have to kill him.

We don’t need another superhero

Before I get to what I have been working on most recently, I want to address these two characters that keep showing up on the periphery.

One is a psychic who keeps getting paired with a disbelieving cop. The question is whether she is someone with real abilities who worked for a fake hotline and got mixed up in some stuff where she requires the cop’s protection, or whether we are in a world where lots of people are developing these abilities, and she is also a cop, and the skeptic is her partner. Either way, you end up with a dynamic of faith versus cynicism in an atmosphere of danger. It comes from a dynamic I had with someone who did not appreciate my intuition.

The other is the idea of someone who always knows when someone is lying because she never lies. They actually had something similar to this with Emma on Once Upon a Time, though she ended up being lied to and not knowing. In that case, her power seems to have been tied to her lack of attachment to anyone, so as she got attached, she lost it.

In my case, one scenario did involve having to tell a lie to save someone else, and then a realization that the power was gone, and the huge sense of imbalance in its absence, because all of the confidence that came with that is suddenly gone. I know some of that comes from an old Vietnam War movie where some nuns were hiding some soldiers and being tortured. (I can’t believe some of the things I saw on non-cable prime time television when I was a kid.)

That one probably would have been a short story, but there were two other times she showed up.

In one, she was a hospital administrator whose work brought her in contact with a wealthy philanthropist/superhero (he was kind of a cross between the Phantom and the Flash), where she did know he had a secret, but not what. Later on she was in an explosion where she was presumed dead, and she came out kidnapped and with amnesia, but she knew she was being lied to, and also her powers were becoming something more. That would have been a graphic novel and it came from a dream I had.

The other time, she was a lab tech who was crossing paths with a vampire who was doing some detective work. Again, she knew he had a secret, just not what. When she eventually found out, she was fine with it. When he turned her into a vampire herself to save her life, that was a more difficult adjustment. This would be more of a television series, possibly a spin-off of a movie trilogy.

Ignoring for the time the question of whether I am going to get back to any of these ideas and develop them, or which ones are more likely (perfectly valid question—I just don’t know the answer), my first thought was why do I keep punishing these truth-knowing girls? Did I think they were boring on their own, so needed some kind of transformation?

Well, I don’t think that’s it. On some level, I have moved away from superpowers. When we get to the next post there are some superpowers, kind of, and that’s cool, but it is also very much tongue in cheek and not to be taken seriously. Maybe we are just too post-modern and jaded, or maybe we can do too many things with technology to need sons of Krypton, but I’m just not finding them too compelling. (Despite that, I have recently seen The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man and I enjoyed them both.)

Okay, but there are special powers here, with the extra-sensory perception. Yes, there are, but they are kind of ones I believe in. Between intuition and inspiration and empathy and psychology, I guess I can always believe in knowing more and understanding more, and maybe in the knowledge not even being that far out of reach.

In addition to that, I guess I still believe that knowledge is the most likely catalyst to transformation. Of course the ones who know the truth are going to change. Information can be dangerous and powerful and enlightening and many other things. Maybe a lot of what I seek out is merely entertaining, but maybe it isn’t so mere. The paths are often unexpected.

Therefore, Jane pores over library books trying to learn as much as she can, and for a while she can see two days into the future. Maybe she’s the natural culmination of everything I’ve been working towards. But before we get to her, we still need to deal with the Genius.

The ISO friends

When I first started at Intel, it was for the Intel® AnswerExpress(SM) Support Suite. I hope I got that trademarking right—they were pretty finicky about that.

We were in the Internet Software Organization (ISO). It was a startup, but within a huge corporation, so there was probably better budget than the average startup has, and since we were the hourly contractors we did not have to work the extra hours that the real employees did, but at the same time, things were casual, and if you could do something, they would let you do it, so I got a chance to develop new skills. All of that was good.

The service itself combined virus protection, online data backup, an online library of PC tips, and support phone calls. I spent a lot of time working on the library, sorting tips, and a lot of my PC knowledge comes from this time period.

During the pilot program there were four of us contractors who did phone support for help with the service, not with the actual technical support phone calls—a different group did that. I think we have already established that my mind goes down weird paths and finds stories, and it happened again. After all, there were basically four parts to a computer (work with me): hardware, software, operating system, and the network. We had four team members. Could it be any more obvious?

The Net: Reclusive billionaire Jeffrey Poseidon, who used his intelligence and vast fortune to perfect the crime-fighting tools he needed. Yeah, he’s Batman, but more purple than black for the costume, and also he carried a trident and net. Sometimes he would use the net for swinging or catching a ride somewhere, but mainly it was used to drop on bad guys.

Captain Windows: Ossie was a mild-mannered window washer, but from his vantage point high above the city he could easily spot crime and swoop down to fight it, using his rather Superman-like strength and flying ability. He also carried a shield that was shaped like the Windows* logo.

Hardware: The ultimate geek, Chip lived in his mother’s basement, where he had a workshop where he developed a retractable armor suit that provided him protection when he needed to fight crime. I suppose that would be more like Mantis, but I pictured him as looking rather like C-3PO.

Software: This was the girl, so I guess this must be me. Incredibly intelligent, Corrine supported herself by writing books in the For Dummies series while working on her doctoral thesis in abnormal psychology. She also used her skills to develop a remarkable fabric that made her costume, allowing her to fly and she could occasionally cause it to do other things, like when She-Ra would transform her sword into a blanket or something. A better example would be the memory cloth in Batman Begins, but it looked cooler when they did it. Naturally she had a utility belt.

I guess she was an important transition for me—no special powers, but what she knew made her able to do things. Actually, most of the team was developing their own abilities rather than having them innate or via radiation. The only one who did not have to invent things was Chris, and I have no idea where he got his powers—he just had them. Maybe he was bitten by a radioactive beetle.

