Cap’n Billy Buckstar XB-19

This is my latest 24 hour comic, completed Aug. 1-2. I missed two sessions this spring (both at Cosmic Monkey Comics if memory serves) so I decided to do one at my house the weekend that Marcie was in DC. By the time I committed to the date, only the estimable Adrian Wallace was able to join me.

I’m quite happy with this one. At 26 pages it is my longest 24 hour comic. It’s also probably the tightest story, with early random elements coming back around to significance later on. Marcie’s comment (after “You’re messed up!”) was that it’s less esoteric than my previous efforts, which suggests that I was able to make the narrative-driving gag structure more readily apparent, and that less explanation is required here.

A little explanation nonetheless: as usual I started with my favorite random story seed generator, and got a robot-cowboy-spaceman-pirate as a character (traditional pub was the place, overclocked kitchen appliance was the object). I built the whole story on the overloaded nature of Cap’n Billy’s identity.

I’ve said before that these manic, surreal funnies tend to produce my purest form of self expression. Now, with a few days distance, I can see what Billy Buckstar has to tell me about my own overclocked self. (I’m a cartoonist! No, an animator! No, a writer! But what I really want to do is direct!)

Noir Nation

I was watching The Wire with David Simon’s commentary, and he said that the crime drama is now as elemental to our understanding of our American identity as the western. I’ve never been to partial to westerns, but I have been enjoying more and more noir fiction, so I’m totally turned on by this theory of a new cultural paradigm. May I suggest, the next time we have a national impulse to elect John Wayne, let’s look for a Philip Marlowe instead.

Harry Potter 6 plus Trailer Trashin 2

For a change, I saw a movie opening week. I won’t include spoilers this time– even if you don’t care, I do.
In 4 words: best Harry Potter ever.
Better, even, dare I say it, than the book. I found the book incredibly aggravating when I first read it, less so on re-reading a couple weeks ago, but still kind of artificially inflated. The movie is of necessity shortened and tightened up, and it made for a much more sensible and interesting story.
But more than that…Harry Potter has always been something of a guilty pleasure, seeing as how it’s aimed at younger readers. I’ve enjoyed the books, but part of me always feels I should be reading something more sophisticated. The movies have been pretty uneven for me. Again, I have the sense that I’m not the target audience, not quite enamored enough with the source material. The Half-Blood Prince is different. I enjoyed it unreservedly. The script is stronger, the directing is more subtle, but I think most of all the acting is hugely improved. Daniel Radcliffe struck me as painfully untalented in the first three films, but now he’s come into his own with a vengeance. Despite all the tragedy and horror, it’s just a joy to inhabit Hogwarts and hang out with the gang.

Before the movie we saw the trailer for Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr. It looks really entertaining, but I have to voice the same complaint I always voice. If you’re going to make Sherlock Holmes (or Godzilla, or Robin Hood, etc etc etc) then make Sherlock Holmes. If you’re going to add a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with the the character, for Frith’s sake make up your own 19th century detective and call him something else! I know, I know, then you couldn’t cash in on the name recognition and branding. Tough!! Suck it!!!! If you’re making something different, call it something different, don’t betray the mythology!!!!!

I have the opposite comment for the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are. The Oregonian’s Nestor Ramos had it right when he called the trailer so powerful and affecting, we can only hope the movie lives up to it. It strikes me what a different approach Spike Jonze is taking in adapting a children’s book compared to all the Seuss-wrecking that’s been going on in theaters. Sure, Dr. Seuss writes a wackier book than Maurice Sendak, but it serves nothing and no one to bury the source material’s charms under a mountain of hyperactive uber-cool pop culture. I wish American studios would take a cue from Wallace and Gromit or Spirited Away. You can appeal to kids without treating them like idiots.

Writing and Dreaming

I don’t like to talk about it, because it’s hard to imagine it going anywhere, but I’m making a serious stab at writing a novel. I try to get in a page every couple of days. Progress is slow. There’s only so much time a guy can spend on non-paying personal projects, of which I have more than my share. But whatever rewards emerge or fail to emerge in the indeterminate future, there has been a surprise benefit: really cool dreams.

