Category: News

First, check out John Ostrander’s column, found somewhere near the stuff you’re reading, and then imagine me shouting Amen into the Grand Canyon and listen to the seemingly endless echoes and finally consider this a small gloss on John’s work.

John cites the old how-to-write chestnut: Write what you know. Okay, first a slightly snarky hypothesis that’s not intended to insult, or even question, my pedagogical colleagues, just raise the tiniest bump in the dialogue: Maybe those who teach the aforementioned chestnut write what they know because that’s all they, themselves, can write. That’s not a knock: we’re all wired a bit differently and who’s to say that a talent for writing, if talent it be, doesn’t manifest in as many different ways as, say, a talent for music? No good or bad, just different. (Who’s your fave, Mozart or Bob Dylan? Oh – lucky you! – can you dig ‘em both?)

It seemed to me, back when I was giving this kind of matter some thought, that until recently there’s been a cultural bias against imaginative storytelling. “Realistic” (note punctuation) equals good: fantastic equals bad. So Hemingway is a good writer because he wrote about going down to the café in the afternoon to drink the good wine, and Bradbury is bad because he wrote about… Martians and stuff.

Second, a confession that, with any luck at all, will segue into an observation: Despite my having written 200 or so Batman stories, I have never waited on a shadowy rooftop for a heavily armed psychopath to arrive so I can give him such! a smack. I’ve never bent steel in my bare hands or changed the course of mighty rivers either, but I’ve written Superman stories. The Batman stories were easier and more fun.

Here we circle back to the chestnut. I think the reason I was more comfortable with Batman than with the undoubtedly estimable Superman has to do with writing… not what I know, but what I fantasize. Batman lives near my dreams: Superman, not so much. I’ve never daydreamed about having godlike powers – and let’s face it, Superman is a demigod, at least – but I could imagine, oh…running a marathon in 2:10? Punching out that bosun’s mate who clocked me solid at that bus stop in Cuba? We’re talking about feats that are difficult and even extraordinary – he was one tough bosun’s mate – but that are within human capabilities. Did you watch the Olympics this year?

Let’s revisit the chestnut one last time…No – let’s toss it out altogether and substitute a few words from Henry David Thoreau: Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

Maybe Hemingway dreamed of those cafés. And Bradbury? All those wonderful Martians…

FRIDAY: Martha Thomases Flies Back

Finally, the comic book store owner on TV that comic fans can respect (as compared to that guy on The Simpsons) gets some respect of his own as Kevin Sussman gets a regular gig on The Big Bang Theory. Deadline Hollywood has the details:

Leonard, Sheldon & Co. may be haning out at the comic book store more often next season. Kevin Sussman, who plays the comic book store manager Stuart, has been promoted to a regular for the upcoming sixth season of the hit CBS comedy. He has been recurring on the show since Season 2, appearing in 15 episodes so far. I hear Sussman’s deal is of the “7/13″ kind, meaning that he likely won’t be in every episode like Big Bang‘s core cast. This is the fourth promotion for a Big Bang recurring player, following similar upgrades for Melissa Rauch and Mayim Bialik, who now appear in virtually every episode, and Sara Gilbert, who left the series.

Stuart played a key part in the relationship between Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and Amy (Bialik) as it was Stuart’s date with Amy that prompted Sheldon to make her his girlfriend. His character also was behind a bet that produced one of the most popular images from the show with the main gang dressed as  Catwoman, Wonder Woman, Batgirl, and Supergirl.

Doctor Who fans don’t have to hold it anymore. The Great Question has been answered.  No, not the one about Life, The Universe and Everything, or even the one that will be asked on the Fields of Trenzilor at the Fall Of The Eleventh.  The BIG question – “When will Doctor Who premiere?”

And the answer is, September 1st.  And it’s the SAME answer whether you live in America or the UK, with only a slight variance in detail.  In the UK, the premiere episode Asylum of the Daleks will broadcast at 7:20 PM, and in the states at 9 PM, EDT.

