AVC: How did you brace yourself for the controversy that would come with the Before Watchmen announcement?

DC: I didn’t, really. I knew there would be a certain amount of it. In all honesty, I didn’t expect, “Poor Alan Moore.” I just didn’t expect that. So that sort of took me by surprise. I certainly expected people to have an opinion about whether this beloved material should be explored any further, and I believe that that’s a question, but it’s also a challenge that I’m happy to meet. All the stuff with Alan, I didn’t count on that or really give it much thought. It’s now an incredibly large issue. So, it is what it is. I guess the most important thing for me, and it’s funny because I have some friends in the business who I have an incredible amount of respect for, and they completely disagree with me on this thing. However, we all realize that we’re disagreeing about a comic book. Not about whether or not children should be allowed to eat. Not about whether we should be blocking the sun, so that Muslims don’t get any sun. We’re not burning the Koran. We’re producing a comic book here, and let’s keep it all in perspective.

- from the AV Club’s recent interview with Darwyn Cooke.

Sometimes in my more charitable moments I have thought, regarding the team DC brought together for their Before Watchmen project (which includes a few creators, Cooke among them, whose prior work I rate highly), that I could disapprove of the project and obvious cash-grab motives behind it, but I didn’t necessarily have to write off everyone involved. Right?

But with every bit of news that trickled out through the comics hype machine, I found myself more and more ambivalent. I dropped the two series by Brian Azzarello that I was reading a few months ago, and the release of The Score, Cooke’s latest adaptation of Richard Stark’s Parker novels, stopped being something I was looking forward to. I hugely enjoyed Cooke’s last two Parker adaptions, and now there was something in the way. Their other work had become problematic for me purely through their involvement in Before Watchmen, because even if I avoided those comics, buying their other work would be a tacit endorsement of people who had chosen to work on it and justified DC’s decision in public. 

The form that justification takes deserves a closer look. DC’s main PR strategy with Before Watchmen has been to brazen it out, restrict its PR releases to the slavishly uncritical comics “news” sites. The other thread of the strategy has been for those involved to not-so-subtly denigrate and patronise Alan Moore, to paint him as the cranky old man that he has become to so many fanboy types when he refused to automatically enthuse over everything the modern comics industry produced.

It still enrages to see it laid out so openly, with the scare/sneer-quotes around “poor Alan Moore”. As if people supporting a creator’s objections to what is done with his work are being unreasonable. As if the obscenely profitable DC Entertainment, which got rich on the backs of artists whom it denied basic restitution for their creations, is the real victim.

Compare and contrast with this in-depth interview Cooke gave to promote the publication of The Score. Read it, and take in his obvious respect for the creator of the work he’s adapting. And try, as I did, to reconcile it with the quote at the top of this entry. 

Suddenly, my ambivalence becomes much less of an issue. There’s no feeling of righteousness here; more a deep sense of dejection. I won’t lose that much keeping The Score off my shelf. Cooke has made his choice, and that in turn makes it easier to make mine.

The Mass Effect 3 Ending

I’ve played through Mass Effect 2 and 3 in quick succession over the last couple of months. They’re great games, but the self-consciously epic conclusion to the series in the final minutes of ME3 left me a more than a little cold. There’s been a lot of internet controversy around the ending, but I am utterly uninterested in joining a chorus of messageboard tantrum-throwers. This is a purely personal reaction, entirely based on how I played the game(s).

(There’ll be spoilers for the Mass Effect series under the jump, so proceed at your own risk.)

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A panel of Brandon Graham’s comic King City, taken from this interview with him by Tom Spurgeon. There’s a great exchange where they discuss this image:  SPURGEON: There’s a great mini-sequence here where you isolate an image within a previous image — the way the feet are placed to show a kind of forward intimacy. For someone that comes across to me as a pretty natural cartoonist you use a lot of what I’d call underlining, calling attention to specific moments in the narrative through repetition or labeling. Do you think that’s a fair assessment, and what do you achieve through moments like this one, above, really emphasizing that specific part of the previous picture?GRAHAM: I like how well comics works for that sort of thing, you can just draw an arrow pointing at something and write “look!” next to it and it doesn’t really throw anything off. I don’t think of a panel like that as just a close up of another panel, as much as it looks like it. I still think of time progressing on the page. It’s a beat of time.  If you look at that page as single unit, you start in the largest panel (top left), move through the two “inset” panels stacked on top on one another, and end in the bottom, with the smoke-blowing. A sequence that takes a short amount of time, extended through panel structure to allow the images and dialogue and captions to hit in sequence, stretching it out like the giddy first moment of attraction it’s depicting.  This is one of the things comics does really well; the intersection of time and space. Within the layout of the page, the artist can make individual moments flow from one panel to another, or break down a single moment to stretch time out (see this rather famous example). Looking at a comic that does this trains you to be a better reader, to look at a comic and settle into the rhythm and the pace the creator is aiming for. It’s the antidote to the recent (awful) trend from certain creators towards layouts containing the absolute minimum of visual information and variety. It’s good comics.
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A panel of Brandon Graham’s comic King City, taken from this interview with him by Tom Spurgeon. There’s a great exchange where they discuss this image: 

