Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

Every time I watch a show on Hulu these days, I wind up seeing this public service announcement.

Seriously, have the people who made this ad ever been high school students? The kids at the school I went to had no problem saying things like this in person—even to the kids who were supposedly their best friends—and being completely serious about it. It’s a way of asserting dominance and marking territory, and I’m sure that if you honestly look at adult life, too, you’ll find that the same thing happens there, largely because those adults have risen to maturity being told that their own violence, stupidity, and petty meanness as adolescents was “just part of growing up.” And, indeed, it was. The behavioral part that was ignored, justified, and tacitly endorsed by the adults in their lives.

I remember my brother giving me a copy of Another Fine Myth to read when I was young. At the time, I believe it was the first comedy fantasy that I had ever read. I was hooked on the Myth books for a long time, and even picked up one of those massive paperback anthologies of the first few novels a year or two ago.

I also remember trying to write a book like the Myth novels when I was a kid, but the work itself is probably better left forgotten…

Robert Asprin, 1946-2008

On May 22, 2008, Bob passed away quietly in his home in New Orleans, LA. He had been in good spirits and working on several new projects, and was set to be the Guest of Honor at a major science fiction convention that very weekend.

It’s time for another installment of my soon-to-be-award-winning series (that I in no way stole from Stephen Colbert), “Who’s Honoring Me Now?”

This time around, it’s the WILDsound Summer One Page Screenplay Contest, that has selected my work – “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah” – as one of 30 finalists! On June 13, they’ll announce the top ten. Those ten will then go on to be read at WILDsound’s June screenplay event.

I was reading through issue 00 of Doorways Magazine (free from Wowio – link at the end of the entry) when I came across this little gem from Gary A. Braunbeck.

Doorways: It’s been said before, by you as well as others, that your work isn’t easily definable—you often overlap horror, dark fiction, sci-fi, and even fantasy and mainstream fiction, as well as writing stories that fall easily within those boundaries. Where do you feel the majority of your work belongs, in terms of general category?

Gary: The more I write and publish, the less I care about categorization—categorization is purely a marketing tool, a necessary evil that mid-list writers like myself—in my case, barely a mid-lister—have to accept and deal with. I was exceptionally pleased when Leisure decided to drop the word “Horror” from the spines of their books and replace it with, simply, “Fiction.”

He then goes on to talk about how he advises his writing students to “forget genre” and instead just tell the story as it should be told—which is great artistic advice, even if it’s a bit dicey commercially.

I, for one, have been disappointed making the rounds of my local bookstores and discovering that none of them have “horror” shelves. Instead, the horror titles are mixed in with the rest of the “fiction” section. The marketing reality of this is that if I’m looking for new horror—which, as someone working on horror manuscripts, I am—then I pretty much have to already know the title and author of the book I’m looking for instead of browsing or looking at a “new horror” section. Especially since my local book stores tend to fill over half of their floor space with the fiction section, making just general browsing a day-long activity. This is unlike the Science Fiction or Mystery genres, where I can walk over and take a look at one to two shelves of “New Science Fiction” and “New Mystery” and acquaint myself with what’s recently published.

Instead, I have to depend on outside resources like, well, Doorways Magazine, for a start, and those nifty cardboard standees at the front of Barnes & Noblesse Oblige. I’ve scanned those standees, by the way, and based on them, here’s the ideal back cover blurb for your latest horror masterpiece. You will adjust your plotlines accordingly.

The streets of [London/New York/Paris/Romantic Western Urban Locale] are dark and mysterious. Real mysterious. Not just episode-of-”Monk” mysterious, but, like, mys-teeer-ious. Life is dull and grey for [reporter/student/other career that involves words] Jane Merkinson [or insert favorite name of your choice]. Little does she know that soon her boring, comfortable life will be ripped asunder as a dark, sexy [vampire/vampiress] leads her into the blood-soaked, sensuous underworld of the undead.

“I loved it!” – generichorrorsite.com

“Breathtaking!” – welovevampirehotties.com

“A sleek and sexy thriller!” – Entertainment Weekly

“Please, please, pleeease give me Anne Rice’s old contract!” – The Author

You know geek conversations. Whatever your particular fandom, you’ve had them. Whether it’s who would win in a fight between Superman and Scud the Disposable Assassin or who would win in a match between 1970-era Joe Frazier and 1999-era Lennox Lewis, you’ve had this kind of conversation.

