Category: Writer’s Blog

Now, yours truly suffers from a shopping list of chronic ailments, not the least of which is being allergic to varying degrees to just about everything in the plant kingdom. You can imagine how I’ve been doing in the wake of the recent rains in California. Yes, it rained enough that most of the state is finally out of the years-long drought we were in, which is great! And the hills are green and the poppy fields are a-bloomin’, and… oy, that’s a nightmare for my sinuses.

But hey, then along comes a real virus and it does the whole “hold my beer” thing as it goes to frickin’ town on your mind and body. That was me this whole past week, including having to go work WonderCon in the middle of it… normally something I’d consider a working vacation, but this time around it was more just work and feeling like warmed-over crap at the times I wasn’t working.

It’s Tuesday now and I’m glad Dawn and I still decided to take our scheduled post-Con break even though we had to beg off last week with the unscheduled one. Thank heavens for you folks being a supportive and patient audience, especially considering the cliff hangers that sometimes result. I’ve returned to my day job but I’m still a coughing and occasionally dizzy mess. But better. Better than last week at least when I felt so awful that this blog was reduced to a single metaphor and a goat video.

Dang if this hasn’t put my allergies in perspective, though. I’m honestly a little amazed I managed 3 days of driving, load-in/load-out, and working that convention floor, though Dawn kept making me go back to the hotel to rest. Ever try to find a simple bowl of chicken soup in a hotel complex? Mental note for next time to bring my own.

But anyhow here we are, communicating and still planning to get back on track for next week. I should be finally on the tail end of this nasty little viral freight train, so see you then!

Gotta be honest, with this virus my head right now feels like a haze of fiberglass being casually stress tested by an ogre. So in lieu of my usual ramblings I’m just going to present 10 minutes of baby goats frolicking.

Quality.

If you haven’t noticed, yours truly is a big comic book nerd, and has been for many, many years. Decades, even. In fact, if my occasionally not-so-great memory serves, this traces back to circa 1980 when a very young Clint stumbled across his older sister’s small collection of Uncanny X-Men, a small collection which just happened to cover most of the Dark Phoenix saga.

Fast forward to these rather incredible times when comic book stories have hit the mainstream, but that particular saga, still considered one of the best stories ever told in comics, has yet to be successfully translated to the big screen. Oh, I’ve had hopes. Back in the early oughts Dawn and I got extremely excited at the closing moments of X-2 when the Phoenix symbol showed up on the waters of the burst dam where we last saw Jean Grey sacrificing herself so everyone else could get to safety. It wasn’t precisely the tale told in the comics but the main points were there, and third film could start the ball rolling.

Well, now of course we know that ball rolled right off the cliff with the utter misfire that was X-Men: Last Stand. Fox really squandered all that potential, to the point where they ditched everything and started over. YMMV on whether the various attempts since then were good, but in the meantime a new production company called Marvel Studios emerged in 2008 and started a relentless march of introducing, developing and merging the stories of various superheroes into an entertainment juggernaut, despite not having the rights to Juggernaut or any other X-Men or X-Men adjacent characters.

It’s all a complicated story, but when Marvel Comics fell on hard times in the late 1990s they ended up selling off the movie rights to a lot of their more well-known characters like Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and yes, the X-Men. Marvel Studios had to make do with the leftovers, and despite what some revisionists might claim Iron Man prior to 2008 was no A-lister. Where Sony and Fox seem to stumble about looking for the proper way to showcase their own Marvel characters on the big screen in a consistently well-received manner, Kevin Feige was a steady hand on Marvel Studios’ tiller that led to success after success both with mainstream audiences and nerds such as myself. They just seemed to get what it was about the comics characters that made them last in the first place, and even if some of the details were changed the heart and soul was there. (Source: me legit tearing up during the first Captain America movie the moment I could tell they were getting him right.)

Anyhow, why am I blathering on about this? Well, for one thing, Marvel Studios has achieved quite a feat in terms of chaining their movies into long-form storytelling on a scale unprecedented in cinema, if not unprecedented in comics. They took their lessons from the comics and it paid off, and at this point I basically look forwards to anything they announce. I can’t say that about the films put out by Fox. I enjoyed Logan, for example, but for me all signs right now are pointing to them flubbing a second attempt at the Dark Phoenix saga. It’s just too rushed to have the proper weight.

And that’s a shame, but I feel X-citement as I write this blog on Tuesday night, because in less than half an hour it will be 9:02 PM PST, otherwise known as the moment the Disney/Fox merger finally clinches and the X-Men officially “come home” to Marvel Studios. Dark Phoenix will most likely still be released, and Feige tends to have things planned out years in advance enough that I wouldn’t expect any X-movies in the immediate future, but hey, just the thought of a decent Fantastic Four at long last has my antennae perked. Or at least a proper introduction to Doctor Doom, which I feel needs the kind of patience and build-up that Marvel Studios has proven very, very good at.

