What do you think? Was the 1978 Superman the best movie made from a comic book, with all other attempts going downhill after that, with the exception of the first two Spidermans (2002 & 2004)? And maybe, Batman Begins (2005)? Oh, wait! There was also the excellent first X-Men (2000).

We shall not even mention the ludicrously exacrable awful X-Man ast Stand (2006) — which seems to be more generally the quality of comix-to-movies and / or video / computer games-to-movies, alas and alack-a-day!

Back to Superman, 1978, the past prophesizes the future. We begin not on the planet of Krypton, but in the Depression with voice over telling us specifically that this is the 1930’s and a world-wide economic disaster has taken place, while black-and-white comic book pages flip. One wonders why, since after that we get the credits, and then the movie properly begins and we’re on Krypton.

However, with the 1930’s global Depression invoked, the trial on Krypton of traitors to the state, and then the denial and rejection of brilliant Jor-El’s warning of coming planetary destruction by the same power elite that passed judgment of the traitors, it feels like today’s headlines.

It’s lovely how the director does not rush us through any of this. The film takes just the time it needs to set-up what needs to be set-up. It remains interesting to look at through this leisurely beginning, leisurely despite the tension and pressure of special effects planetary destruction. Partly this is because the Intro is mostly narrated by Marlon Brando as Jor-El, just the first on-screen member of this all-star cast.

Then we finally get to the best parts of the movie, Superman’s adoption by the Kents and his growing up in rural Kansas. The photography’s tenderness in recording the small details of that life provokes one to wonder whether the director or the cinematographer grew up there too. The glory of the wheat, gold and rose in the lingering sunset glow, sleeping with the bakelite radio tuned in to the local R’nR station, the paper window shades with circle string pulls, the vane windmills, the barns — I know all these details intimately also from my childhood. Then Clark must leave the warm, nurturing pastoral nest, to begin his adult super education via Jor-El’s technology, in the Fortress of Solitude, grown via that same technology out of the empty ice blades at the top of the world.

Next follows assuming a mask and courtship, simultaneously. Such cute bits: no phone booths into which he can change from Kent to Superman, the most extreme looking-up-a-girl’s-skirt scene ever, as Lois Lane dangles from the helicopter teetering at the edge of a skyscraper’s roof deck, x-raying Lois’s lungs through her clothes with his super vision when he advises her not to smoke.

It’s all foreplay and courtship from the moment Superman (not Kent, despite Superman’s Kent mask’s attraction to her) and Lois Lane set eyes on each other. Innuendo, double entendre, her interview of the man who saved her, giving him his name — Superman — gathering his vital stats, most importantly that he’s neither married nor has a girlfriend. She asks if he can, um, well, eat? Meaning, do you, can you fuck? Even better, there is no way that Margot Kidder can be described as anything but, well, homely. This is all lead-up to that marvelous overflight of New York City, which neither Vaquero nor I have ever forgotten. Seeing this movie again for the first time since 1978, seeing the Twin Towers — the flight is even more magical.

For us both this was the highlight of the movie, and it is the point of the movie too. For this is the goal of the courtship-foreplay’s ritual so far: that Lois will take that Flight of Trust with this unknown man, allow him to take entire control of her. First they merely hold hands. He lets her go, to make her frightened rescues her, reprising their first encounter as Super and Lois, so he can hold her in his arms — like a boy at the movies strategizing his move, to get his arm around his date for the first time. She’s already dressed in a blue and white flowing, semi-transparent thing that is essentially a negligee nightgown.

These are more innocent times, even as late as 1978 …. (as well, time is kind of funny in this world of Superman — though in 1978 I passed that lobby of the Daily News at least twice a week, the same lobby with the suspended globe of Clark Kent’s Daily Planet).

“Who are you?”

“I am here to fight for truth, justice and the American way.”

“I never lie.”

“I was sent to America because her people are the the best, to show the rest of the world how it should be.”

Counterpointing this otherworldly romance of erotic attraction, awe and masks, we have the two stooge comedy villains, Gene Hackman’s Lex Luther and Ned Beatty’s Otis, looked over by Bodacious Mama, Valerie Perrine’s Eve Teschmacher.

After these parts though, it becomes special effects: Big Crashing, Big Destruction, Big Noise, Big Repairs and Last Minute Rescue of the Screaming Skirt and isn’t so interesting.

What do you think is happening to Superman’s Fortress of Solitude, now that the Arctic ice cap is melting?