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The episode has already seen its premiere in the UK via a gala celebration, and will see its US premiere at the Ziegfeld Theater in New York City on August 25th.  Tickets for the NYC event sold out in under half an hour, the rush of hopeful fans crashing the Movietickets.com website.

Over and above the welcome news of the premiere, the big surprise was that the premiere will be preceded by a five-part webisode mini series.  The story, entitled “Pond Life”, will feature Amy and Rory PondWilliams attempting to live a normal life, outside the TARDIS.  The synopsis of Asylum suggests that said normal life may not be going too smoothly. Series stars Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill discuss the mini-adventure on the BBC Website.

The episodes, written by Chris Chibnall, will be released one day, starting Monday, August 27th on the BBC website.  They’ll also be made available in the UK, via BBC’s interactive “Red Button” service.  Plans are proceeding on how the episodes will be released by BBC America— look for an update soon.

These webisodes are a continuation of the episode prequels from the previous season, each of which featured a brief extra scene from several episodes of the series.  These prequels were included on the later video releases, it’s presumed this mini-series will also appear in this season’s set.

In honor of this surprise, Your Humble Reporter has crafted a suggested logo for the mini-series, inspired by a popular Britcom which starred a number of actors who later appeared on Doctor Who:

(Update: yes, 9/1, not 8/1 as we originally had in the headline. We’re dumb.)

Inspector Spacetime is a self-paradoxical anomaly, which makes perfect sense.  It’s only existed for a few months, but has also apparently been on television for nearly fifty years.  Actor Travis Richey has played him for all of that time, for a grand total of less than two minutes of footage, and yet 11 actors have played the role, including Stephen Fry and Christopher Lee.  As Travis explains it, “The best part is, NOTHING is canon, and EVERYTHING  is canon”.

After the character made its debut as a brief Doctor Who parody on NBC’s Community, the Internet got right to work fleshing out his history and adventures.  A Tumblr feed was quickly created to serve as the main repository of the work, and photos from past episodes were quickly “discovered” and shared.

Travis Richey had a very good time at Gallifrey One, the country’s biggest Doctor Who convention.  At <a href=”

panel dedicated to Inspector Spacetime, he announced plans to produce an independent web series dedicated to the Infinity Knight and his continuing adventures.

“Tony Lee (writer for IDW’s Doctor Who comic) reached out to me to do a video for Chicago Tardis (the Midwest DW convention) back in November” Travis explains. “I did that, and the greeting went over so well that Tony put me in touch with Shaun (Lyon) who does Gallifrey One.”

The panel was filled with fans and the panel “reminiscing” about their favorite moments of the show, including past Inspectors, and of course, the death of Jeffrey.  “There were jokes people were making that I hadn’t heard, like ‘Horse-Bot 3000’, and I was ‘ Huh? What’s that?’  But I do improv all the time, so I just accepted it, gave it a ‘Yes, and…’ and went with.”  He shouldn’t have been surprised; as is traditional the people starring in the sci-fi show don’t know NEARLY as much about the show as the fans.

What was amazing is that everything they discussed in the panel was all created from whole cloth on sites like the Tumblr blog, in a world wide improv session. Fans across the world agreed which jokes were funnier, went with the stronger material, and the mythos became cohesive amazingly quickly.  “One example of that was the word DARSIT, for the the Inspector’s vehicle,” Travis recalls. “I have to admit, I never really liked it; I thought it was too simple of a joke, from TARDIS.  But someone on the ProBoards came up with BOOTH, and everybody liked it, and not only did the change get made in the “canon”, but they have, I hear, retconned things so that “Darsit” is now an Infinity Knight curse word. And they’ve already started folding Boyish the Extraordinary, our bad guy, into the canon, so by the time we see him, it’ll be his return.”

The ability for fans to so easily collaborate on such a mad undertaking, couldn’t have existed only a few years back.  “It’s really extraordinary. I admit that I saw the potential, but my vision was so far from what actually happened, and how much it means to the fans.  And I think part of it is for fans to be able to actually have a hand in creating something new.  A lot of people don’t have the opportunity to create something new, so to be able to write something on the Internet, or submit a photo to the tumblr blog…it’s an easy way for the fans to be engaged, and I think that’s something that has been lacking. So in that respect, this is something totally new.