Trademark issues alone would have guaranteed that this would never see the light of day, but the team was disrupted in a different way, when it turned out that one member’s lack of social skills was worse than it initially appeared, and he was creepier than he appeared, and he was gone. Pete came in, and he was great, but he would not have been Hardware. I sort of had this idea for a virus storyline, but it faded away.

Oddly, Pete acquired his own special powers later, with one of those weird conversations that I enjoy so. I was talking with one coworker and somehow we got on the topic of things like the Donner Party, and Uruguayan rugby teams except I always thought it was a Chilean soccer team—anyway, we ended up asking Pete if he would mind if in a plane crash situation we ate him. That sounds worse than it came off. There were no illicit overtones anyway.

Pete agreed that would be okay as long as we made sure he was really dead. You know, poke him or something first. And my brain went here:

“Couldn’t you have poked me?”
”We cut off two arms and a leg. If that didn’t wake you up…but it’s okay. We’ll get you new ones. And this time, we’ll make them bionic!”

He’d be the $6 Million Pete. 

Why I didn’t write more in college

So far we have had superhero phases for grade school, junior high, high school, and then even though there were graphic novels in mind for college, I had no heroic roles. I did not even give myself a part in UI Trek. To be fair, I wasn’t an RA. I guess I could have been an alien. Ultimately I did not develop the story beyond what I posted, and honestly, I wasn’t developing much of anything.

It’s not that I wasn’t coming up with any new material at all. I had sketched out some ideas for two animated films. One was a version of the Snow Queen, and one was about homing pigeons used in World War II. They were not strong ideas though, and I have about one song from each, and that is it.

I also came up with ideas for about five LDS romance novels, and my vampire script went through some changes, though none of those changes were really left by the time it became Hungry. There was the introduction of one new character, and some of her traits ended up going to Selena, and some went to Christine, but you would not really recognize her in either person.

I think there were a few reasons why this was the case. One is that I was in college, and that takes up a lot. Writing essays and research papers and dialogues and all of those things was about what I could manage. I didn’t do much pleasure reading either, because there was just too much required reading to do.

What I did more of was drawing, which did not take as much. Granted, I’m not as good at it, either, but that was okay. I remember once I was sketching the lights of the buildings through the trees at dusk, and someone thought it looked like they were banana trees. (I was kind of going for impressionistic, but still.) Clearly, it was not my forte, but it worked. I could do sports posters, or spend a little time drawing, and then get back to studying, and if I had gotten into real writing streaks, that would not have worked the same way.

Drawing UI Trek would have come to close to real writing, and the limitations of my ability would have been more of an issue. I always had concerns about making one character consistently look the same, where you could always tell it was that person. In this reading section, I am seeing that the professionals don’t always succeed at that either, but they still come closer than I would. The Purple Man keeps changing his width, but I guess you still know it is him because he is the only purple one.

Besides all that, and this affected everything, there was a technology issue. I don’t write well by hand. I hold my pen awkwardly, and I know it is a bad habit, but it is deeply ingrained, and I am not sure that I can change it. My hand cramps and ink smears and I don’t get very far.

For my first three years in college I used a typewriter, and that was what I used all through high school and junior high too. With typing and writing, I had minimal output. I completed homework.  I also completed stories for friends. I think I wrote five for Danielle, always with her ending up with Nick Rhodes, and two for Ericka (one with Tim Farriss and one with MacGyver), and a spy one for Elizabeth where the love interest was just a regular CIA agent, not a celebrity. Because there were other people involved, I finished. With things that were just for me, I would get started and trail off.

For my senior year in college I finally broke down and brought a computer. That made homework easier, but it did not have an obvious effect on the rest of the writing because I still had homework. Senior year was tough. My father left my mother, one of our RAs died, I tried out for Jeopardy for the first time (failing, obviously), and I still made Dean’s List twice. There wasn’t really time for creative writing.

Still, when I graduated I took that computer home with me, and I hit job crises and my possible second adolescence, but also, I had tools, and my life started to normalize, and so it was not long before I wrote my first novel. Okay, that’s my only novel so far. Nonetheless, it would not have been possible without the computer. It was around that time period that I also found my next super identity.

Bart Wars

Okay, a Simpsons/Star Wars mash-up is kind of an obvious one, really, and I can’t even swear there isn’t already one out there, but this was mine.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Bart Skywalker lived on the dry planet of Tatooine with his Aunt Patty and Aunt Selma, and Aunt Selma’s dewback, Jub Jub. (Yes, I can see where an Uncle Patty joke would work, but it never occurred to me to go there at the time.)

Buying new droids from nervous Jawa Gill, Bart acquires Lis-3PO and Mag2-D2. While working on them, removing Mag2-D2’s pacifier like bolt, Bart is surprised by a holographic message with Princess Marge saying, “Help us Krusty the Klown. You’re our only hope.” Although it is a long shot, Bart wonders if this might be connected to local hermit Herschel Krustofski. His aunts are discouraging, but the next morning the droids have taken off, and Bart goes to pursue. He finds them, but is then set upon by Tusken bullies Jimbo, Dolph, and Kearney. After a pretty severe pink belly, they are shooed away by Herschel.

Herschel takes Bart back to his house and Bart explains about the message, which they watch. Admitting his true identity, Krusty explains that Marge was once a crusader against violent cartoons, but her reasonable concerns were twisted into a movement against all entertainment, especially humor, especially that mystical power known as “the Farce”. Marge has since been working with the rebellion, and has sent data that will be helpful and must be delivered to Alderaan. Bart should also know that the anti-entertainment forces caused the cancellation of Troy McClure’s show, leading to the breakdown of his marriage to Aunt Selma.

