It begins, as so many Doctor Who stories do, with the TARDIS arriving on a future Earth where everything seems calm and orderly… too calm and orderly, at least to the Doctor (“Never trust a utopia,” he’ll say to whatever fetching young lady is his companion at the time.) A bit of investigation reveals that this peace and order is, indeed, artificial, but it’s not achieved by force: instead all war, violence and conflict are defused before they even begin by a mysterious, unseen figure only ever referred to as “He” or “Him.” The Doctor can sense that time manipulation is afoot, and begins to suspect that this is the work of Daleks, or the Master, or even a lost Time Lord who somehow survived the Time War. Until he finds a little asteroid in the middle of nowhere where time literally stands still and finds the machine that is constantly making all those little alterations to history, to maintain “His” utopia –

– and finds it’s the TARDIS. His TARDIS. And it’s screaming, because it’s being made to violate time in ways it was never made to do — and to end history itself, grinding it down into the stasis of enforced peace.

Now He makes his appearance — he’s been watching the Doctor for some time, of course — and reveals that he is a future incarnation of the Doctor. It’s not clear whether he’s the last regeneration or whether he somehow extended his lifespan beyond the normal limit for Time Lords, but one thing is clear: he’s on his last go-round. (We’ll call him “Doctor Thirteen” for convenience; if this were a two-parter, that would be a good title for the second episode.) He explains how he saved the Earth, and the universe, again and again, and still it needed saving; how his allies died, and he got older and older, but his enemies just kept coming back.

Now the Doctor is given a choice: he can leave, and let things run their course until he winds up here again, or Doctor Thirteen will use his bastardized TARDIS to make him relive all the agonizing steps between them almost instantaneously. And the Doctor runs, but it’s no use because Doctor Thirteen is older and cannier than he is, and knows all his tricks, and in the end the Doctor is caught once more. The Doctor’s fetching young companion rescues him, of course, but it’s too late: in just a few minutes he’s experienced everything that brought Doctor Thirteen to where he is — the last defender of the Earth, all alone.

Except that our Doctor isn’t alone: though his companion couldn’t save him in time, the fact that she was there for him makes him realize that the only way he’ll ever run out of allies is if he turns humans into something not fit to be his companions. Together he and his companion fight Doctor Thirteen and defeat him, and Doctor Thirteen begs him not to destroy everthing he’s built, to have pity — after all, he was the Doctor once. But the Doctor turns back from the door to his TARDIS, shakes his head and says “Not you. You were never me.”

For example:

Bionics: Or, as we say in the real world, prosthetics – which are, of course, becoming increasingly common and sophisticated. What they’re not doing is making anyone superhuman. Go take a look at a VA hospital (and by the way, how much of an opportunity did the people behind Bionic Woman remake miss by not making her an Iraq vet?). Nobody there is lifting cars or taking spy photos with their camera eyes; they’re lucky if they can get anything like the former abilities of the limb or body part being replaced, and even if they give an advantage in one area (as Oscar Pistorius’ legs supposedly did) it’s pretty limited. Even if you could make a bionic limb super-strong, of course, the problem is that the hand bone’s connected to the wrist bone, the wrist bone’s connected to the arm bone, and so on, and that whole chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So superhuman strength is pretty much off the menu (you could conceivably build a bionic hand with superhuman crushing power that wouldn’t stress the wrist too much, but that’s about it) unless you replace basically the whole skeletal structure, which brings us to…

Uploading, or cloning for that matter: Not that either of these things are necessarily impossible (though both involve a fair bit of handwaving, especially the copying-memories part of the latter), but neither are they any kind of ticket to immortality for the simple reason that neither an uploaded version of your mind nor a clone with all your memories is you: they are both copies of you, which will no more prevent you from dying than having children will. With that in mind, it baffles me why anyone would want to do either of these. Who would want to have an immortal or, worse, much younger copy of yourself around? How would that take the sting out of aging and death? Not to mention the fact that you would be made to suffer Robert Burns’ most terrible curse: to see ourselves as others see us. Most of us can’t stand to hear a recording of our own voices; imagine that magnified by a factor of a million and you’ll get the idea of just how annoying and uncomfortable it would be to have a simulacrum of you wandering around.

Sensors: Such an innocuous bit of technology, those machines that let Mr. Spock or whoever tell you what’s going on down on the planet. Unfortunately, nothing like them actually exists. For example, one thing people can always tell with sensors is the presence or absence of “life signs.” How do they do that? It can’t be through infrared or heartbeats, since neither of those would be detectable from space (well, infrared could be, but not individual heat signatures) – but the magical sensors usually can not only detect individual life forms but tell you what species it is! Sensors are practically the definition of the unquestioned assumption; they’re such a background element that hardly anyone bothers to think before plugging them into a story. (This goes double for tractor beams.)

