The Fractal Hall Journal

  Welsh folklore has October 31st as the first of three spirit nights, the others being Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve. I can almost believe all of these days really are times that the departed are allowed back to earth. Each of the days has its own- I’m not sure I know the correct description. Mood? Tone? An indescribable feeling that each of the days is different to every other day of the year?

All, of course, are social fictions, superstition and tradition colouring our experience of the world. But even so, I feel all these days are appropriate to what is ultimately being commemorated. Halloween, most clearly of them all, signifies the beginning of the death of the year.

Life and death, the cycle of inevitable decline and rebirth, all concepts familiar, I believe, to every single human being, to one extent or another. These are very, very ancient ideas, ones that, should we stop and ponder them, connect us to the oldest of our ancestors. Halloween’s predecessor, whether called Samhain to the Irish, or Calan Gaeaf in Wales, or by a name long forgotten, was of great significance to the people of the British Isles long before the Romans, or the Christians. It still resonates (literally) today.

A pumpkin head. A witch’s broom. Gnarled and twisted branches. Masks, costumes, rituals, candles and an orange glow through a low mist on a cold, dark night.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Hollywood…

  Batman Returns    Spider-Man 2    Daredevil …Not even Optimus Prime can break the cycle and keep his fucking mask on.

  

Last week’s posts were written over a fairly long period, and in retrospect I ramble a little with no clear conclusions drawn. When I started writing them, I’m pretty sure I had a point, but if so I’ve long since forgotten it.

This is what I think I’m trying to get at:

a) Increasing danger is a crucial element of drama, but needs to be handled carefully in ongoing comics.

b) Serial comics are not one long film. Using a movie style story structure works well in single issues or limited story arcs, but when applied to long runs of various titles, can lead to repetition rather than innovation.

c) A black and white worldview is inevitably reinforced by super-hero comics, but is not an acceptable way to interact with the world.

d) This kind of worldview is damaging, and has led, I believe, to the kind of offensive intolerance all too often fostered by and published on the largely anonymous internet.

e) I really like super-heroes with secret identities.

f) Regardless of anything else I’ve written, and due to my own fannish lack of perspective, if Peter Parker gets his secret identity back, I will forgive damn near anything.

g) I don’t really know if it should be “Spider-Man” or “Spider-man”. The latter, I suspect.

Ultimately, while I may have reservations about Civil War, they’re all down to personal preference. I can’t (and won’t) fault Marvel for the event, as it’s been a storming success for them, and it’s obviously given a lot of people what they wanted to see. There’s no doubt that it’s been a hell of a rollercoaster, and that the current set of Marvel writers have been invigorated by the possibilities of the new status quo. There’s a real energy in many of the titles.

And, regardless of what the hell they decide to do with Peter Parker’s marriage, with Aunt May, or whether or not they keep to their almost-weekly schedule, if they give Spider-man his secret ID back, I will joyfully hop back on that particular copyright-maintaining train.

I don’t doubt that writers of everlasting comics can learn from these new fangled moving pictures, but ultimately they are two distinct media types that need a different approach, not just in execution but in the very heart of their story structure. For example, just look at the amount of times a costumed adventurer is umasked in a film, and the amount of outings that have occurred in recent comics.

A film maker, as a standard part of her job, would ask herself what could be worse thing to happen to her protagonist? Problem is, if the character’s a cape, there’s one obvious answer. Because of this, as well as an actor wanting more face time, they can’t seem to keep their masks on.

This strikes me as the approach taken by many comics writers of late. Unmasking is rife, which annoys me for three reasons:

1) All we get are dozens of outed heroes, all going through the same stories over and over. Yes, I know superheroes are just like celebrities. I know it must be horrible for your enemies to know where your family lives. I have read all of these before, and it isn’t cutting edge if I read it over and over in a 90s Image comic.

2) Ongoing, endless comic series need a different story telling technique to a done-in-one movie. Once the worst has happened, there is nowhere else to go, and frankly I just don’t trust the current crop of writers to show me something new or interesting. In fact, I think secret identities create more story possibilities.

3) Personally, I really like secret identities, and when I handed my cash over it was to see Spider-man, not bloody Peter Parker.

Let me clarify a point; I have no problem with bad things happening to my favourite characters. I have a problem with them being turned into mass-murdering supervillains, and I can only hope that a) somewhere on the horizon there is an Iron Man: Rebirth, and b) I don’t have to wait fifteen or so years for it.

The problem isn’t the bad things happening; after all, that’s just drama. The problem is things constantly getting worse and worse with no hope in sight. Unrelenting grimness and misery is not necessarily what I want week after week. I don’t think this is mindless fanguish on my part, because I think I know the structural method behind recent stories, and why I think the method is faulty.

I once read Brian Bendis advocating the idea that stories should be advanced by making the worse thing possible to happen to your protagonist. He’s also recommended the book Story by Robert McKee to aspiring writers, and I’m guessing that this book is where Bendis found this theory most strongly presented.