And hell, audiences were just fine with the MCU version of Spider-Man swinging his way onto their screens only a handful of years after Sony made their last solo attempt. Maybe sometime in the next decade, an MCU Jean Grey will be introduced, and built upon, and finally the epic saga of my youth will play out to my satisfaction.

Last Friday evening we were part of Pasadena’s Art Night, and when I say part I mean it: the events were scattered over many locations throughout our hometown. Our corner of it was in the Central Library, and was indeed in a corner, with at least four other shindigs also occurring in other wings and rooms.

This is not to say we were completely forgotten — there was an okay amount of people filtering through in the four or so hours allotted, if not a crowd. But the floor space was far more intimate than your average convention, and for that matter quite cozy with its wooden lamp-equipped tables, book-lined walls and comfortable carpet. You could actually talk to people without having to raise your voice.

And so, because of that, I decided that I could do worse with the time allotted than just walk around and get to know some of my fellow exhibitors, especially ones whose banners I recognized from past shows but who I’d never actually approached. At other conventions just the sheer amount of walking to be done and the amount of different people can be intimidating, not to mention that I don’t want to feel like I’m interrupting or preventing a possible sale. And again there’s that noise factor and the acoustics of the standard convention hall swallowing your voices.

So when you get a small space, a soft carpet and a slow crowd, well… perfect time to go around and hobnob with fellow travelers that you might be too exhausted to talk to otherwise, also without feeling like you’re irresponsible being away from your own wares for long. You might not make a lot of money, but you can potentially make some new friends.

So I’ve always marveled at hearing of writers out there who stubbornly still used typewriters for their work. Harlan Ellison (RIP) was notorious for this, as far as I know still cranking away at one of them until the day he died. I believe he’d also give an earful to anyone who asked, ranting about how sloppy today’s writers were with their newfangled tech that allowed them to go back and edit whatever they barfed out — get it right the first time, dangit! Which ignores the reality that a perfect first draft is by and large a thing of myth. I think Ellison would just say to write it all out again.

Anyhow… surprise, surprise, I use a computer. And yet my fancy word processing software of choice is Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word 2003.

It ain’t broke so I ain’t feeling no need to upgrade (dangit!). It does what I need it to, I know where all the menu functions are, and frankly writing just sometimes is difficult enough without your composition tools getting in the way. Is there stuff out there that’s specifically designed for scriptwriting and organizing world-building, etc.? You bet. Do I want to spend time learning how to use those as opposed to continuing to write? Nossir.

I believe this is not as irrational as my own ongoing confusion over those who would keep using a manual typewriter once computers and word processors became ubiquitous. I spent the early years of my life (including much of my schooling) having to hand write or use a typewriter and it was terrible. God I even remember getting one of those “correction” typewriters that would basically slap a measured dose of white out on the paper as a primitive form of “undo” — which was better than having to paint the white out on by hand but still messy, and you were shit out of luck if you wanted to do something like change the order of paragraphs. Now admittedly the early word processors were clunky as heck and an IBM/x86 dude like me lacked mouse functionality so the Mac users laughed heartily, and inkjet and laser printers were the toys of the rich and no professor was going to accept a book report off the fixed-width dot matrix monstrosity available to the common student.

Ugh. Peers have learned to never reminisce with me about the “good old days” because I’ll happily remind them of how rose-colored their glasses are.

But yeah, I still use a 15+ year old version of MS Word and it’s entirely possible that’s it’s own kind of insanity. Dawn keeps trying to get me to do my scripts on Google Drive so they’re on the cloud, and part of me recognizes that would be a good idea but the other part snarls and huddles away and still has a first instinct to bounce scripts between computers via email or network sharing rather than this newfangled cloud business the damn kids are all into. WordPress recently updated the way these very blogs are written and after struggling with the new format for awhile I hunted down a way to change it back.

I wonder if Harlan Ellison thought people still writing things by hand was crazy? And then there was my grade school teacher insisting we spend all that time learning cursive because it would be essential to our adult lives.

Meh, these days I’m a dog getting old but occasionally can be lured into a new trick, like when Dawn finally got me to invest in a wireless router for our apartment which I now admit I was foolish to hesitate in adopting. We’ll see.

In the zombie genre the name Umbrella conjures up the shadiest of shadowy biotech megacorporations, whose nefarious business practices would perhaps even cause Carter J. Burke to blanch.

This is not about them but the other Umbrella being talked of lately, first a comic book and now a Netflix adaptation available (as usual) in its streamable entirety.

I had heard of The Umbrella Academy back in its comic days but never knew much more than that it seemed to feature kids in masks and kneepants and was written by that guy from the band 30 Seconds to Mars. Which shows exactly how much I’d been paying attention since in the writing of this I realized the band I actually meant was My Chemical Romance, which has nary a Leto on the roster.

I ran into this problem all the time back when I was podcasting with friends. Ask me about the time I talked about Zoe Saldana for ten minutes before realizing I meant Zoey Deschanel. Or better yet, don’t.