Carol

Bob Kane’s Batman arrived in 1939 — he’s nearly 70. One wonders if there was any bit of subliminal influence from Bacardi to Kane’s Batman logo? There was an awareness of Cuba and things Cuban, particularly rum and music, back in those days that’s difficult for people who came of age in the post-embargo era to realize.

This forthcoming film sounds interesting, so I’ll be watching out for it:

Meanwhile, although the vampire in Let the Right One In is altogether more dangerous, she symbolises as much the dark side of the human psyche as an external threat. “I was thinking about these two characters as though they are mirrors,” Alfredson, the director, says. “She is everything that he is not. She is awake when he is asleep: he is very afraid, she is very brave; she is strong, he is weak; she’s dark, he is blond. She is everything that he would need to be to survive. They are two sides of the same coin.”

The vampire craze shows no signs of abating. An English language remake of Let the Right One In has been announced. With three remaining books in the Twilight saga, there is potential for a vampire franchise. And although the Twilight books series is complete, Nash reveals that “Stephenie does have the bare bones of a chapter of a book provisionally titled Midnight Sun, which is the Twilight story but from the point of view of the vampire not the human girl”.

  Love, C.

In fact, I had for some time been aware of his use of this term, well before the present controversy. But I do not consider it my job as a reviewer to discuss or condemn the political statements of a magazine’s editor –- bigoted or not. My job is to review the magazine’s fiction and not its politics.

It is not possible, though, to pretend that politics does not exist in fiction. Fiction has always been a vehicle for political statements. But a reviewer, I believe, should critique the stories, not the politics. Analog, to take one example, often appears to be taking a right-libertarian stand in both its editorial content and its fiction. This is not a position with which I am particularly sympathetic, but I consider my job as a reviewer to consider whether a libertarian story is a good story, not whether its ideology suits me. Grounds for condemning it might be cardboard characterization, clumsy plotting, awkward dialogue, or heavy-handed polemic, but not the ideology itself. If I find a well-written libertarian story, I will recommend it as readily as any other.

Unfortunately, it often seems to be the case that there is an inverse relationship between political zeal and quality of fiction. One way this manifests is in characterization: the ideological opponent is cast as the Bad Guy. When I was a kid, watching crummy westerns on the black-and-white TV, it was always easy to tell the Bad Guys; they were the ones wearing the black hats. They were there in the story to be shot down by the Good Guy. They are villainous because they are villains, bad because they are Bad Guys. Like the Nazi.

Everyone knows that a Nazi is a Bad Guy. He is there in the plot to be killed by the Good Guy, to demonstrate the superiority of the Good Guy and the triumph of the Good Guy’s cause, when he kills the Nazis. We know he is the Good Guy because he kills the Nazis. It is always OK to kill the Nazis. That’s what they are there in the plot for, to provide someone who can be killed without moral compunction. The Nazi is not really human. His death means nothing.

This is bad writing, bad characterization. It is sloppy, cardboard, one-dimensional writing. Nazis might have been created on purpose for lazy authors. Their uniforms clearly identify what they are, like the villains who sneer and snarl and twirl their mustachios. They kill and torture gratuitously and kick dogs and steal candy from babies, all to make sure that the reader knows that they are the villains.

And very often these villains reflect bigoted stereotypes. The Jap. The Injun. Dehumanized figures, like bug-eyed aliens, who exist only to be hated and killed in order to advance the author’s hero, or some cause the author approves. And the “sheet-head” phenomenon concerns me now, because I see a tendency to make the Arab/ Muslim the new Nazi, the latest non-human villain who exists only to serve the author’s ends. And this is why I must disapprove of terms like “sheet-head.” “Sheet-heads,” whatever they are, are a stereotype. “Sheet-heads” are the thinnest, one-dimensional cardboard villains, the latest incarnation of the stock Bad Guy.

This is a phenomenon I must condemn as a reviewer, because it is bad writing. But beyond this, I feel it is necessary to condemn the sort of bigotry that produces such stereotyping in fiction, that enables it, that publishes it.

An example is the story “The Contractors,” by William Sanders, published in Helix #3 (http://www.helixsf.com/archives/Jan07/fiction/Q3_sanders_contractors.htm). In this piece, the protagonist is a hitman in the employ of the devil, and both the targets we see him take out are Arab terrorists, the implication being that these are characters so evil that even the devil can’t stand them. Sheet-heads: the new Nazis.

