Wearing a Duck

Remember that great scene in My Favorite Year: Benny Stone, freshman writer on King Kaiser’s Comedy Cavalcade finally has a date with the girl of his dreams. She regrets that she is the one person working at the show who isn’t funny. He says anybody can be funny. He’ll teach her a joke. “A guy walks into a psychiatrist's office with a duck on his head. The psychiatrist says, ‘Can I help you?’ And the duck says, ‘Yeah, can you get this guy off my ass.’” She laughs, he prompts her to tell it back to him. She straightens her dress a little in an endearing ‘here we go’ maneuver and begins: “A man walks into a doctor’s office wearing a duck.”

Homaged here in Studio 60, Sorkin goes on to explain the phenomenon:
You can’t tell a joke. Like a young child, you hear it, get it, and then can’t reconstruct the moving parts.

This is what we're facing in mainstream comics. A real writer comes along, say Jeph Loeb. He crafts a cunning mystery, putting the long-neglected theme rogues front and center, and weaves in a heartbreaking tragedy of Bruce's inability to trust following the structure best suited to the purpose: Aristotelian tragedy. Since a good mystery requires a good red herring, he constructs one tailor-made to grab the fanboy's attention and keep it rived on the ball in my RIGHT hand. He teased the one thing that all sane comic readers knew would never happen, he teased breaking one of the 3 commandments, he teased Jason Todd was still alive. He then revealed the image they were all waiting for - if Jason were alive today, what would he look like - in a full page at the very end of the issue, giving them a full month to fizz and and enjoy themselves. Then he went on with his story... that's what storytellers do.

Here's what comics writers do: not understanding how any of the moving parts worked, they latched onto things at random: it was the character of Hush himself, not the mystery that made it such a success. And the return of Jason Todd! Like Pacific Islanders lining an improvised runway with torches and sitting a guy on the end with coconuts strapped to his head like headphones, thinking it will make planes land filled with supplies - you know, the way it did during the war. It looks just like it used to, why don't the planes come?

Last week's blog, I quoted the late John Barry bemoaning modern composers who are "just playing with notes." Yesterday I posted a quote of Aaron Sorkin about those demonizing education and intellect. We have a PROBLEM here: people allowed to write, edit and manage major comic titles who have not learned the basics of their own craft - and who scoff at the idea it is necessary. Not only have they been allowed to ruin something that was once a pleasure for thousands of ex-readers, they have taken up a slot that could have been filled by competent and talented writers who would appreciate it.

Chris Dee
www.catwoman-cattales.com
cattales.yuku.com
cattales.wikispaces.com

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Why Do We Fall?

Remember this moment? Remember this question? "Why
do we fall, Bruce?"

So we can lie on the floor stubbornly insisting we haven't?

So we can sit with our aching ass on the cold terrazzo insisting that gravity is a myth?

How about repeating like a politico's talking points that it's not the floor at all and we are, in actuality, on Dancing With the Stars foxtrotting with Jennifer Gray?

No. Why do we fall? So we learn how to get up.

I recently saw a piece on the 10 biggest WTF moments in comics. Not surprising which company took home the trophy for the big #1.

In 1998, DC made the mother of all WTF decisions when they opted to change the character of Superman. This character that had stood for 60 years, and had just been killed off a few years prior to show his utter importance not only to comics but to the world, was out the door...

A change of costume or marriage status is one thing, but completely altering everything that established the character as an American icon in the first place is something else entirely.

Several readers marked this as the first pock of the disease which has consumed just about all the characters now, the first blatant sign that those entrusted to write these characters have no understanding of what defines them or of their iconic significance in the greater world outside their Thursday To-Do list.

But not me. For once, I'm going to stand between DC and the ones throwing stones, because here's the thing: as soon as they realized the ground had given way under their feet and they were falling into a deep pit with a bunch of angry bats baring their teeth and hissing bat-spittle into their faces, they changed him back. The article itself admits "the explanation to get him back to normal was quite vague, probably a result of the severe backlash of comic book fans and their desire to fix the problem as quickly as possible."

