I love (and write) science fiction, but there are a bunch of things that show up a lot in SF movies, novels that have become such a part of the furniture of the genre that nobody bothers to ask whether they make any sense. An unquestioned assumption is not necessarily something that’s implausible or impossible but something that gets plugged into stories like a widget, without any thought on the part of the writer.

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…

Last Sunday’s episode of For Better or For Worse presents an interesting paradox: the punchline involved John, the husband,writing on a dollar bill, but Canada (where the strip is set) did away with dollar bills in favour of coins in 1987. FBOFW true believers will, of course, remember that creator Lynn Johnston re-booted the strip in 2008; the presence of the dollar bill, though, implies more than a simple reboot, and leads to the suspicion that the 2007 period in which several different timelines appeared simultaneously in the strip was not a simple narrative device but actually reflected some untold crisis in the universe of the strip. Based on the available evidence, we can say that last Sunday’s punchline reflects one of the following possibilities:

• 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.

It’s a deceptively simple question: When exactly did ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, the series, end? To some, of course, the answer is, “It didn’t.” Dark Horse Comics has already announced a Season Nine to come after the conclusion of the comics-only Season Eight, and the same people who wrote for the TV series are clearly enjoying the upsides of writing a Buffy series with an unlimited budget and no worries about actor availability. That’s ‘Buffy’ in some form, definitely.

But to others, ‘Buffy’ ended when the series left television. Seven seasons, two networks, 144 episodes, no writing Emmys. Certainly, the facts argue in favor of that interpretation; ‘Buffy’ Season Seven features the same core cast as Season One, the same basic setting, even the same theme music. But Season One was about a teenage girl who was trying to make it through the metaphorical hell of high school while simultaneously trying to stop demons from the literal mouth of Hell, while Season Seven was about…um, a twenty-two year old woman looking for a career, and a bad guy who couldn’t do anything but make vague menacing threats, and Andrew for some damned reason. They’re set in the same place, they feature the same people, but they don’t feel like the same series when set side by side. Only because we watched the transformation as it slowly occurred does it feel seamless to us.

So when did ‘Buffy’, the show that started in 1997 on the WB, end? Did it finish on the WB as well? It’d be hard to argue that, I think; Buffy as protective big sister/single parent to Dawn, working out of the Magic Box to battle demons alongside super-witch Willow and semi-redeemed vampire Spike, feels less like Season One than Season Seven did. (Not to mention Season Five marks the breaking point where the series ceases to be about people growing up and begins to be about people who have grown up and find their life really sucks and it’s not what they thought it’d be in high school and they’d really rather go back and be teenagers again…actually, Seasons Five through Seven really suck the joy out of re-watching Seasons One through Four. “Oh, aren’t Willow and Oz so cute together?” “Yeah, they go through a painful break-up later on, and then she becomes a lesbian and falls in love with this really sweet girl…who gets shot and killed.” One of the big problems with both ‘Buffy’ and ‘Angel’ was that neither series knew when to stop bumping off supporting characters.)

So it’s Season Four, then. Except…as much as I love Season Four (and I do; I think it’s the last good season, and it’s got some of the best comedy episodes) it’s actually a much bigger break from Season Three than Five is from Four or Six from Five. It’s a change of setting, a big change of supporting cast (gone are Angel, Cordelia, Principal Snyder, Joyce, Jonathan and Oz as regulars, and in comes Riley, Maggie Walsh, Forrest, Graham, Tara, Spike and Anya as regulars) and a change of mission, too. Buffy and her friends aren’t teenagers dealing with teenage problems anymore. They’re grown-ups, learning what it’s like to be out in the wider world.

No, I think that you can safely set aside Seasons One through Three of ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ as a seamless whole, an epic story about how we become adults told through a prism of sorcery, horror, kung-fu, and witty quips. All of the themes introduced in the beginning of the series (“high school is hell”, “Buffy’s friends are assets to her Slaying and not liabilities”, “your first love might seem passionate and true and the deepest you’ll ever experience, but they’re not necessarily good for you and passion isn’t enough to sustain a relationship”, “growing up means making decisions for yourself instead of listening to authority figures”, “having true friends that stick with you through thick and thin is better than being powerful”) are wrapped up in dramatic and spectacular fashion in the season finale (the commencement speaker turns into a giant demon snake, Buffy rallies together the entire high school class to defeat it, Angel walks away afterward to let her find someone who can be happy with her, Buffy tells the Watchers to sod off because she doesn’t need a Watcher anymore, and the season ends with everyone together watching the flames and then walking away hand-in-hand.) Heck, the Season Three finale even ends with the suggestion that there’s no need to worry about the Hellmouth anymore: the last line of the episode is, “Why do demons even come here anymore?” What could be more series finale than that?

‘Buffy’, as we finally saw it, is a genuinely great piece of television. But the first three seasons are the true ‘Buffy’ because they’re the execution of the central concept, a great idea turned into a magnificent series that ended just like it needed to. After that, it’s just a matter of following the character around while she lives her life, and frankly that’s not the same thing as telling a story. Buffy might keep fighting evil forever, but ‘Buffy’ ended the day she got her diploma.