So anyhow, I correctly remembered the writer was a literal rock star, and his name is Gerard Way. Friends who have read the comic give thumbs up to the adaptation although it deviates from its source material in some significant ways. I’m still rather ignorant of the ins-and-outs-and-what-have-yous of that, but having binged through the TV show I would say it stands up fine as a good science fiction/superhero tale. In fact I would posit this version is a better Dark Phoenix saga than 20th Century Fox has ever brought to screen, though perhaps that’s a low bar to clear. I don’t have high hopes for the one currently in the pipe, assuming it survives the Disney/Fox merger at all.

To go into why would be extreme spoiler territory so I won’t. My chief observation I wanted to bring to y’all is that I’m fond of how Umbrella Academy continues in the vein of Zombieland and Into the Spider-Verse in bringing comic book elements to a new medium, and I’m not just talking the characters but the Will Eisner-style stuff where you incorporate visual text into the imagery. Each episode begins with a clever instance of a “title card” which I could totally visualize as being part of a still comics page, and much like the “rules” of Zombieland blends right into a visual hyper-reality for our benefit.

Other times during the series I caught myself declaring out loud, “that has to be a panel or sequence from the comic” — albeit one brought skillfully into the world of full motion.

It makes me curious how many times I might have been right or wrong about that. So I suppose I’ll be cracking open the book after all. Feels weird doing that in reverse. But since we’re living in an era where comics have crossed over to the big time in such fashion–and their particular visual power is being recognized at long last by the mainstream–it also feels good.

By which I don’t mean heroin, thankfully. No, 2019 has begun and this past weekend was our first convention of the year at the Long Beach Comic Expo. I think I’ve mentioned before that last year was kind of rough for us, but I’m not sure I admitted that our final convention of 2018 was the first time I can remember my mindset going in felt like, “Let’s just get this over with.” I felt exhausted. We made it through, and there were bright spots, but all in all I worried the spark had finally gone out, maybe for good.

I figure all creators go through cycles like this sooner or later, and if we don’t appear to it’s just because we’re better at hiding it. It wasn’t the first time, but that particular time was at the end of a long slump and both Dawn and I were feeling it simultaneously, whereas at other times we’d have the luxury of leaning on each other.

Okay, anyhow, enough of that! The good news. We got through that show, chugged ourselves along through the end of that year and the beginning of this one, and I’m finally looking forwards to the rest of 2019. It’s not that the Expo went super amazingly well, but it was at least a reminder of all the positive things and, perhaps more importantly, felt like it. People smiled and I smiled back, and sometimes they bought things but if they didn’t they were at least having a good time and I was having a good time.

It’s always a hesitation for me to admit to any bad times because I figure you folks come around here for escape from your own troubles. Also I don’t want to seem like some gratification junkie that needs constant kind words… I feel like we do get plenty of those — in fact I think another hesitation creators have in admitting any sad times is being anxious your fans will feel like their expressed support is so much chopped liver. Nothing could be further from the truth, so I hope none of you who have supported us these past several months will believe that. It does matter, even if sometimes it’s not so much instant succor as just keeping us afloat until we swim.

2019 is our tenth anniversary of the Ranch, so… I’m glad to feel like swimming again.

As a sequential writer I’ve found that I have to be prepared at some point to forge ahead with your instincts and present ongoing development of your characters and events, with no further luxury of leaving things in what physics might call a “potential” state.

It’s still scary, even after all this time. Once you’ve got those words coming out of their mouths or those deeds coming out of their actions in front of an audience, that’s a commitment, and you hope that whatever you just portrayed jibes with what you’ve presented previously. It’s scarier of course the more what you’re presenting might be considered unexpected — on the one hand, the predictable becomes boring; on the other, a plot twist that’s too unfounded might also mess up your story, right?

Now it’s probably a given that nothing will make 100% sense to 100% of your audience 100% of the time, but I think it’s also safe to say that it’s more likely more people will accept one of your characters being shot in the heart and dying than will accept a character being shot in the heart and living. The latter outcome is one that benefits far more from you having laid the groundwork for such a situation, even if it’s something as unlikely (in a real world sense) as the classic “good thing I kept this cigarette case in my vest pocket” save.

Mind you it also is a benefit if the character with the cigarette case is one that (again, most of) the audience would rather not see dead. We accept that flimsy rationale wholeheartedly. Superhero comics in particular are known for tying themselves in utter logical knots in order to bring characters, both villains and heroes, back from the veil, and oddly enough this again seems to be tied into how much wailing and gnashing of teeth (and closing of wallets) results from the idea of that character no longer being part of the tale.

But if you’re aiming for something of a more realistic tone, then there is a sense of finality that can weigh heavily. “Wild” Will can complain all he wants that the victims are of no consequence, but as the author I’m still conscious of snuffing out lives whose only shortcoming is arguably that the narrative did not center around them. William Munny’s words from Unforgiven can come to mind:

“It’s a hell of a thing, killing a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.”

