17 Sunday Aug 2014
Episode 113 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s show, I talk to the poet Sarah Grieve,
plus Rose Tran writes about what Sherman Alexie taught her about humor.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
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Episode 113 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
17 Sunday Aug 2014
Posted in Shakespeare, Shakespearing
Shakespearing #9 by David Foley
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
There’s a form of Equity contract which allows you not to pay the actors, provided certain other criteria are met. It’s called a “showcase,” the idea being that these productions help actors showcase their talents.
The only two productions I’ve seen of The Two Gentlemen of Verona were showcases, perhaps understandably. It has four easy-to-cast young leads. There are comic parts which offer wonderful opportunities for funnymen. (In one production I saw, a friend made Launce hilarious in his native Tennessee twang.) For the rest, the cast is small, the settings simple, the plot easy to follow, and there are no flying fairies or asses’ heads to test the resources of a small company.
There’s something Shakespeare-Lite about Two Gentlemen. Much of it can be read as a sketch for later[*] plays. According to Riverside, one source for the play was the poem on which Romeo and Juliet is based, and thus we have new love driving out the old “as one nail by strength drives out another,” as Juliet drives out Rosaline, and a banishment speech which sounds like a first run at Romeo’s. (“And why not death, rather than living torment?” says Valentine; “Ha, banishment? Be merciful, say death,” says Romeo.) Silvia and Valentine are an early version of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado, while Julia, disguised as a page to the man she loves, prefigures Viola. And as in Midsummer and As You Like It, everyone runs off to the woods to straighten out the mess.
There’s even an uncomfortable happy ending, like those of Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well, in which a woman’s patience is rewarded with marriage to a man who’s been villainously cruel. Sixty lines after Proteus threatens to rape Silvia, he claims Julia as his “wish forever,” though not before Valentine has offered him Silvia to restore their friendship. We can only guess at Silvia’s response to this; she has no lines for the rest of the play.
This may be clumsy or it may be cynical, fitting in with the play’s overall cynicism about love. In one of Shakespeare’s more acid pairings, the parting of Julia and Proteus (“What gone without a word?/Ay, so true love should do: it cannot speak.”) is followed by Launce’s lament about his dog who, at parting, “sheds not a tear, nor speaks a word.” The most consistent imagery in the play revolves around eyes, which love traps or makes blind, and letters, love codified in easily torn entreaties. The very rapidity with which the ending resolves matters suggests that love is light, illusory.
It occurs to me that the man who gave us the phrase “marriage of true minds” was almost Austen-like in his belief that marriage of minds was both deeper and higher than marriage of desire. His most persuasive couples (Kate and Petruchio, Beatrice and Benedick, Antony and Cleopatra) connect as intellectual equals, whereas Romeo and Juliet is as much about the dangers of love as the dangers of hate.
If love in Shakespeare’s plays is illusory, a card trick, it makes a kind of cynical sense that Proteus and Julia can reunite after all he’s done. But it also says something about the way Shakespeare treats villainy: not as a trait but as a condition. Villainy is something Proteus passes through, and if he can, so can we all. As I’ve noted before, even his more sustained villains reflect back uncomfortably on us.
[*] Always with the caveat that we can’t say for sure which plays were earlier or later.
David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.
15 Friday Aug 2014
Posted in A Word from the King
A Word from the King #3 by John King (obviously)
The Writing Process Blog Tour
The Writing Process Blog Tour is a leapfrogging—or rather, leap-blogging—questionnaire linking one writer to three writers who will then answer the questionnaire themselves before nominating three more bloggers who will do the same, until, obviously, this viral activity will require participants from outer space, or newborns who can type, to keep the tour spreading across the infobahn.
The ever-fab Nathan Holic, who tapped me for this honor, posted his own entry for The Writing Process Blog Tour here.
But now it’s my turn.
What are you working on?
I am currently working on (1) a lecture called “Postmodernism for Creative Writers,” (2) a novel that I have been eking out for 20 years, and (3) a top-secret, book-length biography.
How does this work differ from others of its genre?
Why do you write what you do?
In some ways, I write to impose my vision of reality upon others. The off-the-shelf definitions of identity, the political verities, the art that is nothing more than corporate tofu needs to be kicked off-kilter for any real reality to be observed and lived.
Partly, this means preserving those parts of the past that seem to have faded, but whose life radiated such light that they made life more tolerable, more real, more survivable than history.