Travis saw the potential in the character while he was still filming that first episode.  “I wrote the script [for the web series] with my writing partner after I shot the first episode, but before it even aired.  We knew it was gonna be pretty big” Travis recalls.  “I’m a pretty forward thinker; I’m never happy just waiting for things to happen.  So my thought was, Hey, I’ll write this, and if there’s a second episode, I’ll tell them you should do this for the DVD or for web content.  Especially after the first weekend, when it just EXPLODED, so I knew that it was going to be something the audience wanted.”

“So I wrote this, and I brought it with me when I did my second episode, and the  word on set was ‘We can’t just look at it’. So I went back to my agent and said to submit this, because this is really huge, and we understand the character and the meme, and the world that the fans created’.  And he sent it in, but never got any response, one way or the other.  I certainly didn’t get a ‘no, don’t do this cause we’re doing it’, nor did I get a ‘yes’, or even a ‘Hey, this is good, but no thanks’.”

“But like I said, I’m not a person to wait for things to happen. I did wait, actually – I wasn’t going to anything while they were still working with the character.  As long as they had things to do with Inspector Spacetime, I was just, ‘Let that happen’.  But after the Christmas episode, I knew they were shooting the rest of the season, and they weren’t using me. And then the status of the show coming back at all was in question, and I thought, ‘At the very least, this’ll get some buzz, for Community, at least.  Plus, it was a case of me being prepared to take advantage of opportunities presented to me.”

Considering the reaction that 15 seconds of footage got, it’d seem somewhat surprising they didn’t want to do something more with the character, but Travis has a theory. “I think it’s more just how Hollywood works.  It’s very difficult to get a piece of writing into someone’s hand.  And I’m not sure why that it is, because Star Trek did it.  Some of the best names we know in Sci-Fi today, from Jane Espenson, to Ron Moore to Rene Echevarria , they all got their start because they sent in spec scripts to Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I don’t understand it.”

Like air rushing in to fill a vacuum, fans stepped up and created a full 50 years of history for this character, and hasn’t stopped.  “It was less than two or three weeks to form the basis of it, but over the last few months, it’s just continually been adding and adding and adding. It’s astounding the amount of creativity that exploded over the Internet, base on all of this three-line joke. And it was wonderful to see.  And that’s exactly the kind of person I am – I was a fan, at one point. I wrote Star Trek scripts in my bedroom, I wrote Doctor Who stuff.”

With all that creativity already in place, one has to wonder how much material did Travis plan to cull from the communal pool, and how much would be brand new? “When we started to write the first episode, it was before the fans even knew it existed.  Eric [Loya, Travis’ writing partner on his other video work, including Robot, Ninja and Gay Guy] and I spent hours going through the mythos and creating a rudimentary character bible.  We had to understand how it spoofed Doctor Who.  Cause the Community people didn’t really do anything.  They showed that Blorgons were Daleks, and they showed the red phonebooth. So we had to invent everything else. And then the fans came along and started doing their thing, I was actually involved in some of the fandom  – I was on the ProBoards, talking to people about what was what. “Infinity Knight” was mine and Eric’s invention [compared to the “Space master” term the fans have been using], the name of the home planet is fan-created, like that. What we have in the web-series is, I believe, 100% original.  We invented a new Associate; we’re not going to use Constable Reggie, and we have a new arch-nemesis we invented, Boyish The Extraordinary. We’re making a quick reference to the Circuit-Chaps [the fan-created Cybermen-spoof].  We took out the Blorgon reference in respect to the Community team.”

Science-Fiction shows are well aware of the fannish community, and know when to turn a blind eye to fan-made fiction, and even merchandise.  Travis thinks Community is aware of that as well.  “There are people posting mash-ups that use clips from the show; people are posting actual clips of the show,” Travis notes.  “The merchandise that people produce – not only for Community, but for Inspector Spacetime.  And nobody has told the t-shirt companies that they can’t produce the shirts.  And I want to be clear, we’re not selling [the series]. We’re going to make it, and it’s going to exist for free.  We’re not going to make DVDs, we’re not going to do ads on it on YouTube, nothing like that.”