“That’s why she’s a lonely and bitter old woman?”
“Yeah, okay.”

Krusty wants Bart to come with him and the droids and be trained in the Farce, but Bart has doubts. Returning home, though, he finds it has been raided, and his aunts’ secret stash of MacGyver tapes have been destroyed, leaving them irritable and depressed. This seems like a good reason to leave. In town and looking for a pilot, shopkeeper Apu recommends his old bowling teammates, Homer Solo and Chewb-Otto, whom they can find at Moe’s Eisley Cantina.                   

A lot of the really fun sight gags would happen here. Obviously you have the regular barflies, like Sam and Larry, but I think if you also had a table of the aliens who were called in for the line-up in Homer and the Alien (Chewbacca, Gort, Marvin Martian, Alf, and okay, I don’t know if it was Kang or Kodos—they look pretty similar). Also, put the Martian from the Stonecutters musical number there with some Stonecutters, because that kind of gives you Patrick Stewart, and you could have some fun with it.

Transportation is arranged, but they need to take off a little bit more quickly than desired, due to some problems with a debt owed to Homer’s former friend and current rival, Gumble the Hutt (Barney) from some losses on their snow plow business. I imagine a plow still attached to the school bus like ship

Well, you know how it goes. They get taken onto the Death Star, which looks somewhat like the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, and knock out some Storm Troopers, though neither Homer nor Bart fit the outfits particularly well. They are able to rescue Marge, which is great, but sadly, Krusty falls to his rival and former student, canceller of television shows, Darth Bob (Terwilliger).

The rest escape and join up with rebel forces, where the fighter pilots are basically Springfield Elementary’s 4th grade glass, so Bart’s peers: Nelson, Data, Richard, Lewis, Wendell, and Milhouse as Wedge. Let’s forget Biggs, because he dies, and Bart just lost Krusty.

Fast forward to the ice world of Hoth, where that snow plow comes in handy. The rebels are found so need to split up, and while Bart ends up training in the Farce in the swamps with Sideshow Mel as Yoda, Homer, Chewb-otto, Marge, and Lis-3PO end up in the cloud city of Bespin, ruled over by Lando Carl-rissian and his assistant, Len-bot (Carl and Lenny). Everything initially seems fine, but Darth Bob is there.

Now, most of these character choices have felt very obvious to me, but there was not an obvious choice to play Boba Fett, so I think it would just be funny to have it be Flanders, operating not for strict greed but more with a commitment to everyone having to pay debts and adhere strictly to the rules, and you know he would be on the side of the Empire.

Luke goes to try and help, but he is only able to have a major showdown with Darth Bob, featuring this exchange.

Bart, I am your uncle.
You canceled my uncle!
No, that was your other uncle. I was also married to Selma.

This blows Bart’s mind enough that he loses his hair spikes, which are later surgically reattached.

Marge and company go to rescue Homer which is eventually successful, although she does briefly end up as a slave girl of Gumble the Hutt. Her slave girl outfit is basically a short, strapless green dress. That being done, they take off to the moon of Endor, to destroy the new Death Star.

Marge gets separated and meets special Ewok, Ralphie. Actually, if the 4th graders are the fighter pilots, then the 2nd graders are Ewoks. The Ewoks team up with most of the rebels to take over the ground controls, but Bart has gone up to the Star to confront Darth Bob, and the evil Emperor Burns. Things are not looking good for Bart, but he taps into the power of the Farce, and he gets Darth Bob to laugh so hard and feel so good that Bob realizes that when you are laughing like that you can’t turn into a ball of ice and slush (it would be a shout-out to Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, and it sounds awkward there, but I think it could work).

Joy and entertainment is restored to the galaxy. The end.

At least it was the end until the new movies came out, and then I started thinking about expanding, and then I just kind of started to hate everything. I like to pretend that Episodes 1-3 don’t exist, but if that were true then I would not have all of these bad feelings towards George Lucas. Yeah, the end.

Hey, I’ve done this before!

While I sometimes drive myself a little crazy with my new projects and jags and heavy to-do lists, there is neat stuff that goes on too, and I learn things, which is probably why I keep doing it. Actually, I have learned a lot about fan fiction.

My view shifted when I revisited “The Breakfast of the Gods” page at http://breakfastofthegods.com/ and noticed this line:

“Okay, it’s ‘fanfic’ but it’s worth your time – trust me.”

It caused me to redefine fan fiction in my head. I had never heard the term until I started frequenting the Television Without Pity message boards, and even then, I never really read any, and I would just see other people referring to it. It tended to sound pretty twisted.

From Jones’ standpoint, it is fanfic because he is using characters he did not create. Really, that’s all it is. That many people seem to explore the genre only for sexual purposes probably has some deeper meaning, but ultimately that characters or situations set in place by someone else might inspire you and lead you down other story paths is not in itself twisted. Thinking about it that way, I realized I had done this many times.

I was always taking off from television shows and movies and thinking of expanded scenarios when I was younger. Most of them look pretty stupid now, but there is one spin-off from season 5 of The A-Team that I still revisit. (That was a horrible season, so that may be why I think of my innovation more than the original. Stupid Stockwell.)

There were two things, though, that I specifically had in mind to draw as comics, and both involved other people’s work, though with some changes. Why I did not get to them I will explore soon, but for now I just want to go over those, hitting two major sci-fi franchises,

UI Trek

It’s been interesting reading about fake geek girls lately, because I am sure for people who keep score I am not geek enough. There are a lot of things I find interesting, but do not go crazy about. Star Trek has been one of those. I have watched many episodes, and I usually enjoy them, but it has never been must-see for me. In college, I had friends who were much more into it. Our College Bowl’s team name was Pon farr, from episode 30 of the original series. This is the same episode that introduced T’Pau, who gave her name to a British pop group. Everything I know about that, I learned from when we were forming our team, with an assist from Wikipedia during writing. This was not my thing.

