(Big &) Tall Tales

Debtor’s Prison - Greg Rucka

So, the other day I happen to stumble across the fact the Greg Rucka has a new novel on the verge of release called Alpha, the first book in a series starring protagonist Jad Bell.  It came out two days ago, I believe; I bought and downloaded it yesterday.

Greg Rucka is one of only two authors, the other being J. K. Rowling, who have written books that I literally could not put down. I read most of the Atticus Kodiak series in one sitting apiece.  I’m intentionally not doing that with this book…my life isn’t one where I can sacrifice a night’s sleep, or worse, a day’s work, lost in a book…not anymore. But let me tell you, as I polished off Chapter Five last night, the temptation was there.

I discovered Greg Rucka’s work in the pages of the Batman titles. I’m pretty sure he came on board during the “No Man’s Land” storylines, and I was chafing at that point under the departure/dismissal of the writers I’d been used to, but Greg’s work grew on me…quickly. “No Man’s Land” didn’t thrill me at first, but I LOVED the ending, and when Greg took over as the writer on Detective Comics, I was hooked, and it was time for me to check out this guys books.

At this point, I was only approaching Greg as a fan. I wasn’t serious enough about my writing at the time to see him as an idol, although that was soon to change. Indeed, Greg is partially responsible for what I started taking my writing more seriously. Reading more about him, reading interviews, even meeting him briefly at San Diego Comic-Con, all of this stuff made me realize how seriously he takes his writing. Once I started reading Queen & Country, and started understanding how much research he has to do for all of his work, I knew that I was being a lazy P.O.S., and that if I wanted a career like he has, and I want a career very much like he has, that I needed to start making some changes. All of this was happening right around the time that I met Matt Filer, with whom I conceived and began Masque of the Dragons…which later became the book that got me noticed by an editor at DC.

Greg, along with Brian Michael Bendis (who correctly made me realize that the dedication necessary for success might very well cost me some friendships) taught me to take my career seriously. But he also made me a better writer.

If you’ve never read any of Greg’s work, you really, really should. Man, he puts his characters through the wringer. Atticus and the people to whom he is close all suffer. I mean seriously suffer, so much so that you read his books in a state of extreme tension. No one feels safe, and you need that feeling to make a thriller  achieve its highest potential. Poor Tara Chace in the Q&C comics and novels has it even worse. I actually have yet to read the third Q&C novel, but I’m honestly scared to. I don’t want to find out that Crocker, a character that I love, has died…or worse, that Tara, who can barely squeak out a loving emotion, has lost her daughter. Don’t get me wrong…I’m gonna have to read it eventually. But I can’t face it yet.

Looking back at his work, I’ve come to realize: people don’t really want stories where nothing important happens to the character. The story only has that sting if the reader can identify what is important to the story’s protagonist, and that thing is in jeopardy. In episodic or serialized fiction, you can get only so much mileage out of last-minute saves. Eventually, your protagonist has to lose whatever it is they care about…and move on to something new. Your protagonist has to suffer. “Suffering” means different things in different stories…but your character has to suffer nonetheless.

The last thing I should at least point out is Greg’s reputation for writing strong female characters. Personally, I think it’s overblown, because I long ago accepted female protagonists. One my best friends and harshest critics pointed out a slightly sexist slant in my own writing decades ago (holy crap), and it’s something that I like to think I’ve worked through. The only thing that irritates me about this subject is the fact that I’ve yet to get one of my creator-owned projects with a female lead off of the ground…and I have several. Hopefully, Masque of the Dragons isn’t too far from finally seeing the light of day…which brings me back to the earliest days of reading Greg’s work.

Commitment. Suffering. Women. Summed up like that, it doesn’t sound like I owe Greg Rucka a writing debt so much as I do a LIFE debt (with apologies to Chewbacca). Considering that his example is slowly but surely leading me to a more satisfying life…I can live with that.