I’ve now gone ahead and done the same thing for MultiReal. You can now read online the first drafts of MultiReal’s chapter 1, along with footnotes and commentary about each draft. The big difference between the Infoquake drafts and the MultiReal drafts is this: for the latter book, there were thirty-five of them. Yes, thirty-five drafts of chapter 1. Told you I’m something of a perfectionist. (Keep in mind that most of these first drafts were simply rehashes of prior drafts, and most of them are incomplete.)

Instead of posting all thirty-five drafts up on my website, I’ve chosen to simply post the best or most representative samples of the eight different directions I tried. Along with the final published version, of course.

So among the abandoned concepts you can read about in these drafts are: Magan Kai Lee as ruthless martial arts expert (draft 1), a bureaucratic smackdown between rival governments about the weather (draft 17), Horvil fascinated by advertising (draft 18), and Henry Osterman trekking off to Harper’s Ferry to commit suicide (draft 29).

Quick excerpt from draft 29, my favorite abandoned version of chapter 1:

Henry Osterman was dying.

He stumbled into the provincial town of Harper on his own two feet, a pallid scarecrow of a man, his hair greasy, his clothes tattered, his fingernails curling in on themselves like shriveled worms after the rain.

Nobody could say how he had gotten there. The roads leading to Harper had been pulverized a quarter of a millennium ago by the wrath of thinking machines run amok. Tube trains and hoverbirds were technologies for a theoretical future when the world had learned to live without fossil fuels; multi and teleportation were the pipe dreams of lunatics. To get to Harper these days, you needed either a strong horse or a boat limber enough to steer through the debris clogging the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. Osterman had neither.

The city itself was barely worth the effort. A few dozen dilapidated buildings huddled together at the bottom of a hill, that was all. The more prosperous cities nearby had pieced together a fragile shell of trade from the shards of yesterday’s civilization, but so far Harper had little to contribute. Still, you could get three radio stations again in Harper, and sometimes on clear nights you could see the feeble blink of a Chinese satellite. The local music scene was bustling. Drinking water was almost drinkable. Progress.

Hopefully this will prove useful to writers looking for some insight into the process, if not for future scholars at the Edelman Studies departments of major universities worldwide.

(Originally published at David Louis Edelman’s personal blog. Feel free to comment here or there.)

Twilight’s got all the cooties: romance, girl and YA — no Harry Potter adulation for this series.   Shoot, it’s as bad as Sex and the City, except – it haz shoes? It should haz belly dancing.  Does it?  Myself does not know,  not being a romance fan nor generally a YA reader. (I am a fan of belly dancing, and for long time now.)

Salon dot com analyzes.

[   No wonder the media has heralded Twilight as the next Harry Potter and Meyer as the second coming of J.K. The similarities, however, are largely commercial. It's hard to see how Twilight could ever approach Harry Potter as a cultural phenomenon for one simple reason: the series' fan base is almost exclusively female. The gender imbalance is so pronounced that Kaleb Nation, an enterprising 19-year-old radio show host-cum-author, has launched a blog called Twilight Guy, chronicling his experiences reading the books. The project is marked by a spirit that's equal parts self-promotion and scientific inquiry -- "I am trying to find why nearly every girl in the world is obsessed with the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer" -- and its premise relies on the fact that, in even attempting this experiment, Nation has made himself an exceptional guy indeed.    ]This is an interesting piece, though, because it attempts to track similarities, if there are any, and contrasts, which there certainly are many, among Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the Harry Potter series and the Twilight series, and their audiences.

Another quote:

[  If Harry Potter has a vampire-loving, adolescent female counterpart, it's Buffy Summers. ] 

This article and the others I’ve read concerning the Twilight books do make them sound as if they were written for someone as anti-moi as they could be.  It is pointed out that the author is a Mormon.  The Church of the LDS does believe that women are to be submissive, that men are the head of the family, the home and everything else, and that’s how it should be.

[  Even the most timorous teenage girl couldn't conceive of Bella as intimidating; it's hard to imagine a person more insecure, or a situation better set up to magnify her insecurities. Bella's vampire and werewolf friends are all fantastically strong and fierce as well as nearly indestructible, and she spends the better part of every novel alternately cowering in their protective arms or groveling before their magnificence. "How well I knew that I wasn't good enough for him" is a typical musing on her part. Despite Edward's many protestations and demonstrations of his utter devotion, she persists in believing that he doesn't mean it, and will soon tire of her. In a way, the two are ideally suited to each other: Her insipidity is the counterpart to his flawlessness. Neither of them has much personality to speak of.  ]

Buffy is personality plus! 