(My favorite memory of College Bowl is not Star Trek related though. It was when a question was asked about a new stamp series, and three of us looked at each other blankly, but Melissa shyly answered “Love”, and then even more shyly explained, “I like stamps.”)

Anyway, I had already learned Sid was a Star Trek fan my first year, but in my second year he was an RA over at the University Inn, and I guess he found more kindred spirits there. His Spock had a Kirk (Aaron, but not any of the other ones I have written about), and there was a Scotty, whom I seem to remember as David, but then I think maybe David was Chekhov. The thing that I know for certain is that there was someone who identified with Scotty, but also there was someone who was actually from Scotland, who could have been an obvious choice, and that was where the story idea started. (Though I guess to be accurate to the series, the real Scotty would have to be the one who was faking his accent.)

The idea I had in mind was that a transporter would split Scotty into two. This happened once with Kirk, initially believed to have been split into good and evil Kirk, but it was more complicated than that, and eventually they were put back together. Since Scotty would have to either be transporting himself, or have someone else running the transporter, a malfunction makes more sense. However, instead of physically identical but with different personality aspects dominating, these two would be completely different in appearance and personality, and they would eventually decide that two Scotties were better than one. However, the little Scottish terrier that materialized after them both? Pure evil.

Fun parts were going to be the argument between the two Scotties—“I dinnae know who ye are, but you’re nae Scotty!”—and also Christine.

Christine was one of the other RAs, and Sid had recently accidentally hit her in the face with a softball, which she was good-humored about. Anyway, the obvious thing was to make her Nurse Christine Chapel, as played by Majel Barrett Roddenberry, but what if you combined all of those roles? Giver her Nursel Chapel’s attraction to Spock but Number One’s sleek appearance and coolness, and Lwaxana Troi’s aggressive confidence. Okay, I did not do anything with the Computer voice part, but with the rest, Spock was going to be raising an eyebrow.

I really wanted to do this, and I told Sid I was going to do this, but I never did get around to doing it. One thing with a lot of ideas is that they have an expiration date. I had been working over fall term, so I started meeting all the new people and got this idea in Winter or Spring of 1992, and then in May I realized I needed to go on a mission, so after finishing up spring term, I started working, served the mission, worked more, and did not return to Eugene until Spring ’95. The only person who was still around was Sid, who had graduated but was now attending law school there.

Now, even though that idea was not fully developed in its time, I can still put it out there on the internet, where some people may find it mildly amusing. There were a lot of inside jokes, so it had a definite target audience, but there are enough pop culture references that it is not completely inaccessible.

The other idea, which I think I started shortly after college, was all pop culture, so should be accessible to anyone who is a fan of two distinct but big pop culture phenomena. It’s too long to do here though, so tomorrow!

How do you like that? Even among misfits you're a misfit

I do love Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Anyway, there were two stories that were happening in high school. Both were based on dreams. One was straight-up superhero, and the other was post-apocalyptic mutants. There was one other commonality between them; see if you can spot it.

In the first dream, I was hanging out with a bunch of superheroes. I was the only one with no powers. Will it seem less mystifying if mention that the superheroes were all guys from the basketball team that I managed? Initially managing seemed like a fun thing to do, and it was. I did enjoy it, and I was being helpful, so that’s all good. It was also just something that maybe was more for losers, and where you are always aware that there are people who party and date and you are not one of them. I tried to spin it in my mind that I was the spunky reporter, but that didn’t really go very far.

For the other dream, the mutants were basically kicked out of town so were exploring in the post-Apocalyptic wasteland, but I was with them and not a mutant. Again, the only one with no powers. I did not recognize any of the mutants though, so in this case it was not inferiority to specific peers.

That one actually ended up getting pretty complex. As I filled in details I decided that it was about 500 years after whatever happened, and it did involve radiation. At our starting point, there have been two things going on in this cut-off community. One is that initially you had a high percentage of mutants born, but the percentage kept going down, until at the time you have ten mutants left. In addition, a powerful family stepped in and filled the government void and became royalty, and then began losing power, so all you have is a figurehead princess, and the people with the real power want neither mutants nor royalty.

The stated purpose of the “mission” is to map out the surrounding area and establish communication with other groups if possible, and you send the royalty as an ambassador and the mutants because they have special powers to equip them for the trip, but really, it’s just to get rid of them, with the assumption that they will die. No one in the group has any illusions about what is going on, but it takes a while for them to accept the princess.

They had various encounters in different places, and I think I still have the beginnings that I had written out. While I had initially envisioned it as a novel, it felt like too much of a shaggy dog story for that, because there are many parts. I then got the bright idea that it could be a concept album, but I had only worked out one song for it and then did not get much further. And even that was not really songwriting but setting an existing poem (High Flight) to some kind of Iron Maiden-ish guitar that I would never have been able to play.

I am still fond of the whole idea, but I can’t help but think of all the things that would make it impossible now, starting with the fact that nuclear fallout may cause mutations, but not the kind resulting in really attractive people with special abilities. I bet that would make the Chernobyl Diaries a completely different film.

There is one thing that I find really interesting in putting these two together, and I had not realized it before. I was a pretty good kid as a teenager, and I sometimes felt like I had put off all my teenage angst for an extra decade, After Dad left and I came back after college to help out, I felt a lot of responsibility, possibly more than I needed too, and sometimes I just did not want it and felt really rebellious, sometimes getting angry, and sometimes moody and withdrawn. I thought maybe those were my teen years, belated.

Looking back now, I can see a definite thread of alienation during my actual adolescence. Maybe I was developmentally on target after all.