Two things happened to me recently that dovetailed in an odd way: first, I broke my arm in a bicycle accident; second, I picked up volumes 1-6 of Marvel’s Essential X-Men books for a very reasonable price. The upshot of the first event was that I had to have a metal plate and screws attached to hold the broken bone together, with the result that when I travel by air (as I do fairly often for my job) I now have to budget an extra half-hour or so at the airport to explain that, yes, it’s the metal plate in my arm that’s setting off the metal detector. Because I am a smartass, it immediately occurred to me that if I were a suicide bomber what I really ought to do is get a sympathetic doctor to implant a bomb in my arm in such a way that it looked like an orthopedic plate; then I could have a good laugh with the security people, get on the plane and blow it up at my leisure. (I had a similar thought back when they were hunting Saddam Hussein and there was a story about a guy in southern Iraq who was always being mistaken for him; what Hussein should have done, I thought, was pretend to be that guy — “Yeah, I get that all the time.”)

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.

The movie “The Legend of Bagger Vance” popped into my head this morning. (And you think you have problems…) Thinking about it reminded me about how back when it came out, there was a big debate ovSer the movie’s use of the “magical negro” stereotype. I remember agreeing with the people who pointed this out, but not without some reservations…after all, I pointed out, if George Lucas had cast Sidney Poitier as Obi-Wan Kenobi instead of Sir Alec Guinness, would he have automatically become a magical negro even though the script hadn’t changed?

Which, in turn, reminded me of “women in refrigerators”. The list is well-known by now among comics fans, as are some of the excuses different writers have come up with for its existence. But the fact is, the most common one (“Hey, it’s not like men have it easy either!”) is actually sorta kinda true…Steve Trevor bit the big one a couple of times, the Vision was gruesomely dismembered and revived as a pale imitation of himself in order to put a little conflict into the Scarlet Witch’s story arc, the first couple of guys who even thought about dating Ms Marvel bit it, and let’s not even get into the whole Terry Long thing. (Husband and son both bit it there…)

But that’s the thing: Only an idiot would actually try to use these as arguments against the prevalence of racism and sexism in popular culture. Even though you can say, legitimately, that the “magical negro” is simply a mentor archetype that happens to be black, and even though you can say, legitimately, that a “woman in (a) refrigerator” is simply a supporting character that gets bumped off in order to provide a little drama for the main character who happens to be female, we can all recognize that there’s still something skeezy about it all. (Well, most of us can. I know all the enlightened, wise readers here can.) So what is it? Why is it not okay?

The answer is that there are so few other roles for these characters to take that the supporting roles become disproportionate representations of the characters in popular culture. Or, to put that a little less fancy, it’s not that there are lots of black “wise mentor” characters, it’s that there are so few black heroes getting mentored. It’s not that there are so many women in comics who die, it’s that there are so few who get to go off and avenge the deaths. These things are symptoms of a far deeper, more fundamental problem in pop culture, namely a dearth of protagonists who aren’t white guys. Nobody thinks to cast a black guy in the Luke Skywalker role; he’s relegated to the Obi-Wan (or more accurately, Mace Windu) part. We’ve reached a plateau in bringing diversity into our cult fiction, where characters outside the white male “standard” are included, but almost never in a leading role. Until that changes, you’ll continue to see the same stereotypes. Because they’re not stereotypes, they’re archetypes….but they’re the only archetypes women and minorities are allowed to inhabit.

A lot of people have emailed me asking about Comicon and what I am most hyped about and usually my answer is “none of it.” (Well, other than TRON Legacy, but we already knew about that.) Most of what gets advertised at Comicon nowadays is adaptation piled on top of adaptation, and although I’ll doubtless go see the Avengers movie and probably enjoy it very much, seeing the actors all in a line doesn’t juice me like it does some people; I at least need a trailer, you know? And this goes for most things at Comicon. I’m looking forward to seeing The Walking Dead on AMC, but I’m not really deeply excited about it. New Rocketeer comics? Well that’s nice I guess. And so on and so forth.

This is an exception, precisely because it is new. God knows I’ve ripped on Zack Snyder before, but I’ve never really had a problem with his visual style of directing per se. (Sure, you can make fun of the stylized slo-mo Matrix-lite bits easily enough, but they’re an easy and predictable target, much like Brian de Palma’s endless tracking shots or Michael Bay’s absolutely everything he does.) My problem with Snyder’s movies has always been that he has a tendency to take an existing work and become worshipful towards it, turning 300 and Watchmen into adulations of the source material rather than good movies in their own right.

But this – this is his own thing. That alone holds a lot of promise for me. That it is his own thing that also has dragons, samurai, giant mecha robots with bunny faces, Nazis, mobsters, spaceships, and apparently everything else in the world that is violent makes it even more something that excites me. And that is all I want: something new.

One of the things that I genuinely adore about writing for mightygodking.com instead of my own blog is that I get a lot of comments. People love to give feedback on what I’ve written (and ultimately, that’s what every writer really wants, to know that people are listening. Money is just a measurement of that, albeit one that can be used to pay your rent.)

But after a while writing for a high-traffic blog on the Internet, you do start to notice that no matter what you say, someone disagrees with it. I’m not complaining about it; you don’t get into writing, especially writing opinion pieces, if you don’t have enough confidence in your opinions to avoid taking disagreement personally. But I am curious. Is there really any opinion out there that everyone, absolutely everyone can agree on? Is there something we all like?