This paragraph appears to be the center of the salon piece:

[  The "underdog strange girl" who gets plucked from obscurity by "the best guy in school" is the 21st century's version of the humble governess who captures the heart of the lord of the manor. The chief point of this story is that the couple aren't equals, that his love rescues her from herself by elevating her to a class she could not otherwise join. Unlike Buffy, Bella is no hero. "There are so many girls out there who do not know kung fu, and if a guy jumps in the alley they're not going to turn around with a roundhouse kick," Meyer once told a journalist. "There's a lot of people who are just quieter and aren't having the Prada lifestyle and going to a special school in New York where everyone's rich and fabulous. There's normal people out there and I think that's one of the reasons Bella has become so popular."  ]This is diametrically opposed to the stated objectives Whedon had for Buffy.  Whether or not Whedon completely succeeded with his objective to turn the pursued teen blonde girl in the alley from victim into the victor, just the desire to do is what women need.   So now we’ve turned women back into a Dickensian helpless, hapless girl, only to be acted upon, never to act for herself, and that seems really sad.  Give me Hermione any time!

Has anyone read these Twilight books?  Do you agree with this assessment of them?

This is x-posted on my Live Journal.  The comments there were so interesting that I wanted to see what other people thought too.

Love, C.

First off…wow. Comicon was amazing. In over twenty years of attending, Comicon’s managed to outdo itself again, mostly by dint of those who came, both industry types and fans. I don’t know how many, but numbers of over 200,000 were rumored and probably underestimated.

Second thought, what’s up with the art shows at all the cons? At Comicon, I saw more winged kittens in the art show than superheroes, or for that matter, any comic book characters. Yes, I understand the cottage industry of marketing to dragon and cat fetishists, but seeing the same dracokitty art recycled from Westercon to Comicon was surreal given the difference of the rest of the convention.

Saturday night of Comicon, I skipped the masquerade to go to the X-Sanguine party at The Abbey. Theme for for the night was quarantine for a viral outbreak, and the goth industrial finery was on full display, with highlights being a trio of veiled Victorian ghost brides who’d used phosphorescent electric wire to illuminate their gowns from inside, stilt-walking mad scientists, and a guy who’d managed to reproduce Captain Hammer from Joss Whedon’s new project, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, on short notice, but looking even more impressive–Nathan Fillion, who plays Captain Hammer (and was at the con), is slightly over six foot, but the costumer I talked to, Damien, stands about 6′6″ with a superhero build.

My friend Storm was also there, dressed as Marie Antoinette, and we ended up talking to a bunch of fans from Vegas, where Westercon was just held, who were saying that Comicon should move to Vegas because Vegas had the convention space to hold Comicon. I countered that I didn’t want to see the guy in the Chewbacca costume fainting in the Vegas heat, as it had been 115 earlier this month when I was there. They had to agree on that point.

The San Diego Convention center had a dealer’s room the size of two football fields and it was still crowded, despite the alternate draw of all the panels going on upstairs or in Hall H. I completely missed Hall H which consisted as per usual of all the movie previews and panel discussions with the various writers, directors and actors for the movies, instead mostly going to the ones for the comic and television shows and dealing with the lines to get into some of them.

In contrast, the resort where Westercon was held was palatial, if smaller than the San Diego convention center, but the few hundred fans and pros attending were still rattling around. Attendance at Westercon was down from previous cons, and while I did have a good time, it was very much a relaxicon with the added perk of doing 4th of July in Vegas, and Vegas did not disappoint–The fireworks show at the Red Rock was spectacular, and the Vegas restaurants similarly excellent.

That said, the biggest amenity Comicon has going for it in the current location is San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter, which in my estimation is second only to New Orlean’s French Quarter for restaurants in strolling distance, and possibly superior in that New Orleans does New Orleans cooking almost without exception, whereas in the Gaslamp, I had Irish food twice at The Field, semi-Irish food once at Hennesey’s, and amazing Indian food at a new restaurant called Masala. And that’s just a small sampling of what’s there.

Many fine things can be said about Vegas, but strollability in July is not one of them. I’ve heard rumors of Comicon possibly moving to Anaheim sometime, but the restaurants in the Disneyland area, with certain exceptions, do not equal those of the Gaslamp, and certainly do not have their number and range.

But before going back to the wonder that is Dr. Horrible, I should probably go over the con in order. Rather than driving or flying, this year I decided to take the train, both for budget and novelty. And luckily I decided to go down a bit early and leave a bit late, so I missed what the conductors said were the most crowded trains they’d ever seen.