I used to have these epic, cinematic dreams all the time. Spaceships, monsters, ancient civilizations, walking on water, all kinds of cool stuff. For the last several years I’ve hardly had any. it made me wonder if my imagination was drying up, something I’ve always feared. But wrestling with this story I’m writing on a regular basis seems to have brought them back. I’ve had three in the last week or so. A giant grinding necropolis in space, a ghost-hunting operation, a trio of shape-shifting monsters.

It gives me hope.

China Mieville’s The City and The City

What I love about China Mieville is his imagination. Most of his books are phantasmagorical parades of nightmarish creatures, picaresque characters, dazzling places and mind-bending concepts. The City and The City is less expansive; rather it’s a deep exploration of just one mind-bending concept, one place unlike any previously conceived. It’s also a wonderfully evocative detective story. Comparisons with Philip K. Dick are well warranted, although City is more of an adventure novel and less a work of crushing impact.
Read it!

Star Trek: a Non-Trekkie’s Opinion

As always, spoilers.

I’m not a trekkie. Not because I don’t know anything about Star Trek– I scored dismayingly high on a Trek trivia quiz recently– but because I don’t like it. I enjoyed the original series as a kid, but never became a dedicated follower. I suppose it started to seem silly and self-indulgent with the 3rd movie. I watched Next Generation in college with the rest of Bean Complex housing staff, but by the time Voyager came along I could not watch any iteration of the show. The whole thing just rubs me the wrong way. The military hierarchy, the deus-ex-machina pseudo-science (every problem is solved by re-routing and converting and diverting power, as if the Enterprise is made of Legos), the stiff postures, the orders barked and phasers fired without the least sense of tension….argh.

Star Trek (2009) is a whole new ball game. In the first ten minutes it achieves the impossible: making the quintessential scene of crew-on-the-bridge, confront-enemy-ship, pleasantries-end-and-firing-begins, actually exciting. From there is carries itself as a real movie, developing plot and character in solid fashion, rather than relying on automatic buy-in from a cult following. At the same time, from what I hear, the new movie manages not to alienate said cult-following, but delights them as much as, or more than, me. I’m sure I missed countless references aimed at the trek geeks, but the ones I caught were fun; the doom of the red-clad away team member, Kirk and a green-skinned babe, Captain Pike in a wheelchair, Sulu fencing, Scottie’s signature line.

Quibbles: Kirk’s mother is on the ship? And gives birth at the moment of evacuation? That was a little much. And honestly I feel like I’ve seen someone giving birth in every movie of the past year. The Nokia product placement was especially grating in a future setting. And just where was Kirk’ mother when he enlisted in Star Fleet? I suspect there are some deleted scenes there.
Chekov was cool, but once Scottie shows up he seems redundant. Spock the elder was essential to the story, and really a tragic figure in the end, which was cool, but I felt there was one too many Nimoy scenes.
Everyone is awfully cavalier about creating black holes. I would think you’d want to be very careful about when and where you do that.

My favorite things: how the crew all found their niches as the crisis wore on, not necessarily the roles they were assigned. Rolling cameras giving outer space its 3-dimensional due. Vulcan emotionlessness being a cultural convention rather than a biological fact. Spock and Uhura. Using the alternate history theory to cut loose from the canon. Simon Pegg. The bridge! As a kid, I liked nothing better than imagining I was onboard a spaceship. The bridge reminded me why.

Right and Left

There was this column in the Oregonian by Nicholas Kristof about a study of the different tendencies between self-identified liberals and conservatives. The upshot is, conservatives are more likely to feel disgust and respect for authority. Interesting I suppose, but in my experience, liberals and conservatives alike claim to champion the rights of the individual over the tyranny of the oppressor (government if the opposing party is in power; otherwise the tyrant is corporations, Hollywood, etc.)

In school I learned that Left and Right are two ends of a political spectrum, with a linear progression from one extreme (communism) to the other (fascism). From what few fragments of European political discussion I pick up, this model seems to hold true across the Atlantic. Not so in America. Our two major parties have more or less consistent platforms that are more or less in opposition much of the time, but both claim to be pushing for individual liberty.