So, here’s the experiment. I’m going to name ten movies that I consider to be awesome. Not the ten best movies of all time, or the ten all-time classics; just ten movies that I love, and that I could sit down and watch at any time and enjoy them. And in the comments, you can either add movies to that list, or veto movies that someone has added. You don’t need to defend your choices, either to add or to subtract. In fact, I don’t want you to; I’d prefer that the comments not get bogged down in a big argument about whether or not “Buckaroo Banzai” sucks. I’ll try to go back and edit the list occasionally, so people can see at a glance what the current content is, and we’ll see if anything survives as something everyone on the Internet could sit down and watch together.

UPDATE: I went through the first sixty-two comments and updated the list based on everyone’s new picks and vetoes. A few points I want to clarify for future commenters: You do not, I repeat not need to take something off the list in order to put something on. The list can be as long as it needs to be. Comments that said “replace X with Y” were treated as “Veto X, Add Y”. Also, there is no need to re-nominate or re-veto a movie. I won’t take anything off unless it’s vetoed, and once it’s vetoed, it can’t go back on even if someone nominates it again. The whole point is finding films everyone wants to watch! (If you want to make my life easier, you can just make your comments: “Veto: A, B, C, D” and “Add: E, F, G, H” so that it’s easy to figure out what you want me to add and remove. Also, it’d help if you mentioned whether you meant the original or the remake. I assumed the original unless otherwise specified.) Oh, and sorry, but if you nominated a film specifically to watch the Rifftrax version of it, that doesn’t count.

The current list:

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Alien, Aliens, Animal House, Apocalypse Now, Army of Darkness, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Better Off Dead, The Big Lebowski, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, The Blues Brothers, Das Boot, Bringing Up Baby, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Chinatown, City Lights, A Clockwork Orange, Dawn of the Dead, Death to Smoochy, Doctor Strangelove, Donnie Darko, Empire Records, The Empire Strikes Back, Enter the Dragon, Fargo, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Fight Club, Forbidden Planet, The Full Monty, Ghostbusters, The Godfather, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, High Society, Highlander, The Hudsucker Proxy, Hunt for Red October, In Bruges, It’s a Wonderful Life, It’s My Party, Jaws, Juno, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, LA Confidential, Last Night, Last of the Mohicans, Latter Days, Little Miss Sunshine, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Lone Star, Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings, Memento, Metropolis, Miller’s Crossing, MirrorMask, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Moon, Muppet Christmas Carol, The Muppet Movie, Murder by Death, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, Night of the Living Dead, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Perseopolis, The Princess Bride, The Producers, The Professional, Pulp Fiction, The Quiet Earth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ransom, Rebecca, The Right Stuff, Ronin, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Rushmore, Ruthless People, The Shining, Silver Streak, Snatch, Sneakers, The Specials, Spider-Man 2, Star Trek (2009), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Sting, The Terminator, Thank You For Smoking, The Thing, The Third Man, Throne of Blood, Time Bandits, Unforgiven, The Untouchables, Watership Down, Willow, The Wizard of Oz, Used Cars, The Valet, X-Men 2, Yellowbeard, Young Frankenstein

The Vetoed List (remember, once it goes on this list, it can’t come off):

Airplane, Amelie, Avatar, Back to the Future, Big Trouble in Little China, Blade Runner, Blazing Saddles, Brazil, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Bug’s Life, Caddyshack, Chasing Amy, Children of Men, Clue, Contact, Cowboy Bebop, Dangerous Liasons, The Dark Crystal, Dogma, Drunken Master 2, Evil Dead II, The Fifth Element, Finding Nemo, (500) Days of Summer, The Goonies, Groundhog Day, Happy Gilmore, Hot Fuzz, Hudson Hawk, The Incredibles, Iron Man, Jacob’s Ladder, The Jerk, Jurassic Park, Labyrinth, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Love Actually, The Matrix, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Monsters, Inc., Pan’s Labyrinth, The Patriot, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, The Philadelphia Story, Police Story 3, Ratatouille, Repo Man, Schindler’s List, Serenity, Sexy Beast, Shaun of the Dead, The Shawshank Redemption, Shrek, Silverado, Sin City, Star Wars, Stargate, Starsky and Hutch, Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny, The 13th Warrior, 30 Days of Night, This Is Spinal Tap, Tombstone, Tommy Boy, Toy Story, Toy Story 2, 12 Monkeys, 28 Days Later, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Unbreakable, Up, The Usual Suspects, WALL-E, When Harry Met Sally, Zombieland, Zoolander

There we go; let the consensus-building continue!

Hello again, and welcome to another installment of “Looking Back at Comics”! This week, we’re going to take a look at the 1990s. Everyone who was around during the 90s now looks back at the era through a lens of somewhat sheepish embarrassment; although it was easy to get caught up in the hype and excitement of an era that was all about flash and excess. Even the covers of the 90s were big and flashy: Comic books back then artificially raised their value through so-called “variant covers” that the company hyped as being worth more than the regular ones. Fortunately, modern comics have completely ditched the variant cover craze and…um…well, except…I mean, those are legitimately rarer! And they aren’t shiny!