Anyway, my friend Albert picked me up Tuesday night when I got in. Wednesday we went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park and then to the con in time for Preview Night, which has gone from being a perk for those who get their memberships in advance to a virtual necessity for those who want to see the show relatively uncrowded. Repeat, “relatively.”

The dealer’s room was amazing. Small generalities: Larger Hollywood presence, smaller game company presence, a somewhat larger artists alley and more fine art booths, both modern and vintage. As opposed to the winged kittens upstairs at the art show, the owner of Century Guild had just acquired a portfolio of original Klimt prints and was showing them to interested buyers and also those like me who couldn’t afford them but still appreciate fine art. Last year he had original Mucha. Century Guild was also showcasing some works of current day artists working in similar styles and there were a large number of professional artists who had booths outside of artists alley.

It was, in short, the grand bazaar. I bought a colored die I needed to complete a set, for ceremonial and aesthetic reasons, caught dinner at The Field with Jim and Nancy Hay, and then went to the X-Sanguine after-party held at the Airport Lounge, a nightclub in San Diego done in an early 70s airport theme.

Thursday, I did the dealer’s room floor for the most part, locating the Tor booth, waved “hi” to Patrick Nielsen-Hayden who looked like he was busily liveblogging the whole thing, admired the cover of Inside Straight, and then spotted Caroline and Warren Spector nearby. We were all heading off to the Doctor Who/Torchwood panel in Ballroom 20, which was thankfully big enough to hold everyone, but the line wrapped around the upper floors. A large number of the writers, producers and actors were there, especially for Torchwood. John Barrowman was particularly funny and was obviously having a great time because San Diego is his old college town and he was able to return as the triumphant actor-hero.

After Torchwood, I ran over to 5AB for Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s new project, The Middleman. Javi was there, pleased as punch (and deservedly so), and Matt Keeslar who plays The Middleman was there as well, obviously having a great time too. They played a clip from the other star, Natalie Morales, in which she apologized for not being there, and then showed an amusing clip from an upcoming episode in which Kevin Sorbo plays a bad Middleman from a previous era. All-in-all, very fun. I hope the show makes it, and not just because Javi’s a friend but for the selfish reason that I want to see more episodes.

A bit later there was the Superhero Superfiction panel in the same room. Caroline Spector and Melinda Snodgrass were there representing Wild Cards and promoting Inside Straight as well as Melinda’s new novel, Kevin J. Anderson with a new Superman book, and several other authors for various other books, including two from a new one called The Darker Mask. Mary Elizabeth Hart from Mysterious Galaxy was moderator and afterwards hosted the signing. I’m looking forward to next year when Busted Flush is out, as well as Esther Friesner’s Witch Way to the Mall anthology so I’ll have something current to sign.

After dinner at the aforementioned Masala with Margaret Organ-Kean (who came after finding from the internet that fans were already expecting her in artists alley) and her husband and fellow Foolscap instigator, Bruce Durocher, they con had a special showing of The Lost Boys: The Tribe along with a panel with the writers and actors. Corey Feldman was hamming it up by coming in character as Edgar Frog, and Angus Sutherland was taking the analogous role to what his brother Kiefer did in the original. Short review: Not as good as the original, but still quite good for a sequel, and far better than a direct-to-DVD movie has any expectations of being. I saw it along with my friends Albert and Jerry who are about the same age as I was when the original came out. They liked it a lot and I smell more sequels sooner than twenty years.

Friday was the day of lines. Joss Whedon was in Ballroom 20 with the cast of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. The line went on forever, but the panel was both funny and informative. I’d thankfully been turned onto it before the con, so was able to watch it free, then paid for an iTunes version I could watch on my iPod on the train the way down. I was hoping and expecting there to be a big-screen showing of it, and one was scheduled for that evening, but unfortunately not in that room, which was reserved for the Eisner Awards. Instead, it was put across the hall in room 6B, after the showing of the Sci Fi Friday Night preview shows of Eureka and Stargate Atlantis, after the 30-year reunion show of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

This was a mistake. Not everyone could get into MST3K who wanted to, and everyone who wanted to see Dr. Horrible was getting in line early to see Sci Fi Friday too. I actually could have gotten in to the room earlier because one of the door guards looked at my badge and thought I was the Kevin Murphy from MST3K, but I don’t think I’d be able to fool the audience let alone the other panelists, so I didn’t capitalize on the confusion.

Thankfully there was some mad plate-spinning from the convention staff and they arranged for rooms 5AB and 7AB to be opened and show early showings of Dr. Horrible. However, I was already in a good place to see the SciFi Friday, so I got in and watched both. The producer of Eureka introduced the Sci Fi portion of the show, and Joss and the rest of the cast and writers attended the big-screen premiere of Dr. Horrible and took their bows to thunderous applause.