Space combat: This is probably the most commonly appearing one on the list, but think about it for a minute. Actual combat mostly consists of one person trying to get to a target, and the other one trying to stop them; a fighter-interceptor trying to stop a bomber, for instance (or disabling the bomber’s fighter escort.) That works all right when your battleground is the sky, because there are a limited number of possible approaches and escape routes. But when the target is a planet that limited number increases until it approaches infinity – so it’s likely that your fighter-interceptors will simply be unable to intercept anything.

Aside from that, though, the notion of space war is equally unlikely. Even if we assume the existence of FTL travel (something that would have been on this list thirty years ago, but which writers have more recently made more of an effort to justify), it’s almost certainly going to take a lot of energy to get from star to star; what could be waiting there that would be worth the effort involved? You might argue, of course, that war pretty much always takes a lot of energy and that’s never stopped anyone, but the fact is that almost everything of value on an inhabited planet can also be found on uninhabited planets, asteroids or comets. Sure, you can come up with some other reason for an interplanetary war – an ideological difference, some genuinely unique resource, a pathological hatred of the colour blue – but by this point you’re either handwaving or actually giving the matter some thought, which means it’s no longer an unquestioned assumption.

Sol III: This is a pet peeve of mine. SF writers figured out a long time ago that aliens wouldn’t call our planet “Earth,” so you often see it referred to as “Sol III,” which sounds much more science-fictiony. The problem, of course, is that “sol” is Latin for “sun,” which means that instead of calling the planet “Earth” you’ve called it “Sun III” – so much less geocentric!

None of these are bad ideas, necessarily – except for that last one – but I’m tired of seeing them recycled over and over like so much dorm room furniture. So here’s my challenge to everyone who writes SF in novels, movies, comics or wherever: the next time you’re about to use one of these ideas, think it through – odds are good that after a few minutes’ consideration you’ll wind up with a more interesting and original story.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a dynamite idea for an epic about bionic space marines I need to work on…

• The new continuity takes place in a universe where the world changes more slowly, so that dollar bills are still in use; we can call this the Earth-2 version.
• The new continuity is meant to be a darker, edgier version of the original, and thus is set in the United States; call this Ultimate For Better or For Worse.
• Last Sunday’s punchline was a “rogue joke” that somehow survived the annihilation of the previous timeline. As time goes on, the implications of the paradox it embodies will wreak havoc on continuity and on causality itself, leading to a crossover event in which multiple versions of each character appear and Farley the dog sacrifices himself to save all of the universes.
• Due to the commercial success of the strip, Johnston has as little familiarity with small denominations as George H.W. Bush had with barcode scanners.

Which brings us to the X-Men, because I hadn’t realized until I read from Giant-Size X-Men #1 to around issue 200 all in a row just how much the whole “persecuted mutants” business was Claremont’s idea. (And by the way, how hard is it to imagine that back in the day the Defenders got four Giant-Size specials, while the X-Men only got one?) Sure, the original run had the Sentinels, but their creator was portrayed as a basically crazy guy, not a garden-variety bigot; more to the point, there was little sense in the original comics that the average man on the street was anti-mutant. Nor is that the case in the early issues of Claremont’s run: in their very first adventure they’re called to defend Cheyenne Mountain in place of the Avengers (the general in charge remarks that he doesn’t trust them, but he still lets them go to it) and a few issues later a fairly big deal is made out of just how high Professor X’s security clearance is, the upshot of both being that the X-Men are still very much a part of the establishment. (When Cyclops identifies himself to the general his dialogue could just as easily come from Captain America.) For some time after that the X-Men have pretty generic superhero adventures, encountering demons, aliens and leprechauns (don’t ask; for the love of God, don’t ask) until the storyline that forms the basis of the whole rest of Claremont’s run, the justly famous “Days of Future Past.” (As an aside, Claremont clearly just loved to sound profound by putting antonyms together; for a less successful example, see “Lifedeath.”) Though what most people remember from that story is the scenes of various X-Men being killed, the element that matters most thematically is the introduction of the Mutant Registration Act, which was originally going to be introduced in memory of Senator Kelly, a politician the X-Men failed to save from assassination, but which Kelly was able to introduce himself when they saved him thanks to some handy-dandy time travel. From then on anti-mutant sentiment becomes a predominant motif in the book, with both harmless Professor X and cute-as-a-button Kitty Pryde being “mutant-bashed” and practically every non-mutant character uttering some sort of anti-mutant slur. The Mutant Registration Act stands a symbol of that attitude, with support for it standing as a handy identifier for bigots.