But it wasn’t just the covers that made the 90s so ludicrous. Those fancy variant covers frequently adorned comics that had over-hyped “shock” storylines. Who can forget the so-called “Death of Superman”, a story that actually got play in regular newspapers because foolish reporters actually believed that the character was going to permanently die! Of course, less than two years later, Superman was back, but fans at the time treated the mock “death” as real and vehemently debated the merits of replacing him with a grim and gritty cyborg version of the character. Thankfully, we’d never see a grim and gritty cyborg character replacing an iconic American…um…let’s move on. Let’s just move on.

To the villains! Yes! That’s certainly an era where the 90s got downright silly! They loved nothing more than to make good guys go bad and villains reform, simply for the shock value of seeing them change sides! You’d get absurdities like Iron Man turning against the Avengers and Venom becoming a good guy…crap. The point is, we’ve learned from the 90s. Definitely.

Because we wouldn’t have such an excess of grim, dark, anti-heroes. Back in the 90s, it was almost de rigeur to have “grim and gritty” heroes show up like Darkhawk, Night Thrasher, and Lobo. Back then, they even had a “Dark Speedball” character! Of course, at least they were self-aware enough to make it a joke, instead of actually trying to sell the character as an actual deep and meaningful character moment. I mean, come the fuck on! “Penance”? Who were they thinking this would appeal to? Speedball fans who said to themselves, “Hey, I love Speedball, but he’s not enough of an emo prick!” Or perhaps comics fans who said, “I dunno, I really like emo pricks, but none of them have the name recognition that would make me take a chance on them!” …sorry, breaking character there. The point is, Dark Avengers, Dark Wolverine, Dark X-Men, and Dark Reign are entirely different from Force Works and X-Force. And X-Force is entirely different from X-Force, too. Just like Fantastic Force is different from Fantastic Force. Because it’s not the 90s anymore.

What changed to break comics out of the 90s mindset? The arrival of Joe Quesada, that’s what! Quesada put an end to the numberless spin-off titles that were diluting the brand identity of Marvel’s classic titles (like X-Factor, X-Force, et cetera) and ended the practice of frequent, pointless crossovers that was eroding reader loyalty. Without that, it’s doubtful that Marvel would have survived to hit the motherlode of movie adaptations that have become the company’s financial lifeline. Yes, Joe Quesada’s innovations ushered in an era of true greatness at Marvel.

I wonder if he remembers what they were…

I had an interesting experience this weekend at a yard sale on my street. While digging through a bin full of kids’ clothes in hopes of finding some for my two-year-old son, I had a Spider-Man t-shirt thrust into my hands. “Trust me,” said the father of the boy whose old toys and clothes were being sold, “when he turns three he’ll be demanding that you get him one.”

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.

Everybody hates gratuitous resurrections, right? It’s just a fanboy thing, like bagging your comics or bickering about who would win in a Batman/Captain America fight. It just sucks that they (Marvel or DC, take your choice) continue to insult our intelligence by giving us unbelievably contrived resurrection storylines. “It wasn’t me who died! A cosmic alien impersonated me while I was in suspended animation, then blew herself up and telepathically inserted a shard of her consciousness into my clone, who then got absorbed into my mind when she died!” “No, I never died at all! Being impaled through the chest with an eight-inch-thick chunk of razor-sharp metal merely greatly inconvenienced me!” “Yeah, when I got decapitated by Wolverine? Funny story…”

Comics writers are well aware of this particular fanboy pet peeve; how could they not be? You only need to be accosted so many times at a convention by an angry fan saying, “You should never have brought back Barry Allen/Harry Osborn/Doctor Octopus because their death was so meaningful!” So they try everything they can to make sure that this time, when they kill off a character, they ain’t coming back.

They’ve long ago realized that you can’t just kill someone off in an explosion or a fall; dying off-panel is an automatic “Get Out of Kill Free” card. And they’ve figured out that exotic deaths never work, either; if Wonder Man dies of ionic energy poisoning, you can bet that somewhere down the line, somebody’s going to get the bright idea to bring him back. And who’s to say that ionic energy poisoning doesn’t just cause you to go into suspended animation, anyway?

So it’s got to be on-panel. It’s got to be a “real” cause of death. And the latest innovation: It’s gotta be gory. Sure, you might survive a gunshot wound, but are you really going to survive having your head popped like a zit by Black Adam, or ripped in half…um…also by Black Adam…or impaled on a sword? (By Deathstroke; presumably, Black Adam was busy that day.) Um…actually, the answer seems to still be “yes”. The Martian Manhunter came back after being immolated on-panel, Ronnie Raymond returned from a full-on chest stabbing, Colossus wasn’t stopped by cremation, and even perma-death poster boy Bucky showed up again as Grim-N-Gritty-Cyborg-Assassin-Bucky.

Clearly, the only solution is an editorial mandate. From now on, it’s time to take a hard line: No more gratuitous resurrections. That’s right, no matter how popular the character, no matter how unpopular the death sequence, Psylocke is not coming back from the dead! Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada has sp…oh. Hmm. Maybe that’s not as fool-proof as we thought.