Super Clutz

Yes, that should be a “k” there. Auto-correct knows it. I know it now, but I didn’t until after I made the cape, and someone asked about it. This is indeed embarrassing for a four-time school spelling champion. I guess there’s a reason I never made it past district. If I had developed the character I would have corrected the spelling, but for right now I’m just letting all my foolishness hang out, in the hopes that it’s good for my soul.

It all started at Five Oaks during Spirit Week. I always participated in Spirit Week, dressing up every day, but also not ever going really elaborate with the costumes. That time, there was a super hero day. I could have gone with an existing superhero of some kind, but I did not have any costumes like that, and sometimes I get weird ideas, so it occurred to me to locate my super self, and that was someone who was pretty awkward but got the job done.

My costume was simple, but someone who was super only in her clumsiness would not have a really sleek costume. It was definitely a white t-shirt with no logo, paired with blue shorts (I think), and then my cape was a red towel with felt cut out letters along the bottom that gave the name. Obviously despite the homemade nature it was legible, or no one would have noticed the spelling error.

That really just was the one day, but she did take hold of my brain. Still influenced by Wonder Woman, she transformed by spinning around, but in her case she would often fall out of the spin, or at least get dizzy, and the time she changed in a bathroom stall she ended up wrapped in toilet paper, which she broke through easily because she was strong and could fly. (I do not remember the origin of her powers, but it might have been aliens, like the Greatest American Hero.)

Again, she did get the job done. She foiled a bank robbery by crashing it, literally, but whether the robbers got knocked out by the swinging door due to a flight gone wrong or through an intentional “bonk”, it’s still foiled, right?

So you would think. In fact, the other heroes in the local Justice League-type organization found her to be an embarrassment, especially the elegant, sophisticated female one, and forbade her from using her powers or practicing as a hero, or they would send her through the trans-dimensional portal.

Well, that was all well and good until a particularly effective super-villain took all of the competent superheroes out of commission, and there was no one else left. Super Clutz went in and saved the day, and then, knowing she had broken the rules, went through the trans-dimensional portal on her own.

Meanwhile, her love interest had figured out her secret identity, and after giving all of the competent heroes a piece of his mind for even creating a situation where she would feel like she needed to go through the portal, regardless of whether they would have been jerks enough to enforce it after she saved them all, went in after her.

Unfortunately, the trans-dimensional portal is not completely consistent in its destination selection, initially placing them both in separate dimensions. One was very Hoth-like.

I didn’t actually ever come up with a resolution for the whole situation, but my thought was that all of the heroes were going to work together, initially encountering obstacles in many different dimensions, but overcoming them and learning valuable lessons about devaluing others by the time they eventually reunited. Perhaps it was too complicated for me to develop it much beyond that point.

There is a footnote to this. Years later I was watching Saturday Night Live. The guest host was Catherine O’Hara, making it 1991 or 1992. In one of the sketches, she was a superhero being called up in front of her league. Her offenses included flying upright instead of prone (it reduces cape welts!) and when she confiscated guns from criminals, using them to shoot the criminals rather than crushing them into little metal wads. Well what do you expect from a league with members like Sissy Boy and Calcium Man? (And why can I never find SNL skits online?)

It was not all a loss though. She defended herself, and Zombie Man agreed with her. They did not win the support of their fellow heroes, but they flew off together in the upright position. Preach it sister! I know exactly how you feel.

My first superhero identity

Yes, when I say first, it does indeed mean that I have had several superhero identities over the past. None of them involved any real world crime-fighting, and most of them never even got written out, but they were there. As my recent reading and writing has been bringing back memories, I notice some interesting trends and things about them. The problem with any of these retrospectives that I do is that there tends to be a lot of lameness involved, but hey, I am who I am.

This first memory, is something that I had gone for years without thinking about it until December 2008, when I was on my way to a memorial service for one friend with another friend. We were talking about Josh, as it would have been impossible not to. Although we had both been close to him, it was at completely different times, so we didn’t really have shared memories of him, and we had seen completely different sides.

I first met Josh in first grade, and I can’t honestly swear to you whether this memory happened in first or second grade, but it wasn’t any later than that. Anyway, on the playground one day we were deciding what kind of superheroes we would be, and working out the details of our costumes, and the next day Josh came with drawings of them. I was telling Karen that and she said “That’s so adorable,” and I really could not feel that. She was looking at it as an adult looking at two young kids, and so for her it was, but somehow even though I could understand that perspective, my emotional memory is so strong that no, that’s not adorable, it’s awesome. He was being really cool!

Where I can have a different perspective now is to see how incredibly lame my concept was. I think I just need to shudder, cringe, and get it out. “Fantasia” wore an outfit that was remarkably similar to Wonder Woman’s, in that basically it was a bodysuit and boots, but instead of the red, blue, and gold with those patriotic stars and eagles, it was just all pink. Well, maybe the boots were red. Her superpower was that she rode a flying horse.

I don’t even remember being into pink as a color then. I know I could not pick a favorite color, but pink was not in the running. (Eventually, because people are always asking kids for their favorite color, I started saying orange because no one ever picked orange, and I felt sorry for it.)

Basically, with the questionable taste and judgment shown by the name, outfit, and lack of any actual powers, I am mainly grateful that somehow I did not grow up to be a stripper. I had not realized how close I had come to that path.

Having safely dodged that bullet, I still think Josh coming back with the drawings was really cool. By the way, Josh’s costume was somewhat similar to Superman’s, mainly blue with some red, but he also had a red mask that I think had three red points sticking up. Obviously our concepts of how superheroes dressed came from the existing dominant constructs, which could lead to a discussion on gender bias and objectification of women in the media, but I am not going there, at least not yet.

