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Dragon Con is this weekend and if you’re going, be sure to stop by to check out my artwork! Maybe take pictures if you can, I’m really sad that I can’t be there myself. Hopefully one day I will and then the next goal will be New York Comic Con.
*sigh* This is what happens when nerds dream big. 
Also, it’s a new month, so don’t forget to give us a click for TopWebComics if you feel the notion!
As I’m writing this it happens to be August 31st in the good ol’ U.S. of A., also known as the birthday of one Clint Wolf. Having a birthday fall in the middle of a busy work week is a bit underwhelming, but it’s possible I could con someone into at least taking me out for some drinks this weekend. We shall see.
Another option could have been celebrating this past weekend, but that was mostly spent engaged in a marathon D&D session. I hit level 6 with my Protector Spirit Shaman. Good stuff.
Now if you haven’t ever had the experience of “tabletop” gaming, you may not be aware that a good portion of the time is actually spent not on the game itself but discussing various topics with your fellow nerds. In this case, I was talking of how my recent post regarding Steampunk for The Satellite Show had come about because of someone claiming Firefly/Serenity was somehow a Steampunk offering, and how nuts I found that concept.
Nah, my friend Justin said, Firefly isn’t Steampunk. It’s a Bat Durston.
A what? I’d never heard this term before.
“Bat Durston, Space Marshal.” Justin went on to introduce me to the gentleman known as Bat Durston. He was the invention of the editor of the 1950′s science fiction anthology Galaxy Magazine, a parody of the already common practice of transplanting Western tropes wholesale to a galactic setting and calling that Science Fiction: The “Space Western”.
H.L. Gold, the editor in question, was not a big fan of this trend. Actually I think it’s fair to say he outright hated it, and Bat Durston was his man for showing why. The infamous back cover of Galaxy provided two oddly similar tales printed side by side:
Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing…and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand.”Get back from those controls, Bat Durston,” the tall stranger lipped thinly. “You don’t know it, but this is your last space trip.”
Hoofs drumming, Bat Durston came galloping down through the narrow pass at Eagle Gulch, a tiny gold colony 400 miles north of Tombstone. He spurred hard for a low overhang of rim-rock…and at that point a tall, lean wrangler stepped out from behind a high boulder, six-shooter in a sun-tanned hand.”Rear back and dismount, Bat Durston,” the tall stranger lipped thinly. “You don’t know it, but this is your last saddle-jaunt through these here parts.”
Beneath the two, Gold spelled out this little corner of his philosophy: “Sound alike? They should—one is merely a western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet. If this is your idea of science fiction, you’re welcome to it! YOU’LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY!”
Gold went on to say that what you would find in Galaxy was “the finest science fiction… authentic, plausible, thoughtful… written by authors who do not automatically switch over from crime waves to alien invasions; by people who know and love science fiction… for people who also know and love it.”
So Gold doesn’t as much imply as outright state that if you write science fiction this way, then your story sucks and he’s trashing it. Was he correct in his views? To a lot of professional SF writers, he was correct enough that in the Turkey City Lexicon the Space Western entry reads:
“The most pernicious suite of “Used Furniture”. The grizzled space captain swaggering into the spacer bar and slugging down a Jovian brandy, then laying down a few credits for a space hooker to give him a Galactic Rim Job.”
This might all be starting to sound very elitist, and throughout the years since Bat Durston came on the scene there have been defenses of Space Westerns, such as people pointing out that Ray Bradbury’s Martian works have a very frontier feel to them but yet are still considered the good sort of SF. From my point of view I always hate blanket dismissals of a certain genre as being somehow less worthy than others. It goes against Sturgeon’s Law; Theodore Sturgeon being a science fiction author once famously quoted as stating “Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90% of everything is crud.” Note how he didn’t single out any particular aspect of science fiction there.
But even if I’m not prepared to dump the entire concept of the Space Western in the ashbin just for being, I’d confess there’s still room to scoff at the particular style of it embodied in Bat Durston. Mr. Durston has grown beyond his humble roots to represent any sort of lazy writing where an exotic setting seems totally irrelevant to the plot or characters, to the point where the story can be transplanted to a completely different time and place if you just change a few words around.