Which brings us back to airport security. Because if you think about it for a moment it becomes clear that something like the Mutant Registration Act would be absolutely necessary. Imagine standing in line at the airport and knowing that some of the people around you might be able to project energy beams, or bend metal, or mind-control the pilot; that they might not be fully able to control their powers; and that these people had a documented history of fighting other people like them in public places. Would you feel confident about getting on a plane? (I’ll bet the airlines were Senator Kelly’s biggest contributors.)

The X-Men series is often described as being a metaphor for the oppression of minorities, but when looked at it this way it becomes clear that the metaphor doesn’t stand up: if superhuman mutants really existed society would have a legitimate reason to fear or at least be wary of them, something that has never been true of any oppressed minority.

But if the metaphor that’s supposed to be at the heart of the series doesn’t work, why has the comic been so successful? Because the X-Men don’t represent oppressed minorities, they represent oppressed teenagers. (This may also explain why comic books about characters who are actually part of oppressed minorities generally fail to sell.) Nobody feels more persecuted than teenagers, especially the nerdy, white, middle-class teenagers who have traditionally been the main audience for comics. In the hyper-dramatic world of the teenager, breaking up with your girlfriend (or, more likely, being turned down for a date) has the same emotional impact as your fiancee being disintegrated on the Moon, and being hunted by giant robots is exactly equivalent to being told to buy something or get out.

I finally got a chance to see Inception a couple of days ago and while I enjoyed it, there were a few things that puzzled me. Not that the movie was confusing — honestly, one of its bigger flaws was that it often seemed to feel the need to spell things out for the slower kids — but for a generally well-written movie it had some odd flaws. Or were they flaws? Well, probably, but just for fun let’s use the No-Prize method and see if we can’t find in them hints of a deeper, better story underneath the obvious one.

See, a lot of people think that the ending means the whole movie was a dream, but that’s not likely. To begin with, “it was all a dream” is no less of a cop-out just because your movie is about dreams, and if there’s room for multiple interpretations you might as well pick the one that doesn’t suck. More importantly, though, the “real world” sequences include scenes that Cobb, the Leonardo DiCaprio character, isn’t in. When was the last time you had a dream you weren’t in?

Interestingly, the scenes without him all feature Ellen Page, whose character is oddly underdeveloped and inconsistent considering how prominent she is. She’s set up heavily (Cobb remarks on how she’s a natural at manipulating dreams), has a heavily symbolic name (Ariadne) and gets a number of scenes without payoffs (for example the scene where she makes her totem, the chess piece.) But in the actual action of the movie she’s not very important, being mostly a vehicle for exposition — the “new guy” that other characters can explain things to, as well as the person who ferrets out Cobb’s backstory. There’s nothing wrong with that, except that there’s another character who plays a similar role — Saito, the one played by Ken Watanabe — and at first glance, at least, the movie would be stronger if he had the role to himself: he has an emotional investment in learning the rules of the game and understanding the plan (since he wants it to succeed) and there’s tension added if he learns about Cobb’s issues with his wife (since he has the power to reunite Cobb with his children), while Ariadne is both uninvested and undermotivated. In fact, her motivation changes several times throughout the movie: at first it’s just professional interest, then a desire to protect the other team members, and then finally (for no clear reason) she’s determined to complete the mission even at the risk of her and Cobb’s lives.

So here’s my attempt at a No-Prize: none of these things are mistakes. The whole movie that we see is a dream, but Cobb isn’t the only real person in it: Ariadne is there too (and maybe Joseph Gordon-Levitt, what the hell.) She has inserted herself into Cobb’s dream because he is still stuck in limbo from his experience with his wife — when he experienced her “dying” that was her waking up, but he’s still asleep. The mission is actually to rescue him; like the fake mission explained to Cillian Murphy in the hotel room, it’s a fiction designed to make him rescue himself. That’s why she plays coy at first — the trick of getting the dreamer to do the work for you — then draws out his emotional issues, and in the end is determined to complete the mission at all cost. It also explains her name: Ariadne, after all, was the one who got Theseus out of the labyrinth.

But why was she so determined? Because Cobb has been dreaming longer than he realizes — ten years or more — which explains another motif with no apparent payoff, the hiding of his children’s faces throughout the movie. Ariadne is his daughter.