How does your writing process work?
The most important part of my writing process is how I overcome the pressure of the workaday, to have my own mind restored to me for use. And to find momentum.
I call my podcast The Drunken Odyssey in part because my writing process is an epic misadventure, a rupturing of plans and a distancing from domestic tranquility. I wish my life were more civilized or orderly, or that I could travel to conferences or carve out an hour or two of each already damaged, diminished day.
With a similar situation, many writers just stop writing, but not me, as project (2) indicates. I claw my way through the seas, against the tide. I beat to windward when I must, which is most of the time.
I’ve invited three writers to continue this relay:
and Dianne Turgeon-Richardson.
There own takes on this questionnaire will appear next Friday-ish. Keep a weather eye open.
Selah,
John King
15 Friday Aug 2014
Posted in Film, The Curator of Schlock
The Curator of Schlock #52 by Jeff Shuster
Congo
(Ape of the Week: Gorilla)
When a movie starts out with Bruce Campbell screaming directly into the camera, you can take that as a good sign that you won’t be wasting your time. 1995’s Congo from director Frank Marshall tells the story of a talking gorilla, King Solomon’s diamonds, super satellites, laser guns, and an extra evil Jo Don Baker. What more could you want out of movie?
As mentioned earlier, Congo features a talking Gorilla named Amy. I know what you’re thinking: how can a gorilla possibly talk? That’s impossible! Well, she does the sign language thing and she has this device attached to her arms that translates her signs into spoken words. Granted, Amy sounds a bit like a Speak & Read. What is a Speak & Read? It’s an electronic device that taught children how to read back in the 1980s. Yes, I owned one. Yes, I’m an old man.
Anyway, poor Amy’s been having nightmares about the jungle and her guardian, Dr. Peter Elliott (Dylan Walsh), decides it’s high time to deliver her back to the Congo. Plus, he figures since Amy knows how to sign, she can teach the other gorillas in the wild how to talk. That should go a long way toward speeding up the inevitable ape uprising.
Unfortunately, Dr. Elliot is having trouble securing funds for returning Amy back to the wild. He should have tried auditioning Amy for a Broadway revival of Bye Bye Birdie. I guarantee you that sucker would be have been a sold out for six months. Dr. Elliot eventually manages to get funding for his exhibition from a mysterious benefactor named Herkermer Homolka (Tim Curry).
Yes, Tim Curry is in this movie sporting a Romanian accent. Do you really need more reasons to watch this?
Homolka isn’t the only one who wants to fund this expedition.
Dr. Karen Ross (Laura Linney) is a communications scientists who works for TraviCom, TraviCom is run by R.B. Travis (Jo Don Baker). He’s obsessed with getting his hands on a rare blue diamond so he can build a super satellite like the kind we see in James Bond movies. He sends his son, Charlie Travis (Bruce Campbell), off to Zaire where he mysteriously disappears (gets mutilated by killer gorillas.) Charlie was Dr. Ross’s ex-fiancé so that’s her motivation for leading the exhibitio. R.B. Travis simply wants to rule the telecommunications industry. That’s his reason for sending the exhibition.
The group arrives in Africa where they meet Eddie Ventro (Joe Pantoliano wearing a Hawaiian shirt) who helps them to organize the exhibition. They also meet Captain Munro Kelly (Ernie Hudson sporting a British accent) a mercenary who will lead them into the Congo.
Will our intrepid group of adventurers survive heat seeking missiles, killer gorillas, and an active volcano? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.
Congo came out the same summer of Batman Forever. I’ll take a movie starring a talking gorilla and one of the greatest ensembles of character actors ever seen in on film over that mess any day. Plus, Congo features killer gorillas that toss human heads around like they’re footballs. What more could you possibly want from a movie?
5 Things I Learned from Watching Congo.
1. Talking gorillas could give JIBO a run for its money.
2. “Rain drop drink” is gorilla speak for a vodka martini with olives.
3. You can’t trust Tim Curry.
4. You can always trust Ernie Hudson.
5. It’s always fun to watch Jo Don Baker lose his cool.
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Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102) is an MFA candidate and instructor at the University of Central Florida.