Anyhow, if you’ve been reading this comic you’ve probably sussed out that I have a fondness for genre “mash-ups”. I’m writing one, after all. So Bat Durston seems to be a bogeyman of mash-up attempts who I didn’t know was lurking in my creative closet until just the other day. Thankfully, despite its SF/Western elements I don’t think Zombie Ranch quite falls into his territory. The zombies replace cattle, for example, but they don’t quite replace cattle, if that makes any kind of sense to state.
In the end, I think as long as there’s thought going into your story and background beyond merely “Gangsters in Outer Space” or “Angsty Teenagers with Fangs”, you can keep ol’ Bat at bay.
Now pass me the space whiskey. I gotta spend some quality time pondering another year clocked on this ol’ corral called Earth.
Why, you ask?
Because this week marks comic #42 in the Zombie Ranch storyline!
Who’s Douglas Adams, you ask?
Sigh.
Look, you damn kids, I’m not falling for this again. It’s going to be like the day I found out Roy Scheider died all over again. I was playing World of Warcraft at the time and immediately broke the news to the guild channel.
Me: Holy crap, Roy Scheider died.
Them: Who?
Me: Roy Scheider.
Them: Rob Schneider?
Me: No, Roy Scheider. Jaws?
Them: What?
And that was about the time I realized the world had moved on. Their pop culture was no longer my pop culture. I mean, Rob Schneider? Seriously? What the hell are Google and Wikipedia for if not doing a quick Alt-Tab and looking up a reference you don’t get?
Anyhow, because of that incident I realize Douglas Adams may not be a recognizable name for many of you, but I’d like it to be. So, y’know: WIKIPEDIA. As for whether he’d actually be proud of comic #42, I have no bloody clue, but I’m taking advantage of the fact that he’s dead and can’t contradict me without the services of a spirit medium… and as far as I know, spirit mediums don’t often take contracts from dead people on account of the problems inherent in getting paid.
42 was an important number to Mr. Adams. And by important, I mean it’s 99.9% likely he just arbitrarily decided on it, when he could just as easily have come up with 66, 7, or even pi. Actually, I doubt he would have gone with pi, which is a pretentious enough number as it is. 42 was just eminently mundane, at least until it gained its measure of fame through the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, and that really was the whole point.
So what does that have to do with a cowgirl lassoing and hog-tying a zombie? Nothing that I can think of, really… unless you offered me money to come up with reasons, in which case I could likely think of a few things. Right now, just leave it at the doorstep of cosmically arbitrary coincidence–which happens to be a central theme of Adams’ writing. Oh crap, I just did that for free.
But seriously, if you’ve never read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and at least the next two books in the series, you owe it to yourself to do so. In particular, if you’re any kind of fan of Terry Pratchett, Monty Python, or the “British style” of dark, absurdist science fiction, they’re must-reads. Even if this week’s comic isn’t an homage beyond numeric coincidence, I’d be lying to say there isn’t a bit of Adams and his ilk in situations like a country uncle dispensing folksy talk while messily feeding zombie parts into a wood chipper.
And I grew up on this stuff. So yeah, do me a favor and check out the “classics”. If nothing else, you’ll make me feel less old when I bring ‘em up.
In last week’s blog I brought up Twilight in an indirect fashion. Not long after, I followed that up by also discussing it in an email exchange with one of our newest Rancheros who spoke of his tweenage daughter’s disdain for zombies (but her love for the Edward, Bella, and Jacob). Apparently this topic is on my brain of late.
Now, I’m not like some of my friends in wanting Stephanie Meyer to painfully DIAF, but in our bad movie club we recently had a viewing of “New Moon”, and damn if Twilight didn’t call us zombie fans out. If you haven’t seen it (and I’m willing to bet a lot of you haven’t), there’s a scene where Bella and one of her friends are leaving a theater where they’ve just seen a zombie flick, and Bella’s friend is bitching a blue streak about not just the movie they saw, but the whole genre.