I do not remember us working out any superhero adventures at that time. A few years later recess consisted of playing Graveyard Airlines, which basically meant heading to the tire trees (upright logs with two clusters of four tires grouped around them, meant for climbing, I guess) and imagining that we were on an airplane that was always running into trouble, possibly due to the sometimes poor judgment of the deranged pilot (me). Josh was my navigator, though, so technically if I was flying into trouble he was charting the course.

(My friend Jennie was co-pilot, and Jonathan was usually with us. Jason and Lara and some of the younger kids would sometimes join us as crew or passengers. I mention this because obviously we sound weird, but we weren’t shunned for this and clearly some people enjoyed it.)

Eventually, that started getting repetitive, and Jennie and I got really into Dungeons & Dragons (not with dice and a board, just going around and imagining stuff), but we didn’t do that at school. We both went through a jump rope phase, and then I started playing basketball a lot. Josh and I would still hang out at times, but usually with Stephen too, whom I liked. (What they did not know is I wrote out one Dungeons & Dragons story for an English assignment where our characters met up with Stephen and Josh.)

After that, I went to Five Oaks with the three other sixth graders who were affected by the boundary changes, and everyone else went to Mountain View, and I only kept in touch with Jennie. When we all ended up back at Aloha High School, Josh was in Drama, and he was great at it, and I was doing more sports and speech. Karen and I had become good friends at Five Oaks, and she did both speech and drama, so that was where their bonding started. Actually, most of my junior high friends got into Drama, but I’ve already written about that.

Josh and I never ended up hanging out much after that. There were no bad feelings or anything. I got to see him in plays, and I have seen clips of his role as Gilbert, sidekick shared by the Amazing Men, but that was more his adult life, and for me it always goes back to being kids. It is having superhero dreams and flying around disaster but having worked it all out by the time recess was over. It was Josh and I comforting Stephen after Lora had dumped him (even though I was secretly thinking he was an idiot for going out with her instead of me). It is Josh briefly removing the hat he always wore so I could sell it to him in a skit we did for English class, where I owned the hat and shoe store, “It’s Raining Hats and Clogs”. It is working on our short animated film, “The Garden Tragedy”, where long before anyone had heard of South Park we had construction paper vegetables succumbing to a crow, drought, and car exhaust from the new freeway.

I can look back and see how innocent that was. Other than the Stephen/Lora thing, and some other stuff that started happening towards the end of sixth grade as I was contemplating being separated from my friends for three years, and starting to like other boys just before Stephen got the message, making me dump him even worse than Lora did, but he didn’t even remember it happened in high school, you know, other than that, it was kind of angst-free.  I guess we just start getting stupider in sixth grade. Maybe that’s why most schools run K-5 now.

The song that keeps coming to mind as I remember is “Kids in the Street”, by the All-American Rejects. Looking at the lyrics, it does not match at all, but emotionally it fits. There is something bittersweet, with knowing that it is gone but that it still happened, and a little bit of awe at the velocity with which it fades away and new things come head on.

That being said, I still don’t look back and think it was cute, because we were fully invested in those moments, and we were very serious about it. We were not cute; we were amazing. And odd. I can look back and see that we were pretty odd, and perhaps a little morbid, though it didn’t feel like we were. Still awesome!
 

Something about Eugene

I mentioned yesterday that CulturePulp was special to me, and this goes back to my love of comic strips.

Yes, even as a poor college student I maintained my subscription to the Oregonian (not only for the comics, but still), but I was also an avid reader of the Oregon Daily Emerald, and that included its comics. In my first year that involved Hudson Van Curren by M.E. Russell. I missed fall term so I came in a little late, but he later released a book with all of the strips, which I still have.

In the next year Hudson had moved to the Oregon Commentator, and changed its format from a strip to a page. This made sense as the Commentator was not a daily paper. Honestly, I did not care for any of the other papers. The Emerald was the official student paper, and I think journalism students got credit for working at it, but there was a bit more of a sense of professionalism and objectivity.

There were several other, smaller papers, and I don’t remember any of them not being annoying, especially the Commie-hater, as it was frequently called. (It was right-leaning, and the school was more left-leaning, which may have made the staff feel a little more aggrieved and besieged beyond the normal young Republican attitude.)

However, many of these smaller papers did have pretty good comics, so I did at least have to look through them for that. In addition, the Emerald had gotten a new regular strip, Oscar the Freshman, by Neal Skorpen. Neal, although not a Resident Assistant, was good friends with one, as was I, though not the same RA, so running with that crowd I did know who he was, and also he planned some amazing interactive mystery nights. I want to say murder mystery, but with the one I did, Red Riding Hood was not dead, just missing. Snow White was dead before the end of the evening though.

(I never met M.E. Russell, though another friend that I met through Sid had apparently attended a party thrown in honor of Liberace’s birthday that he organized.)

The Emerald also added Weasel’s World, by Kraig Norris, which I enjoyed a lot, and though I don’t remember exactly when they ran Flaxen, by A C Smid, and I think I actually first saw Hairlis Kat (Vernon C. Wallingford III) in a guest appearance in someone else’s strip, but this is going back twenty years. Anyway, there was cool stuff going on, and another book came out, which I have right in front of me or I would never be getting these spellings right. That was “Panels: UO Cartooning 1991-92. Russell was listed as the editor, but Skorpen, Norris, and Adrian Wallace also assisted with production.

Time goes on, and college is far behind, and I still read the Oregonian. Some time ago they add CulturePulp, and there was something familiar about the drawings (especially something about the legs and feet), and it was Mike Russell, whose middle initial is in fact E, and although he does not only draw but also reviews movies and things, he is in fact still drawing and making a living at it.

Go on a few years later, and this thing called Facebook is developed, which I join in October of 2008, and slowly start reconnecting with people. It is mainly people from high school, church, and work, because in college I almost never knew anyone’s last name, but I was able to locate a few, and one of them is Neal.