That’s the most extreme case, but if you think about it every published image, every canonical word that makes its way from author to audience, closes off pathways and possibilities. And yet that’s exactly what has to happen for a narrative to be anything more than just random ideas haphazardly slapped together.

It’s a hell of a thing. But then again, when an author closes those doors I guess that’s why fan fiction sometimes opens the windows.

So I’m still not very good at drawing.

Here’s a situation where that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Behold Drawception.com, which has apparently been around for many years but which I stumbled upon recently by pure accident. It is described as… well, here’s the blurb from their own About page:

Drawception is a free web game that combines drawing with the classic “Telephone Game”. As a phrase is drawn and described by players it changes in unexpected ways. Miscommunication and hilarity ensues!

Basically, when you register and choose to play you are presented with either a picture needing a caption, or a caption needing a picture. You are provided with no context beyond what is immediately in front of you, and only once the game completes do you get to see the whole progression and where your submission falls within it.

It’s like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, except when all’s said and done you may find out that it started out being about cockroaches. The site provides their #2 game of all time as an example of the insanity: https://drawception.com/game/ZODEsT1ym7/sonic-rainboom/

You generally get about 10 minutes to draw something using their in-site editor. There’s paid upgrades but eh, the free version has been fun enough for me, and there’s even a slim chance I might get better at drawing since they’re making practicing it fun.

Or maybe I’ll just stick to captions.

This is the kind of topic that probably deserves more than a little discussion, but seeing as this week has us in some distractions I’ll just start off for now with the thesis statement, so to speak, and then maybe write some more next week.

The topic itself burbled up due to Dawn and I having a conversation after she was remembering how bookstores often lumped Science Fiction and Fantasy works into the same section. They might still do this, though there are fewer and fewer bookstores still around to check. Her declaration that such was fine because “they’re basically the same thing!” got yours truly in a huffy, refutative state. Not so! cries I, with all the weight of my absolutely no degrees in literature behind the argument.

But here’s my take: lumping SF and Fantasy together is lazy, but also is not simply a matter of sorting dragons and elves in one bin and spaceships and lasers in the other. Science Fiction versus Fantasy is not about the props and settings, but about how concerned a given author is about the technical details of their world and the impact any alterations (from what we in our world are used to) might have on how people live.

By this metric, I maintain Star Wars is pure fantasy despite its spaceships and lasers because it really has no time or interest in explaining how hyperdrives work; all you need to know is that the Millenium Falcon’s hyperdrive is not currently working. Oh, I know there are technical manuals out there that have been published in the 40+ years since the movie’s release, but I feel like they are willfully missing the point. Star Wars is, excuse the expression, light-years removed from something like the original novel of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, where for better or worse a great deal of time is spent detailing how a submarine might function and how its existence impacts society. Eventually there is a giant squid attack, but it’s hardly the central focus of the story.

Now there’s something to be said for tendencies. Stories with what we’d consider possible future technology tend to explain that tech more often, and on a deeper level, than stories with wizards and dragons, even if Clarke’s Third Law still has a ring of truth to it. ESP tends to get more time devoted to its workings than magic crystal scrying, even if they functionally do the same thing. Ask yourselves, though… what was the last setting you read that really tried to make a study of how magic being real might have impacted Earth’s history? I mean without some amount of handwaving I would find that a herculean task, likely beyond my scope of confidence and knowledge to tackle. Hell, I remember when I was going to try to write about a race of intelligent cephalopods that evolved underwater and got hung up pretty darn early on the tech tree due to the fact you can’t really have fire. Think about how much of human technology depends on being able to easily produce and harness fire. And sure, I could posit some phlebotinum substance like “phosphire” which is as easily observed, used, and reproduced by octopus-folk as fire was for us, but the more you’re trying to lean into Science Fiction the more that feels a bit like cheating.

Well, I didn’t say it was a very concise thesis, but there it is. Change my mind.

So longtime readers know that occasionally I like to experiment with Zombie Ranch, which I conceived as a fairly straightforward story — except when it isn’t. Media interludes abound, sometimes in a single page and sometimes occupying entire segments of a given episode. Are you seeing real life as it happens? Real-life but edited and pre-recorded? Is it possible that if you pulled out far enough you’d see Suzie & co. on a soundstage and every bit of what you’ve seen would all turn out to be a lie? Nested in a whole nest of lies? A “lieception,” if you will?

I don’t think I’d ever go that far since it would arguably cheapen the whole experience, the way I often get angry at the “It was all a dream!” cliche if I’ve just spent two hours of my life invested in a movie. But “Wild” Will was fair game and not someone I believe I’ve presented in such a way that the reveal his adventures might be at least partly faked would be a huge shocker.

Still, it puts me in mind once again of that infamous art piece called “The Treachery of Images” by surrealist painter René Magritte, as pictured here:

“Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

“This is not a pipe.”