It’s true; my neighbourhood is full of kids, and nearly all of the boys routinely wear clothing with logos or images of superheroes; Spider-Man is easily the most popular, but I often see Superman, Batman and occasionally Wolverine. Love of superheroes seems to be an almost universal phenomenon among boys of a particular age. At the same time, it’s almost certain that few of those boys will wind up being regular or even occasional comics readers. This presents us with a paradox: superheroes are more prominent in popular culture than ever (particularly kids’ culture), but fewer and fewer people are reading comics – and almost none of them are kids.

I don’t need to tell you what you’ll see if you go into a typical comics shop: adults, and not even particularly young ones. Sure, you’ll see a few teens, but odds are they’re there for whatever anime and manga the shop sells – and you certainly won’t see anyone under thirteen. This isn’t a new problem, and lots of people have discussed the reasons for it and possible strategies for addressing it. But I’d like to raise two points that I’ve never heard mentioned. First, that the loss of the children’s market is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what kids’ comics are for; second, that the paradox I describe above is not actually a paradox, in that the omnipresence of superheroes in media and merchandising is actually a cause of the loss of the children’s market.

Let’s start with the purpose of comics. Not the purpose of comics for you and me, or the purpose of comics for the kid who might theoretically read them, but the purpose they serve for the parents who might conceivably buy a comic for their child. For parents, comics are not an entertainment medium; they are a distraction device. Think back to your earliest childhood experiences with comics. Here are mine: being bought comics to keep me quiet at restaurants while we waited for the food; being bought comics to keep me quiet in the car while we drove to the cottage; being given comics in my Christmas stocking to keep me quiet while my parents slept a few more hours… getting the picture? So long as the content isn’t explicitly offensive (are you reading this, dismemberment fans?) parents don’t care what’s in a comic so long as it distracts Junior for a reasonable amount of time. Once you look at it that way, you see why comics for kids don’t work today. You need to go to a special store to buy them, and the price-to-value ratio is terrible – especially when you compare them to an in-car DVD player or an iPhone. (There’s a reason the NFB’s free library is one of the top iPhone apps.)

That covers the parent side of the equation, but what about the kids? Children can whine hard enough to overcome nearly any parental reluctance to buy something, so if they’re so keen on superheroes why aren’t they demanding comics? Because they don’t particularly want to read Spider-Man comics; they want to be able to project themselves onto Spider-Man as a fantasy figure, and they don’t care whether they get that fix from movies, TV, the Web, their t-shirts or Underoos. This is where it gets counter-intuitive: rather than leading kids to comics, the merchandising is satisfying a need that once only comics could meet (of course, it doesn’t help that in many cases the media versions are better than the comics ones.)

So what can comics publishers do to get kids reading comics again? Well, they’re not going to do it by publishing kid-friendly comics in the traditional format; as good as those individual comics may sometimes be, they don’t meet parents’ value-for-cost analysis, and they don’t meet kids’ need for superhero fantasy any better than do other sources they can access more easily. What they need to do instead is make printed comics that are bigger and cheaper (imagine a scaled-down version of Marvel’s Essentials line) and sell them everywhere: gas stations, convenience store, grocery stores – you know, everywhere you used to buy comics. Or they can give up physical comics and concentrate on the Web – or, what’s really the most rational option, give up on comics entirely and simply license the characters.

It was a funny enough story that even the New York Times ran it, but it got me wondering: now that pubic waxing is apparently de rigueur among young women, are female genitals even called beavers anymore? I mean, when the hair is gone, the resemblance pretty well disappears.

So will “beaver” wind up being one of those funny little linguistic artifacts, like calling a remote control a “clicker” decades after they switched from sonics to infrared, or should the magazine just have held out until we start calling women’s privates “chinchillas”?

Bonus: Apparently the term “beaver” in this sense was popularized by Kurt Vonnegut in Breakfast of Champions. I couldn’t find Vonnegut’s drawing of a beaver anywhere online, so here is his rendition of an asshole.

No, what I’m more interested is in how the whole idea came about that unusually cold or stormy weather disproves climate change, and I think fundamentally it’s a matter of branding. The abortion debate is a good example of how choosing the right term to describe your position can be essential in framing the debate: who would want to be anti-life or anti-choice? In light of that it’s significant that in this issue, the denialists haven’t attempted to even come up with a name for their position, never mind reframing the debate. The fact that they’re perfectly happy with the terms the other side uses show just what a problem those terms are.

