Heroes Never Rust #104: A Final Note

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

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1985, Escapism, Mark Millar, Marvel

Heroes Never Rust #104 by Sean Ironman

A Final Note

With Marvel 1985 issue six, no reader will be surprised when Toby returns to the real world with the Marvel heroes, and the villains are soon defeated. Does anyone ever expect the heroes to lose in these stories? But just because the inevitable good-triumphing-over-evil occurs, the story does offer interesting developments.

In an effort to stop the villains, Toby’s father is gunned down by Red Skull. There’s a dark comedic vein running through the scene of Toby’s father confronting the villains, and Red Skull calmly taking out his pistol and killing the father. The story doesn’t end there. Nor does it end with the villains defeated, the heroes returning to their world, or even with Toby’s father’s funeral.

The comic ends years later, when Toby is an adult. He’s on his laptop writing a comic called 1985, and in the final two pages, his father wakes up in the Marvel Universe under the care of Jane Foster, a nurse and a love interest for Thor. Earlier in the comic series, his father said that he had a crush on Jane Foster, so years later, Toby gives his father his wish—his father asks Jane out on a date and she says yes. Marvel 1985 ends with his father looking out at the New York City of the Marvel Universe in anticipation for the possibilities.

This brings up an interesting aspect of superhero stories, and fiction as a whole—the idea of wish fulfillment. Why write fiction? Why write superhero stories? The superhero genre isn’t well respected. Even now, much of the respect it has earned is only because of the hundred of millions superhero films bring in at the box office. While comics have gained more respect in recent years, mainly by people who resist calling comics comics and instead refer to them as graphic or sequential narrative or other terms showing their embarrassment over comics, the superhero genre is still thought of in a similar way as fantasy YA novels are thought of in the literary community.

Superhero stories, though, serve an important function for the literary community. Due to many factors, like the rise of creative nonfiction and the focus on a global community, so much of writing is about our world. Even in fiction, our reality plays an important role. Stories must be real. Stories must show the world as it is, people as they are. Stories seem to be gritty and characters gray. But superhero stories offer a break from all that. Instead of showing the world as it is, readers (and writers) get to use their imagination and look at a different world.

But, this isn’t escapism.

I don’t like that word, escapism. Whenever I hear someone say they like a certain book or a certain film or a certain genre because it offers them an escape, I just feel bad for that person, that he or she lives such an awful existence or views the world in such an awful way that they must shut down for a couple of hours and escape. Superhero stories are not escapism. They can comment on what it means to be human just as much as any literary story. Does each superhero story do that? Of course not, but neither does every literary short story. Does Superman really save the day? Does Spider-man? Batman? etc. No, they don’t. Superman fights a man or a robot or a monster with his fists and he puts off evil temporarily. But, that’s not where the story is at.

Superman’s story is with Lois Lane, Perry White, the Kents. It’s the people and the effect Superman has on them as people. If literary means a focus on craft and that the story comments on what it means to be human, then superhero stories are literary. A story doesn’t have to comment on how the world is for the reader to learn about the world. You can learn about our world, not just by studying what it is, but by studying what it is not.

With all the technological advancements and heroics in a superhero comic, the world is not better off. The Marvel Universe still has the same problems as our world. There is still greed and selfishness. There is still violence. Kids still go to bed hungry. Sexism still exists. Racism does too. Superheroes are just window dressing on the same world. Even with the help of superheroes, them saving our lives, the human beings are still the same human beings as we are. The presence of a superhero doesn’t change what it means to be human. It just allows a different view of our world.

Many of us complain about mass shootings (rightly so). Many of us complain about space travel no longer being a priority. Many of us want something in place to stop the government from doing whatever the government wants to do. Yet, even in a world of superheroes, there are still mass shootings, people aren’t traveling freely to other planets, and government officials are still corrupt. A superpowered savior will not save us from being us. I think that makes a greater comment on humanity than many realist short stories and novels. We may wish for something magical to save us, some kind of easy solution to our problems, but superhero stories show us that that will never happen. We are who we are. Nothing will stop us from the faults of Man. Only we can do that.

_______

Photo by John King

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.

Heroes Never Rust #101: 1985 and Villainy

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

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1985, Mark Millar

Heroes Never Rust #101 by Sean Ironman

1985: Villainy

In Marvel: 1985 issue three, Marvel villains continue to invade the real world. The Hulk was seen in the second issue, but no other Marvel heroes seem to be around, leaving humanity with limited support to fight off the bad guys. While this issue does feature Fin Fang Foom, a giant green alien Buddhist dragon and the Iron Man villain that has been sorely missing from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there are no world-conquering plans afoot. So many times in superhero stories, and in summer blockbusters and other popular writing works, the stakes are raised for not only a person or a small town but the whole world. In the mainstream comic universes, there are very few serial rapists. There may be petty thieves Spider-man dispatches early in an adventure, but most villains have wonderfully complex and grandiose plans. While the audience gets to see a lot of destruction, with many battles toppling skyscrapers, the men and women caught in the middle rarely get much attention. This ends up taking the bite out of the violence. I’m not necessarily a fan of violence, but I do think that if a story shows violence than it has a responsibility to show the full ramifications.