A thoughtful reminder that no matter how authentic the image of a thing might be, it is not the thing. Yet we hear stories and watch them and read them and our minds and emotions can be swayed into the illusion of reality. I inevitably still get choked up at the ending of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan despite knowing on some level that “Ceci n’est pas une Spock.” Leonard Nimoy has been quoted in interviews as being grateful for his signature role but also mentions at least one tragic occasion where a mother thought he could heal her sick child with his Vulcan touch, and how heartbreaking it was that she had put her hopes in an illusion.

But there you have the matter of degrees. It’s almost an academic distinction for me to declare the “Wild” Will Show fake and the Zombie Ranch show real, because both are technically figments of my (and Dawn’s) imagination. And on the other hand, it makes all the difference because maybe one of those pipes is the one you much more feel you could reach out and grab.

I remember when I was a kid growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, the show Happy Days was a big deal. Happy Days was a sitcom set in the 1950s, and that appealed to people that had been teenagers back then but were now grown adults with their own families, and perhaps more importantly were old enough to have a yearning for the bygone times of their youth.

Nostalgia. It’s a powerful force. A money-making force if you can tap into it. Let about 20-30 years pass, enough time for there to be an entire generation with no personal experience of what their forebears experienced, and you can strike gold by digging back into that recent past. You don’t even have to be subtle about it, as evidenced by That ’70s Show. More recently, Stranger Things unabashedly hit me right in the proverbial feels (as the kids say) because yes, now I’m old enough to have the nostalgias. I would have been pretty much exactly that age at exactly that time, and you better believe I had a bike and blew through quarters at arcades and had my red boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons.

Although weirdest thing? The guys who wrote Stranger Things — The Duffer Brothers — weren’t born until 1984. So they are of that newer generation of whippersnapper Millenials that only know of the early 1980s by proxy.

But I digress. Last week I had Dawn draw something she had no personal experience with, a Mold-A-Rama souvenir machine. I renamed it to Mold-O-Matic because I think that rolls off the tongue better and hey, maybe we’re protected in the <0.000001 chance the makers of the Mold-A-Rama were to get testy about trademarks. Hey, don’t laugh, when I looked them up I found out that a) they’re still around, and b) they seem to be at every frickin’ zoo in America. Also Choose Your Own Adventure recently sued Netflix. Sometimes nostalgia bites back.

But anyhow I won’t lie, it kind of floored me to see a Mold-A-Rama machine when looking up recent images of the San Antonio zoo, lookin much the same as I remembered from little Clint at the L.A. Zoo putting in the coins for his very own overpriced, freshly produced plastic animal, warm and waxy from the bin.

So Dawn’s problem wasn’t that the machines were gone, the way a five year old these days looks confused at a CD — Dawn’s problem was her family never took her to the zoo.

I wonder if that’s why she was much more impressed by the concept of 3D printers than I ever was. I think I might be stuck in thinking of a 3D printer as being nothing more than a programmable Mold-A-Rama.

It tickles me though that while Dawn may not share my memory, more than a few of you readers did. And while I don’t have a kid, I’m pretty sure that if I did and I took them to the zoo I’d want to give them the money for a Mold-A-Rama souvenir and watch them watch the mold press together at their command. Would they be as fascinated as I was? I feel like the fact the machines are still around means some things are just weirdly timeless like that. Probably the best kind of nostalgia of all is the kind you can pass on.

Perhaps “spider-curse” is too strong a wording for some who may have enjoyed Sony’s recent big screen Spider-Man efforts. For me, they haven’t made a decent one since Spider-Man 2, so it’s taken a little less than fifteen years, an abandoned reboot and maybe Marvel Studios taking them aside with Civil War/Homecoming/Infinity War to say “Hey guys, this is how you do it.”

But here it is, and as I write this the news is still fresh that this week it won the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature, which should hopefully keep it in theaters a little longer should any of you feel like catching a showing as a result of this blog.

I’ll be honest, I hadn’t even really had this flick on my radar at all and on paper it sounds like a mess. Bring the “multiple Spider-folk from multiple realities get together to fight something that threatens them all” storyline from the recent Spider comics to the movie theater? I know Guardians of the Galaxy can be seen as the watershed film that convinced Hollywood that general audiences can handle and even enjoy weird shit but Mortal Engines (which I blogged briefly about before our Holiday break) sputtered and died so that’s not always the case. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse hasn’t necessarily been lighting the worldwide box office on fire but I’d say it’s doing better than expected for an animated flick I didn’t see much of a marketing push behind.

Anyhow, the movie wisely distills the huge plethora of Spider-types the comics crossover event gathered into a handful of the break-outs and ditches the notion of an immortal vampire family that feeds on Spider-people to survive (yeah, that happened) in favor of the Kingpin funding the building of an unstable reality bending machine to try to return his dead wife and son to him by contacting a universe where they are still alive.

Trust me when I say that’s rock solid realism by comparison. The circumstances are extraordinary but the characters and their motives are clear, which is danged important especially when things are getting bizarre. I won’t get too much more into the plot and appearances because part of the fun for me was for once going into a comic book movie mostly blind.