13 Wednesday Aug 2014
Posted in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust
Heroes Never Rust #54 by Sean Ironman
Introductions
Now that the tone and racy content has been set, issue two of The Boys sets up the characters. In the premiere issue, readers were shown two of the main characters (Billy Butcher and Wee Hughie), but now the rest of the team comes out to play. There are twenty-two pages of content, three characters to introduce, two main characters whose stories must be furthered, and there’s still world-building that needs to be done. There’s not much room to spend on each character of the team. Plus, introductions shouldn’t feel like exposition. It’s a lot of work for Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, but they solve any problems with a strong structure.
The issue opens with Rayner (the CIA contact for The Boys) looking through files of past cases of The Boys. She gave Butcher the go ahead to start up again and seems to have doubts. Other than Butcher making superheroes pay for being dicks, readers haven’t been given much about what Butcher and his team actually does. In two pages, Ennis and Robertson set up just how devastating Butcher’s team can be, while still keeping a mystery element in play. Readers aren’t shown much, but they are given hints with excerpts from the files.
It’s enough to set up the team and show that Rayner is not fully on board with Butcher. Most importantly, the plot doesn’t stop to tell the reader what happened in the past. It uses past events to complicate Rayner’s relationship with Butcher and gives the reader a peek at the team, which Ennis and Robertson then go into.
The rest of the issue jumps back and forth between a conversation between Butcher and Hughie as Butcher attempts to make Hughie a part of the team, and Butcher collecting the other three team members (The Frenchman, The Female, and Mother’s Milk). We all know Hughie will eventually join the team so I won’t waste time here discussing Butcher talking with Hughie. Now, I like Butcher and Hughie, but a conversation could be awfully boring to read. So Ennis and Robertson break up the issue so that it’s not shown in chronological order. At points in the conversation, the story jumps to Butcher approaching another member of the team.
The first is The Frenchman. He’s drinking espresso at a coffee shop and talking to himself. Some assholes in suits make fun of him. “Fuckin’ French faggot.” “Goddamn surrender monkey.” He stares at the suits cool and calm. Then, quickly, he puts goggles on and beats the shit out of them. Butcher walks in, and The Frenchman calms down, runs up to Butcher, and hugs him, happy to see his friend again. Then, they walk off, leaving the suits bloody and either dead or unconscious. The action scene does a good job breaking up the conversation between Butcher and Hughie, but it does so to show The Frenchman’s character. It’s not just random action scene. The reader sees that The Frenchman is dangerous but not wild. While he shows a range of emotions in the short scene, he’s not emotional. He’s in control and can go from sitting with a nice espresso into killing somebody within a second.
The second is The Female She’s on a doorstep, small and thin, with a jacket that’s three times too large. She knocks quietly, and the bad guys inside argue and then try to get rid of her. She grabs the man at the door and shuts the door behind her. Butcher watches the house from across the street. Readers only get the screams of those inside. Then, a face, not the skull, just the face, ripped from a man hits a window and slides off. That’s all readers get from The Female. She never speaks. But, readers can see that she might be more dangerous than The Frenchman. She uses her looks to her advantage, but in a different way than many comic book female characters. She doesn’t have huge breasts, long legs, and wavy hair. She looks sad. People drop their guard, and then she tears them apart.
A couple of summers ago, I took a poetry class and the professor said that poetry is about creating a pattern and then breaking that pattern. This is done by creating a structure to stanzas and lines, and, at the end, changing it up. It creates a tension in the structure. That’s what Ennis and Robertson do here. We get two introductions with violent action scenes. These scenes show the capabilities of The Frenchman and The Female. But, with the third member, Mother’s Milk, the pattern changes. Mother’s Milk, a large black man, is shown in his dining room drinking coffee from a mug that has “Bad ass” on the side. His first line of dialogue is “Butcher, man…I dunno.” He’s calm and seems tired of it all. He only gets a little worked up when Butcher puts his mug down on the counter without using a coaster. The first two introductions are three pages each, while Mother’s Milk’s intro is four pages. He seems more important than the other two because of the change in pattern.
Mother’s Milk’s daughter comes in dressed in a small tank top that shows off her breasts, and when he tries to talk to her about it, she yells at him and leaves. This guy can’t even control his own household. He’s a far cry from the other two, but I get the feeling he’s got something brewing inside. Butcher gets the action here. He goes outside and yells at the daughter and crushes the gun from two guys she’s hanging with. This introduction gives more color to the issue—it complicates the structure, making Mother’s Milk stand out and making the issue more than just the other teammates killing a bunch of people. Changing that pattern helps save the issue from a bunch of boring exposition and setup.