The truth is, there actually is a fool-proof way of stopping gratuitous resurrections in comics. It’s even simple, easily executable, and would be wildly popular with fans. Ready for it? Here it is:

STOP KILLING THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Seriously, is this really that hard to understand? There’s no way you can possibly make a death stick in a comic book; they’re fictional characters, they’ll come back as long as someone remembers them fondly enough to bring them back. And as Bucky proves, that can be an amazingly long time. Since there’s no way to make death anything more than a temporary condition in a comic-book universe, why keep deploying it? Surely it can’t be for shock value. Jaded fans no longer care about comic-book death, not when DC kills the Martian Manhunter and resurrects Barry Allen in the same crossover. Death in comics doesn’t matter anymore as much because it’s overused as because it’s impermanent. So why not just let death die for a while?

Except for the Sentry. The only possible reason to bring him back is that he’s NOT FUCKING DEAD ENOUGH.

The wonderful thing about the DVD revolution is the way that it makes it possible for just about anyone to become a film student. Videotapes began the process, of course, but their limitations meant that the really nice versions of a lot of movies were only available to someone who was willing to shell out the big bucks for a laserdisc player (and the expensive discs it played.) Once DVDs really caught on, though, science-fiction fans like myself could take an informative, exhaustive, and above all cheap trip through the history of the genre.

All of which is by way of introduction to my decision, some years back, to sit down and watch The Omega Man, Logan’s Run, and Soylent Green. I figured I might learn something about my sci-fi geek ancestors by watching what I thought of as an informal, accidental trilogy. All three of them had come out on DVD, and all three of them had come out in very reasonably-priced versions. And most importantly, all three of them had become, in their own way, pop-cultural touchstones. I didn’t know exactly why I grouped them together in my head beyond that, but I figured it would come to me as I watched them.

It actually didn’t. Perhaps it was because the project took a little longer than planned; I watched Logan’s Run in 2002, but I didn’t get around to watching The Omega Man and Soylent Green until about four years later. (In my defense, in the intervening time I bought a house, wrote a couple of books and some short stories, and watched lots of other movies. Oh, and I started a blog.) Even after I’d finally watched all three, though, the connection never gelled in my mind. I knew it was there; I was sure I was right to see them as somehow linked. But it still didn’t click as to why.

Until recently, when I read about another movie that came out not long afterwards. It’s a little cult film from a director that only did a handful of movies, a sort of avant-garde sci-fi flick that tried to graft the techniques of cinema verité into a new genre. You might have heard of it, though. It’s called Star Wars.

(pause for laughter)

(pause some more for laughter)

No? Not even a little? OK, I’ll move on. The point is, Star Wars came out only a couple of years after Logan’s Run, but the two of them look like they’re from different decades. Logan’s Run is a very technically polished science fiction film, with effects that no doubt dazzled contemporary audiences, but it’s still one of the last pre-Star Wars films, whereas Star Wars is the first post-Star Wars film. (Yes, Star Wars is a post-Star Wars film. I’ll explain.)

All three of the films in my informal trilogy share that same elusive element, that quality that changed in the watershed moment when Star Wars transformed science-fiction cinema for better and/or worse. They’re better, simply in terms of production quality, than 50s sci-fi movies like The Thing, It Conquered the World, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers…but you can see a continuum of evolution between those movies and Soylent Green, whereas something like Transformers doesn’t even look like it came from the same breeding stock. It looks more like a descendant of Star Wars…OK, a brain-damaged, atrophied descendant, but a descendant nonetheless.

I think the key is Lucas’ decision, with Star Wars, to create an immersive environment. People talk about the special effects of Star Wars as though that was the film’s great breakthrough, but it really didn’t make that many advances beyond what was already possible. (Which is not to denigrate the advances it did make–motion control cameras allowed for fluid, realistic shots of space battles that were essential to the director’s vision.) But the real change was the extra care that was taken in crafting the models, the costumes, the sets and the locations. Lucas wanted you to feel like he was shooting a documentary, not a science-fiction movie.

Previous science-fiction effects artists weren’t lazy when they didn’t take that same amount of care–they were just thinking about the effects in a different way. To them, the science-fiction genre was the genre of ideas; everything was an allegory, a representation of existing concepts. Logan’s Run was about the generation gap. Soylent Green was about overpopulation and pollution. The Omega Man was about nuclear war. Likewise, the effects were representational instead of realistic. Prior to Lucas, science-fiction was the cinema of ideas.

Actually, Star Wars is an allegory too. It’s a movie made by a cynical veteran of the 60s, with the Empire as a stand-in for a pre-Watergate Nixon administration that seemed (at the time) to be about one bad week away from dissolving Congress and declaring martial law. The only solution, according to Lucas’ actually pretty radical and highly politically-charged script, is for armed rebellion against the tyrannical government, aided by all the other races that the Powers That Be ruthlessly oppress. (Early drafts of the script contained sequences that later trickled into Return of the Jedi. The highly trained, professional soldiers with all the cool technology getting their asses kicked by natives with pointy sticks and stolen guns? Gee, what war was going on right around then?)

The problem is, Lucas made the film so immersive that nobody noticed the allegory, and the effects so beautiful that everyone judged all subsequent films by the standards he set. From now on, an important aspect of all science-fiction movies would be, “Are the effects realistic?” The cinema of ideas was replaced, in that instant, by the cinema of visceral experience. Sci-fi became all about making you feel as if you were there, recreating the documentary feel of Star Wars instead of the philosophy of it. A post-Star Wars movie was one you lived, not thought about. (Which is why, despite having intended to make a pre-Star Wars movie, Lucas made a post-Star Wars movie in the eyes of everyone who saw it. See? Makes sense now, right?)