SPURGEON: There’s a great mini-sequence here where you isolate an image within a previous image — the way the feet are placed to show a kind of forward intimacy. For someone that comes across to me as a pretty natural cartoonist you use a lot of what I’d call underlining, calling attention to specific moments in the narrative through repetition or labeling. Do you think that’s a fair assessment, and what do you achieve through moments like this one, above, really emphasizing that specific part of the previous picture?

GRAHAM: I like how well comics works for that sort of thing, you can just draw an arrow pointing at something and write “look!” next to it and it doesn’t really throw anything off. I don’t think of a panel like that as just a close up of another panel, as much as it looks like it. I still think of time progressing on the page. It’s a beat of time. 

If you look at that page as single unit, you start in the largest panel (top left), move through the two “inset” panels stacked on top on one another, and end in the bottom, with the smoke-blowing. A sequence that takes a short amount of time, extended through panel structure to allow the images and dialogue and captions to hit in sequence, stretching it out like the giddy first moment of attraction it’s depicting. 

This is one of the things comics does really well; the intersection of time and space. Within the layout of the page, the artist can make individual moments flow from one panel to another, or break down a single moment to stretch time out (see this rather famous example). Looking at a comic that does this trains you to be a better reader, to look at a comic and settle into the rhythm and the pace the creator is aiming for. It’s the antidote to the recent (awful) trend from certain creators towards layouts containing the absolute minimum of visual information and variety.

It’s good comics.

Source: comicsreporter.com

The "nerd girl" phenomenon discussed on Jordan Jesse Go

(Skip to 38:35 for the start of the discussion.)

In a way, I can understand what they’re talking about - I have a few problems with nerd culture in its current iteration - it seems to have become mainstream, but kept the dickish defensiveness common to picked-on people (I should know - I was one) without realising that an attitude like that, when coming from a position of power, can seem awfully like bullying. (Nerd bullies! What hath we wrought?!)

But … pretty much every woman I know who is into geek/nerd stuff doesn’t identify as such in a particularly overt way. It’s just something they do, and something they have in common with their friends. I think the controversy as it stands has a lot to do with women who are visible in pop culture (ie. fairly famous, at least in certain circles) who are targets for a lot of credential-questioning and accusations of pandering. My question is … why care? MTV and other big media outlets have realised that the geek contingent means big money (they’re a big part of the comic-book movie audience, if nothing else) and feels the need to appeal to them. I don’t think the “girls acting like nerds to impress guys” (cf: The A.V. Club) is something we need to worry about. Real-world people tend to gravitate to stuff they like. Treat them with respect. That’s all there is to it. 

The pub game used to be imagining what you’d do if you had a million bucks. Now it’s: imagine if you had a million people who had decided to pay you attention. What the hell do you do with that? Are you a philanthropist, or a social currency entrepreneur; do you invest it for your pension?
Matt Webb at Interconnected. Clever way of looking at it. Also ties in with Warren Ellis’ term “attention economy”.

Source: interconnected.org

And the way Rhino funded the box shows a different relationship to the band’s hardcore fans. Rather than simply creating products and hoping loyalists will bite, the label has laid out the economics of a planned release upfront and asked fans if they’re in or out.

I had this same thought a while ago - modern digital recording technologies must make it so much easier to save every bit of cast-off audio from any band’s studio recordings. The market for such releases naturally depends on whether the band has a fanbase dedicated enough to respond to these reissues. The Dead obviously have an existing built-in audience who are incredibly devoted. But in a world of artists who regularly release content for free, is this a viable business model for artists who don’t command an adoring fanbase?