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Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read inThe Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.
11 Monday Aug 2014
Posted in In Boozo Veritas
In Boozo Veritas # 54 by Teege Braune
Anthology: Getting Drunk and Reading Stories
Saturday night I participated in a truly unique literary experience: Cole NeSmith’s Creative City Project sponsored Anthology: A Night of Stories and Spirits at Snap! Space.
To a soundtrack of gypsy jazz provided by The Cook Trio, writers Jared Silvia, McKenzie Parker, Keith Kolakowski, and Vanessa Blakeslee (whose debut collection Train Shots was recently released by Orlando-based publisher Burrow Press) and myself took turns reading original work sitting in an easy chair on a stage set up to look like Masterpiece Theater before a wonderfully large and responsive audience.
Lest we writers imagine that the packed house was brought by the allure of our brilliant work alone, signature, craft cocktails designed by Matt of The Courtesy Bar were also served. Five cocktails to be exact, one for each story.
It probably comes as no surprise that I, a drunken writer who keeps a weekly blog called In Boozo Veritas about literature and alcohol, would consider having a cocktail based on a story I wrote one of the pinnacles of my career. My weird story about prop comedian Carrot Top fighting reptosapien-hummanoid monsters in Winter Park’s Kraft Azalea Garden inspired an equally unusual beverage that combined chai-infused Bacardi with simple syrup, lime, and carrot juice. While I would never have thought to mix these ingredients together myself or order the concoction in a bar, this just goes to show why I’m no mixologist. The delightfully off-center, bright orange elixir partnered perfectly with a tale about a man with bright orange hair who is addicted to drinking lizard blood.
Across the board, Matt did an excellent job taking cues from both odd details and a story’s overarching atmosphere to create drinks as rich in layers and subtleties as the literature from which they were derived. I found it a personal treat enjoying his mixture of scotch, lemon juice, lavender-infused simple syrup, Peychaud’s bitters, and darjeeling tea while listening to my good friend Jared Silvia read his story “Thursday.”
Having read this story in Burrow Press’s first collection Fragmentation long before I even knew Jared, it was my introduction to the work of someone who has become one of my favorite local writers. Jared’s story, narrated by a ponderous drifter whose adventure finds him indulging in his penchants for sunscreen, cheap wine, and the dirty, after-work smell of a Russian bartender, is equal parts funny, sad, and wonderfully resistant to easy interpretation.
Each of the stories contained an air of the mysterious and an open-ended quality that lent itself to the heavy consumption of top shelf spirits. As the Creative City Project scheduled two shows back to back (both of them sold out), by the time everything wrapped up around midnight the writers and our significant others were ten stories and ten cocktails deep, and quite frankly swimming in it. Some of us sobered up by stumbling up Mills Avenue towards Tako Cheena and then jumping right back into that pool of self abuse by finishing the night at Lil Indies where they were serving some very fine cocktails of their own and playing a fantastic set of soul and funk. As always an otherwise classy evening devolved into a foggy night of rowdy debauchery. The events that followed are worthy of their own lurid tale, one that would most likely inspire its own signature cocktail containing what? Bourbon, beer, horse radish, dog food, and Edy’s slow churned French silk ice cream perhaps? But that is a subject for another blog post and another reading, one that will hopefully never see the light of day. In the meantime, Cole has proven that the City Creative Project is an organization to keep your eye on. I for one am eager and excited to see what amazing events he hosts in the weeks and months to come.
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Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.
10 Sunday Aug 2014
Posted in Shakespeare, Shakespearing
Shakespearing #8 by David Foley
The Taming of the Shrew
In my memory, The Taming of the Shrew was a rambunctious farce with two larger-than-life roles and a Stepford Wives ending. On reacquaintance, it’s a joyous work of art. But about that ending: the reasons Kate gives for submitting to Petruchio are not comfortable, but they express an ideal of marriage still to be found in many parts of the country today. What rankles is the taming of Kate’s glorious refusal to submit. But there’s plenty to suggest that Kate has not so much been tamed as she’s learned to manage the relationship between self and society more astutely, and in the service of love.