To over-simplify, McKee’s ideal story structure for films (and novels, as I recall) is like an oscilating line on a graph, with negative and positive incidents occuring after the other and increasing in importance until the climax. In particular, McKee advises that the film must represent the most significant period of the protagonists life. After all, if it doesn’t why is the story at all interesting?

This is the crux of the problem. A film is self contained, even if it ends up spawning sequels. Ongoing superhero comics are not. Every issue cannot possibly be the most important incident in Peter Parker’s life. But the more the oscillating graph line is followed, the worse and worse things get, which is exactly the pattern that has emerged of late.

As far as I can recall, I’ve always known Marvel and DC were separate companies, and that while Superman and Batman would (frequently) team up, they probably wouldn’t have Peter Parker on the JLA speed dial. Then again, they could live in the same universe as him, and still not know who he was; that’s a critical part of the character’s concept to me, and probably why, amongst other reasons, I don’t get any Spider-man titles anymore now he’s a world-famous, out-of-the-secret-identity-closet Avenger.

That said, I’m certain I was a teenager before I started to recognise the individual tones the two companies had. I’ll concede that the two lines are now and have always been fairly different, but it’s only in the Sixties material that I’ve ever detected significantly distinct philosophies between the two. I’d argue that the relatively free movement of creators means that certain idiosynchratic styles will be apparent whatever company the work’s being done for. Grant Morrison will always write like Grant Morrison, for example, and for the past fifteen years or so you can track my ‘preferred’ company by whoever was publishing his major work at the time; DC during JLA, Marvel for New X-Men, then back for Seven Soldiers, 52 and All-Star Superman.

Even that admission feels strange to me. How can I really prefer one corporate entity to another, in particular companies that draw from the same, relatively small creative pool? I may have gone right off the Spider-books and the rest of the Civil War palaver, but I’ll still get Daredevil until the day I die and I still get plenty of other Marvel titles. And as much DC stuff as I get at the moment, no power on Earths One through Fifty-Two will get me to buy Countdown right now.

Having said that, I don’t advocate thinking in absolutes. It’s too easy to do, and God knows I’ve done it myself on far too many occasions. Until my discovery of comic blogs and message boards in the fairly recent past, I hadn’t realised there were so many people who almost exclusively liked either Marvel or DC over the other, and believe me I must have been particularly oblivious to not notice that. In the declining popularity of the underwear-pervert comic industry, this tendancy is unimaginably destructive, but unsurprising considering the lack of foresight, insight or empathy for anything that elements (hopefully, the minority) of the super-hero comics community regularly display on an almost daily basis. In the kind of world we live in, maybe this really shouldn’t have surprised me.

The concept of two opposing forces forever in conflict is a common human conceit, one that colours our world view to destructive effect. Light versus Dark, right versus left, good versus evil; all fun concepts to explore in a story, but unforgivable and ignorant when applied to human society. The result of this kind of thinking is unavoidably apparent in the history of the 21st Century so far.

In this fictional world of irreconcilable extremes, much weight is given to the mythical centre, and the value of bipartisanship. The advocates of the middle ground compromise as the optimum solution are fooling themselves, unwilling to think beyond the political ’spectrum’. We can talk about shades of grey, but even this suggests our default foundation must be the fable of black versus white.

There is no spectrum, and no-one can be placed precisely along this strip, or assigned a specific political frequency. No metaphor can encapsulate the nuances of political viewpoint. I may be a socialist, but I suspect my views on the free market, Welsh nationalism, foreign policy or the criminal justice system will not align with others on the same political wing; unsurprising, as the socialist movement in Britain is based almost entirely on an inability to agree on anything.

And now the burning question of our age: how does this line of reasoning apply to superhero comics?

Hot Fuzz

This film sucks. Nah, just kidding. This film is as joyous as finding out on my fourth birthday that magic fairy unicorns are real and they love me.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

Let’s face it, they could have filmed a freshly minted turd for two hours (some say that’s exactly what they did), but as long as it had those 10 perfect minutes of the Silver Surfer, I’d still give it 5 stars.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

At one point, the hero sword fights a monster in the riggings of a ship plunging into a whirlpool, while carrying the creature’s still beating heart in a box. If you don’t like that, you don’t like good things and you and me can’t be friends any more.

Sunshine

If there’s one thing they get absolutely, perfectly right in this film, it’s the sheer, mind-blowing, flesh-boiling brightness of a fusion furnace a hundred Earths in diameter.

Why is it 2007 feels very now but when i write 2010 it feels like actual SF proper future flying cars and food pills? will by the time we reach 2010 will i be as blase about that as i am this current year? Is there a kind of inflation involved so that the closer we get to a date the more our expectations are scaled down to the reality that no matter how much cool future stuff we get it will be both expensive and probably won’t work?

Are all these questions rhetorical? or just a bit Po-Mo pretentious?