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that every science-fiction movie made before Star Wars was a deep, insightful allegory, any more than it means that every post-Star Wars film was a brain-dead piece of eye-candy. Writers and directors still have things to say in their art, and that’s a constant in any time and any genre. But the emphasis shifted with Star Wars…and by watching Logan’s Run, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green, you can see some of the most advanced examples of films made before that watershed moment, the apex of the cinema of ideas.

And, um…if you haven’t seen them, please don’t read the comments section. Because someone’s going to spoil the ending of Soylent Green, I guarantee it.

Everyone understands the comic-book reboot, right? A comic (or an entire line of comics) is getting too bogged down in old continuity, making it less accessible to new readers and difficult to get people to try. So, the thinking goes, let’s start everything over again! A new beginning, from square one, looking forward to a fresh start and attracting a whole new audience with its fantastically new newness! (Did we mention “new”?) The reboot is all about erasing the slate and starting fresh.

Except that by definition, it doesn’t work. Far from being the new beginning that it’s intended to be, I would suggest that by definition, a comic book reboot is inherently nostalgic…and that in fact, reboots delay any kind of “fresh and original” stories for several years.

Because as I have commented elsewhere, a comic book is more than just its main character. It sounds like a nice idea to start over at the beginning; just retell Batman’s origin, and you’re good to go, right? But setting aside that you’ve just begun a “fresh start” to a character by retelling the one story about them that probably everyone even remotely interested already knows, you’re nowhere near finished. You also need to introduce Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon, Alfred, the Batcave, Robin, and every single member of the rogue’s gallery…which means a story retelling the origins of the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin, Catwoman, Killer Croc, Mister Freeze, the Scarecrow, Ra’s Al-Ghul…

And where does the writer go for inspiration on every single one of these stories? They look back. They go back to the original story the character was introduced in, and they retell it. Sure, they add their own inventive spin on it. They retell it in a way tht makes sense to modern audiences, and that resonates with our time and our culture. But they retell it, nonetheless. And until they’re done retelling old stories, they can’t tell new ones.

But it gets worse. Because sometimes it’s not enough to retell the origins of characters; sometimes, specific stories and events make so much of an impact on the character’s history that they’re just not the same without that chapter in their history. The “essential” elements of Jean Grey include the Phoenix saga, her love triangle with Wolverine, and a host of other aspects that didn’t show up until years after her introduction. The death of Lightning Lad is so fundamental to the history of the Legion of Super-Heroes that it’s hard to imagine not including it in some form or another. So the “fresh start” version of the comic book has things like “the Hellfire Club story, as told by Mark Millar!” or “the Clone Saga, as told by Brian Michael Bendis!” or “the Galactus saga, as told by Warren Ellis!” And your new beginning winds up going a hundred issues without ever getting to any really new stories. It’s just a fresh coat of paint over the old ideas that made the original continuity too convoluted to begin with. (Seriously, did anyone need Ultimate Stryfe or Ultimate Onslaught?)

In some ways, a reboot is like a mild sickness that has to be gotten over before the writer can start really working on the title. Some reboots get it over with quickly–the post-Crisis Lex Luthor is so radically different from his pre-Crisis counterpart that there really isn’t a whole lot to recap–while others take longer. (*cough* Ultimate Universe *cough*) And unfortunately, as Lex Luthor shows, there’s always the danger of a relapse. The current DC editorial team seems determined to retell every single story that was ditched in the reboots, one by one if need be.

In the end, that’s the real problem with reboots; not only do they not really give the title a fresh start, they don’t really make it any more accessible. Within a year or two, the new continuity has its own backstory to wade through, and a few years after that, it’s just as convoluted and messy as the old one. (And that’s assuming Geoff “Legion of 3 Worlds” Johns doesn’t decide to try to bring back the old continuity, too.) And how does the publisher decide to deal with that? “Hey, this is too convoluted! Let’s do another reboot!” Which just dooms the series to five more years of rehashing its old plotlines. (This is why the Legion of Super-Heroes hasn’t been successful since 1985.)

So what’s the solution? It’s easy to say, but hard to do, which is probably why it’s not tried more. The solution is to make the series more accessible by writing it more accessibly. Introduce new bad guys for the heroes to fight, ones that are just as fresh to the characters and the old fans as they are to new readers. More importantly, remember the new reader when writing the story, and explain things to them as you go. Expository writing is one of the least noticed, most neglected, and hardest things for a good writer to do, but it pays off in getting new readers involved in your comic. (Or novel. Terry Pratchett, among his many other talents, is an expert at writing expository passages that explain things to new readers without boring old ones.) It takes hard work and discipline, but it’s the only real answer.

That, or make a deal with Satan. Deals with Satan always pull in the readers.

Last week, as you may have heard, Fox cancelled Dollhouse. Also last week, as you probably didn’t hear, whatever network aired Hank cancelled it too. Neither was a surprise: they were both solidly bottom-of-the barrel performers — Dollhouse was considered a worse bet than reruns of House to run during Sweeps Week, while Hank was frequently outperformed by its competition on Spanish-language networks. What ought to be a surprise is the reaction each received: the end of Dollhouse resulted in anguished howls that reverberated across the Internet and all the spheres of nerd-dom, while Hank‘s cancellation was received by a chorus of crickets.