And oh boy is this a comic book movie. The people responsible were obvious lovers of all things Spider and put their hearts into this, making the most of it being fully animated to produce what might be the first and only “motion comic” I’ve ever unequivocally enjoyed, because the comic book elements are presented in full, fluid motion. But they’re unashamedly doing things like letting a character’s scream show up as visible letters trailing behind them as they fall. It’s not leaned on so heavily to outstay its welcome, but it was nice to see some experimentation and risk-taking in the name of hearkening to comic book roots.

I should perhaps warn that this sort of enthusiasm and the necessarily hyper-kinetic flow of proper Spider-action may threaten to overwhelm the senses, but if you can make it through the opening credits you’ll probably be okay, especially once you realize it’s not just being done to be edgy and noisy but is a story element. I think it helped my own middle-aged eyes and ears that the film is paced well and has a good amount of quieter moments to balance the battle chaos. And there’s certainly no danger of boredom stemming from another round of the same ol’ orange-and-teal palette.

Anyhow, go see it, or at least make a note to catch it later on when it makes its way onto streaming services. Sony finally got it right again, all on their own, in the most unexpected of places, and this time around if they want to spin off some further features starring Miles Morales, Spider-Gwen or even Peter Porker the Spectacular Spider-Ham, I’m actually looking forwards to the possibilities.

This show, man.

This is the Christmas miracle I didn’t know I needed. I think I heard rumblings about it last year, but it was on SyFy and we ditched our cable TV some years back, deciding to subsist on a diet of Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. Far, far cheaper, although it’s cost us the ability to watch some things in any sort of timely manner. Happy! would be one of those, but the first Season finally dropped on Netflix and I am having such a great time watching it. It genuinely brings me joy.

Considering what goes on in the show, that makes me a twisted bastard. Don’t be fooled by the cartoon unicorn, this is as TV-MA as it gets. This is “holy shit they showed this on SyFy unedited?” level stuff. I mean you figure HBO is no holds barred territory but when I was growing up the channel formerly known as Sci-Fi was fairly restrained. Hell, the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Farscape were only a decade or so ago and everyone was saying “fracking” and “frelling.” Happy! drops the true f-bomb like it was being paid for every four letters, and that’s just the tip of a cavalcade of sex and violence that would put a Scorcese mob flick to shame.

Put the kids and anyone else of sensitive constitution to bed before watching, is what I’m saying here. But then watch. If you’re worried that Happy! is mired in gratuitous sex and violence for its own sake, well… okay, let’s get right to brass tacks: if you enjoyed Garth Ennis comics like Hitman and Preacher, you’ll love this show.

In fact, Happy! did start out as a comic. A graphic novel, to be precise, though not from the twisted minds of Ennis and Steve Dillon. Instead Happy! is the brainchild of the arguably equally twisted minds of Darick Robertson (most famously the penciller of Transmetropolitan) and Grant Morrison, who should need no introduction to comics fans. Transmetropolitan was rather brilliantly twisted in its own right but there’s an even closer connection since Robertson and Ennis worked together on The Boys.

Full disclosure is that I haven’t read the graphic novel, but from the preview pages I’ve scared up the TV show seems to be a pretty faithful adaptation which in no way waters down the tale of a rogue junkie ex-cop and the upbeat imaginary unicorn that befriends him.

Ever played the video game Max Payne? It’s kind of like that. And Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And Harvey. And an aforementioned Ennis comic. Put it all in a blender and you get magic. Dark, dark magic, but for a guy like me Happy! isn’t just an ironic title but something that is fiendishly imaginative in its storytelling and performances and keeps going in unexpected directions that delighted me to the depths of my soiled soul. Hey, it even manages moments of genuine pathos… and reality television.

I could go on and on but for now I’ll just give it my recommendation. Sadly, although it’s been renewed for another Season that won’t be until March and will be exclusively on SyFy then, so I’ll probably be waiting several more months before being able to watch. But for now, what a nice early Christmas present — dark like a lump of coal but also shining like a diamond.

You know, sometimes I’ll explain the premise of Zombie Ranch to people and their response (for good or ill) will be, “Wow, that’s pretty bizarre.”

I can’t really argue that. Bizarre is part of the point. If we were doing just another bog-standard zombie apocalypse scenario, well… fact is we probably wouldn’t be doing this at all. As post-apocalypse settings go, the zombie option isn’t very unique in of itself.

On the other hand, if you came to me with a pitch that said, “this is a post-apocalypse world where the cities of Earth have been transformed into gigantic mobile fortresses and they rove around the wasteland eating each other for spare parts!” — that’s a more inherently unique concept. Certainly worthy of a “wow, that’s pretty bizarre.”