(P.S. - I wrote the above all but ignoring the fact that he’s the writer of the wonderful webcomic, Lady Sabre & The Pirates of the Ineffable Aether, on which he has graciously linked to Hunter Black, and even gone so far as to write a blog about the comic. So, yeah…my debt to him is actually a very concrete one. But all that other stuff came first.)

Debtor’s Prison - Matt Wagner

It’s kinda sad that it’s taken me this long to return to celebrating those creators to whom I owe so much. It’s no excuse, but mahybe you will at least understand if I sum up my reason why with a platitude: life got in the way. I’ve been tremendously busy, and some of that business was fighting off the previously blogged about Writer’s Block…but now I’m back.

In the previous two installments of this “series,” I extolled the effects that Scott McCloud and Alan Moore have had on my writing, and I chose them very specifically. Through Scott McCloud, I learned to “speak the language” of comics. From Alan Moore, I learned what a writer can do, I was treated to possibly the best that a writer has yet done in the medium. And I do neither of them a disservice when I say that neither of them inspired me. They instructed me, but neither of them makes the kinds of comics that I necessarily seek to make.

Matt Wagner is perhaps the storyteller in comics that I most want to be like, which is odd. After all, Mr. Wagner is a superlative cartoonist, a gifted visual creator who has made some amazing comics with only his brain and his drawing hand as collaborators, while I have no skill for illustration, and at this point, it’s unlikely that I’ll ever develop one. If for no other reason than that, he and I will always be different. 

That said, Matt Wagner tells the kinds of stories that I want to tell, and he tells them exceedingly well, whether he’s writing for himself or for someone else to draw. In particular, Mage and Grendel, his two best known creator owned series, have influenced me greatly.

Mage is an autobiography of Mr. Wagner himself…if he were King Arthur reincarnated. Every writer puts something of himself into his creations, it’s just that in the case of Mage, Wagner doesn’t even try to hide it. Kevin Matchstick looks like Matt Wagner, and his trials are fantastic retellings of some of the things that Wagner himself has had to go through in his life. That’s probably why Mage: The Hero Denied is still (to the best of my knowledge) unwritten; Wagner’s life has not finished taking him to that part of himself, and given the title, I can why he wouldn’t be in a rush to go.

I often wonder, as I read and reread Grendel, if Mr. Wagner knew from the start that he was telling a story that would span millennia. Speaking for myself, I often have a clear notion as to where a long-form story is going to go; I’ve planted seeds in Planet Pantheon that won’t bear fruit for years at the current rate. But then again, I often have NO IDEA where things are going. I have a lot of Hunter Black mapped out, both in my head and on paper, but I couldn’t even begin to tell you if and when he’s going to…well, telling what I don’t know would be telling you too much. Back to Grendel. Let’s call the theme of Grendel, and these are my thoughts, not anything that Mr. Wagner himself has expressed to my knowledge, let’s call the theme The Monster Within. There’s plenty of evidence to bear me out, especially in the earliest tales. But because Mr. Wagner lets the theme roll on and on and on, and lets The Monster Within really have an effect on his setting as a whole, that Monster is incapable of staying Within. And it ends up ruling the world.

I love theme. Without it, cool stories are just a jumble of elements and events. And Matt Wagner’s work is as thematic as HELL. His stories are ABOUT SOMETHING, and that’s why I return to them over and over. And this isn’t just true for his creator owned work. His Batman stories are enough to make him my #1 choice to write Batman if I ever run DC Comics, and his Sandman Mystery Theater is probably my favorite thing that Vertigo ever published.

I want to tell the types of stories that Matt Wagner tells. I want to write big fantasies that affect even the little people. I want my readers to feel like they could change and be changed by the events in my stories. I want my readers to see me, and the things that matter to me, in my stories. I don’t know if I’m there yet. I don’t know how many of Hunter’s feelings about betrayal stem from mine, and I don’t know if people can see the whole gods/followers/fathers/sons thing I have going on in Planet Pantheon. I don’t know how much of me is seeping in there yet. But I’m trying, and Matt Wagner is a big part of the reason why.

the secret knots » Archive » The true story of James Alonso

WonderCon!!!