Let’s start with the most common name for the phenomenon, “global warming.” It’s easy to see why the term was first used: it’s a clear and accurate description of what’s happening, as temperatures gradually rise worldwide. The problem, as we’re now seeing, is that while that may be the overall trend, not everything that’s caused by global warming is going to result in warmer weather. Nor is it necessarily going to have a stronger effect than more local weather effects; in other words, you can still have a snowstorm while the Earth is getting warmer. But by calling it “global warming,” scientists and activists created the impression that the world will get warmer, point blank — which is why cynical politicians can now take advantage of a blizzard to score points on CNN. Another problem is that for many of us who live in cold climates, the notion of global warming sounds like a positive thing rather than a negative one, and the generally positive connotations of the word “warming” don’t help. (You’ve never heard of anyone being “warmed to death.”)

The main competitor to “global warming” has been simply “climate change,” but it’s easy to see why that didn’t catch on: it’s too vague, and at any rate sounds too neutral to be any kind of rallying cry. There was an attempt a few years ago to rebrand it as “global weirding,” to reflect the fact that rising temperatures will lead to more extreme weather, but this depends too much on already knowing the term “global warming,” and has the added disadvantage of sounding like a theory to explain the popularity of Lady Gaga.

What’s my suggestion? If it were up to me I would go with “catastrophic climate change,” which opens the gates wide enough to include all of the severe weather effects that may be caused by a rise in temperature and, more importantly, sounds like an unequivocally bad thing. Most likely, though, it’s too late: at this point we’re almost certainly stuck with “global warming”, and as many people are learning, it doesn’t matter how good your data is if you don’t brand it right.

Speaking of cold: there are still three days to read my story “The Coldest War” online and, if you feel so motivated, nominate it for an Aurora Award. Only Canadian citizens and permanent residents can nominate, but anyone can read it.

Shows like Lost and BSG (my fingers are getting tired) have a particular challenge in finding good endings because they’re not just “arc” shows with continuing storylines, they’re also “mythology” shows: a lot of the fun of watching them is getting more and more details of the backstory, details that are most often unknown to the main characters as well as the viewer. Not all arc shows, or even all SF/Fantasy shows with arcs, are mythology shows (Buffy, for instance, flirted with being one but never really was, as the mythology was both inconsistent and mostly irrelevant to the plot), but it’s hard to think of a mythology show that isn’t SF or fantasy. (Soap operas don’t count because there has to be a sense that the mythology was created before the show started, whereas the revelations in soap operas are generally retcons.)

What makes mythology shows different from others in terms of how we watch them is that we’re not just watching for the story, the characters or the performances: we watch, in large part, because we want to better understand the world the writers have created. As wiser people than me have noted, we humans have a built-in tendency to look for patterns, and we feel a kind of pleasure when we identify one we didn’t see before. The flip side of this, though, is that if something we think is a pattern turns out not to be, we can get very annoyed. This is what happened with BSG: by the end of the series finale we had all the pieces to the puzzle, but for most fans they didn’t fit together to make anything meaningful – or at least the picture they created was so far from what we expected as to have the same effect. So here are some lessons the producers of Lost could take from the final season of Battlestar Galactica:

What have you done for me lately?

Fans are fickle creatures. No matter how much we enjoyed the first five seasons, if the final season – and the final episode – aren’t satisfying, we will quickly toss you on the Junk Heap of Forgotten Pop Culture Artifacts.

Don’t marry your ending

Ronald D. Moore has said that he had the final scene of the last episode – where Head Baltar and Head Six wander around New York and watch dancing robots – planned out from the beginning. Which is great, except that after several years of making things up as he went along, that scene no longer made a lick of sense. Honestly, after all the things that came up in the series, the last message he wanted to leave us with was “hug your robots tight”?
A good example of a show that did this right was Babylon 5. J. Michael Straczynski made a similar comment while the show was running, saying that he already knew the ending… except that when circumstances changed (the original lead actor leaving the show) he changed the ending, making it the ending of that character’s story but not the overall series. B5 had its share of problems in its last season, but marrying the ending wasn’t one of them.