They didn't tap Wizard to call it a giant step forward in comics, they didn't embark on a PR campaign to try and convince the terminally stupid that unsweetened lemon juice tastes just like water, they didn't figure there would be a new crop of gullible half-wits who would be coming along any minute to replace the 80% of their readership heading out the door. They didn't think up even worst things to do to Superman to punish the fans for not accepting the fiasco. They got up. That's why we fall. And if we can't get our asses out of that hole on our own, we scream for help before the rest of the ground gives and we fall farther.

Remember a few weeks ago I said The Reaper is out there, and DC's attitude that it's okay to mess things up further/they'll fix it (or not) next year was horrifically out of touch with the reality that there may not BE a next year? Anyone who thought I was being melodramatic, please turn and wave goodbye to Wizard. It's gone, as of yesterday. All staff let go. If a new online magazine transpires to replace it, the focus is to be on pop culture and the non-comics media where these characters still thrive. Not print comics.

Do I have your attention now, boys?

Fantastic Four is snuffing a major character today. What makes this different from past fan-inflaming stunts is that it's the first under Disney. That means if it doesn't work out (and by "work out" I don't mean by the comics definition 'people hate it' but the definition of everyone else on the planet), then those responsible are going to be introduced to a concept that is new to them but familiar to everyone else who works for a living: consequences. You make a bad decision, you piss off customers, you materially damage a company's assets, there are consequences. I don't think it's a bad thing. It's not going to be a pleasant adjustment. Growing up often isn't. But it's pretty much the only choice the medium has if it wants to survive.

Why do fall? Well, eventually to learn how to get up. For some though, there is an intermediary step: to learn to recognize the hole, and then to accept that the hole is not the place to be.

On a lighter note, it's a big week for Cat-Tales. The Dracula spinoff Capes and Bats releases its penultimate chapter today, and there's a plot twist that absolutely nobody saw coming--but which was right in front of us the entire time. I have to admit, I was floored when I read it. Scared the cat with my gasps of surprise. We're also less than 48 hours from the launch of a new feature to make life easier for our mobile friends. Work is underway on the new chapter of Trophies, while reviews continue to come in on À Bon Chat, Bon Rat.

Chris Dee
www.catwoman-cattales.com
cattales.yuku.com
cattales.wikispaces.com

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How to Succeed in Comics Without Really Trying

Had a few comics-related conversations over the holidays, and particularly their similarity to theatre. Comic books, like stage productions, cannot show elaborate cinematic scenes. They suggest, and the audience (or reader) fills in the rest from their imagination. Panel 1: close up on a Bat-glove, fist cocked. Panel 2: DEMON minion lying on the floor. You don't SEE Batman attack (reminder if you haven't seen the Arkham City trailer, you haven't seen CGI Keysi Shakespeare the way it's meant to be played), you create it in your own mind, and that folks, is why fanboys are more INVESTED in these characters and these stories. We are more possessive because they truly are OURS more than something we only see in a movie or on television.

Because of that similarity, and because theatre has had to reinvent itself for thousands of years to keep entertaining in a changing world, the modern comics professional can learn a lot from the theatre world. The big one to consider today is literally the difference between a theatre that failed in the last 10 years, and one in the same city that kept its lights on and is still performing shows. The philosophy is simplicity itself:

Look on every single performance of every single show as your one and only chance to win over someone in that audience and make them a lifelong theatre goer. Someone out there has never come to the theatre before, and what they see and hear and experience tonight could be so overwhelmingly magical for them that they are hooked for life.

Look on every single performance of every single show as potentially the last straw for someone who has seen one bad show too many.

Remember The Dark Knight? That movie brought people into comic shops for the first time. They were looking for Batman. If what was in the comics DELIVERED what they wanted, some of them would have come back. (And maybe some comic shops that have closed in the last 2 years would have weathered the storm, but that's a question for another day.)

But it doesn't take a movie. It doesn't even take a cartoon. SOMEONE is be walking into a shop for the first time EVERY DAMN DAY. Every issue of every comic is a chance to win them.