Here’s my favorite geek conversation ever – newly supplanting my previous favorite, the ethics of destroying a Death Star filled with otherwise innocent private contractors and full-time support employees. Ladies and gentlemen: Evil Monkey’s Guide to Kosher Imaginary Animals.

Mermaid – A: “No, for the obvious reasons.” EM: “What if you marry one? Is that kosher? Will a rabbi marry you?” A: “Kosher is a term about eating, not about sex.” EM: “I’m not talking about sex–I’m talking about marriage!” A: “If the mermaid is Jewish, the rabbi will probably marry you. But only if you’re Jewish too. But you’ll definitely have to find the right rabbi…”

Priceless.

Thanks to Boing Boing, I find my way back to ElfQuest.com – where WaRP Graphics has started the long process of posting every page of ElfQuest online for free reading. The second wave is about to go up, but the first wave contains – among other things – the first full story arc of the original series, Journey to Sorrow’s End.

It’s ElfQuest’s 30th anniversary this year, and last year DC Comics let go of them. They’re one of the longest-running indie comics on the scene, and I discovered they’re selling merchandise through CafePress.

I had problems with how DC handled their property. The “manga” reprints hacked the original art apart and re-ordered it, slathering it with a liberal dose of digital screen tones, and the only way to get the comic as it originally appeared was in overpriced “Archive” editions. Add to that the lack of promotion and the fact that the movie adaptation fizzled shortly afterward, and it seems like DC just didn’t quite bring its A-game.

There’s nothing wrong with CafePress. I still have a store with them, myself. But it still feels odd to see an indie comics institution of 30 years using what is usually thought of as a beginners’ merchandising outlet.

ElfQuest was a big part of my artistic development. It was the first outlet that made me realize that character design was more than just how people looked, but could also be used to reveal the inner life and monologue of a character. It was the comic that kept me interested in comics as a storytelling medium at times when the mainstream output failed to engage me. A lot of my sense of visual storytelling still comes from tricks I learned from Wendy Pini’s sequential art, with its use of cinematic angles and animated frame layouts that mimicked the time-flexibility of film.

And to top it all off, my first actual audience for any one of my short stories was an ElfQuest fan club (or “holt”).

I’m happy to see ElfQuest going online, and hoping that now WaRP will be able to bring back an audience for the comic. I know I’ll be tuning in every week and re-acquainting myself with what still remains my favorite comic.

I wrote a couple of years (ouch) back about the redesign bug biting Archie comics. At the time, I had picked up an issue of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Betty & Veronica, and I bemoaned the wooden artwork, the clumsy jokes, and the general feeling that somehow, the comic had decreased in quality, although also admitting I had never been a big fan to begin with.

The other day, I was at the store when I saw the good ol’ Archie Double Digests on the shelves. I decided this was my chance to see if the smaller size made the artwork look better, so I plunked down the bucks for both an Archie and a Jughead double digest. From these two slim volumes, I learned 4 things.

It wasn’t the size, it was the crappy printing. The new double digests are crisp. Clean. Almost pristine. The line art is solid, the colors unblurred, no bleed on the page and no smearing of the ink. In other words, it’s lousy. I discovered that it may not have been the size, but the cheap printing that made me remember the artwork as being good. The old printings with reduced artwork, bleeding colors, and ink processes so helter-skelter that there was a 50-50 chance of any bold-faced word being illegible gave the comics a sort of charm. Rendered in clean lines, the by-the-book character renderings have almost nothing to give them an edgy, rough feeling.

Your children are buying reprints. It’s actually kind of ingenious. If you happened to read Archie back in the days and you have kids who are obsessed with it now, you can identify with them almost immediately. Not only are they reading a comic that looks and reads like the comics you used to read – they’re reading the exact same comics you used to read. I made this discovery suddenly as halfway through the Jughead digest, I ran across one of the few stories that I vividly remember from my childhood. In it, Mr. Weatherbee tries to improve the students’ scores by telling them to get their imaginations involved in the learning process.

My suspicions were further confirmed by a backup story in which Jughead is always “carrying around cassettes” ever since he got his “brand new video recorder.” Oh, you silly writers. Archie Comics had a brilliant plan going, and you had to ruin it all by trying to be all timely and everything.