I’m thinking that in the future, Hall H may have to be opened for nighttime programming.

Now, what to say of Dr. Horrible? I’ll echo what Joss said at the panel earlier that day: During the writers strike, they’d thought about making art without any money going to certain people, with “certain people” being an obvious circumlocution for the studios. It was rather exciting to watch something at the forefront of a new media form, direct-to-iPod rather than direct-to-DVD or its precursor, direct-to-video.

Of course Dr. Horrible showed up on DrHorrible.com first, for free viewing to build buzz, and of course the Comicon placement and showing was well chosen. Joss’s brothers and co-writers, Jed and Zack, mentioned that there would be tryouts for the Evil League of Evil on the website, and ten or twelve winners would be added to the League and included on the eventual DVD. And there was also mention of future installments of Dr. Horrible.

But what to say of Dr. Horrible? Apart from superlatives about the writing, acting, and music, and nice words about the low budget costuming which looked like stuff that regular people who were superheroes or villains could throw together (explaining how so many costumers reproduced it so quickly), maybe a quick thumbnail pitch: Dr. Horrible, aka. Billy, wants to join the Evil League of Evil, but also wants to get the girl of his dreams, Penny, but has trouble when Captain Hammer, narcissistic prat of a superhero, gets in the way. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say that it does a very nice job of wrangling with the concept of what is good and what is evil, who’s the hero and who’s the villain, and far more successfully than other things which I would have expected to be better but weren’t and I’ll get to later. (Hint: The Dark Knight.)

In any case, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was marvelous to see on the big screen. I want the next installment. Now. But in the time being, I can just rewatch the original three acts on my computer for my happy payment of $3.99 to iTunes.

Saturday, got to the con too late to get in the line for Heroes second season panel, but was able to get into the Tori Amos panel. I’m a big fan of Tori Amos and it was great to see her, though it was a bit odd given the dressing down of most of the panelists (Joss was running around in rumpled plaid), Tori was got up in a black designer gown and long red wig like she was going to the Grammies. She was also discussing the new coffee table book of comics that have been done based on her songs, and mentioned how after reading the stories in it, she was hearing different, new music in her head. Which means we’re going to get more albums from her. Really interesting discussion between her and the writers and artists on the project.

After this came the line and panel for Joss Whedon’s other new project, Dollhouse. Eliza Dushku was also there, as well as the actor who plays the investigator and also played some major role on Battlestar Galactica, which is still on my “to catch up on” shelf, so I can’t say anything about him other than looking forward to seeing him on the show since he and Eliza appeared to have good chemistry. And Dollhouse looks like it’s going to be very interesting.

Now of course comes the question…this is Comicon. Where are the panels about the actual comics, as opposed to fancy coffee table books or comics like The Middleman that made the jump to the small screen? Okay, I next attended the Fables panel, which had the full writing and art staff there, as well as the editor as a ringer in the audience and a friend who was model for Bluebeard playing the MC. Plus a gang of fans who’d costumed themselves as everyone from Flycatcher to The Snow Queen. There was also a giveaway of a one-page comic, which was good fun, and special giveaways of art for those who didn’t get one last year.

I then went and caught the second half of the Chuck panel. All the actors were having a great time kidding each other and extremely earnest about getting people to watch their show. I was rather disappointed it and Fables were put opposite the Pushing Daisies panel, but at least it kept the rooms less crowded.

For dinner, met up with my friend, Pete, aka. Dr. Peter Coogan, instigator of the Comics Arts Conference, a whole academic track going on in Room 30 (a.k.a. Outer Mongolia) during the con. Got a great academic conversation fix with him and the gang and then primed myself for going to the aforementioned X-Sanguine party at The Abbey, where of course there were a number of other professionals spiced in with the regular goths.

Finally Sunday. Missed the Smallville panel with was on strangely early, and then couldn’t get into the room for the Supernatural panel due to the large number of drooling fangirls. Instead, went to the Emily the Strange panel which had the usual Mad Lib and a rather interesting slideshow of Emily art, but less schwag than previous years when they had a music sampler. Caught the end of Paranormal State so as to sit down for the Ghost Whisperer panel. Jamie Kennedy showed up acting like, well, Jamie Kennedy, and wearing a plaid fedora through the panel. Probably the best example of “star” behavior I’d seen all weekend, as opposed to “giddy happy actor” which everyone from Barrowman on had been doing when they weren’t doing the “play your character as a member of this panel” shtick. Of course Jamie Kennedy was also probably happy that Jennifer Love-Hewitt was unexpectedly absent so he could make jokes about her breasts.