I’ve long been of the mindset that if you’re going to go over the same well-trodden tale in a well-trodden setting–say, a group of comrades in a fantasy world of elves, dwarves and orcs on a quest to destroy some Macguffin of evil–you better bring your storytelling A-game to the table. If you’ve got a more unique spin on things, then I’m going to cut you varying amounts of slack because you’re getting out and “swinging for the fences.” That’s an American baseball term about throwing caution to the wind and just chasing the pitch for all you’re worth… you might strike out horribly, but if you connect right you’re going to send that ball over the outfield barriers and earn yourself an automatic home run.

And in those cases you’ve got to at least respect the enthusiasm, and the fact that, yeah, gigantic mobile cities eating each other is a funkily fascinating idea to chase.

Is it going to get me out to see Mortal Engines in a theater? Probably not, because movies are frickin’ expensive these days. But again, a certain amount of respect even if it ends up in execution as total cheese (or worse, mediocrity).

Here’s the trailer, by the way, if y’all ain’t seen it yet. You decide.

Pardners, y’all may or may not be aware of this, but I’m one of those heathen souls that didn’t care for True Grit. The Coen Brothers remake, that is. Loved the book, love the original film, and normally I cozy right up to the Coens’ signature surrealistic stylings. True Grit being a quirky story in its own right seemed like a natural fit, but… well, I’ll let 2011 me explain if you feel the notion. The best way I would describe it now would probably be that, being familiar with the pre-existing material, I was highly aware of the particular Coen spin upon it and it was just too dang much. “Seeing the wires,” as it were.

But that’s then, and this is 2018, and it turns out the Coens weren’t done with the Western genre just yet. Nossir, not by a long shot. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, now available on Netflix for your viewing enjoyment, represents their explicit return West of the Mississip and South of the Twentieth Century, and it is a charming and disarming effort that at long last has provided me everything I might have hoped for in a confluence of Coens and Cowboys.

What’s the difference? Well, for one thing–and I had no notion of this going in–it turns out that this film is actually six films in one. An anthology of tales that are unrelated save for their particular time and place in the American Old West, much like the big collection of Zane Grey that sits on my bookshelf, and in fact presented exactly as if they were short stories in an oversized prestige edition, illustrated bookplates, frosted separator pages and all. If you’re old enough to remember such affairs (or perhaps at least have run across one in your local library or family home), the nostalgia will hit you hard before Tim Blake Nelson has sung his first horseback stanza.

Yes, only the first tale features the titular singin’ cowpoke Buster Scruggs, and unfortunately I suppose it’s a bit of a spoiler to say, since I managed to not know and because of that was rather intrigued by outcome. Following on are five more vignettes of varying tone and theme which run the gamut not only of the Western genre’s storytelling potential but the various moods and fringes of the Coens as well, where you might be pleasantly reminded how the same men who brought you Raising Arizona also brought you No Country for Old Men.

That was my reaction, anyhow. I would contend none of the stories presented would be capable of holding up a feature film in their own right, but as short subjects they are right at home, and neither they nor the Coen stylings they feature overstayed their welcome. “Meal Ticket” was the story that perhaps most threatened to become tedious for me, but was also paradoxically the most emotional for me when it hit its marks, and when its abrupt ending finally came it left me feeling almost guilty instead of relieved.

Anyhow, if you’re a fan of the Coens, the Western genre, or both, there’s something in Buster Scruggs you’re going to like, and I believe that’s true even if their most recent cinematic efforts haven’t given you quite the thrill you used to experience. It makes me want to see the Coens do more collections like this, but exploring different genres every time: pulp horror, perhaps, or fairy tales. But in the meantime I’ll be selfishly happy it was the Westerns that got the nod, here. Recommend.

Bill Maher is a total a-hole.

Now I was already of that opinion prior to his recent comments on Stan Lee’s death (and comics in general), but he does like to remind me every so often why it’s best just to ignore him.

And that’s all the effort I personally care to spend on the situation. You can read more here, if you want. I suggest having better things to do. Such as reading comics.

I don’t think of myself as a composer by any stretch, and yet here I am fumbling my way through another song. I did some musical theater and glee club (yes, glee club) in my academic years, but that was so long ago I’ve likely lost any pitch and breath control that I might have once enjoyed. Vocal chords are like any other muscle you don’t keep exercising, and my exercise for the past several years has mostly been singing in the shower and/or car where I pray no one is overhearing my gasps and squeaky graspings at octaves I can no longer easily reach, if indeed I ever did.

It’s probably for the best my musical soundtrack CDs were stolen so long ago CDs were still a relevant form of media. Belting out songs from Phantom of the Opera or Les Miserables was always something of an exercise in hubris, I’m sure, and infinitely moreso now.

So why, oh why, did I bother recording and uploading this? A capella, on a cheap headset mic in my living room, scratchy-throated during a 2am bout of insomnia? I can’t ascribe that to hubris, so it must be sheer masochism.

Well, that, and this: whenever I would read the lyrics of a song presented in a silent medium, it would be somewhat frustrating. I would try to imagine the tune Tolkien or Alan Moore had in mind and, on those occasions where a tune actually did exist, would find out I was waaaay, waaaay off.