The play is actually quite subversive about the relationship between love and the social forms. Shakespeare worked in pairings, and it’s no accident that Petruchio’s absurdist wooing of Kate is echoed immediately by Tranio and Gremio wooing Baptista for Bianca’s hand. “’Tis deeds must win the prize,” he tells them, only to clarify that by “deeds” he means “dower,” the money, land, and luxuries they then fall over each other to promise him. It’s Petruchio, despite having “come to wive it wealthily in Padua,” who has to remind everyone that you marry a person, not an estate, nor yet a social form:
To me she’s married, not unto my clothes. Could I repair what she will wear in me, As I can change these poor accouterments, ’Twere well for Kate and better for myself.But the play is more subversive still. I don’t know how common it is these days for productions to leave out the Christopher Sly “Induction” (the first productions I saw didn’t have it), but to do so cheats both audience and play—the audience because the Sly scenes are charming and funny, and the play because the Induction provides a key to all that follows. It not only frames the main action of the play as a performance, but, like the play itself, it’s a series of performances by people pretending to be people they’re not. Most significantly, the Lord’s page pretends to be Sly’s wife: “I am your wife in all obedience.” To put this neat foreshadowing in the mouth of a boy who’s pretending to be a woman and a wife suggests that Kate’s final speech is just another performance, that marriage itself is a performance as artificial as all the other performances in the play.
Kate and Petruchio come to terms not in the last scene, nor even on the road back to Padua, when Kate is clearly humoring Petruchio (she’s learning to perform), but in Act V, Scene 1, when they “stand aside” like spectators at a play to watch the unraveling of all the performances in the Lucentio/Bianca story. At the end of the scene Petruchio asks Kate to kiss him, and she at first resists. She’s not ashamed of him, she says, “but asham’d to kiss.” “Why then let’s home again,” he says, but she replies, “Nay, I will give thee a kiss.” It’s a public performance of the privacy of marriage, whose public face, we now understand, is a necessary absurdity, a performance within which love is shielded.
None of this fully accounts for the joyousness of the play, which I put down to something else. According to the Riverside notes, the Sly scenes are full of references to people and places around Stratford. It may be that in Shrew Shakespeare went nearer to home than he ever had before. There’s a sense of fondness in the Induction and the play itself: a fondness for the frantically performing folk of everyday life.
David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.
09 Saturday Aug 2014
Posted in Craft of Fiction Writing, Episode, Vanessa Blakeslee
Tags
Aristotle's Poetics, High Before Homeroom, John Gardner, Kevin Bray, Martin Amis, On Becoming a Novelist, The Blind Assassin, The Roaring Girl, Vanessa Blakeslee
Episode 112 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
On this week’s show, I talk to Vanessa Blakeslee about what Aristotle’s Poetics can teach us about fiction writing today,
Plus Kevin Bray writes about reading John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist.
TEXTS DISCUSSED
NOTES
This new project–discussing relevant books about the craft of storytelling–is a continuation of a long defunct feature of the show. Two years ago, Jaroslav Kalfař and I discussed Stephen King’s On Writing on episode 6 and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction on episode 2.
Quoting George Orwell in an shockingly Orwellian way, Amazon has undertaken a weird counter-compaign to the Authors United movement, according to David Streitfield in The Times. Check out the statement from Authors United that led to this counter-campaign.
Episode 112 of The Drunken Odyssey, your favorite podcast about creative writing and literature, is available on iTunes, or right click here to download.
08 Friday Aug 2014
Posted in Film, The Curator of Schlock
The Curator of Schlock #51 by Jeff Shuster
Dunston Checks In
(Ape of the Week: Orangutan)
The country is going ape crazy due to that Dawn of the Rise of the Battle for the Planet of the Apes movie. Therefor, the remainder of August will be Ape Month here at The Museum of Schlock. We’re going to do a different primate each week so hold onto your bananas and enjoy the ride. First up is Dunston Checks In, a comedy about an orangutan with a penchant for cat burglary.
Dunston Checks In from director Ken Kwapis is a stupid movie for stupid people. That came out the wrong way. Let me try again. Dunston Checks In from director Ken Kwapis is a delightful family comedy that’s fun for all ages. In other words, this is a kid’s movie. We have nothing against children here at The Museum of Schlock, but we do insist that parents tie the younglings up outside before entering the premises.
What’s the plot? There’s an evil jewel thief by the name of Lord Rutledge (Rupert Everett, obviously) who uses his pet orangutan named Dunston to help steal jewels from the rich patrons of the Majestic Hotel.