Every issue of every comic is also a chance to LOSE them. There is a misconception out there that because fanboys howl and complain, because they have always howled and complained, that it's fine and even desirable, to anger, disappoint and insult them. And it isn't necessary to master or even understand the basic tenets of storytelling because a bad story will pass the time for the next 6 months as well as, or better than, a good one. There is a reason it is writers with roots in or ties to other media who are having exponentially more success than the hacks: because they understand real readers and audiences. They know that those hundred guys on forums are not representative of anything. The vast majority of readers you never hear from either way. They like it and they buy again, or they hate it and they don't.

Things can be bad enough for long enough that the most vocal and committed fans decide enough is enough. We're seeing that happen in increasing numbers, but those are the extreme cases. Every issue of every comic IS a chance to lose one of those diehards, but it is also infinitely more probable it will lose a hundred casual readers. Particularly when the actual goal is to cause maximum offense. It's not okay to know something is wrong but wait until next year to fix it. Every single issue of every single comic is an opportunity to win or lose. And like life, you simply don't know how many chances you have left. The Reaper is out there, folks, and there are major titles whistling in the graveyard, acting like it doesn't matter, they'll fix it next year. It really doesn't seem to occur to them that there may not be a next year.

It's a new year, and I wanted this entry to be an optimistic one. I want to offer more encouragement to those pros out there who honestly do seem to be trying to fix this. I know things that have been breaking for 20-plus years can't be fixed in a day, but unfortunately, that's what's required here.

There's another theatre principle: the miracle. It's 30 minutes to curtain, the paint is still wet, they're finishing off the second act costumes with a glue gun, the props table fell over, breaking the decanter we need for the first scene, the leads are having a shouting match in their dressing rooms, the fire marshall is seizing all the pyro earmarked for the end of the first act, and the ASM is locked in the costume loft. But the show goes on because even though it is f-ing IMPOSSIBLE to overcome all that in less than half an hour, we dig in and do it, because we gotta. Because we give a damn.

So maybe, just maybe, this can be an optimistic entry after all. All you guys need to do is dig in and give us a miracle. If it sounds like a lot to ask, look at your cousins in theatre who've been doing it for just over 5,000 years.

Chris Dee
www.catwoman-cattales.com
cattales.yuku.com
cattales.wikispaces.com

Thank you for reading. If you are viewing this post anywhere other than The Catitat you are reading a mirror. Please visit the original posting in The Catitat to leave a comment.

You Are What You Eat

Had some interesting responses to the last blog Please Drink Responsibly, so I decided the central idea was worth revisiting from a wider perspective than writers or comic folks.

Briefly: you’re only as good as what you take into your system.  If you do anything creative, then you’re drawing on your imagination in a very special way and it is not a good idea to poison it.  Well duh, it’s never a good idea to chug poison, right?   The disconnect seems to be in recognizing the imagination can be poisoned and that these things are.  Consider an athlete who ate a steady diet of Big Macs and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day.  Would you be surprised when he failed to win a marathon?  Would you be surprised if he fell down dead at Mile-18?  Of course not, because we all get that an athlete is using his body to do what he does, and we all get that the cigarettes and junk food are not good for the whole air in/air out/blood pump/muscle flex process.  Problem is, few of us see our imaginations that way and far too many of us act like it doesn’t matter what we take into it.

First Principle: anything you do that’s creative comes from your soul – Okay, that’s a big word.  Forget the soul.  But there is a part of you that’s… better.  When you create in any medium, whether it is writing or painting or music, you hook that magical sacred part of you up to the Universe and channel something that is bigger and greater and infinite… Hell, I don’t know what it is, but it’s the reason it’s good to be alive.  Bob Fosse called it Joy.   And when it comes through YOU, you infuse it with your ideas and your emotions and your life experience and everything that makes you who you are.  It makes your story, your song, your sculpture or performance unlike anyone else’s.  And it’s your imagination – the part in all of us that first looked up at the stars instead of down at the dirt – that’s the core where all this happens.  So what you’ve got laying around in there matters.  If it’s Michaelangelo and Mozart and Dickens, great.  You’ve got more options than someone who only has Daniele Steele and Nickleback, but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t have a database of classics to draw on.  What is the end of the world is if you’ve got steaming piles of dog shit in there.