“I don’t know why you want to sit through all those zombies eating people and no hot guys kissing anybody. Gross. Like why are there so many zombie movies anyway? Is it supposed to like draw a parallel with leprosy? My cousin had leprosy, it’s not funny, you know? And like is it supposed to be a metaphor for consumerism? Cause don’t be so pleased with your self-reverential cleverness, you know. Like, some girls like to shop.”
Reportedly, although they do go to see a zombie film in the novel, the reactions to it are limited to Bella angsting about her own relationship based on a young (living) couple in the movie, not clumsily trying to stick a thumb in Romero’s eye. This means Meyer is not responsible for the salvo so much as screenplay author Melissa Rosenberg.
Maybe she was being ironic, I don’t know. On the one hand, Melissa Rosenberg has written several episodes of Dexter. But on the other, she wrote several episodes of Birds of Prey. Whatever the case, due to her words I got to enjoy a roomful of grinning acquaintances suggesting that obviously, what I needed to do to make Zombie Ranch more popular was have two hot zombie dudes kissing.
Look, as a rule? Zombies are not hot. I’ll agree with Bella’s BFF about that (apologies to those of you out there making and buying the Zombie pin-up girl calendars). But at that moment, besides wanting to murder several of my closest friends, I thought: Is this what horror has come to? Our monsters have to be sexy, or no one sees the point?
That can’t be right, or the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street remakes would have featured a shirtless Freddy and Jason with rippling abs and chiseled-yet-tender brooding countenances. I probably shouldn’t be giving Hollywood ideas, here.
Vampires and werewolves have always had a certain erotic component to their mythos, and I don’t mind if that’s played up. I think Meyer goes too far, though, by getting rid of or downplaying a lot of the danger that ought to go with it. Sure Edward talks about being dangerous, but we don’t really see it, except perhaps in the sense that his aloofness causes Bella to attempt suicide. But that doesn’t speak “vampire” to me so much as “dude being a douche”. On his end, he really seems to have nothing serious to angst about. Sunlight doesn’t bother him, he has a cozy family to hang out with, he gets along fine on deer blood without ever having to touch a person… you just never get the sense that vampirism is any sort of curse, so when he refuses to make Bella a vampire, then again he just seems like he’s being a douche, especially when he’s simultaneously all torn up because they can never truly be together.
Jacob seems similar in that I never get that sense of loss of control and undercurrent of barely controlled rage that’s at the center of the werewolf myth. So with Twilight I feel like we get VINOs and WINOs (INO = In Name Only), which leaves me with a bland protagonist and a lot of dudes taking their shirts off. It’s about hot guys kissing people, not monsters, and hot guys kissing just doesn’t do much for me on its own.
But am I a big hypocrite for thinking this way? After all, we’ve had hot chicks in horror movies almost since the beginning, panting and swooning and getting preyed on while in flimsy revealing outfits. If the “monster” happens to be female, they tend to be highly sexualized both in appearance and behavior, often having a component of nymphomania combined with Black Widow syndrome. How many times have we seen the tagline “She mates… and then SHE KILLS!” or something similar? How many times have we seen horror covers that juxtapose a sexily posed woman with disgusting monstrosities, regardless of whether she’s cowering, controlling, or co-existing? Even our Zombie Ranch covers are guilty of that. A lot of these efforts were not particularly heavy on story or character development, so are we justified applying a double standard now that bare-chested hunks are making inroads on the genre? Just the other day a friend was telling me about a comic book proposal he’d looked at, and his take was: it had horror, it had hot girls… and frankly, at that point he was in. Nothing else necessary. So too, perhaps, with Twilight fans.
But maybe the key difference here is that the horror element needs to be maintained. The HBO series True Blood has plenty of hot guys kissing people, but the monster is always there as well, which is what makes it compelling for me. That element of horrible, horrible danger always lurking, even through the more comedic, touching, or simply quiet moments. Certainly it’s there in the “sexy” moments; if you’ve seen the episode from a couple of weeks ago, you know there was one scene between Bill and Loretta I would guess only a very small segment of the population could possibly be turned on by. And in a more recent episode I won’t spoil, the sex was purely a means to a very brutal end.