Rupert Everett was in Cemetery Man, a movie that I have great fondness for seeing as how it was the swansong for Italian horror cinema. I also remember reading somewhere that he wanted to play James Bond someday. I’d like to think it was this film that ruined his chances of playing 007. On the plus side, we do get to Everett sporting a glorious set of crooked British teeth.
Jason Alexander plays Robert Grant, the manager of the 5-star hotel and single father of two boys. Unfortunately, Robert Grant is a likeable man who misses his deceased wife and treats his staff with kindness. This is a far cry from the George Costanza we know and love. You won’t be hearing any bits about how wonderful the word manure is or how Pepsi is better than wine. Instead, we get a sensible family man. You do get to see a fight between Rupert Everett and Jason Alexander with kitchen utensils, though.
Fay Dunaway plays Mrs. Dubrow, the mean hotel owner who is obsessed with the idea of the Majestic getting a 6-star rating.
Fay Dunaway was also in Three Days of the Condor. You know, the ending of that movie bugged me. Did The New York Times print Joseph Turner’s story? If they didn’t, he was a dead duck. If they did print it, he had a fighting chance. I still can’t wrap my head around there being a CIA within the CIA.
Paul Reubens stars in Dunston Checks In. He plays Buck LaFarge, an animal control guy who is hired to shoot the monkey.
I used to watch Pee Wee’s Playhouse when I was a kid. I used to scream whenever the secret word was said aloud. Conky the robot would give those out every episode. I’ve said this before, but robots were a thing back in the 80s. They’re making a comeback though. It’s called a JIBO and can’t wait to have one next to my bedside so it will watch me while I sleep.
Some of you may be wondering where this review is going. I don’t care. I don’t want to talk about Dunston Checks In anymore. This is the last time I’m taking a schlock recommendation from Mr. Sean Ironman! Good luck in Arkansas!
Five Things I Learned From Dunston Checks In
1. Orangutans don’t just eat bananas. They’re also partial to quiche.
2. It’s okay to call orangutans monkeys.
3. It’s okay to shoot monkeys if they’re trashing your hotel.
4. It’s okay to smush cake with pink frosting into Fay Dunaway’s face.
5. It’s okay to end a children’s movie with a hotel critic’s skull getting crushed by a coconut.
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Jeffrey Shuster (episode 47, episode 102) is an MFA candidate and instructor at the University of Central Florida.
06 Wednesday Aug 2014
Posted in Heroes Never Rust
Heroes Never Rust #53 by Sean Ironman
Censorship
A couple of years ago, I went to a cartoonist residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, Florida. One afternoon, I sat on the porch with the master artist for my group, Megan Kelso, creator of Queen of the Black Black and Squirrel Mother. We spoke about my work, both past and future. She said she chose me for the residency because my work was confident, that I was going to tell the story I wanted to tell and it didn’t matter if the reader was on board or not. At the time, I thought it was a weird comment, but I kept returning to Kelso’s words when I read new work.
Nothing is made for everyone. Whatever comic, essay, story, poem, movie, music, or anything else is for every person in the world. Your favorite story is another person’s most hated story. I’ve come to think of creating art as something like this: I sit down at my desk in the morning and I have the whole world as my audience. Once I decide to write, I’ve lost like half the world. Once I decide to make a comic, I’ve lost like 80% of the world. Once I decide to make a comic about a dog and a T-rex travelling through time together, I’ve lost another 10%. The goal isn’t to finish with the most audience. Well, maybe if you’re a salesperson. My goal is to make sure whatever audience I have left is truly affected by my work. Part of creating a work of art is that you just have to go for it. It doesn’t matter if someone doesn’t like it or thinks it’s stupid, you just do it the best you can and go all the way with the concept. There will be others out there.
I love a lot of comic book writers. Way too many to list here. But usually, no matter how much I love one comic that a certain writer has done, he or she has written another that I don’t care for. Except for Garth Ennis. Everything I’ve read from Garth Ennis has ranged from good to fantastic, with Preacher being my favorite comic. One of the main reasons I love his work is because he just goes for things, regardless of whether a lot of people will love it. He’s confident in his work. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to take a look at volume one of his series The Boys, drawn by Darick Robertson, another one of my favorite creators.
