Brand X

We did it.

Tonight, against all odds and most initial projections, against the predictions of everyone including my brother, who's a very shrewd guy, we pulled off the political feat of the century. Yes, I was moved to tears by Barack Obama's acceptance speech tonight. That doesn't prove much; I was drunk, and I get sentimental when I'm drunk. What will be remembered from this race is not Obama's stirring acceptance speech, it's not even McCain's surprisingly graceful concession speech. I think that in twenty years, when people try to talk about this election, the phrase they'll come back to is "We're voting for the nigger." It's ugly and embarrassing and emblematic of the political coalition Barack Obama has built out of nothing but dreams and truth and the hope for a better tomorrow.

Speaking of tomorrow, tomorrow I will have lots of caveats and dire warnings about how bad everything's going to get. So will a lot of people, and that's valuable and good.

But not tonight.

Tonight, I am proud of my country.

Tonight, I know that we set up safeguards against bad government when we first designed this republic, and they don't work perfectly but they do work.

Tonight, I believe in democracy.

Tonight, I know that our system of government, flawed and crazy though it may be, works when we need it to. Our terrible governments, which come as they do to all nations, do not need to be gunned down in war or revolution. They are chased from office by the basic structure of our nation, by the common sense of its citizens, by the dreams we still share of an ideal we have never reached, but still strive for.

America fucks up, quite often and quite spectacularly. Nonetheless, some of us crazy bastards still believe in it. And after tonight, I don't feel I have to explain why.

Dire prophecies on a blasted heath can wait until morning. Tonight, at this hour, in this minute, and with this precise blood-alcohol content, America is the greatest fucking nation in history, and I feel humbly lucky to be one of its citizens and to have cast my vote in this election.

It's been an interesting summer, particularly if one is a geek, particularly if one is a comics geek who really loves movies.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK would be the best superhero movie I'd ever seen, except that this was the same summer that IRON MAN came out. And IRON MAN would the best superhero movie I'd ever seen, except that this was the same summer that THE DARK KNIGHT came out.

Enough has been written about these movies already, and I don't need to add more wank. I just want to point out that this autumn finds me coming off a summer where, whatever else has gone on, the comics movies I dreamed of as a boy have finally, after Christ knows how many half-assed false starts, come to life. And yes, I know that the half-assed false starts are necessary, they're what lays the groundwork for the great stuff. Just as BATMAN BEGINS had to spend much of the movie explaining how there can be a Batman, freeing up THE DARK KNIGHT to just be about Batman and his world. And that brings me to something else.

I recently saw a movie that won't be out until next year. A test screening for a much-anticipated geek film, one that many of my tribe have grave doubts about. Thing is, it's good. It's not perfect, but it's really, really good. It excited me, it moved me, it did what I wished to god it would do and pulled off things I didn't think were possible. Most of all, it does what its source did: it takes the visual and conceptual vocabulary of previous work in the genre, the tropes that the audience has been trained to accept, and uses them to tell a new kind of story that the tropes haven't been used to tell before.

That is one of the kinds of storytelling that I find most exciting. I hadn't dared hope that the movie would get it, would understand why it was important. I've been disappointed too many times--we all have. Instead, I see the movie version of this particular genre starting to take some of the steps that its antecedent did, and that's thrilling to me. I want more stories, I want different stories, I want ALL the stories, dammit.

I want to go into more detail about media feeding of geek desires, about the Drought and the Conquest and so on, but right now I haven't time, so I'll leave you, my (at this point only the) loyal readers, with this awesome reading of the current presidential campaign as mythology: the Obamadammerung,.

Writers will do damn near anything to avoid writing. Every group of professional and semi-pro writers I've ever known agrees that one vital professional skill must be learned: the knack of sitting down and actually writing instead of engaging in vigorous, busy, productive non-writing. It doesn't help that these days we all write on computers, and those computers are connected to the internet. To rephrase an old adage, writing provides a sense of self-satisfaction eventually, but smacking some guy around at length in a comment thread provides self-satisfaction now.

