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.

Please Drink Responsibly

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There is something profoundly wrong with people who don’t like Dickens, but even they allow that A Tale of Two Cities has one of the greatest openings in the English language. The Great Gatsby opens well too, and is also one of the rarest of rarities: a spot on perfect movie. AMC has a collection of films called “Essentials,” films from Casablanca to Close Encounters of the Third Kind that everyone should know. They are part of the collective vocabulary. They are required for cultural literacy. In literature there’s the Five Foot Shelf. In music, it’s Synchronicity and The White Album, South Pacific and Into the Woods. If you seek out what’s good in many fields, you feed your imagination and will be a better artist for it.

That’s the positive side. The flip side is also true. Imagine a professional athlete that ate nothing but Big Macs and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. Would any of us be surprised if this guy failed to win the New York marathon? For that matter, would any of us be surprised if he failed to finish and fell down dead at Mile 18? No, of course not. Because this guy who uses his body to do what he does has been pouring poison into it.

If you’re a writer, an artist, a musician, a composer, a creative in any field, then your imagination is the bread and butter machine. Since you’re also a human being, it is the most magical and sacred part of you. That alone is a good enough reason not to flood it with poisons, but I’m talking about something beyond just being human. I am talking about being a creative. The imagination is what stretches beyond the literal and mundane and the goings on in your digestive tract. It is what connects with something higher and better, and channels a little piece of the infinite when you make something that wasn’t there before. If you pollute it with garbage, the result will be the artistic version of that wheezing pathetic “athlete” gasping his way through the race.

No, I do not read comics anymore. It’s more than not giving DC even $2.95 worth of encouragement for something that is truly bad, it is declining to live on a toxic waste dump. It is refusing to take poison into my imagination. Not only is it bad for me, it’s going to be bad for anything I write.

You are what you eat. And drink. We’ve all seen the creative output of the drunk drivers out there, professional and amateur. It’s time for those of us who are not three sheets to the wind to start staging some interventions.

But let’s return to the Best of Times, because there is a new artist to welcome to the Fan Art Gallery, and she’s certainly kept her imagination fueled with the best of raw materials. Check out the beautiful work of Anya Uribe, an absolute master of feminine curves, color and form.

The Virtual Visitor Center is decked out for the holidays. In Second Life, as in Cattitude, as in Real Life, Cartier wraps itself up in a bow for Christmas. More information on the Cat-Tales website, or residents may teleport directly to the Visitor Center.

Random Equinox even has an update for his spinoff fic: Don't Fear the Z.  And as if that wasn't enough, we had two lovely developments over the Thanksgiving break: The Macy's parade was good enough to open with Aviator Snoopy, providing yet another opportunity for the slow-witted to realize that the inspiration for the Catwoman abomination--the virtual SIGNATURE of the new direction that failed to grasp anything that defined Catwoman and got absolutely everything wrong--was, in fact, based on a cartoon dog. How symbolic do you want it? They didn't understand anything at all about Selina, right down to the CAT in Catwoman. A symmetry such as makes the angels weep, if it wasn't so effing sad. And, finally, the forum's running gag of Batman's Black Friday Protocol finally has some artwork:

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.