The Boys is about a CIA squad who monitors the superhero community and makes sure no one is causing trouble. For decades comics have attempted to bring superheroes down to the level of humanity. Instead of the god-like Superman, Marvel Comics brought in the Fantastic Four, Spider-man, Daredevil, and the X-Men. More humanity was brought to superheroes. Regular people were superheroes. In the 1980s, the deconstruction of the superhero came around. What if superheroes were in the real world? Many of these comics had superheroes taking control of the world or these comics pointed out how superheroes couldn’t really exist. In The Boys, Ennis and Robertson take the reality of superheroes in a different direction. Superheroes aren’t conquering the world or deciding what is best for the world—Superheroes are dicks, at least many of them. They are incredibly powerful and popular. They walk around like frat boys who think they own the place. They are sexual deviants and care more about public perception, money, and status than saving the world. In a way, I think The Boys is closer to what superheroes would really be like than Watchmen or other comics. The Boys is a dark comedy, but sometimes comedies can get closer to a serious subject than a straight drama. This comic has a lot of sexual content, violence and profanity. So much so, in fact, that it was dropped by its original publisher, Wildstorm, an imprint of DC Comics. Luckily, Dynamite Entertainment picked up the series. In an interview with Comic Book Resources, Ennis said, “We’d have died on the vine [at DC]. The book would have been chipped and chipped away at until writing it was pure frustration.”
The first issue focuses on two characters: Butcher, the leader of the Boys, and Hughie, who will become the newest recruit. The comic opens with a full page shot—a close-up of a superhero’s head being crushed by a boot. With Robertson on art, the image is incredibly detailed. The superhero has no teeth. His nose is crushed. One eye is swollen shut. Blood sprays. The ground is cracked. Underneath comes the title for the individual issue, “The Name of the Game.” Some readers don’t like violence. I don’t get it, but okay. People like what they like. I saw Steven Spielberg’s film, Munich, with a girlfriend and her parents. I loved it. They hated it. They said it was too violent. I don’t know what they expected from a film about the Israeli government’s secret response to the Munich massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics. But, oh well. That didn’t make it a bad movie. Those people just weren’t into what the filmmakers were going for. Same thing with The Boys. If the reader doesn’t want to read a very violent comic, they know on page one what they’re getting into. They can stop right there. Dr. David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals, taught me that the job of a writer at the introduction of his or her story is to let the reader know what they are in for. It’s up to the reader to decide if they want to keep reading. Ennis does just that.
By page four, we’re introduced to Wee Hughie, who is on a date with his girlfriend. They say they love each other and they kiss. Oh, how cute. Then out of nowhere, a superhero knocks a supervillain right into Hughie’s girlfriend and crushes her against a brick wall. Hughie is left holding her arms, ripped off her body just below the elbow. The superhero doesn’t care. He beats the villain and then runs off to the next adventure. What a dick.
This sequence is shocking not just because of what happens, but because of how Ennis and Robertson break the page. On one page is Hughie and his girlfriend all happy and lovey. The next page’s first panel is Hughie holding his girlfriend’s severed arms, and she’s already been crushed into the brick wall. Her death happens between panels. In comics, time passes between panels. Static images come to life in the gutters, the gaps between the panels. Here, Ennis and Robertson give the reader, and Hughie, a shock by having such a huge moment happen in the gutters. She’s dead and gone before we even realize what’s going on.
Something similar occurs on pages seven and eight. Butcher goes to see a woman at the CIA. He walks into the room. She looks at him. Then, the next page opens with Butcher having sex with her doggystyle. It gives the scene a much larger effect and allows Ennis and Robertson to quicken the pace. The boring stuff is skipped. Also, by page eight, we’ve had a superhero’s head being crushed, a woman crushed into a wall, her boyfriend holding her severed arms, and Butcher fucking a woman and saying, “Wait’ll you see where I wipe my dick.”
Obviously, this comic isn’t for everyone. This is the first third of the first issue. There are seventy-two issues. If you don’t like it by page eight, you should read something else. It’s not Ennis and Robertson’s job to give the reader something they like. It’s their job to create what they set out to create. Hopefully, enough people like it and read it so Ennis and Robertson can eat and pay their bills. But that’s it. They’re going to do what they want, regardless of readers thinking the comics is too filthy or violent. They get my respect for that, and my money because I happen to love what they do.
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Sean Ironman (Episode 102) earned his MFA at the University of Central Florida. Currently, he teaches creative nonfiction and digital media at the University of Central Arkansas as a visiting professor. His work can be read in The Writer’s Chronicle, Redivider, and Breakers: A Comics Anthology, among others.