So I sang out the tune in my head, crappy as the effort is, and linked it in the comic blog. So now if there’s anyone out there like me, they at least have something to work with.

You’ve probably heard the news by now. After 95 years on this Earth, Stan “The Man” Lee has passed.

I never actually met him. I could have. Over the years I’d seen him at various comic conventions, in fact so many it became a bit of a joke when some show would tout “FEATURING STAN LEE!” If you paid him, he would come.

Now that he’s gone, do I regret never shaking his hand? Well, no. I’ve searched my feelings and what I felt then is what I feel now… he was an important figure in comics, yet not one I ever felt like I needed to spend time with. But it’s nothing personal.

What I said two paragraphs ago wasn’t meant as a dig at him, either. In fact all I can think of these days is that I hope he *did* get paid, and paid well, and most importantly that the people he had running his business affairs didn’t cheat him too badly as he hauled his 80-something and then 90-something self around the world meeting and greeting fans. The story of all that is a sad one and if you don’t know about it then if you’re currently in mourning for him I recommend not googling it up, at least not until you’ve had some days to process.

Or you might be in the other camp, the ones whose hot takes are already here and there reminding us Stan Lee was everything that was wrong with the comics industry, screwing over everyone he worked with while stealing credit for their hard work and creativity, etc. etc.

Yeah, you might want to tone that down a bit. Whatever else Stan might have been, however much it might rankle when a mainstream article dubbed him “the inventor of comics,” I don’t think it can be argued that comics, or at least Marvel comics wouldn’t be where they are today without his seemingly indefatigable hype powering the promotional and PR engines. And he was an important icon for a lot of folks. He remains perhaps the only comics creative whose name the average layperson knows around the world. How much credit should he get for Spider-Man? People have argued that for decades. Was he a genius with his finger on the pulse of the public? Or just someone who threw out a whole crapload of superhero and supervillain concepts, declaring them all the next big thing with his singularly hyperbolic enthusiasm, and just separating out whoever caught on while letting the failures fade and be forgotten?

Well, shoot, I have to admit sometimes Dawn and I wish we could have had a Stan pounding the proverbial drum for our efforts. Spider-Man made it big and Frog-Man did not, but Stan presented both with equal fervor. That’s also what everyone I know who did meet him would always say, too: he’d make you feel like the most special person, even if it was just a few moments of him signing an autograph for you before you had to make way for the hundreds waiting behind you. Kirby and Ditko and Romita were all creative powerhouses and absolutely deserve their own spotlights, but Lee was that rare blend of shameless schmoozing and earnest belief in comics that never once doubted that you–yes you–should have them rolled up in your back pocket ready to read, share and enjoy. With his “Stan’s Soapbox” inserts and Bullpen Bulletins he was blogging long before there was a web to blog on, doing his best to inform and make you feel like a part of the family, and sometimes poking at the “Distinguished Competition” but never too roughly even though he would obviously prefer that you declared “Make Mine Marvel.”

Oh yeah, he also really liked alliteration. Peter Parker, Pepper Potts, Happy Hogan, Stephen Strange, Bruce Banner, and many more are testament to that.

Penny Arcade had Robert Khoo and that was a pretty amazing success story, but Khoo had nothing on Smilin’ Stan and his cheesily infectious style of salesmanship. Whether you consider him an Edison or a Tesla or somewhere in between, I think he brought some great things into this world, and so I’ll salute him as he leaves it at long last. He didn’t start comics and his death doesn’t finish them, but he’s an important part of their history.

Oh man.

So I’ve written many times before about how this page-a-week serial format requires writing on multiple levels. I try to make each page its own thing, that also collects itself into the flow of an Issue/Episode installment, and then the even longer term flow of conceptualizing a Volume of several issues, and the eventual goal of wrapping up the whole comic in a way that will provide a satisfying experience from start to finish.

That’s immense if I start to think about it too much, so I try to keep to the classic method of breaking down the big task into the smaller tasks so I don’t go blitheringly insane with the scope. On the other hand, even though I’ve done perhaps better than I ever expected at keeping the whole train chugging along this past nine years, I must admit I’m currently fretting over this episode that we just finished. As a day-to-day I think it’s worked well, as an issue it’s good, and it weaves into the overall story fine. But the eventual Volume could be a problem, because this is meant to be the first installment of a future Volume 3 and I feel I may have relied too much on references, locations and callbacks from the previous issue. I fear a theoretical customer picking up a theoretical Volume 3 as their first entry to the story could end up pretty lost as a result.

Well, I was bound to slip up at some point. And fact is we haven’t even put out Volume 2 yet, which isn’t even a given unless we get another successful crowdfunding done next year. A Volume 3 is so much vapor and years down the pipe, and it’s probably paradoxically optimistic of me to even be worrying about it.

And if we do happen to get there, well, folks like a little extra content in their trade collections, right? I’m sure I’ll think of something.