Not only is Neal a graphic novel instructor at PNCA, but he still organizes things like 24-hour cartoon projects and things like that. So I did some more searching, and a lot of the featured cartoonists are still drawing. Some of them still seem to be in touch with each other.

I don’t know that it makes sense how happy this makes me. I guess it is a lot like the musicians I know who are still always in some kind of a band (even though they have day jobs) and get paying gigs. There is that creative need to fulfill, and I relate to that, but also it is great that they get some recognition for it. They find an audience. Well, maybe I’m not too hard to please, but I like it.

For the record, my own contributions to the Emerald included two cartoon submissions (only the political one was selected), an article on recycling that may not have been printed, several letters to the editor, and one picture that gave some incorrect impressions. Pretty typical, I would say.

The funny papers

One of the landmark events of my young life is when the Oregon Journal and the Oregonian merged. Both had strong comics sections, and you would think that normally they would have just kept one or the other, but they didn’t. From then on, the Oregonian had two full pages of comics.

(Okay, one page is not exactly full because it also has the crossword and horoscope, but still, it’s pretty impressive.)

I don’t know why I love them so much. I just do. Some of the strips I truly love, and there are some that I kind of hate and they annoy me, but I still read them. Sometimes I try and remind myself to just skip The Family Circus, but I never do. I should quit reading the Judge Parker they have hidden in the classifieds with For Better or Worse reruns too, because it has really gotten stupid, but somehow, I just keep going back.

I have a hard time letting go of strips that I like. With the Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes, they were retired—there was nothing you could do. With others though, they were still happening, just no longer in the paper I was reading. Once upon a time there was nothing you could do about this, but through the magic of technology that changed, and you could find things on the internet. This led to me discovering new strips, and rediscovering old ones. Also, sometimes they just lead to unexpected places. Basically, I’m going to tell two stories.

For my web comics I use gocomics.com, but it started with a different page, and things are changing online all the time too, including sometimes having to take a strip that is losing its presence on that site and follow it to the artist’s personal site. This happened with Little Dee, by Christopher Baldwin. One year I saw that he was going to be at Stumptown Comic Fest, and I realized I could totally go and get him to sign my book, and then look around some.

This is nothing like San Diego Comic Con. I don’t remember seeing any costumes. It was just a bunch of tables in a big room, and I did see a pirate on my way to the hotel, but that was just a Portland thing.

I found him, I handed him the book, and he asked who was my favorite character. I have always had a hard time picking favorites, and I said “Well, all of them,” which I thought was a good answer, because it confirms my appreciation for his work, but he looked a little dismayed or puzzled or something, and when he handed the book back I realized why.

When an artist is signing your book and asks about your favorite character that is because they intend to do a small sketch with their signature. It’s really very sweet, and it makes a lot of sense, and I am an idiot. Sorry Christopher! I get it now. Obviously I should have chosen Blake, the well-meaning but not that bright dog.

The other story starts with a print comic that was not in the comics section but in A&E. I speak of course, of CulturePulp: http://culturepulp.typepad.com/

CulturePulp has a special place in my heart anyway, for reasons that shall be dealt with in the next post, but also it is good at covering cool and interesting things, and one of those was the most awesome graphic novel based on the web ever, The Breakfast of the Gods:

http://breakfastofthegods.com/

When ME Russell covered it, it was still in production, so I remember reading until I was caught up, and then anxiously waiting for the next installment.

It is kind of like The Lord of the Rings done with classic breakfast cereal characters, and don’t be fooled by the cute background—it gets gritty. There is blood and death and some language. (Dig’em, the Sugar Smacks frog, is especially street.) And it is epic! It is well-drawn, it is clever, and it is a satisfying story. It is emotional. The structure is really well thought out, too. My appreciation for it keeps going up, actually. And the book’s page describes it as “fanfic”, which makes me feel a lot better about my efforts than reading about the genesis of Fifty Shades of Gray. (Shudder.)

Speaking of which (the thing I am working on, NOT 50), I wish you all a wonderful International My Chemical Romance Appreciation Day. It would be nice if I was actually back to blogging about them again, but I think we will be there in about a week and a half.

Graphic content ahead!

Amy: Sheldon I'm disappointed, as a brilliant man you're entitled to a vice. I could understand frequenting an opium den or hunting your fellow man for sport, but this lame-o!
Sheldon: A, comic books employ story telling through sequential art, a medium that dates back 17, 000 years to the cave paintings of Lascaux and B, you play the harp. Like that's cool.

Time to leave the gloom and doom behind, and start that section now where we talk about comics and graphic novels. (Actually, there will be some gloom and doom.)

Writing one made me think I should read more, but as I have been working on both, I have realized that I have a lot more history with both than I thought. I think part of that may be that I spent a lot more time than I realized with nerds.

The people whom I am going to mention are not people that I ever thought of as nerds, but looking back on the Star Trek obsession, the action figures, the games of laser tag (which I participated in) and the games of Magic: The Gathering (which I did not participate in), I may have missed the obvious. Maybe nerd-ism expires after high school, Big Bang Theory aside. They will come up more as we get into my comic writing history.

My introduction to comics predates all of that, going back to the girl next door. Shaila was a year older than me, and she was only there part of the time due to her parents’ divorce and their custody arrangement, but she had a lot of cool stuff in that garage, and she was reasonably generous about sharing. Because of her I got to play with Lite-Brite and many fine board games, but also she had boxes and boxes of comics, and they were printed material and I devoured them.

We were respectively a third and fourth grader, when we met, and we weren’t that much older when her father moved, so none of it was too hard-core. There was lots of Archie and Richie Rich, but there was also some Teen Titans, and some superheroes in the future that were trying to keep the earth from being suffocated by a giant chain, and also, there was Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld.

