Category: Columns

Dennis O’Neil: How Long Can You Go Without Faking It?

Story ideas are pretty malleable. I once presided over/rode herd on/sweated out an 1,100+ page continuity that began as a plot for two 15-pagers.  Hemingway is credited with writing a story in only six words.  (Go on. Google it.  I’ll wait.)  I did something a while back, just a bit over 500 words, that, I think, qualifies as a story, though some might disagree, (and because we cherish the First Amendment, if for no other reason, we welcome their dissent.)

Slick magazines, back when my mother was reading them, featured stories complete on one page.

Superman’s origin, which, you might recall, involved an exploding planet – we’re not talking small, here – was originally told on one page and the first Batman story ran a mere six pages, but it was very close to a Shadow novel that must have been in the neighborhood of 45,000 words.

[[[The Great Gatsby]]], often cited as a great novel, is 47,094 words. [[[War and Peace]]], ditto on the great novel label, goes 587,287.

So, is there a point to all this?  Let’s try to find one.

Story ideas, and literary forms, might be malleable, but that doesn’t excuse scriveners from the labor of plotting and structuring. You can’t just plunk yourself down at the keyboard, decide you’ll do an 1,100-pager and begin to perpetrate the opening of this Sahara of a continuity. No, check that: you can begin the aforementioned perpetration, but a prudent person might advise against it. The danger is that, toward the end, you might find a lot of loose ends that defy knotting, or you might have given your characters problems that they can’t solve and still stay true to whatever else you’ve established.  Or you might just run out of plot. Then, you begin to improvise. You fake it. You pad. Are you, by now, boring the reader? Admit the possibility, anyway.

It happens.  A person far wiser in the ways of Big Media recently confirmed what I’d read somewhere.  Sometimes, writers and producers of television entertainment begin a protracted and complicated storyline with no clear idea of how they’ll get from A to B. They make it up as they go along.  Sometimes they get away with it.  Sometimes.

I know that some Nineteenth Century literary luminaries – Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky to name two – serialized their novels before publishing them in hard covers.  I wonder: did they make it up as they went along?  Did they do outlines?  Plot summaries?

What we did, my comic book colleagues and I, was make pretty detailed outlines, in consultation with our freelancers. We all knew what story we wanted to tell and had a reasonably firm idea of how it should end.  There was a few small disagreements: some of my merry men wanted the outline to be detailed; I wanted to leave wiggle room and preserve the option of someone having a better idea along the way.  But we generally knew where we were going and how to get there.

One more thing: that outline assured us that we had enough plot to justify the number of pages we were planning to occupy.  We could and did permit side plots to run in parallel with our central story, but we wanted none of that padding stuff.

Is here any padding in the preceding 551 words?  Well…

Mike Gold and His Invisible Donuts

(For reasons that will become obvious, this, my first column in about a month, is to be run both on www.MichaelDavisWorld.com and on www.ComicMix.com. Go nuts; read it twice and offer contradictory comments!)

I have a friend named Larry Schlam, a noted child’s rights advocate and a former Bronx street-corner singer. Back around 1973 he and I were cutting through the Montgomery Ward store in downtown Chicago and I wanted to stop at their donut shop, which was excellent. Larry, who is prone to eating frog’s legs and sushi (not necessarily together), explained the concept of “empty calories.” This past month, I learned the concept of invisible donuts.

This winter, the convention has been to slip on the massive ice floe that has engulfed most of this nation east of the Rocky Mountains. That’s not for me. I don’t roll that way. A month ago I took a fall about thirty feet below the ice, at the Times Square subway station. Had this not been an accident, I would have had the foresight to bring along a coffee can to collect contributions. Intention aside, I managed to pulverize my left shoulder – and, of course, I’m left-handed. I’m damn near left-everything.

But I say “pulverize” instead of “break” because that’s exactly what happened. Several X-Ray technicians, emergency room personnel, and my surgeon-to-be all wondered why I wasn’t on a morphine drip. Nonetheless, my shoulder replacement surgery was scheduled for about two weeks later, doubtlessly so I had time to reflect upon my behavior. However, I was given Oxycodone and Vicodin to battle the pain. They said I was stoic. I said it hurt.