After checking out more of the dealer’s room, I went to Outer Mongolia, or Room 30, and caught the last panel of the academic track, a round-robin of undergraduates and graduate students giving nutshell presentation of their papers. The most interesting of these came from Brian Swafford of Ohio State, who talked about Comicon as a site of pilgrimage, and how status was accrued by fans by having visited the legendary Comicon. I’d never put it in that context before, but it made perfect sense, and the link between medieval pilgrim badges and modern con badges is far closer than one might think.

After that, I decided to go to the Once More With Feeling screening as the finale of the con, but got in the room early and caught the tail end of Grant Morrison and Deepak Chopra talking about their new project, some online animated Indian mythology that left me underwhelmed and had me staring at Deepak Chopra as he talked about worldwide poverty while wearing these red-sequined spectacles that looked like they’d been made to accessorize with the Ruby Slippers. But I suppose being an international self-help guru lets you transcend irony.

Then came the second Joss Whedon musical of the con, with the entire audience singing along. It was marvelous fun, and after it, I met up with my friends Albert and Jerry and we went off to meet up with Pete and the other professors to see The Dark Knight. En route, we ran into a grand score of con schwag: a young woman opening up boxes of T-shirts and squirt pistols promoting Sukiyaki Western Django, telling everyone to take as many as they wanted. I took a brace of pistols and a pile of T-shirts, as I had an empty bag and was going to be meeting Pete soon. I handed around some to the Pete and the other professors and one of the Dark Horse editors who was also hanging out with the academics, we got our tickets, got dinner at the food court, and then saw the film.

Afterwards, over drinks, everyone was pretty much in agreement: It was a good film, but we were all disappointed because we went in having been told it would be a fantabulous film and it was merely good. Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker was probably the shining star of the film, but couldn’t transcend the numerous plot holes and idiocies. Also, the child playing Commissioner Gordon’s son couldn’t act his way out of a wet paper bag, but to give him credit, even a cross-dressing Shirley Temple couldn’t have pulled off the winsome moppet dialog they gave him, or made it convincing in the absurdly CSI-esque version of Gotham City he was living in. If they’d let him drop an F-bomb or two, I might have bought him as a real child, but not as they had him.

More problematic, Aaron Eckhart makes a perfectly fine Harvey Dent, but his transformation into Two-Face is unconvincing to say the least. Here again, I’ll blame the writers, since I can’t think of any actor who could have pulled off the lines they gave him.

Also, the Joker’s traps only appeared to work because the people of Gotham are idiots who take everything he says at face value, rather than expect him to do something like lie, or change his mind, because he’s crazy. There’s a couple boatloads of people in one of his traps and nobody twigs to the idea that you can’t trust that what he’s said is true. Some others defended this by saying that they didn’t have time for a long dialog between the civilians, but as I said, I would have settled for just one junior high school student who’d just done a book report on “The Lady or The Tiger.”

Again, similar themes to Dr. Horrible, but far less successfully dealt with.

And that was Comicon 2008. Whew.

another obstacle that I found to be limiting with the first person perspective was the inability to give the reader information outside of the main character’s knowledge. I grew concerned that I would not be able to adequately hold the reader’s interest or create a sense of worry for the main character by breaking away from their storyline for short periods of time.

Certainly there are limitations to strict first person POV that one has to deal with. You mentioned a number of concerns here, some of which are related and some not.

1. giving the reader information outside the POV character’s knowledge

2. holding the reader’s interest

3. breaking away from that (POV) character’s story

4. creating a sense of worry in the reader

First off, #2 should not be dependent on #1 or #3. If you create an interesting character, and a strong vivid supporting cast, complex relationships, and interesting events surrounding that character, ie. a good story, you can hold the reader’s interest. Your POV character - no matter first or third - should be someone we want to spend time with. Someone with a complex personality, not perfect, with interests, attitudes, likes, dislikes, beliefs, superstitions, whatever makes a person human (or not, as the case may be.) Someone who learns and is capable of change. Sometimes the first person narrator is not the true protagonist, but only the person who is telling the story of the true hero or heroine. (I tried that with Transformation, and it ended up the narrator WAS the heart of the story, but those things can happen…) First person is certainly not appropriate for every story.