Exposition does not equal drama

Sure, fans of mythology shows want to find out the answers to all your mysteries. But those answers need to come out of drama and conflict, not just be parceled out in economy-size lumps of exposition (or worse yet, explained in post-series interviews.) We wanted to know who Head Six and Head Baltar were, but having them suddenly talk about God as if they spent weekends with him was not an interesting way to do it. We wanted to know the connection between the Colonies and present-day Earth: having a newscaster explain it was not an interesting way to do it. And so on…

Some revelations are optional, some are not

The producers of Lost have said that not every mystery raised in the show will be resolved. Well, good, but it’s important to discriminate between which mysteries the fans will accept you leaving unanswered (or otherwise defusing) and which they won’t. How do you know which is which? One clue is to look at the mysteries you yourself defined as important. For instance, BSG spent much of a season teasing us by having some characters hear bits of a mysterious tune. During the season finale, in a very well-executed and dramatic sequence, we discover that they’re actually hearing “All Along the Watchtower” – at which point the camera zooms out to a view of the whole galaxy, and zooms in to what is recognizably our Earth. Wow. So what was the significance of the song – why were they hearing it, and why that song? It’s obviously related to the mystery of the connection between the Colonies and our Earth – the equation is laid out for us visually in that sequence. So when Moore says (after the series is over) that the song didn’t have a significance… that there are just tunes that somehow reverberate through human (or Cylon) consciousness throughout time and space… we may feel just. A tad. Cheated.

Don’t give up the ’shippers

Remember what I said above about exposition not replacing conflict? This goes double for relationships between the characters. As much as we love learning about the mythology, a lot of viewers are even more invested in what happens to the characters, particularly their love lives. Don’t try to elide these issues or wrap them up too tidily. Avoid having characters fall out of airlocks or have their parentage retconned so that the writers don’t have to deal with them anymore. In improve, this is a kind of blocking called cancelling: instead of resolving the conflict that’s been raised in a scene, you come up with a reason why it just isn’t an issue. (“Oh no, a bear!” “It’s okay, he got caught in a bear trap.”) Look at the relationship between Kara/Starbuck and Lee/Apollo in BSG: on the most basic level, people wanted to know Will they wind up together? Was he her one true love, or were her feelings for him just another one of her self-destructive qualities? Not to mention her whole dying-and-coming-back-to-life thing, and the question of whether or not the Kara in the final season was the real one. So with that amount of screen time and fan speculation invested in a relationship, what you don’t do is have her disappear into thin air just when all the impediments to them being together have been removed. That’s not tragedy, it’s not irony, it’s just cancelling.

Don’t neglect the French books, Hollywood — I can’t wait to see mustard being used as a weapon in Jeanne, Fille du Roy or a post-nuclear Montreal in Surreal 3000, or four guys slowly dying of woods-related causes because they hunted a moose illegally in Revanche de l’Orignal.

Don’t think that you’re off the hook just because I can’t remember the title of a book, either. I’m counting on seeing that one where the girl with the harelip runs away and her whole family follows her, and her little brother sees the sea for the first time and decides he wants to live there. Also the book about John Cabot where he disses spices and his mom serves him a lasagna with no spices and rancid meat. Take that, John Cabot — if that is your real name (it’s not.)

And don’t forget the books I just made up because it was easier to do that than read them for book reports. Coming in 2012: “Shakespeare’s Planet,” based on Matthew Johnson sort of skimming the back cover of the book by Clifford D. Simak and hoping his teacher hadn’t.

So far as the last comics business is concerned, there’s little doubt that the major companies did basically nothing of significance other than continue their slide downhill. Almost every move they’ve made has been to try to consolidate and recapture their traditional audience, whether it’s been resurrecting Hal Jordan and Barry Allen, erasing Spider-Man’s marriage or recreating the multiverse. What few efforts they’ve made to expand their audience, such as DC’s Minx line, have received about as much support and commitment as a Fox sitcom. I’m not the first to point out the irony that this is happening at the same time as superheroes of various kinds have pretty well taken over the movie business; the problem for comics companies is that special-effects have advanced to the point where movies can do a better job than comics at delivering the kind of excitement superhero comics promise. Similarly, the rising quality of cheap overseas animation has made TV one more way of getting superhero thrills more easily and cheaply than comics. All that comics have left that no other medium can promise is the ability to deliver a continuing narrative (and shows such as “Justice League Unlimited” and “Spectacular Spider-Man” show that this advantage may not last much longer,) which is why DC and Marvel are now stuck on a treadmill of constant”events” and stories that never end.