In the writer's conference on the WELL, we used to joke about "burly nurses", personal assistants we all wished we could afford who'd just hold us down in our chairs and stop us going around pretending to do other stuff. A joke, sure, but reread MISERY sometime. Paul Sheldon's trapped in an ungodly nightmare by a burly nurse who forces him to write, but he's also more productive than he's ever been and produces a novel that he genuinely loves and which makes him a ton of dough. Stephen King clearly understands the issue at hand.

Writers don't really know how writing works. We understand a lot of the craft, but there's always that step in the equation labeled "and then a miracle happens" and we hate thinking too much about that step. As I've said before, we're a superstitious and cowardly lot. One of the things we do, being superstitious and cowardly and needing to find a way to work anyway, is we build rituals. Little or big things we do to make that stupid miracle happen, to force our brains to acknowledge "This ain't clean-the-fridge time, this ain't catch-up-on-the-BBC time, this is writing time." Mine is smoking.

I have a small collection of decent but cheap pipes, some antiques, some just well broken in. I have a nice little antique pipe rack/humidor where my pipes are racked efficiently around a well-lined wooden box--I keep the box full of a special blend I get from the best tobacconist in Portland. It's a mix of two of their popular blends, my own special flavor that tastes a little different in each of five different pipes. I love the comforting physical ritual of filling and tamping the pipe, lighting a match or occasionally my Zippo pipe lighter, working the flame around the surface of the tobacco, retamping the layer of fine ash, and keeping the whole affair lit and gently burning (not too hot, but never quite going out) until I knock it clean at the end of a long, relaxing smoke.

Thing is, I only ever do that when I write. I don't smoke on breaks at day jobs, I don't smoke after meals or after sex or watching videos. If I've got my pipe lit, it means I'm writing. The relaxation helps me loosen up enough to let the words flow, but so does a shot of whisky, and I don't reserve whisky just for writing. A nice pipe of tobacco, however, is an unmistakable signal to my brain that we're not doing anything else right now, we're not reading humor columns or surfing for porn, we're not playing with the cats or following more than one Wikipedia link, we're writing. Stupid? Sure, but it works. Rather like a lot of human habits, really.

I know various creative types read this blog, writers and designers and artists and whatnot. I'm curious, what are your rituals? What do you do, if anything, that puts you in the zone when it comes to your creativity? Music, exercise, locale, tools, preambles, rewards, what do you use? Break your customary silence and comment; the results can only be interesting. Besides, writing a nice long comment's a good way to put off work.

Labels: writing

The world got a little crappier today. Rory Root died of complications from a hernia operation. For those who don't know, Rory ran Comic Relief, the best comics shop in the country. Nobody disputes that he was the heart and soul and brains of the store, built it from nothing and made it what it was.

I wandered into Comic Relief in 1989, at the age of twelve. I didn't leave for about six years. Like most adolescents, I didn't really have much money of my own, and in most comics shops I wouldn't have been able to enjoy much. Rory, however, insisted on a free-reading policy. New issues and trade paperbacks were out on the shelves to be enjoyed, and you could read all day without buying anything or having the staff give you so much as a cross look. That was my education.

I read Matt Wagner's Mage three or four times before I finally scraped together the money to buy it. I discovered Harvey Kurtzman because Betsy's Buddies had boobs on the cover. (That's a big deal when you're thirteen, okay?) It took me a long time to give manga a chance, but when I did it was because it was free to read and Rory recommended some.

I discovered Will Eisner in Comic Relief. I still remember reading The Building for the first time and being amazed that comics could do that.

I discovered EC Comics in Comic Relief. There were some really nice reprints coming out around that time, and I didn't even really know they were from the 50s, I just knew I'd never seen anything like them and I read them and reread them even when they gave me nightmares.

I discovered Alan Moore in Comic Relief. I read D.R. and Quinch and wondered what about the style seemed so similar to some of the other really cool stuff I'd read.

I actually met Jack Kirby in Comic Relief. First I just waited in line to shake his hand like everyone else, but then two hours later I came back and he was still there, chatting with Rory and a few diehard fans, telling stories from the 30s and answering geeky questions and refusing to say a bad word about anyone he'd ever worked with.