Amethyst introduced me to one of the hard facts of the comic world. I was really into the series, and Shaila was portioning them out to me, because I seriously would have taken the stack home and read them in one night, but being one year older (and the owner) gives you a certain amount of authority, and she was into that. One day she tells me…

“I shouldn’t have let you start reading those.”
”Why not?”
”The end is going to come out while I’m here, so we won’t ever get to see it.”
”Can’t we still get it?”
”No.”

I think the reason she had so many comics was her mother had some sort of connection in Salem, and yet why her being in Aloha for the summer meant that she could not take advantage of that is still not clear. Regardless, I don’t know what happened with Amethyst. I assume the good guys won, but with some sad losses, and that somehow she reconciled her Gemworld ancestry and Earth upbringing.

Anyway, this taught me a very important lesson, in that continuing storylines will leave you hanging. When I had the opportunity at times to buy a comic of my own, I almost always went for one of those that was a collection of ghost stories. That was it was self-contained, and spooky!

Looking back has also clarified another spotty memory for me. I remembered sometimes going with Misty to what I thought was Dark Horse Comics, like it was a store, but that didn’t seem right. Well, I remembered comics and a horse, is what it was. Actually we were going to Pegasus Books, which is now Things from Another World. I know I bought an Elfquest there.

Misty would buy things that were special, like the Spider-Man where he and MJ got married and Bob Mackie designed the gown (that’s why I knew about Gwen Stacey before), or this pretty cool one going over various Star Trek characters from both the show and the movies.

I would read those (without her permission!) and I would occasionally pick up a Simpsons or something, but I was more into comic strips, as they ran in the paper, and that eventually led me into web comics where I found some other interesting things.

I just keep putting this off

I mentioned earlier that I had been making good progress on my task list. There is one that I just finished, after promising myself to do so for a long time, and continually getting distracted. This was frustrating to me because it was for someone else, and I really wanted to do it, but also the thing that kept thwarting me is stupid, and embarrassing. Obviously I need to write about it.

I hope I have made it pretty clear that I am grateful for my religion because it gives me a lot of purpose and joy. I also feel exceptionally lucky to have been raised LDS, because some of the practices kept me from things where I would be very susceptible. With my longing for physical touch and doubts of the possibility of actually being loved, I could easily have been prey to a string of bad relationships. Actually, I had one friend where we had a lot in common, except for the religion, and yes, I can see how things might have gone.

Also, I have a kind of addictive personality. There is some history of the males on the Harris side having trouble with alcohol, and based on some of the doctor prescribed medication I have taken at times, drugs have a really strong effect on me. Also, I tend to be a little compulsive, so just the fact that I never even considered trying alcohol, tobacco, or other types of drugs seems really, really fortunate.

I say this realizing that my vices could be a lot worse, and I am lucky, but the vices that I do have are very frustrating, in addition to being really lame. I get addicted to games. Not even cool games, where lots of people are obsessing over them in a massive multi-player format or where you can make money off of them. No, at various times they have been Solitaire, Freecell, Spider Solitaire, Minesweeper, Marble Drop, Speed Marbles, Jewel Quest, Diamond Mine, and pretty much every type of Pac-Man (Regular, Plus, Super, and Pals) out there, plus Mappy which came with Ms. Pac-Man. Sometimes Sudoku is an issue, but it is easier not to spiral out of control on that one.

I think one thing that contributes to it is my tendency to be a little OCD. I fall into spells rather easily, and I do have great concentration, which is clearly being misused at these times. But always, even when I play really well, there is the thought that I can do better. That round was too easy, or that round was too hard, or I should try it this way. I can be really persistent too, but again, it is really misused here.

Where I start doing it, though, is due to procrastination. I think I will play one game of Spider Solitaire, or five rounds of Marble Drop, or something, and then start what I really need to do, and then I far exceed my allotted play time, not only not getting what I want done, but also generally staying up later than I should, which will then affect me into the next day.

I have never known a writer who does not procrastinate, so at least I come by it honestly, but it is really not helpful.

I know some of it is fear. With the one thing I was putting off, it was something that I wanted to do a good job on, but I was not confident in my ability to do so, and then the longer I was delaying the better I felt it had to be so it was worth the wait, and this was just not helpful. (It was helping someone with her resume.)

I think it is more so with the writing, though this is stupid. I mean, it doesn’t always come out well, but that’s what rewriting is for. In fact, sometimes you have to write something badly before you can write it well.

The frustrating thing is that I had actually stopped. I had a really good week where I was working full days and commuting and I would get home and write12-14 pages, which is amazing, and I tried to think what was different, and I think it was just that I was only writing and not procrastinating. However, I hit some scenes that were hard to write, and I had some things come up that made me broody (not a helpful coping mechanism, but I do it), and I fell off the wagon. Badly.

So, now I am trying to incorporate shame to get back on track. I am telling you that I do not intend to play any more. There are people who can do it with no ill effects, but not me.

Actually, I tried to block the web site, because while it is easy to give in to temptation and visit the site, I thought it would be significantly easier to resist going in a removing a block. However, again the lack of deeper technical knowledge becomes an issue. I may need to coax a geek to help me, and maybe to uninstall Windows Gadgets for me too, because I think it is dragging down my system performance.

For now though, telling you, in the hopes that the sense of shame and self-loathing will be deterrent enough when I make it public. In a way, it’s just a stupid little thing, but sometimes I worry that it is more.

There is a pretty famous quote from Marianne Williamson (often attributed to Nelson Mandela):

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

I don’t know. I really think I am more afraid of being inadequate, but if I am meant to shine, I can’t be frittering my time away.