As I type this, I’ve got pretty much everything I need to do for WonderCon done. I do have a little busy work to engage in, putting booth numbers on Hunter Black postcards, but other than that, I’m a go.

So…yeah. We’re going to WonderCon. We’re gonna be set up in Artist’s Alley, the booth number is AA-162. If you’re a reader, come find us! We’ll have posters for sale for the ridiculous price of $2, and since we have THREE different posters (two featuring Hunter and one featuring Maliya Pel, Professional Bad-Ass), we’ll sell all three together for $5. That’s a bargain by anybody’s estimation! (Isn’t it? We’ve never done anything like this before…)

We’ll also have business cards, since Will and I are both available for freelance work, and some pages from what we hope are the forthcoming books Rocket Girl & The Wrench and Over My Dead Body.

More than anything else, we’re hoping to bring in some new readers, and we’re excited about that opportunity. We’ll be taking some notes and polishing our act, because we’re also going to be at C2E2 next month, and we’re hoping to do NYCC in the fall.

Wish us luck!

Girls With Slingshots » Archive » GWS #1351

John Carter

(I was planning to write this about eight hours ago, when I got home from my job tending bar, but something insane and hopefully wonderful happened while I was working, and I was not in a geeky frame of mind: my beloved Washington Redskins traded away the future [their first- and second-round picks this year, along with their first-rounders in 2013 and 2014] to move up to the second spot in the draft THIS year, blatantly aimed at getting [most likely] Robert Griffin III or [unlikely to be available, and not the guy I’d want anyway] Andrew Luck. Either way, we are getting a player who looks like a franchise-maker, a player who will have us set at the most important position in the game for the next 10-15 years, and the sort of player who will attract more and better free agents to the team. This is a dangerous gamble, but a smart one. Forgive the aside, but it simply had to be said.)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS…If you have not yet seen John Carter, and you intend to, don’t read any further. I will be discussing the film without regard to spoiling the film. You have been warned. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

So the other night, my fiancee and I went to a midnight showing of John Carter. There was no way I was going to not see this movie. First of all, A Princess of Mars (which should have been the title of the movie) was the very first “adult” book I ever read, and I have loved it since I was seven years old.  John Carter is one of my three favorite characters from literature (the others being Aragorn from Lord of the Rings and Cadmann Weyland [for whom Weyland’s Bay in Hunter Black is named] from The Legacy of Heorot). When I was in the second grade, the first character I ever played in D&D was named “John Carter,” because I was at that point yet to read any swords-and-sorcery styled fantasy. The first book I had my fiancee read (she’s a wonderfully patient woman) was A Princess of Mars. Going in, this movie was very important to me. Given its pedigree and the talent attached, and I’m referring specifically to Andrew Stanton, who directed two of the best movies I’ve ever seen, Finding Nemo and Wall*E, I’d been waiting patiently for this film done this way only my whole life. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a movie. The only film from which I have ever expected more was Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace…which was, of course, a massive disappointment to me. Episode I struck out swinging.

John Carter, however, did not. Nor did it hit the home run I was hoping for. But it hit the ball cleanly, it got to second, and it brought home the man on third. It could have been better…but it not a lot better.

Let’s just get what disappointed me out of the way. John Carter is consistently portrayed in the books as being the mightiest swordsman on Mars. This is partially due to the fact that he’s basically the Golden Age Superman, capable of leaping incredible distances, and stronger, faster, and tougher by far than any Martian. But he’s also an accomplished and experienced warrior for whom the longsword is a preferred weapon. And frankly, we never really got to see this in the movie. What we did see, and maybe this was necessary, was a John Carter who struggled more fighting Sab Than, one of several of the film’s villains, than he ever would have. (It’s almost beneath Carter , and impossible given certain cultural necessities, to kill Sab Than in the book. Kantos Kan gets to do it in the book.) Don’t get me wrong, I understand that there is more tension in a difficult fight than in an easy one…but still. (There was one AMAZING scene where John Carter fights and all but defeats a horde of warriors of the Warhoon, but that was the only occasion showing just how bad-ass John Carter really is.)