Actually, this explains a lot of things that never quite jived back when I was actually a kid reading these. How Archie could have stylish 80’s hair in one comic and be showing off his new polyester leisure suit in the next before wearing a Kurt Cobain plaid flannel in the third. But the reprint of that first story also brought me to my third revelation.

Despite Archie Comics’ best efforts, the artwork is inconsistent. It’s an issue with any time you try to get people to adhere to a given style manual. Even if you have your artists training line by line from the original artist’s works, they’ll always wind up interpreting it in their own style. One of the reasons I knew that the comic in question was actually a reprint and not just a new version from the old script was a few key panels that had stuck in my young mind like… a very sharp, jagged thing that gets stuck easily. Not all the similes can be brilliant, people.

In this case, it was a good thing – a cartoonist who was experimenting within the confines of his style manual. There’s Jughead’s borderline psychotic expression as he proclaims that Mr. Weatherbee has inspired him, and his eery costume and makeup job as a mad scientist walking through the halls who stops to tell Mr. Weatherbee, “Today, ve are dizzecting someting. Or eez eet… zomebodee?”

In other cases, it’s not so good. In the lead story in the Archie digest, six pages are spent with Archie running around trying to get pristine winter photographs. In all of the six pages, there is only one facial expression that is not a broad, teeth-bared grin. It takes all of six pages for Archie’s mother to stand there in the final page – after having smiled the smile of the paranoid schizophrenic along with every other troubled soul in Riverdale – and finally offer a close-mouthed smile. The kind of tight-lipped simper that shows the true depth of misery in her life. Surely, she’s coming down off her diet pill high, she’s all out of the good vanilla extract, and the reality of her miserable suburban life is coming crashing down upon her without the comfort she usually gains through her intoxicant friends. A portly husband in a go-nowhere job, a vapid son whose promiscuous lifestyle will only lead to tears, freeloading neighborhood teens who raid her icebox without asking permission, and the kind of soul-crushing ennui that can only come from spending every waking moment getting her whites their brightest and avoiding those darn spots on her good glassware. Were we only to have one more page, we would see her sneaking into Archie’s room to “borrow” his model airplane glue – just to tide her over for one more day….

Sorry. I have to admit – the artwork in that story was a little bit depressing.

Finally, I learned – Yes, the writing has always been that bad. Well, maybe not always. After all, I have the feeling they’re not going back to the old Bob Montana days to get their reprints. But what I found is that the comics in general were not just suffering from hackneyed jokes – they were suffering from poor timing, as well. A lot of comics would have been funnier without the last page or panel. It reminds me of the experiment a while back in which people were making Garfield comics funnier simply by removing Garfield’s thought balloons. Here’s an experiment, guys – write a comic in which you don’t try to top your punch line with an immediate follow-up. One-two punches work well in boxing, they aren’t always as successful in writing.

Okay – before anybody answers “throw it out the window,” “prop open your door with it,” or “hold down papers,” just consider it for a second. Maybe you were one of the people who spent the money and actually got one before they went out of stock. Maybe you put it on your wish list and, wonder of wonders, someone actually bought it for you.

The point is, if you have a Kindle then you need content to fill it.

Might I recommend the anthology recently edited by Thirdlayer, Bristolcountry, Thud, and me?

It Came From Airport Security is now available for your Kindle at a bargain price.

The writer’s strike has resulted in a plethora of fantastic internet videos – for which the networks that hired these writers and then tried to screw them out of new media revenues are getting nothing. Discuss.

Twice in a single day—twice, and it’s not even noon—I have run into people quoting the $200,000 average WGA salary figure, claiming that it’s proof the striking writers are just greedy.

First of all – it’s not about them making as much money as the producers. It’s about the producers turning their content into money without giving them a share. Writers see nothing from online use of their content, and little if anything from their content being put on DVD. All of this based on the idea that the content is worthless to the companies, even as the companies turn around and happily slap a dollar figure on it for the purposes of investor reports and lawsuits against YouTube.

Second, as August J. Pollak points out, if many writers make over a million a year and the average salary is $204,000 annually, then the vast majority of people have to be making well under $200,000 a year for the numbers to add up.

In conclusion. First, let’s not make the strike out to be about being paid the same as management – it’s about being justly compensated for your work. Second, let’s not allow pretty numbers to shut off our actual ability to interpret those numbers, shall we?