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.

Now maybe you go to a big convention and you see someone in an unfamiliar costume and you are all “gosh I wish I knew who that was, but I can’t say that out loud or I will lose valuable nerd cred, and nerd cred is the only cred I have since I came to this convention and all.” So you sit there in silence, drinking your Mello Yello because the convention only has Mello Yello to drink because they ran out of all the other soft drinks three hours ago, even the Fresca, but what is worse than the silence and the vaguely citrusy pop is that you sit there in anguish because you don’t know what those nerds are dressed up like!

Well, never fear. I am here to help you nerds. I know everything that there ever was to know about anime. I know so much about anime I actually know what it will be called next, just like how I knew it was going to start being called “anime” back when everybody else was still calling it “Japanimation.” (I can’t tell you what the new name is, because that is top secret, but I can give you a hint: it will rhyme with a large animal commonly found in zoos.)

ANIME: Honor Of Panda
BRIEF SUMMARY: Kenji Watanabe is a 17th-century ronin with a very unruly student: Popo the panda! Kenji and Popo ride through the countryside, righting wrongs, helping villagers against bandits, defending the honor of beautiful maidens (who inevitably are allergic to pandas) and reading from The Book of Five Rings. Humourously, Popo never quite understands the way of war – he always wants to eat bamboo instead! Silly Popo!
WHY DO YOU LIKE THIS ANIME, COSTUME PLAYERS? “I like dressing as Kenji because he’s tough and cool, but with a good heart. Steve has been looking forward to dress up as Popo ever since he first saw the series. I’m not sure why.”

ANIME: Mercenary Princess Toyoka
BRIEF SUMMARY: Toyoka is a medieval Japanese princess who one day, while picking chrysanthemum blossoms to place in an artistic arrangement to present at court, falls through a time vortex right into the middle of a crazy gunfight: evil yakuza versus Isamu and Seiko, the famous mercenary duo known as the Running Bomb Angels! In their company, Toyoka quickly discovers skills she never realized she had as the Running Bomb Angels get a third member, who is deadly with her delicate fans and sense of right place.
WHY DO YOU LIKE THIS ANIME, COSTUME PLAYERS? “I’ve always wanted to commit horrible acts of violence, but I don’t like guns. Then I started watching Mercenary Princess Toyoka and realized the horrible things you could do with a fan.”

ANIME: Byzantine Fashion
BRIEF SUMMARY: Aglurk, a soldier for the Ottoman Empire, secretly wishes he was a fashion designer. Although bound by his warrior’s code to defend the Empire, this does not stop him from accessorizing in this wacky comedy for anybody who has ever loved shiny things.
WHY DO YOU LIKE THIS ANIME, COSTUME PLAYER? “The sparkles!”

ANIME: Oops! Jun Loves The Dead Girl!
BRIEF SUMMARY: Poor Jun – he finally gets up the courage to ask out Yukie, the girl he has loved all through high school, but on that very day she dies in a freak snorkeling accident. Will Jun ever realize that Aoi, his best friend, loves him very much and wishes to be his wife? Or will he spend all his time pining for dead Yukie and wishing she was alive so he could have sex with her? Find out in the 327 episodes of this fun sexy comedy!
WHY DO YOU LIKE THIS ANIME, COSTUME PLAYERS? “Alan likes it, and it means I don’t have to move around too much.”

ANIME: Zucchini Warrior Z
BRIEF SUMMARY: Z is a mutated zucchini, a cross between vegetable and man. In the future wars of 1993, Z leads the war against Petroglox, a massive corporation bent on control of all the world’s agriculture. Over the series’ six-season run, Z horrifically murders 1,924 corporate goons, each in a completely unique way. Anime Compendium says this series should have been called “Fist of the North Star 2: The Search For More Violence.”
WHY DO YOU LIKE THIS ANIME, COSTUME PLAYER? “I originally just started watching it out of boredom when I couldn’t get copies of Ranma 1/2, but somewhere around the three hundredth death I started wondering if they could keep up the original kill streak. It gets really compelling watching them come up with new ways to rend and tear flesh.”

What do Citizen Kane, The Matrix, and Meet the Spartans have in common?

What do War & Peace, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and The Destroyer Volume 11: Kill or CURE have in common?

What do Persepolis, Jack Staff, and Tyrese Gibson’s MAYHEM! have in common?

I imagine the answer to the first two questions is obvious to pretty much anyone who’s familiar with films and novels.1 Unfortunately, I don’t need to imagine getting into an argument over what I believe is the obvious answer to the third.

I understand why Will Eisner came up with2 the term/format of the “graphic novel.” He wanted a “real” book publisher to publish his comics3. Comics at the time carried the stigma of being throw-away entertainment for kids. Getting a traditional novel publisher interested meant convincing one or more of them that the comics being offered up for publication were, in fact, something other than comics.

Fair enough. I’d call my feet tits if I thought it’d convince someone to give me money to touch them. I’m not proud.4 But I’d like to think that when I got out of the long, scalding hot shower I’d take after having whatever’s at the ends of my legs fondled, I’d be able to recognize that my feet aren’t breasts.