Is it because Twilight is meant as Young Adult fiction? I don’t buy that that has to be true, since the Harry Potter books have some very intense stuff in them. Hell, decades before J.K. Rowling, Roald Dahl wrote “children’s classics” like James and the Giant Peach or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory that weren’t afraid to explore the dark side, and neither of those books were dealing in vampires and werewolves as subject matter.
As Young Adult fiction, Twilight seems closer to Sweet Valley High… which is fine, we all were young once, and we all have our guilty pleasures. But oh, the irony of a character trying to deconstruct the zombie genre, when Twilight can’t even get its own monsters right.
You can have horror without hotness, and horror with hotness, but if you have hotness without horror, then you have something else entirely.
Now let’s, like, go shopping.
(And for a toothily tongue-in-cheek look at bringing “hotness” to both vampires and other monsters of fiction, click here: LINK)
As I start writing this, I was suddenly deluged with the thought that telling someone about The New Dead out loud could lead to them thinking I’d recently finished reading an anthology called “The Nude Ed”. That would be an entirely different kind of book, wouldn’t it?
Fortunately, the text-only medium of this blog ensures a minimum of homonymic awkwardness, potentially hilarious though it might be. No, I read a collection of zombie stories, not ruminations on some au natural gentleman. So let’s talk about that.
As I briefly mentioned last week, The New Dead gathers together 19 different stories from 19 different authors, and while billed as a zombie anthology, editor Christopher Golden makes it clear in his foreword that not all of the tales will be in the “traditional” mold of what modern audiences have come to think of as zombie fiction. He seems to have set out to gather as many different perspectives as possible to illustrate the metaphorical role zombies fill, centering on questions of death and resurrection, and starts his introduction by contrasting the more obvious draw of vampires (eroticism and perfection in immortality) with their rather less sexy cousins. Golden surmises that the zombie is a by-product of an increasingly connected world which exposes us not only to wonders but horrors on a daily basis. Zombies, then, are means for us to confront and grapple with the images of death, torture, and disease that have always existed in the world, but that we no longer have the luxury of pretending don’t exist. I remember making a similar point several blogs ago: you can’t take a baseball bat to a virus, but you can take one to a zombie. Even if “they” win in the end, at least there was a rotting sea of troubles to take arms against.
But in any case, Golden warns you up front that while he’s gathered some tales with the usual trappings of apocalypse and the hungry dead, there is a more philosophical mission in mind that allows for some tales that get pretty far from that theme. There’s even one story which doesn’t have any supernatural element whatsoever, and by the time I’d read it I’d forgotten his warning of its existence and was surprised when it ended without so much as a twitch from the corpse. By the time you finish, you have, as promised, “…run the gamut from modern warfare to postapocalyptic futures, from love stories to heartbreaking voodoo horrors, from the Bible to Twitter.”
Is it all fantastic? All equally thought provoking? No, but that’s generally the case with any anthology. One of the stories is told entirely as a series of 140 character or less “tweets” from Twitter, which is a narrative experiment that some may love, some may hate, and some may just shrug at. Another contribution has an unending staccato rhythm to it, almost enough for me to imagine it being recited by some Beatnik in a smoky bar… it turned me off, but may turn others on. Conversely, the very first story in the collection is a retelling of the tale of Lazarus as a collection mimicking (I think) the short verses of the Bible, which had me completely fascinated but might leave others as cold as he was.
Regardless of any disagreements with styles and presentations, though, I’d venture to say there’s something here for everyone who’s a fan of the zombie genre, and even if you hate some of it, there’s going to be some of it you’ll enjoy, and maybe even one or two stories you’ll be blown away by. As you might expect I’m a big sucker for re-imaginings of the genre, or visions of how life might proceed in a world where the dead walk, and there was a good dose of that. I think my favorite story out of the bunch is one entitled “What Maisie Knew” by David Liss, which makes wonderful usage of first-person narrative. In fact, I don’t think that particular story would work at all if it wasn’t being told in first-person, which to me means the author really nailed it.