1989-1995 was a bad period in mainstream American comics, overhyped and underwritten superhero saturation fed by a hollow collector boom, in so many unopenable plastic bags that it's called the Mylar Age of Comics. If I'd been in any other comics store, I wouldn't have been able to read anything without paying for it, and if I did pay for something it would likely as not have been written by Rob fucking Liefeld or somebody. There'd have been nobody to push the good stuff from the small publishers, nobody to nurture an interest in comics as an artform rather than an investment, nobody to let a kid loose to explore all the worlds on all the pages.

Rory's dead and I should be writing about him, and I know this post is mostly about me. That's because I'm not qualified to write about Rory's life. He touched too many people, changed too many lives and fortunes, did too much for too long for an artform that everyone used to dismiss as irrelevant trash. All I can do is tell a little about how he touched my life, what his work and his store meant to me.

Without Rory Root, I wouldn't be anything like the man I am today. I wouldn't have the life I do, I wouldn't be the person I am. For good or ill, he changed my life irrevocably, just by running the best comic book store there ever was. And I'm far, far from unique in that, but it's what I have to remember him by.

Labels: comics

Because this is awesome and deserves the hits.


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo

Full update later. Much been going on. But it's officially the 8th now.

Seven or eight days in, 26 pages and counting. I've never produced this much script this fast in my life, including last year's Script Frenzy. Evidently the moral of the story is this: to get a story written fast, first carry it around for fourteen years. This may not work for all definitions of "fast".

Labels: script frenzy, writing

Last June, for Script Frenzy, I wrote an entire screenplay in a month only to find it came out short of the length requirement. I counted this as a partial victory and promptly lost the script in a hard drive crash because I'm dumb. Now, because I'm dumb and persistent, i.e. a writer, I'm doing it again. This year Script Frenzy is in April and the length requirement has changed from 20,000 words to 100 pages, which is a better measure for a script anyway.

I shouldn't have any trouble filling those pages, though filling them in time will be tricky. This time I've chosen a big old epic space opera that's been kicking around my head for years, an adaptation of a project I've tried before in a different form. It's an experiment with a structure I call the "long trailer", which I'll probably expound further on later in the month. For now, I'm having fun making up alien names that sound evocative of what I want them to mean without being too on-the-nose. Darth Vader, after all, is "Dark Father" via mangled German, and there was a time when Darth Vader was very cool indeed, before they changed his name to Little Orphan Ani.

Labels: script frenzy, writing

So, as of this writing many people are pissed off at Hillary Clinton for taking yet another cheap shot at Barack Obama. They think that someone who acts like that shouldn't be president. Frankly, I'm inclined to agree--a candidate that devoted to personal destruction and winning at any cost is simply not who we need in the Oval Office, especially not right now.

I do, however, have a recurring political fantasy wherein she swallows her pride and accepts the vice-presidential slot. Yes, this would require both her and Obama getting past some things they've said, but they're adults, they can do that. I think that President Obama and Vice-President Clinton could do more for this country than any administration in decades.

"Wait, Noah," you say, "you'd really want her as the VP despite her track record of harsh statements, underhanded tricks, and general stubborn troublemaking?" No, I don't want her as VP despite those things. I think she'd make a good VP because of those things.

Let's look at Clinton's qualifications for a second. She's smart as hell, very hardworking, very capable, and has the best set of connections you could ask for. It's no secret that much of life and almost all of politics is about who you know, and the Clinton Rolodex is a treasure trove of the right people to call in any situation. And yes, like most Southern politicians, she's a streetfighter. She'll dig in, like she's doing in this nomination race, and fight you for every inch of ground, hit you with anything that comes to hand, and never give up while she's still breathing. Those are semi-admirable but not inspiring qualities in a leader, but they're incredibly useful qualities in a leader's capable assistant.

Obama, as I've said before, is the inspiring, visionary leader this country needs now. Clinton is treating this race as an old-fashioned delegate fight, while Obama's treating it as a referendum on his vision for America's future. This year, at this historical moment, Obama's right and Clinton's wrong. Old-fashioned ideas and solutions are not what we need to dig us out of the deep hole we're in; we need bold new ideas and a leader who can make us believe in them. However, actually getting those ideas implemented would go a lot better with some old-fashioned junkyard-dog tactics behind the scenes.