My other issue with the film, and maybe this makes me something of a chauvinist, is the way that they chose to change Dejah Thoris and her relationship with John Carter. In the book, Carter is instantly taken with her beauty, and he is later entranced by her imperial manner and her decency. That character would not deceive him in the ways that she does (I don’t think…it’s been a few years since I read the books, admittedly) in the film. In the film, Dejah Thoris tries on several occasions to deceive or manipulate John Carter into fighting on behalf of Helium, and this is motivated in large part by her desire to avoid marriage to Sab Than as a peace gesture. Now, Sab Than plans to murder Dejah Thoris on their wedding night, and Dejah Thoris is given some nebulous intuition about bad things happening if Zodanga and Helium are united by her marriage. Dejah Thoris was a noble in the books and acted that way. In the film, her deceptions make her…somehow less worthy of John Carter’s love and adoration.

It’s Dejah Thoris, coupled with the fact that he’s a fighting-man with nothing to fight for on Earth, that compels John Carter to stay on Mars, and I just didn’t see a woman that he HAD to love in the movie…and that undermined all of his character motivations for me.

Without blood-pumping action the way I wanted it, and without a romance for me to get passionate about, the movie just didn’t go where I wanted it to go in my heart.

That said, I really enjoyed the film. My complaints are substantial, but the movie itself is still very well executed. The CGI was consistently good, as far as I was concerned. I even managed to forget that I was watching it in 3D (which was completely unnecessary). Woola was the lovable pet and companion that I was hoping to see, and his incredible speed was hilarious on one hand and kick-ass in the other. The Tharks were depicted as the savages that they are, and I loved that. The scenes with the wriggling baby Tharks were both hilarious and disturbing, as they should have been. The only problem with the great white apes, which were MUCH COOLER than they ever were in the books, was that I knew too much about that scene due to all of the attempts to overcome the piss-poor marketing Disney did with this film. John Carter’s leaping ability was way cooler on film than I expected it to be in the books. I even dug the Ninth Ray super-weapon.

The big change that they had to make from books to movie, was the development of the main character. In the books, John Carter DOES NOT DEVELOP. He’s not supposed to. Barsoom changes because of him rather than the other way around, and that works in the books. In a movie for a mainstream audience, I think there NEEDS to be a character arc, or you’ll lose them. John Carter goes from a man who will fight for nothing to a man who will assume the mantle of leadership for the Tharks to a man who asks for Dejah Thoris’ hand in marriage, and this after he refuses to help the U.S. Army agains the Apaches (or vice versa), and after he has lost a wife and child to some unexplained savagery. An audience NEEDS for John Carter to go from being a good fighter to a good man, and we get that.

The performances were solid across the board. Mark Strong is rapidly becoming the best choice possible for a villain in a genre piece, taking the mantle from Jason Isaacs in my mind. Lynn Collins did a very nice job playing the film’s version of Dejah Thoris, and Taylor Kitsch managed to handle the gargantuan task of playing one of my favorite characters. Dominic West is always awesome playing a shitbird, and Willem Dafoe managed to combine savagery and gravitas to produce an almost perfect Tars Tarkas, a character that I LOVE.

Here’s my advice…if you have never read any of the Martian Tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, see this movie. You’ll enjoy it. It’s 100x better than Avatar. If you are a fan of previous works starring John Carter, see this movie. It ain’t perfect, but it sure as hell ain’t bad.

Neil Gaiman: The Faces of Fantasy Essay