Both are opiates and are taken recreationally by some. Contrary to common wisdom medicine is an art form and not a science – what works for you could be no more effective than a Skittle for me. The meds helped with the pain, but the concurrent high was insufficient for me to break out my Jimi Hendrix albums. So it goes.

When it finally came time to go under the knife, I was told I’d be in hospital for one night, maybe two. Surgery was scheduled for the last Monday in February. But I woke up on Thursday with a bit of grogginess and that whole unmentionable catheter thing (yes, guys, you too can squirm). Being in compos mentis, I figured I was wrong and the surgery must have happened on Wednesday.

Well, I was wrong. The new shoulder went in on Monday, and Tuesday evening I had a severe reaction to the anesthesia. My blood oxygen was down to a near-lethal level and I was acting like – in the words of my gifted daughter Adriane – a 220 pound drunken three year old. Evidently I was funny and charming, but I scared the hell out of the assembled medical practitioners. As I do not drink alcohol and do not have a street drug problem (they called around to confirm this), they were dumbfounded.

Meanwhile, I was having a blast. Prior to my blood oxygen train wreck I announced to the assembled masses that two boxes of invisible donuts had just materialized on my chest. Given the circumstances, I believe there was some attempt to quantify the humor of my revelation. A short time later, Adriane saw me pantomiming eating those donuts. She asked “Are you, ah, eating those donuts?” I responded mouth-closed (even in my condo in Wackyland, I endeavor to remain polite) by opening my eyes brightly and nodding happily.

I’m told I spent Wednesday in the ICU until my numbers recovered, and I was discharged the following Friday. My new shoulder has more chrome in it than a ’57 Buick and I still can’t use my left arm for more than a few minutes – this piece will have taken me about six times as long to write. After a few more doctors, I’ll be starting physical therapy in a couple weeks. Larry Hama, who’s been through this type of thing and just had a hip replacement, advised me “Whatever the therapist tells you to do, do it.” That’s good enough for me.

So I haven’t quite disappeared from the planet as of yet. I’m blessed with good friends, comrades who cover for me without squawking, a wonderful slew of professionals at Norwalk and Stamford Hospitals, and a daughter so awesome and self-sacrificing I wonder what I did in a prior life to deserve her.

Invisible donuts are just as satisfying as the real thing – but getting them is a bitch.

Mike Gold will get back to performing his weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. He thinks this will happen on Sunday, March 16th. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color. Gold also joins ComicMix’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.michaeldavisworld.com, and chances are you’re presently reading these words at one of those two venues.

Michael Davis: Who’s Sorry Now?

It’s been a while since I’ve taken someone to task with a good old fashion rant, so…

Last week I missed my ComicMix deadline.

Not that anyone noticed.

Usually when I missed a deadline it’s because of illness or stupidity.

Not that anyone cares.

I drive myself pretty hard and take on a lot of stuff and there are times when I drive myself too hard.  When those way to often moments happen I’m subject to the worst migraines and I’m unable to work.

How bad are these headaches? You know the expression; ‘I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy?’  Well I would, because I’m just that kind of bastard. If I miss a deadline because of illness a migraine is almost certain to be the reason.

I did not miss list week’s deadline because I was ill. So that leaves being stupid. (more…)

Jen Krueger: Checking in to The Grand Budapest Hotel

Sometimes living in L.A. has great perks, and one of the most recent I’ve enjoyed is the fact that of the four theaters in the U.S. that had The Grand Budapest Hotel on limited release this past weekend, one was just a few blocks from my apartment. I know Wes Anderson isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but as someone who’s been a fan of his films for more than a decade, I find myself increasingly annoyed by the most frequent criticism of his work: he’s making the same movie over and over again. The most common things cited to support this complaint are the look and themes of his films, but I don’t find either of these to be valid arguments. (more…)

Jen Krueger: Forgoing the Gold

This year is the first time in my life that the Winter Olympics and the Academy Awards have fallen in the same month. Because I grew up with a great love for watching both figure skating and movies, it seems like 2014 should be a banner year for me to tune into the events that represent the highest level of competition in these two pastimes. Instead, 2014 is the first year that I watched neither. (more…)

John Ostrander: Writing Tids and Bits

Absent any overall topic occurring to me, maybe we’ll try the ol’ shotgun approach – a bunch of writing tips with the idea that, if there’s enough of them, some should work. (My friend William J. Norris used to describe my sense of humor that way – if I just kept talking, a certain percentage of it was bound to be funny.)

