Month: August 2017

Ben Edlund may not be a name you’re familiar with, but you may know of his most famous creation: The Tick. From humble comic shop beginnings in 1986, the satirical superhero franchise grew to a national and then international following, then an animated series and two live-action small screen adaptations, the most recent of which has debuted on Amazon recently to what seem to be good reviews so far.

I haven’t seen the new series yet but it’s good to hear that Edlund has apparently lost none of his edge, as detailed in this interview. An excerpt of which I found very interesting, since in his discussions of what makes the superhero genre, well… tick… Edlund brings up Westerns:

“What explains the Westerns? World War II, I think,” Edlund says by way of comparison. “Where does the wounded fucking guy who can’t tell his pain to anybody — where does that come from? Where does emptiness, peace, and quiet as a fantasy come from? What is the story of all that shit?” 

This put me in mind of a documentary called Five Came Back that Dawn and I watched not too long ago, which spent some time on famous Western filmmaker John Ford and how his military service in WWII informed his postwar work. You need only watch Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956) back-to-back to see a fairly gaping tonal difference even though the superficial elements are the same (including John Wayne being the star). Westerns of course predate the start of World War II, but it’s only after the war that you really start getting that genre feel of the lone man or small band of men on their own, often struggling to deal with a world that no longer seems to understand them or have a place for them. I’ve talked up George Stevens’ Shane (1953) before as the arguable ur-example of this, and wouldn’t you know it, Stevens was on the frontlines of WWII as well.

What also struck me about Edlund’s quote was thinking back to how The Searchers unabashedly interrupts its dark existentialism towards the end for an absurdly staged, lengthy fistfight at a wedding party, complete with one of the guys involved all but calling a time out while he gets someone’s abandoned fiddle out of the way before the next punch. It goes on for so long and is so comically bizarre that the only comparison I have is the similar scene in They Live where two grown, burly men are fighting over one of them putting on a pair of sunglasses.

And yet that’s the thing, isn’t it? Catch-22 and other works like it certainly prove that darkness and absurdity can walk hand in hand. Stoicism and absurdity are also aspects that can go together… The Tick isn’t really a stoic sort but if you’ve never seen the movie Airplane!, the performances of Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves and Robert Stack in that movie are perfect specimens of how being oh-so-serious can be oh-so-funny. The idea of “deadpan humor” is entirely built around this phenomenon, and in the world of Zombie Ranch Frank is probably my best example.

The Tick has similarly flirted with a dark side to its humor that doesn’t undercut it so much as throwing it into greater relief. It can be a fine line to walk to avoid figuratively breaking your audience’s neck with the mood whiplash, but if you can get it right a bit of contrast can really add up to more than the sum of its parts and (bizarre as it is to say this) actually give a sense of verisimilitude over a piece that is relentlessly on one side or another.

Yeesh. Not two weeks down the road from my post on the marital crash-and-burns of two geek icons, we get what could possibly be the biggest wreck of them all. Joss Whedon’s ex-wife has held forth on the infidelities that led to their divorce, and the picture it paints is… not kind. If you’re a fan of his work, this may be yet another case where you’ll have to be able to separate the art from the artist. Whedon’s longest-running fansite doesn’t seem prepared to do that, though, and is shutting down after 16 years of operation.

Assuming the allegations have at least some truth to them, that line from The Dark Knight once again comes to mind: “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” It also puts me in mind of a blog I wrote a few years back along regarding geekly inspirations of my youth that I felt had fallen from grace personally, professionally, or both. You may read it here: The Fallen Lords of the ’80s.

I admittedly haven’t been keeping up with my zombie fiction lately. I haven’t watched The Walking Dead in many years, for example, and while stuff like Train to Busan is on my list I keep forgetting to fire it up at an opportune moment. It’s not a situation like Stephenie Meyer where she didn’t want to read or watch about horror, it’s just circumstance.

But anyhow, with that backlog weighing on my mind, I got around to checking out the pilot episode of a zombie series one of my friends had been talking up — Z Nation, a SyFy show whose first season is now on Netflix.