From the perspective of the publishing business, the big comics story of the last decade has been the widespread adoption of manga by North American readers. There are a couple of reasons, though, why I don’t think that this qualifies. For one thing, it’s not really a comics story; the cultural movement has really been led primarily by anime, with manga tagging along behind. (It’s significant that the shop in my neighbourhood that specializes in such works is called the Anime Stop, even though the majority of its shelf space is given over to manga.) Moreover, while manga is now widely read on this side of the Pacific, it’s not read by comics readers. When people started putting together best-of-the-decade lists a few months ago, one thing that was consistently true was that all of them — whether assembled by a superhero loyalist, an indie reader or a catholic comic lover — failed to include a single manga title. Put simply, there is almost no overlap between traditional Noth American comics and manga in terms of readership, and what little overlap there is consists of American titles that ape manga in style and content. But the manga readership isn’t the mainstream, either: it’s another non-mainstream audience, parallel to but separate from the ones that read indie and superhero comics.

So much for what the decade wasn’t. Why was it the decade of non-fiction comics? One piece of evidence is just to look at the titles that made the New York Times best seller list, such as Persepolis, Fun Home and Stitches. You can look to the success of the movie version of American Splendor and the interest it aroused in the work of Harvey Pekar, a pioneer both in specifically autobiography and (along with his wife, Joyce Brabner) more broadly in non-fiction comics. But I think what distinguished the development of non-fiction comics in this decade was in part its broadening its focus to include more than memoirs. Look at the work of Larry Gonick, whose landmark series Cartoon History of the Universe began in the 1970s but was completed (three of the five volumes) in the last ten years.

Joe Sacco, whose work was nearly all published (in book from) in the last decade, is another good example, and it shows how well comics are suited for non-fiction topics. While he works hard to uncover the facts, he never presents himself as an impartial observer; neither does he try to remove himself from the story. When this is done in other media, such as film, there’s always a sense of being manipulated; in a Michael Moore movie, for instance, when you become aware of how selectively Moore is using his footage it can undercut the force of his argument. Sacco’s work, on the other hand, is transparently his own impressions and recollections.

One more reason it was the decade of non-fiction comics is that they have improved so much. Consider, for instance, the “For Beginners” series of books . The former books may occasionally have had some merit, but by and large they were hardly even comics — most often they were simply illustrated texts that made the old “Classics Illustrated” comics look like Watchmen when it came to comics storytelling. Compare these to a work such as Action Philosophers! which, while not without its flaws, is indisputably a comic in a way those books are not.

To be honest I don’t really care, and I’m already bored of talking about V. What does interest me is the persistent fascination with vaccines among conspiracy theorists of all stripes. It’s the one thing paranoid right-wingers and paranoid left-wingers have in common: a conviction that vaccination is somehow bad, though the reasons why it’s bad vary somewhat. Now, of all the health innovations of the last few hundred years, vaccines and antibiotics have to be pretty near the top in terms of improving public health (general  antiseptics and reliable supplies of clean drinking water would be the only competition I can think of.) Vaccines are probably the more important of the two because antibiotics are primarily of use in a) curing venereal disease and b) surviving trauma and surgery — both worthy causes, but not really that significant on a population-wide scale. If you want evidence, look at the Spanish conquest of North America: the conquistadors had been more-or-less inoculated against smallpox (mostly by having survived it as children, or being exposed to it and developing antibodies while reacting asymptomatically), while the defenceless Aztecs died by the millions. Or look at the persistent use of milkmaids as icons of beauty in Western art: it’s not just because they look so fetching covered in cow manure, it’s because exposure to cowpox protected them from smallpox and the associated “small pocks” that marred the face of nearly every other person in Europe. (Next time you’re reading one of those epic fantasy novels with the embossed covers, try to imagine every single character’s face with little scars, pits and boils. Your desire for time-travel will drop substantially.)

So what is it about vaccines? Why are people so willing to believe anything bad about them, no matter how flimsy or nonexistent the evidence? (There have, it’s true, been a small number of bad or tainted vaccines distributed, but on average vaccines are still much safer than, say, cars or hamburgers.) Some of it is probably just reflexive post-’60s anti-authoritarianism — if the government, or doctors, or scientists, or any other authority figure wants you to do something, it must be bad — but vaccines are a special case. (We don’t see a similar resistance to antibiotics, for instance; in fact parents insist on getting antibiotics prescribed for children’s ear infections even though the evidence shows they have no positive effect whatsoever and help spread antibiotic resistance in bacteria.) The method of delivery no doubt has a role to play as well: taking a pill has little emotional resonance, but having something injected into you has an instinctive ick factor, with connotations of violence, poisoning and penetration. But the biggest reason, I think, is the power dynamic involved. Even though a doctor prescribes antibiotics, we control the act of ingesting them. Vaccines, on the other hand, are administered to us — and for most of us, our main experience with inoculations is as children. What inspires more terror in an elementary school than “shot day”? Unlike visits to the dentist, which are a solitary trauma, inoculations are often done in large groups, encouraging an “us” versus “them” feeling. Just as children fantasize that their real parents will someday whisk them away to the life of splendour and luxury they deserve, or that ice cream will eventually be deemed healthy and spinach poison, so too do we find it easy to believe that this awful experience — given to us “for our own good,” like so many childhood horrors — is part of some evil plot. We knew it all along.