It’s frustrating to me to see writers and artists I respect giving more than the minimum lip service required to the notion that their work in the medium of comics is something other than comics work.

In his (Revised) Graphic Novel Manifesto, Eddie Campbell states: “The goal of the graphic novelist is to take the form of the comic book, which has become an embarrassment, and raise it to a more ambitious and meaningful level.”

(EDITED TO ADD: I’ve since been informed by someone who’d know that the Manifesto in question is intended as a work of comedy–a context I’m embarrassed to admit I missed due to clearly insufficient research on my part. I thank Mr. Campbell for clarifying the matter in the comments {which anyone who can be bothered to read my blathering should definitely check out}, and apologize for inadvertently misrepresenting his position.)

I’m all for more ambitious and meaningful comics. And I can even see how someone of Campbell’s stature could perceive a medium that includes the work of Alex Toth, Jack Kirby, and Bernie Krigstein, among many, many others, an embarrassment, irrevocably connected in the public’s mind with the stereotypical “Biff! Bam! Pow!” Adam West Batman image as it seemingly is, even to this day. The still widespread perception that comics are for kids is problematic (most North American comics not being for kids is also problematic for entirely different reasons, but that’s another post.)

I submit to you that the solution to the problem isn’t to create a new term for comic books,5 but to create more and better work in the comic medium–while making sure as many people as possible know that’s the medium the work is in.

As a comic book, From Hell elevates the comic book medium. As a graphic novel, it diminishes the comic book medium, in the same way Margaret Atwood insisting A Handmaid’s Tale isn’t science fiction diminishes science fiction. Both situations encourage those who don’t know what a comic/sci-fi is to believe the comics/sci-fi they’re consuming is something else. They are given no incentive to seek out good comics or sci-fi, because they aren’t interested in comics and sci-fi. The fact that they just enjoyed those very things is immaterial to their future reading choices, because they don’t understand what they just read was the very thing they’re predisposed to believe they’ve no interest in reading.

That’s not entirely an apples to apples comparison, as comics are a medium and science fiction is a genre6. But the point is that some comics will be embarrassing to people who want their comic work taken seriously for its literary or artistic merit for as long as there are comics. And whatever necessarily arbitrary distinction one tries to make between comics and graphic novels won’t change the fact that there will be some graphic novels that will embarrass creators who want their graphic novel work taken seriously for its artistic or literary merit, too. Because the distinction is arbitrary, and it’s an arbitrary distinction I suspect many would be unwilling, unable, or simply unprepared to make, even if there were widespread agreement on what the distinction should be7.

A year or two back, I was contacted about editing a series of graphic novels for a corporate client. Each of the graphic novels was to contain a central theme educating the reader about the client’s product; each was to reveal that theme in a humourous way; and each graphic novel was to consist of a row of three to four panels.

I tried to explain to the client that what they were describing would more accurately be called a comic strip. The client was quite insistent that they didn’t want comics, strips or otherwise. They wanted graphic novels. Four panel graphic novels.

That’s what those who’ve tried to elevate comics to the level of serious literature by creating a new and, from an artistic standpoint, unnecessary term have gotten from the public for their effort: a complete lack of any recognition of a qualitative (or even quantitative) difference between a graphic novel, a comic book, a trade paperback, and/or a comic strip.8

At the end of his Manifesto, Campbell returns the idea of the graphic novel to its original context, that of a marketing tool–a context in which the term had, and continues to have, a positive value for the comics creator. Says Mr. Campbell: “The graphic novelist reserves the right to deny any or all of the above if it means a quick sale.”

The use of the term graphic novel to describe comics has enabled a huge number of sales, to publishers, potential readers, and the Hollywood moneyhandlers who arguably keep the North American comics industry solvent (or at least inspire people to continue creating and publishing work inside it, if only for the worst reasons.) But at the end of the day, a graphic novel’s just another word for a comic book.9

There are more and better comics being made today than ever before. Instead of being embarrassed by those examples of the medium that display modest (or no) ambition, I’d prefer comics creators acknowledge what’s gone before, celebrate what’s been accomplished in the medium so far, and embrace the possibilities of what’s yet to come.

Unless, of course, doing so would interfere with a quick sale. In that case, here’s your four panel graphic novel; where’s my cheque?

-Foley 10

1. For those who aren’t familiar with those things, the answers are “They’re all films” and “They’re all novels” respectively; “They’re all stories told in the same medium” is a perfectly reasonable answer to both. [↩]
2. or co-opted, depending on whose version of events you believe [↩]
3. Considering the way comics creators were treated by the major comics companies of the time, you really can’t blame him. [↩]
4. I’m also not wealthy. [↩]
5. though that ship’s already sailed and it ain’t coming back to the dock. [↩]
6. regardless of what my local mass market bookstore thinks [↩]
7. and there isn’t, as far as I can tell [↩]
8. Well, that and a shelf at the local chain bookstore, a topic I may revisit in a future post if some politician fails to say something suitably moronic in the next few weeks. [↩]
9. At least in Canada and the United States. Over in his blog, Campbell has suggested the term “comic book” may carry substantially more baggage in a European context than it does in the one I tend to experience it in. [↩]
10. “Co-writer” of the “graphic novel” Cowboys & Aliens. Which we still don’t talk about. [↩]