Now, for any newcomers to this blog, I write a metafiction series about Batman, and yet, I haven’t looked at a current comic in at least 4 years.  The reason is that the current output at DC is toxic and I won’t pollute my imagination with it.  This is more than not wanting to give DC Comics $2.95, what economists call “Dollar Votes,” in favor of making more of the same.  It isn’t about money, it’s about poison.

Someone sent me a link a while back to a website that posts scans from the current comics, and I can tell you right now that if I’d followed that link, that would have been my day.  Why?  Because if you step out of your house in the morning into a steaming pile of dog shit, that’s where your focus is going to be for quite some time.  The unpleasantness of the initial experience stays with you—in this case, my anger and disgust at whatever went on in those pages.  That’s going to come out in the writing.  Then there’s the smell that lingers: I would be aware if I used certain characters, alluded to certain ideas or events, everything would have a resonance in relation to their crap.   Now, your story should be your top priority, not an editor’s agenda, the marketing or the merchandising.  The story.  Making anything else a priority is a mistake, making their story the priority?  Hell no!  (We won’t even discuss the practice of, having cleaned off your shoe, going into a forum of people discussing the dog crap as if it’s fine French perfume:  Eau Merde de Fifi.)

Look, there are people out there who thrive on anger and disgust.  I find it doesn’t lead to creative output.  I find it leads to stuff like this:

Those who do create from those negative places, their stuff doesn’t last.  Occasionally, if the timing is just right, it will make a splash for fifteen minutes, but before too long, its popularity wanes and future generations just laugh at the goobers who found it profound or shocking. 

It’s the stuff that comes from the good place that lasts:  from a sense of play, loving what you do, loving the characters, loving the process of creation and being excited to share it all with an audience—it’s that love and joy that is infectious.  Love of the characters, celebrating them, holding up the essence of what they are supposed to be, what we’re all supposed to be...  The stories that last have always been about the same things: heroes, redemption, coming of age, going home, the power of love.  We tell the same stories over and over again because they are true, because they are universal, because they resonate in our core.   And that’s where we connect as human beings.  That connection, that’s everything.  That’s why we do this. 

The people I talked to after Please Drink Responsibly are not in comics.  They are in another industry that is broken in ways nobody fully understands, but where everyone recognizes that something is profoundly wrong.  Look, I don’t know if any one artist can hope to fix a broken system, but we are all in the business of “making a hat where there never was a hat.”   Who’s to say we can’t?  It starts with making that connection.  And to make it, we’ve got to detox, folks.  We’ve got to stop taking in poisons and polluting our imaginations with the artistic “product” of people writing comics or making music the way Pumpkin the Pekingese takes a dump.  If you’re one of those saying they read/saw/listened to such-and-such “and of course it sucked LOL,” stop laughing.   “Of course it sucked” means you knew better before you took that thing into your head.  You went right past the surgeon general’s warning and you took that poison into your system anyway.  You are what you eat. 

All that said, Cat-Tales had a fabulous week.  Electron 29 posted its final chapter, which means it is now available in one complete download as ebook or print-quality pdf.  As if that's not enough, Book 5 is ready!  That's the compilation of Cat-Tales #51-59 including fan favorites Riddle Me-Tropolis, Vault, War of the Poses, Armchair Detective, Not My Kink, Do No Harm AND alternate-reality game fodder I Believe in Harvey Dent - all that in one compact ebook download - or, naturally, print-quality pdf.   Just in time for Christmas.  Meow.

Chris Dee
www.catwoman-cattales.com
cattales.yuku.com
cattales.wikispaces.com

Thank you for reading. If you are viewing this post anywhere other than The Catitat you are reading a mirror. Please visit the original posting in The Catitat to leave a comment.