Da tips.

Cast your characters. This can be short-hand for a character and can help with dialogue. Who would play your character in TV or movies or who would provide their voice if the character was animated? It doesn’t have to be a living actor; heck, it doesn’t have to be an actor at all. It can be somebody you know or knew, friend or foe or relative (the last can be a combination of the first two). It can be a politician or your boss or a co-worker. Somebody you find distinctive and whose voice is inside your head.

Using a person as the template can help you with how the character acts, who they are, how they physically express themselves. Mannerisms, habits, nervous tics can all work into the character. The cadence of how the template speaks, verbal habits, and so on can help you as you write the dialogue. It’s sometimes easier to identify these traits in others than in yourself. That gives you perspective on them.

These traits are all shorthand – you still have to do all the basic hard work of who they are, their background, and what they want but this can help, especially if you get stuck.

You/Not You. All your characters are you; all your characters are not you. You have to find the point where you and your character intersect if you’re going to write the character honestly. Every character – the good, the bad, main characters, supporting character, one line wonders – lives inside you. However, you also have to detach from them a bit. You have to have some objectivity in portraying them. Give them their own life. It’s like parents with kids; at some point, the parent has to acknowledge their kid ain’t them. The dichotomy between you/not you can be tough to master.

Make Them Turn the Page. (more…)

Dennis O’Neil: The Evolution of Religion and Mythology

Gotta get this sucker written tonight because tomorrow or the next day I may have to resume watching the snow fall and fall and fall and fall…

So: what some benevolent publisher should do (and surely benevolent publishers do exist) is to put put a book that examines the way mythology/religion have evolved quite similarly.  Both began with stories that were. by our standards, crude, with little characterization and virtually all the meaning carried by the plot.  Then, very gradually, the storytelling forms began to vary, the story content change, the narrative structure mutate…But hey!  Enough.  I’m not going to write the frigging book, at least not here and now.

If such a book were to exist, though, it might include. perhaps as an appendix, a discussion of how a certain kind of movie is evolving much as its source material evolved a half century or so earlier.  I refer, as you astute hooligans have already guessed, to superheroes.

The first superhero stories tended to be short – there were several of them in your 10-cent comic book – and the heroes were…well, they were the good guys.  The ones that beat the bad guys. Characterization, insofar as it existed, tended toward the sketchy.  All the heroes were white and waspy, and the minorities were small in number and often the kind of stereotypes that might make those of us with delicate sensibilities cringe – not because the writers and artists were bigots, but because they didn’t know better.  You could tell which heroes were which mainly by their powers: the Flash could run fast, Green Lantern had a magic ring, Hawkman had wings that enabled him to fly, et cetera, et cetera…Most of them also had double identities, also white and waspy: rich guys with no jobs, or scientists,or journalists – nary a trash collector or milkman in the lot.
The form – comic books –  soldiered on through good times and bad, growing more sophisticated year by year, and gradually those complete-in-one-issue stories were supplanted by elaborate serializations.  Genuine characterization entered those colored pages, and “adult” themes, and one morning I woke up and my benighted profession was being covered by the New York Times and taught in major universities and – ye gods! – I was respectable.

That was comics.

And movies?  I did mention movies, didn’t I?  Somewhere back there?

Well, yes I did.  But that topic might be a bit ungainly to be contained in the small bundle of verbiage remaining in the 500 words (more or less) I promised to deliver each week to Mike Gold back when ComicMix was in its birth throes.  Let’s table movies  until next week.  For now, some of you better get to the ATM because you’ll probably need to buy salt or to pay hardy young men with shovels because the weather people are predicting more of the same.  Then you can lie back, cuddle up with a mug of hot chocolate, gaze through the window at all that glistening splendor, and hope there are no power failures.