Sony and NBC did decide that an outside entity producing an Inspector Spacetime series was a bit offsides, and sent Travis a request to shut down.  Luckily Travis had a backup plan just in case someone in the legal field got uppity. “Except for the name ‘Inspector Spacetime’, everything we have in the script is invented by us.  So there’s no reason this can’t get made.  And you can’t copyright a title…and they haven’t trademarked the name; I did a trademark search. Cause I want to be careful.  So hopefully they’ll let this happen. And more hopefully it’ll create some buzz for Community. Cause even though it’s coming back for the rest of the third season, there’s no guarantee it’ll be renewed for a fourth.”  The series will be titled “The Untitled Webseries About A Space Traveler Who Can Also Travel In Time”.  So we’ve got an unofficial adaptation of a parody show that only exists in the mind of its fandom…that sound you hear is reality folding in on itself.

The Kickstarter campaign, which made its $20,000 goal and them some, will cover the cost of the production.  “Frankly, I don’t have the capability to make it look and sound as good as it deserves to,”  says Travis.  “If you look at the stuff I’ve produced so far, it looks…okay, but you can tell that it was made with no budget. But here the writing and the acting is so strong, it really deserves to be be complemented by good equipment; a decent camera, lights and stuff.”  Travis schedule is pretty accelerated. He’d already posted a better-quality animatic of the first episode through the folks at io9, the same episode he did a live read-through of at Gallifrey One.  Principal photography is complete, and Travis is looking for a sound designer now.

NBC has also seen the potential in the character.  It was announced at San Diego that an episode of the new season Community would center around an Inspector Spacetime convention.  And the show (both Community and IS) has one other big fan – Karen Gillan, AKA Amy Pond on Doctor Who.  She’s already gone on record as saying that she’d LOVE to appear on an episode.   The irony is that in the continuity of the show, it’s her on-screen husband that would be a more logical fit.  According to the history, the character Rory Williams (played by Arthur Darvill) is the only one to appear on BOTH shows, moving from Inspector Spacetime to Doctor Who.

It seems that The Inspector’s possibilities are, rightfully, infinite.  It’s not WHERE he’ll pop up next…but WHEN.

Well, everybody else has the Avengers gag reel, so why not us? See Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Gwynneth Paltrow, Jeremy Renner, Scarlett Johansson, Clark Gregg, Cobie Smulders, Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson, and somebody named Joss and how they spent their summer vacation playing Avengers vs. Chitauri. Watch it now, and you’ll feel better for the entire day.

Gag Reel from “Avengers” by Flixgr

It’s just another average day of internet browsing. You’re doing your thing, checking the news, maybe taking a detour to your favorite webcomic. Then, WHAM (or rather, the internet version of said sound effect).

ERROR 451.

What happened? Did the servers overload? Did the connection crash? Is the address wrong?

No; this page has been burned.

Error 451 is a new HTTP Error status code proposed by Google developer advocate Tim Bray. The code would pop up the same way an Error 404 code does — except instead of being told a page could not be found, a viewer would be informed that the site is being censored.

The number is an homage to Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451, which takes place in a dystopian future in which firemen burn books because the government has declared reading illegal.

According to Wired’s WebMonkey blog, the biggest advantage of the 451 code is that it would explain why content is unavailable — such as which legal authority is imposing the restriction. This would let visitors know that the government, not the Internet Service Provider, is the reason for the page’s malfunction.  Currently, 403 errors are most often used when blocking access to censored pages.

Error code 451 would pop up in situations such as the Indian government’s censorship of the site Cartoonists Against Corruption, which was blocked because its critique of the government was deemed “defamatory and derogatory.”

The biggest problem with the code, Bray admits, is that many governments are not fond of the idea of transparent censorship. So, if we’re lucky — or not? — this code may be popping up in our browsers in the future.