The Libertarian Party argues that both parties are tyrannical, just in different areas; socially for Repubs, economically for Demos. They claim to be for freedom across the board, pushing government out of our bedrooms and out of our paychecks, thus transcending the Right/Left dichotomy. Strictly speaking, the Libertarian model verges on anarchy, more of a leftist extreme. Aesthetically, the Libertarian party is incredibly right wing. Their whole platform amounts to cutting taxes, which accounts for half of the Republican platform. (The other half is Evangelical morality, which also has it’s own dedicated proponent in the ironic-name-trophy-holding Constitution Party.) (Biased? Me?) Plus Libertarians always exhibit a surly cynicism commonly seen in right-wingers. Compare the approaches of Rush Limbaugh and John Stewart and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I think about all this stuff, and I try to understand what people in America mean when they say Right and Left. Well generally what they really mean is Republican and Democrat, even though both parties all all over the political spectrum. But if the spectrum is a viable model, than people ought to fall somewhere along it, even if party platforms have been compromised and muddled over the years. So what does it mean in America to be Right Wing or Left Wing? It’s not a matter of adhering to individual freedom. Lefties want everyone to be free to love who they want and plan their families. Righties want everyone to be free to do their work and keep their earnings. Each side would accuse the other of driving society toward fascism. Righties call it communism, but they’re talking about Iron Curtain communism, not the philosophical principles at the left end of the spectrum.

So how can we define Right and Left? My latest theory is to go by what trips up our leaders. Righties want money. Lefties want sex. Discuss.

Surprise: Waterboarding IS Torture

Apparently I’m a week late in my blogosphere crowings, but never mind. Take a look at this right-wing-talkie-guy who tried out being waterboarded, thinking it would just be a splash in the face. Note that he’s barely on an incline and gets barely a quart of water. Then try a Google image search to see how it’s really done. Also note the marine volunteer, who seems entirely too cavalier and familiar with the process. How many people has he waterboarded? This is how our military functions?

No Justification for Torture

Anyone who thinks torture helps our security should read Newsweek’s article about FBI agent Ali Soufan.

“Lost” Season 5

I haven’t blogged about Lost since discovering Jeff Jensen’s staff-of-researcher-fueled hyper-recaps, but why should the professional journalists have the only say???
Naturally, here be spoilers. If you aren’t caught up on Lost, why would you read this?

There’s no way the plane isn’t going to crash. If Jack’s effort to rewrite history succeeds, he won’t have any reason (or means) to go back and rewrite history. That’s just elementary time-travel fiction. Lost has worked too hard to maintain an intricate and solid internal logic to throw it all away on a scrap of pseudo-science about humans being the variable. Plus, as Marcie points out, erasing the plane crash would wipe out 5 year’s worth of character development and relationships, and they have to know the audience wouldn’t take kindly to that.
Miles gave them the out. The bomb is the incident. Oedipus fulfills his own doom. The explosion will send everyone back to their proper time and season 6 will pick up with phony-Locke and Ben and freshly stabbed Jacob (another line of narrative that won’t happen if history gets rewritten. No way.) That’s my prediction.

The fact that Bill (that’s the name Marcie and I have given to Jacob’s “do you know how much I want to kill you” companion, for convenience sake) was able to animate Locke started me thinking, maybe Bill’s been animating every dead person we’ve seen come back. Christian, Charlie, Claire, Alex, Horace, etc. Well, maybe not EVERY dead person. John Locke has actually come back from the dead at least once. Jacob revived him after his fall out the window. Did he also revive him after Ben shot him?

I don’t have the recall to tease it all out, but it leads me to this notion: Bill has influence over the dead, and Jacob has influence over the living. I keep coming back to this supposed war that’s coming. I keep trying to assign the various factions (Dharmas, Others, Whitmore, Eloise, Shadow-of-the-statuesies, etc) to one side or the other, and it never works. There has to be a ton of motivational and cause-and-effect crossover going on between the different groups. But Jacob and Bill– there’s a manichean pairing up I can get behind. Maybe they represent the forces of life and death? It has a nice cosmic symmetry, but it’s probably not the real secret.

I love this show. I love how after 5 years they’re still raising more questions with each answer given. The story has gotten crazy complicated yet somehow stays buoyant and integrated and believable and enthralling. Can they bring it all together in the final season? The history of television would suggest no. The history of Lost would suggest yes. Maybe that’s who Jacob and Bill really are; smart tv vs dumb tv. Vive la smartesse!