Be grateful to the Grateful Dead by Tom Ewing 

Source: Guardian

“The Pet Shop Boys combine ironic distance and emotional honesty in a way that is very common in British culture; dealing with tragedy with a raised eyebrow.”

Found this in the Notes section on my phone. I’m sure it was originally meant for some larger blog post now lost to procrastination and forgetfulness, but it’s nicely-phrased enough that I want to give it a public airing.

Mad Men, S04, E10 - “Hands and Knees”

The bit that struck me about this episode was Lane’s conflict with his father. While at first, it look like his flirting with the waitress at the Playboy Lounge was a creepy/pathetic attempt to project a swinging bachelor lifetstyle in the wake of his separation from his wife, the subsequent scene with the two of them shows that he has an existing relationship with her. But how much of it is real, how much is infatuation, and how much is a means to rebel against his father? 

Lane says “I love you” to Toni, but does he really love her? For someone as buttoned-up as him, raised in the period in Britain when stiff-upper-lip stoicness was at its height, maybe just getting to express his emotions is a thrill in itself. We’ve seen Lane arrive in Season Three as an uptight bean counter, and gradually warm to the perceived classlessness of America (“no one cares where you went to school” he says) even as his wife finds herself unable to live there.

Of course, America is as riven with class divisions as Britain, but less overtly discussed. Toni works as a waitress - while Peggy talks about the struggle of women as related to the civil rights movement, it will be a long time before a Madison Avenue ad agency hires a black copywriter, let alone a black female one. And Don, the alpha-male protagonist, is still a poor farmboy hiding inside the identity of someone who enables him to make something more of himself. 

I find this stuff fascinating. When Lane and the Brits were introduced, I thought it was just some yawn-worthy stereotyping from Matt Weiner and co. But they’ve since come up with some fascinating ways to view 1960s America from an outsider perspective - just as the privileged male WASP characters are contrasted by Peggy and Joan’s stories, looking at a system where the deck is stacked against them. Lane is obviously viewing 1960s Madison Avenue from a position of privilege, but he is still navigating a world where he can be a different person. Much like our nominal “hero” Don Draper. Where he goes from here will be fascinating to watch. 

Nanowrimo, Day 6

5,862 words so far. I’ve got a lot written down today, but I view it as catch-up for the precisely 0 words I wrote yesterday. Still, if I haven’t written 50,000 words by the end of the month, it’ll be no skin off my nose. I used Nanowrimo as the impetus to kick-start the process of writing down all the ideas that have been bouncing around in my head for ages now. If I can at least commit them to page (or screen), look at them in an honest light, and start redrafting or refining them, this will have been worth it.

chrishaley: “When people complain about Batman being foolish in The Dark Knight, they wish for the strong, always-right, never-wrong Batman of their imaginations. But the greatness of The Dark Knight‘s narrative lies in how it shows that Batman is often wrong, and completely helpless when dealing with a criminal like the Joker. There is no defense against evil, only the strength to not give in to it. “If Batman has limits, I can’t afford to know them,” says Bruce in Act I, and here he’s confronted with the folly of that headstrong philosophy — Batman is all about limits, and the narrative of The Dark Knight is, in large part, an examination, and definition, of those limits.” - Todd Alcott at The Beat Plus the fact that he effectively created The Joker and other costumed criminals - the idea of “escalation” raised at the end of Batman Begins. The ultimate definition of his limits is the realisation at the end that Gotham can’t just be freaks in costumes maiming each other - there has to be a better symbol of goodness for people to rally to. 
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chrishaley:

“When people complain about Batman being foolish in The Dark Knight, they wish for the strong, always-right, never-wrong Batman of their imaginations. But the greatness of The Dark Knight‘s narrative lies in how it shows that Batman is often wrong, and completely helpless when dealing with a criminal like the Joker. There is no defense against evil, only the strength to not give in to it. “If Batman has limits, I can’t afford to know them,” says Bruce in Act I, and here he’s confronted with the folly of that headstrong philosophy — Batman is all about limits, and the narrative of The Dark Knight is, in large part, an examination, and definition, of those limits.” - Todd Alcott at The Beat

Plus the fact that he effectively created The Joker and other costumed criminals - the idea of “escalation” raised at the end of Batman Begins. The ultimate definition of his limits is the realisation at the end that Gotham can’t just be freaks in costumes maiming each other - there has to be a better symbol of goodness for people to rally to.