Every vice-president is different. Sometimes they're a quiet nonentity, sometimes they're the president's rival, sometimes they're the real power in the White House. If she could find the courage to take the job, Hillary Clinton could make the vice-presidency her own, make it the fiercely effective backup to President Obama's agenda. Let's face it, their agendas are largely pretty similar--if Hillary wants to see that agenda enacted, she could do it better from the smaller office. Let Obama stay out front and draw the fire, while she makes the calls and pushes through the legislation and sets up the meetings and kicks the necessary ass.

John Edwards has been talked about for the vice-presidency, of course, but I think we all know deep down that he was born for the job of United States Attorney General. Let the man do what he does best: unleash the power of the U.S. legal system on bastards who think they can get away with hurting people for money or ideology or power.

The image I keep coming back to is something Gail Simone once said: “When a giant robot attacks Metropolis, send Superman. ... When a car is hijacked by an escaped loony, turn on the bat signal, by all means. But if an ARMY shows up on your doorstep, that’s when you call in Wonder Woman." Wonder Woman is the only one of DC's major heroes whose entire raison d'etre is to be the perfect warrior for good, and like Hillary Clinton, she'll fight like hell to her last drop of blood and never give an inch.

So there's your metaphor. Obama is Superman, the inspiring leader whose charisma and power and vision set the standard. Clinton is Wonder Woman, not because of her gender but because of her skill set; she's the fighter. Edwards is Batman, the guy who gets the criminals no one else can catch. Cheesy? Maybe. But try believing in it for a second, see how it feels.

That combination of abilities in one administration could potentially achieve more good than anyone since Roosevelt. A new Marshall Plan for the Middle East, a revitalization of our currently-fucked economy, the reestablishment of America's role as a moral and political leader in world affairs. Maybe it wouldn't, of course, but we'd at least know we got the best possible people to try. Imagine it: Obama in the lead, changing the course of public opinion, leaping political divisions in a single bound, shrugging off right-wing attacks like bee stings. Clinton in the halls of power, getting the votes and making the threats, ensuring that the job gets done and done right. Edwards... well, personally I imagine Edwards appearing from the shadows in corporate boardrooms and whispering "Does the phrase war profiteering mean anything to you, Mr. Chairman?", but I may be overextending the metaphor an inch or two.

I don't know if Clinton has what it takes to accept second place; the very qualities that would make her so good at the job mean she's unlikely to take it. But it's been a long time since I've been able to dream of a really good American government, and for right now I'm going to continue to dream, and I'm not sorry.

Oh, and just as a geeky side note: in this metaphor, Bill Clinton is the Martian Manhunter.

Labels: politics

Like all good Americans, I read Girl Genius regularly, and I buy the printed collections from time to time.

The art's always terrific, as one has come to expect, but today's page literally made me stop reading and say "Wow" with one panel.



(Cropped for clarity and size--composition slightly damaged in the process. Look at the original to get the full effect.)

Let's look at what exactly makes this panel so good, shall we? First and most obviously, there's a great visceral sense of movement; nothing here is static. Agatha is flying out of the panel at us, a classic old effect that works unless you overuse it, which Foglio doesn't. Those knives are flying in straight, hard lines with a great sense of velocity, so they look good and dangerous. (Yes, those are both effects Jack Kirby pioneered, so this panel is two-thirds Kirby. What comics art isn't two-thirds Kirby?) Von Zinzer is shoving Agatha hard, and his line is a solid diagonal, a well-rooted architectural support that lets us feel the force of his shove.

This leads me into the really remarkable thing about this panel, which is the lines. There are three characters in this panel: Agatha, Von Zinzer, and the not-a-kitchen as represented by the knives. All three are represented by totally different types of lines. The knives are all straight lines moving in one direction, and covered in pointy bits. Agatha is all curved lines (All together now, boys: "I'll say she is!" There, now it's out of your system.), not a straight line anywhere on her, forming a bow around the point where Von Zinzer's pushing her. And Von Zinzer is made of hard angles and blocks. Look at the man, he's built out of gray-and-black bricks. His shoulder looks like it was quarried.

The art on this comic is always terrific, but it doesn't often make me stop dead and stare like this did. When someone pulls that off, I like to take a moment to respect that level of accomplishment. The control of his medium Foglio's displaying here is genuinely breathtaking, and I think a little nerdy analysis only serves to highlight that.

Labels: comics