So far I’ll say this: if the pace of TWD is too slow for you, Z Nation will probably be right up your alley. The pilot barely stops to breathe as it keeps piling on the zombie attacks (and zombie tropes). By the end of it, I hadn’t really gotten much of a sense of the main characters or why I ought to care about them — in fact I joked to Dawn something along the lines of “Oh hey, all the PCs are together now.” And no I’m not really kidding about that, one character in particular pretty much joins up by shrugging and climbing into the back of the truck after they say “Hey you’re a good sniper, come with us.” The rest of the story is one you’ve probably seen before… zombie outbreak, America As We Know It has fallen, last outposts are trying to find a cure, and eventually a ragtag band is set up to make their way across the wasted nation.

So the show so far is not what I’d call particularly innovative or insightful, but if you want to see a lot of people get eaten and zombies get bashed/shot you’ve come to the right place. It’s fun to watch for that, even if we weren’t particularly compelled at the time to see what happens next. If any of you out there have watched more episodes I’d be interested to hear your take, does it stay with my first impressions more or less or go somewhere a little less traveled?

If you haven’t heard the news yet, this week Chris Pratt and Anna Faris announced they’re breaking up after several years of what the general public had by and large considered a happy, nay even adorable marriage. The general public did not take it well.

I mean, so what? It’s a Hollywood marriage, aren’t those doomed to failure? But I suppose this was meant to be the exception to the rule, with both people involved being so gosh darned likeable.

Shortly before this, I belatedly learned that Dan Harmon (the man behind Community, co-creator of Rick and Morty, etc.) had gotten divorced from his wife about a year ago. And so here’s two cases where I can absolutely envy the talent and success of Chris Pratt and Dan Harmon in their careers, but their personal lives didn’t work out so well. Both men’s careers really took off in the past handful of years… is that related? Are success and marital happiness mutually exclusive, and Dawn and I should thank our lucky stars we remain relatively obscure in our efforts?

I’m sure there’s a middle ground to be sought and had, and there are Hollywood marriages out there that defy the stereotype. Also neither breakup seems to point towards a scorched earth scenario so much as just “creative differences”… but then again there’s Harmon’s old studio production card and his new one this year:

Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here counting my blessings…

The start of Episode 15 comes with the reminder that The Exec is still watching, and that he (well, technically ClearStream) has a satellite. A perk you don’t often see in post-apocalyptic zombie fiction. The fact ClearSteam has access to one still in operation is a pretty big indicator of the power they wield.

Of course its presence would beg several questions, such as whether there’s still some sort of space program going on somewhere. Texas certainly is no slouch on those terms in our modern era, but the easier answer I always went with is that it launched shortly before everything went to hell. This might also beg the question both of timing, and just why a communications satellite has high-resolution spy cameras on it.

Or if knowledgeable people wanted to get really pedantic on me, they could point out that the maximum “life expectancy” of even a geostationary satellite is around 15-17 years… so if this particular specimen launched prior to the Zombie Wars, how is it still functioning? Sure, I’ve kept exact timelines vague, but given Suzie was born a post-war Repop and is now an adult, that’s pushing it, right?

Now in theoretical response I could just say “shut up and enjoy the comic, nerd” — but being a nerd myself, I would rather weasel about until I find some answer that works, even if it working depends on making shit up. You know: the Star Trek method. This is where having your setting be in “the future” even before the apocalypse happened is a huge plus, because what we’ve seen with the camera drones alone requires a level of active camouflage, anti-gravity and long-lasting portable power that doesn’t quite exist yet (as far as we know). True, the AAVDRO units were debuted after the Wars began, but does that mean their tech wasn’t already developed in secret?

Now with satellites, the operational life is measured as a matter of fuel used for repositioning, which is why those lower in the atmosphere have much shorter “lives” as they have to burn fuel from time to time just to prevent orbit decay. The higher up ones like the communication sats don’t need to do this but still need to change orientation occasionally — other than that, the lenses and electronics involved are considered to have a much longer life expectancy than a couple of decades, barring unforeseen malfunction. So hey, if you solve the fuel problem, then it would follow that with a little luck and foresight, two decades of operation isn’t so out of the question anymore. Therefore, with just a little applied phlebotinum we are back on track and I am satisfied. All of this in the background of course since in terms of the story, well… us nerds should probably just shut up and enjoy it.

And yes, The Exec seems content to use this technological advantage to fiddle around with a handful of ranchers. I suppose that says a lot about him, too, doesn’t it?