In The New Dead, there’s humor, and there’s horror, and there’s affirmations both of life and of death… but most importantly, I don’t think I could honestly assess any of the tales as mindless. An irony with zombies, I know, but then again not all the zombies in this collection are mindless. And while that might offend those for whom the Romero zombie is the be-all and end-all of what zombies are about, The New Dead’s broader definition and examination is a great way to tune in to all the possibilities of what death, and life-after-death, can mean to us as human beings, without all those pretty vampires getting in the way of the parable.
Oh great, now I’m back to the beginning of this blog and realizing “Nude Ed” could be a short form of “Nude Edward”. Say what you will about zombies, at least no one’s come along yet and decided it was a good idea to make them sparkle.
It’s weird how you can be around something for years, and yet still miss out on details you didn’t even know you were passing up until someone points them out. For instance, there’s a certain feature of lettering in comics that I never noticed, and yet is considered a fairly important formatting consideration.
The issue centers around the way the letter “I” is presented in comics, at least in the traditional method where word balloons, captions, etc. are written in all capital letters. Basically, the rule is that you only use the “crossbar I” when the letter is being used as a personal pronoun or abbreviation. What’s a crossbar I? It’s the style of capital I being used in this very blog, with the tiny perpendicular lines on the top and bottom. Any other time, you’re supposed to use the “stroke I”, which is the one without the crossbars that people might confuse for a lower case “L”… except that in an all caps situation you won’t see the lower case “l”.
It seems like such a minor thing, and I admit I was a bit skeptical until I started going back over all my professionally lettered comics and discovered it to be absolutely true. I expect the convention came about originally for ease of both writing and reading (probably mostly writing) when most lettering was done by hand, but I’m not entirely sure of the origins. What I can tell you is that something as seemingly inconsequential as the shape of your I’s is considered one of those dividing indicators between “pro” and “amateur”. Fair? Maybe, maybe not, but if you’re going to start up a comic (web or otherwise), be aware of the convention. I wasn’t until just this week, which means if we ever get around to doing a big TPB of Zombie Ranch I’ll probably be going back and doing a fair share of re-lettering.
The crossbar I rule is considered so important that most of the computer fonts out there intended for comics use have both the crossbar and stroke I as part of their library, usually one as the ‘lowercase’ and one as the ‘capital’ (this is possible since the comics fonts don’t have a true lowercase). It turns out that’s exactly what was tripping us up, since as you might remember from my script blogs, I had all my dialog set up to automatically be capitalized. Not to mention the script itself is written in plain old Times New Roman. The font we use for the comic does have both kinds of I’s available, but until I started checking into things I never knew!
Learn from my example, any of ye who would be comics writers. And if you do acquire (or buy) a comic-specific font, take some time to check out all the features it has: for instance, one other thing I discovered in the process of all this is that our font has built-in “fireflies” I can add using Shift-[ and Shift=], which was a timely find for Uncle Chuck’s expression of “pfft” in this week’s comic.
If you’re interested in further examples of “comic book grammar”, Blambot has a nice, easy-to-read summary on their site: LINK. I’m certainly not advocating slavish devotion to what’s presented there, but it’s good to be aware of so that any choices you make in a different direction are a matter of style and not just ignorance. I was aware of a lot of it already, but I have to admit, the crossbar I bit? Well, it crossed me right up.
So anyhow, one bit regarding Comic-Con I failed to mention was that I picked up a copy of The New Dead, a zombie fiction anthology I’d been meaning to get my hands on. When I bought it the lady at the booth informed me Max Brooks (who penned one of the 19 stories, and who y’all might know better as the author of the Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z) was going to be signing copies of it if I wanted to come back in about 15 minutes. Of course, when I came back there was a line, and I had a panel I dearly wanted to get to, so I didn’t stay for the autograph, especially since I figured also I wasn’t really going to have a chance to talk to him. I chickened out on the idea of shoving a copy of Zombie Ranch at him… he probably gets dozens of people trying to pitch Zombie related stuff his way, so it seemed totally obnoxious to do that during a signing appearance. Sometimes I think I have entirely too much shame to succeed.
Regardless of which, I have my zombie book, and so far I’m greatly enjoying the first two stories in it. Depending how much further I get, I’ll likely make it next week’s blog topic. For now, I think it’s about time for bed. My I’s are crossing.