Next week: the cinema.

dw-gpk-014-212x450-3596526

Jen Krueger: The Little Things

dw-gpk-014-212x450-3596526A few weeks ago, I was idly browsing a store that carried everything from as-seen-on-TV products to Halloween costumes on deep discount. I didn’t really expect to find anything worth purchasing, but just as a bored salesperson mumbled in my general direction that everything in the store was 30% off, I came upon an aisle with [[[Doctor Who]]] merchandise and figured a quick perusal couldn’t hurt. It was all stuff I’d seen before, mostly TARDIS hats, scarves, lunchboxes, and keychains, but then a rack of random packs of micro figures caught my eye. I already had two such micro figures on my desk at home, a Centurion Rory and a Tenth Doctor that had both been gifts, and I liked the idea of getting an Eleventh Doctor or an Amy Pond to join them. But as I thought about making my first micro figure purchase, I realized that despite my vast love of Doctor Who, I hadn’t actually bought much merchandise related to the show. Wondering how that could possibly be true, I grudgingly admitted to myself that my merch buying experiences haven’t been very good.

(more…)

John Ostrander: Dumb Ways To Die, Better Ways To Live

I was shocked to learn of the death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, one of the bright lights of his acting generation. I then learned he died of a heroin overdose with a needle stuck in his arm, surrounded by 50 packets of heroin, and I’m afraid my first reaction was, “What a stupid way to die.” Ungenerous, I know, but that was my honest first reaction.

I had the same reaction to the death of Paul Walker, of the Fast and Furious franchise, in a fiery crash while drag-racing. Coroner’s report says that Walker was alive, at least briefly, after the car caught fire. What a stupid way to die. I feel sorry for his friends and family who loved him but I also wonder at who Walker and the guy driving him could have killed as well.

I was more bothered by Heath Ledger’s death, also by overdose although this was more prescription medication, than I was by Hoffman’s or Walker’s deaths. A common connection in all three cases is to wonder what else they might have done, what work might they have accomplished. They all left behind family, children, friends who grieve and wonder why the ones they loved died in this fashion.

You look at Hoffman’s life– brilliant actor, lots of acclaim, lots of work, highly regarded in the industry, loving partner and kids he loved. Lots to live for and he dies with a needle stuck in his arm. A common junkie’s death. What a stupid way to die.

Then I took a step back and thought more on Hoffman’s death, on all these deaths. One of my prime rules for writing is that “Nothing that is human is alien to me.” Can I really distance myself that much from these men and their deaths and judge so harshly? I’m presuming that they could have made other choices. Maybe they could have but can I understand the choices they made? If I was writing them as characters, could I understand them?

When writing a character, I always try to find something in myself that corresponds to the character that I’m writing. If I was to write Hitler, I would need to find the parts inside me that corresponded to Hitler. If I’m writing a racist, if I’m writing a misogynist, if I’m writing a homophobe, I need to find the parts in myself that are racist, misogynistic, homophobic.

I’ve never taken heroin but what am I addicted to? What self-destructive elements are in me? What really stupid things do I do despite knowing they will eventually catch up to me? Are they choices or compulsions?

This isn’t a confessional and I’m not going into details here. Suffice it to say I found plenty of the above and I didn’t need to look that hard or that long. There’s a line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet where the Prince says, “I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.” It’s a little extreme but I’ve found a truth in it for me.

My apologies, Mr. Hoffman. I’ve learned things about people and the world from the roles you played; you found yourself in them and showed us part of ourselves. In your death, in the way you died, I may have also found aspects of myself.

Thank you. Sorry you’re gone.

Marc Alan Fishman: Crowdfunding Fist To Your Face

Bereft of much else on my mind this week, I turned to my social media outlets. I asked the world to inspire me, and seconds later, the world responded. “Monkey Fist”! It shouted at me. Well world, what about it?

“Monkey Fist” is in fact a crowdfunded project being thrown by fellow indie-in-arms studio, the Sun Bros. I myself am proud to proclaim myself a backer. Perhaps you should too. The Sun Bros, Wesley and Brad, are two hard-working dudes I’ve seen successfully launch now their third project, by way of crowd-funding. They hit the scene (which given the fact that Wesley knows Kung Fu means the pavement is now dead) with the apropos “Chinatown” in 2012, followed it up a year later with “Apocalypse Man”, and are now amidst their campaign to fund the fist. Suffice to say, they are making their way in the industry 1 great fan at a time. Not unlike Unshaven Comics. But given a look at their crowd-funded kitty, perhaps we should be asking them questions and taking serious notes… instead of shaving.

(more…)

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