The easy answer, of course, is that Dollhouse was a good show while Hank sucked. But presumably the people who were watching Hank didn’t think it sucked, and on average about twice as many people watched Hank as Dollhouse (though the two were on different nights, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair.) So our question remains: why were Dollhouse fans so much noisier about its cancellation, and about the show in general, than Hank‘s fans? The answer, I think, is in the phrasing: the people watching Hank were really just viewers, while the people watching Dollhouse were fans.

“Fan” is short for “fanatic,” of course, and the qualities that distinguish fans from viewers do have some similarities to fanaticism. Fans, in general, have a personal investment in whatever text it is they are fans of: they feel pleasure when other people recognize its quality (and pain when others criticize it), they care strongly about the narrative, they think about the text when not consuming it (sometimes to the point of wanting to be part of its creation), and they identify personally with its success or failure. All of these are similar to how one relates to, say, a political philosophy or religion.

What’s interesting is that while just about all religions or philosophies have attracted their fanatics, only certain texts have typically attracted fans: what are called (by non-fans) “genre” texts and, in general, the most marginalized and despised of those genres — science fiction, fantasy and their adjacent genres such as superheroes. That marginalization probably has something to do with the strength of fan-feeling — we define ourselves as much by what we’re not as by what we are, and shared exclusion can create a strong bond — but that’s obviously not all there is to it, or we’d be swimming in Gilligan’s Island fanfic. Another factor is probably the unreality of these genres, which provides the audience with “blank spaces” they’re invited to fill. Star Trek, for example — really the classic fan-text — provided next to no detail about its universe beyond what was absolutely necessary for the story, which led to endless speculation and discussion about just how many moons Vulcan has and what happened to Kirk’s nephew and so on. More importantly, it’s impossible to treat an SF or fantasy story as a “found object”; its unreality means someone must have written it. That may explain why I’ve never met anyone who read science fiction or fantasy fan who didn’t also want to write it, at least in passing.

For a long time mass media, and TV in particular, valued viewers over fans: a show that makes fans is, by its nature, harder for the casual viewer to get into, and therefore, all else being equal, will be watched by fewer people. But recently that trend has been reversed: with new distribution channels (particularly DVD sets) and increased competition from other media, the greater commitment that fans bring makes them worth more as consumers than simple viewers, which has led to the inclusion of fandom-generating elements such as continued stories in non-genre shows. As well, the Internet has made it much easier to connect with other fans of the same show, which has had the interesting result of creating fandoms for shows that traditionally wouldn’t have them. (The prime example of this is Mad Men, which has reached some kind of pop culture singularity where there are more people discussing it online than actually watch it.) It’s an odd and perhaps surprising phenomenon — I don’t know about you, but I threw up a little in my mouth when I learned there was such as thing as House fanfic — but it reveals just why a classic laugh-track, always-return-to-the-status-quo sitcom like Hank was such a dinosaur, and died so completely unmourned.

But, you ask, what does all this have to do with Being Erica? Okay, few of you — all right, none of you — are asking that, and probably most of you don’t even know what I’m talking about. For those among us from south of the border, Being Erica is basically My Name is Earl done as science fiction: the title character meets a mysterious “therapist,” Dr. Tom, who has her write down a list of regrets and lets her travel back in time to revisit each one, trying to make it better. Except that not only is it not called science fiction, the early promotional material insisted that it was not science fiction. I can only assume this was for the same reason that Margaret Atwood claims her books which clearly are SF aren’t: because many people, and in particular many women (the core target audience of both her books and Being Erica) simply won’t consider reading or viewing something if they think it’s SF. The result has been a tightrope walk, avoiding outright science fiction while providing fandom-inducing elements. This season has introduced a key one of those elements — a mythology, as we learn more about Dr. Tom, discover that there are other therapists like him, and that they have some sort of hierarchy — and I’m curious to see what effect this will have on the show’s already shaky ratings. In the first season Dr. Tom was really just a device, but with these added elements the show has moved clearly into the realm of the fantastic. If the conventional wisdom about women and SF is correct, it might just kill the show — but on the other hand, it could make it a show people will miss.