Skipping to #4, because it is so important: You’re concerned about creating a sense of worry in the reader. Rightly so. Dramatic tension is a critical part of storytelling. Rising tension grips readers and forces them to turn the next page, to stay up a little later because they can’t put the books down. It creates the drumbeats in the background, the spooky music.

Giving the reader information that the POV character doesn’t have is ONE device that can enhance dramatic tension. But you could rephrase the basic idea as: Lack of information creates tension. Tension is raised when a person in a dramatic situation lacks critical information and knows it. This is the key to many mysteries and suspense stories - things keep happening and the protagonist doesn’t know where the hammer will fall next. It is a sense of inevitable danger. It’s why amnesia has always been such a beloved storytelling device. (Note I am not touting amnesia as the key to dramatic tension, only suggesting why we love it!)

Example: if you’ve read (or seen) Touching the Void, the story of the two UK climbers in the Andes. One breaks his leg in a terrible storm and the other, to save his own life, is forced to cut the rope. He climbs down, assuming his partner is dead. The guy with the broken leg doesn’t die, and the book tells how he crawls out of a crevasse and all the way back to camp with a broken leg and no water. One of the greatest points of tension in this book is that the guy crawling doesn’t know whether or not his partner has broken camp and left the area. Switching out of his POV would actually KILL tension.

So what if you want the POV character to be “innocent,” unaware of her lack of information? Then you have to add the spooky music other ways. Warnings. Concerned friends or colleagues. Other events that the reader might be able to pick up on. The risk here is making your POV character seem stupid or incredibly naive - both turnoffs. But consider which is more dramatic…having a piano fall suddenly on your hero’s head or having him see the piano dangling and the rope fraying and knowing his foot is caught? Consider whether we really needed to know what dangers Frodo was to face or the entire history of the Ring before he set out on his journey? There was plenty of spooky music playing.

Back to #1: As to giving the reader information outside the POV character’s knowledge, consider what and why you need that to happen. Would it ruin the story for your character to know or learn this info? (Often learning is a more interesting process anyway!) Think about how you would handle this in a third-person story. Switch POVs? Well you can certainly do that in a first person novel, too. Multiple first person narrators can be quite as effective as multiple third person POVs, as long as you keep readers informed as to which head they’re in. Would you have switched to a temporary omniscient voice? Mmmm…valid, certainly, but not a technique that produces the same intimacy as a close third or first person POV. Again, consider carefully what the reader really needs to know, and whether the story tension depends on your protagonist being deprived of that knowledge.

As for # 3 - breaking away from the first person character’s story - you can certainly do that with multiple narrators as well. It can be a great story development technique to show an event from one character’s perspective, and then the same event from another’s perspective. Or to keep several parallel plotlines going and have them merge in a cataclysm. Again - just keep it clear whose head we’re in. One of my great writing challenges was when my first person narrator chose a course of action that changed his personality late in a book. All of a sudden I wanted nothing more than to see him from another viewpoint - but it was much too late in the day to introduce another POV. After I worked on it a while, I realized that everything I wanted to show could be reflected through another character’s dialogue and body language as observed by my changed hero. The POV does not have to understand what he is observing. Only react. It worked.

Some people move from a first person narrator back and forth to a third person story. I’m sure that can work, too, though I can’t cite examples that I particularly like.

In summary of this wandering post: To be successful with first person POV

- Pick your viewpoint character carefully; and don’t be afraid to challenge yourself with tricky situations!

- Consider multiple first person narrators for a story that depends heavily on events outside a single character’s direct experience

- Create strong, vivid additional characters so that your narrator is not living wholly in his own head, but bumping up against and reacting to interesting personalities

- Consider all ways to create dramatic tension;

- Lack of information does create tension, but consider whether the reader actually needs to know the info before your POV character does;

Hope this all makes sense! I’m sure many of you have additional ideas.

Carol

The best parts:

–The locations, the vistas, the action, the people — none of them are digital.  This is all location and real people riding real horses.  It does look different, and so much better, I do say.

–The landscape, as one expects, has the leading role in Mongol.   You will not be disappointed.  Vistas of snow, of arid slopes, green rolling spring grass, doesn’t seem foreign to someone who grew up on the Great Plains, though, no we didn’t have mountains where I grew up.  But I did visit the Black Hills, which are really mountains, often on family summer vacations, and the Badlands, in both South Dakota and North Dakota.  The Missouri-Platt system meanders through parts of both these states on their way to the Mississippi, so I saw those too on summer vacations.  These are true vistas and landscapes, from my own life, and the lives of these characters in