Please help support CBLDF’s important First Amendment work and reporting on issues such as this by making a donation or becoming a member of the CBLDF!Becca Hoekstra is studying journalism in San Francisco, California.

Everyone has their niche, their two inches of ivory that they work over so closely with a fine-haired brush. Some niches are larger than others — project manager, superhero artist, war apologist, social novelist — but they all bind, more or less, around the edges. Some artists fight against that niche, and some embrace it.

Guy Delisle is a cartoonist — originally Canadian, though resident in France for some time — whose niche is creating books about the strange foreign cities he finds himself living and working in. First was Shenzhen (see my review), about time spent working as an animation supervisor in that Chinese city. Then came Pyongyang (see my review), in which the same job took him to that very odd, constricted North Korean capital. And then there was Burma Chronicles(see my review), by which point Delisle had transitioned to a full-time long-form cartoonist, and was accompanying his partner (a Médecins Sans Frontières administrator) to the capital of the country that wants the rest of us to call it Myanmar. (Somewhere in between, he also published two books of unsettling, mostly sex-role related cartoons — Aline and the Others and Albert and the Others — which I also reviewed.)

Delisle’s work typically has a crisp, clean line — as one would expect from an animator working in France — with a good eye for detail and enough description and narration to allow the drawing to be simple; he doesn’t try to cram everything into either words or art.

Recently, Delisle’s wife was posted by MSF to Israel for a year, and so, eventually, that experience turned itself into his most recent book, Jerusalem. It’s larger and more diffuse than those previous books, over 300 pages long, and filled with lots of small stories about Delisle’s and his family’s life in a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. (And that location is the first manifestation of what will be a major concern of Jerusalem: borders, both physical and mental, and how they interleave themselves, through walls and checkpoints and bus routes and roads and prejudices.)

Jerusalem doesn’t grapple directly with the legitimacy of the Israeli state, or of its treatment of Palestinians (or, conversely, with the actions of Palestinians and others against Israel), making it feel a bit politically naive at times. (Reading it in tandem with Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days Or Less — see my review — would be interesting; Glidden was in Israel for a short time, on a tour, specifically as a tourist on a heritage tour designed to make her intensely pro-Israel, and intensively questioned the Palestinian situation, while Delisle lived in Israel for a year, mostly among vaguely pro-Palestinian expatriates, and lives the physical discomfort of the occupation without engaging with it on a theoretical level.)

Delisle’s job — besides writing books like Jerusalem — is a house-husband; he had two small children during that year, and just taking care of small children (even if they are in day-care part of the time) is massively time-consuming in ways that it’s hard to describe. When you wake up with a toddler, you get through the day somehow, and then wonder, at the end, what you actually did during the last sixteen hours. So Delisle isn’t as free to move around this year as he was in Shenzhen and Pyongyang — but, then again, those were shorter trips, so he had more time to immerse himself in Jerusalem (and, before that, in Burma), more time to live in those places rather than just passing through them.

Jerusalem is a discursive, rambling book, equally about daily life as an expatriate in East Jerusalem and the physical problems of just moving around so militarized and controlled a country [1] as it is about Delisle’s continuing attempts to sketch and draw and work on his cartoons when he has time away from his young children. It’s a long, looping story, circling back to those same few concerns — time to sketch, physical access, which day things will be open — and is more obsessed with time (the right day, the right time of day, enough time to do something while the kids are in day-care) than one would expect. Throughout, Delisle is an interesting and thoughtful guide to Israel, showing us the things he did and saw and thought, and what it was like to live in that place for that time. I expect some people will be unhappy at Delisle’s take on the Israel-Palestine situation — people on either end of that argument, because as much as he engages with it, he’s somewhere in the middle — but that’s an occupational hazard when you create books about your time in odd, contested, unlikely places. Delisle is always honest, and shows us what he sees and feels: you can’t ask for more than that.

[1] His partner was posted in Gaza for most of this trip, and the one crossing into Gaza is more tightly controlled than any other gate in Israel.