Also, by focusing on such large, complex villainous plans, the reader, or viewer, is actually kept at a distance from the story. A few weeks ago, I read an article on the new Jurassic World and why the CGI looks bad compared to the original Jurassic Park. A lot of reasons were given, but one that hit me the hardest is that filmmakers, for Jurassic World and for other films like The Hobbit trilogy, go overboard, not with how many frames are CGI but with what happens with the CGI. Because filmmakers can do whatever they want, they do. But, the audience doesn’t really have a frame of reference for what’s going on. When the helicopter in Jurassic World gets attacked, spins out of control, breaks through a large aviary, crashes, blows up, and dinosaurs flee from the wreckage, the audience can’t process what’s going on. The scene is too foreign. I though back to that article when reading the third issue of 1985.

Here, the villains are truly terrifying. MODOK, probably one of the goofiest looking villains in comics, is incredibly creepy as he mind controls a group of townspeople and leads them to drown in the river. One woman even holds a baby, and everyone slowly walks single file into the waters. MODOK doesn’t kill a whole city. He’s not out to rule the world. The simplicity of the scene is why it’s creepy. I can imagine that scene, and because I can imagine it, the scene becomes horrific. I become afraid. If the villain’s plan becomes to ambitious and elaborate, if the action scenes have too much going on, then the whole thing seems cartoonish, and instead of building tension, the scene becomes laughable.

The issue ends with our protagonist Toby and his father driving down a road, and the Lizard, one of Spider-Man’s set of bad guys, jumps onto the roof and tries to claw at the boy and his father. The issue ends without a resolution, but the cliffhanger works because the scene builds terror and tension. The Lizard doesn’t have some crazy plan of turning everyone into lizards with some kind of new technology that readers have no idea how it works. The Lizard is a monstrous half-lizard half-man creature atop a car trying to kill, and possibly eat, the occupants. We don’t need anything else. If we care for the protagonist and his father, the danger doesn’t have to be incredibly complex with all these moving parts. The kid is in danger. We like the kid. We don’t want the kid to die. That’s it. We, as writers, or at least the writers of the usual summer blockbusters, are making storytelling more difficult for themselves. What difference does it make if our protagonist is going to be killed by a two-by-four or by some kind of alien technology? Well, the difference is that we can imagine what would happen if the character is beaten by a two-by-four. We can imagine it, and that’s why we don’t want it to happen.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic as I see trailers for Terminator: Genisys. The original Terminator still looks more terrifying, and I think it has nothing to do with the R rating of the original versus the PG-13 of the new one, or the CGI in the new film. In the original film, the Terminator walks into a police station and shoots a whole bunch of cops. The building doesn’t blow up. The Terminator isn’t flinging vehicles at the heroes. There isn’t some kind of domino effect of falling debris. It’s one man, or robot in this case, walking confidently down a hallway and shooting whatever is in his path. In the new film, the Terminator is jumping out of a helicopter into another one. A bus falls from the bridge with the heroes inside, clinging to each other to avoid falling to their deaths. The film is trying to be too big. Last year, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was released. Obviously there was a ton of CGI used for the apes. Yet, the film seemed more real than most summer blockbusters because the action scenes weren’t over the top. The audience was grounded. Our imaginations help drive tension. For me, a horrifying act for a villain would be to have the villain walk up to a person and shoot the person point in blank in the head. I don’t want to get shot. I can imagine what getting shot would do to me. I don’t know what being turned into a lizard man would do to me. And I don’t know what a MODOK is, but I can imagine being drowned in a river, and that is terrifying.

_______

Photo by John King

Heroes Never Rust #100: Adequacy is Okay

01 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

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1985, Goodfellas, Mark Millar, Tommy Lee Edwards

Heroes Never Rust #100 by Sean Ironman

1985: Adequacy is Okay

At the end of issue one of Marvel’s 1985, Toby, the protagonist, runs into the Hulk one night in the woods. The second issue picks up from that point, with the Hulk asking Toby if he’s seen the Juggernaut, who is apparently causing trouble. To many people, the Hulk is thought to be the mindless alter ego of Bruce Banner, who is the intelligent scientist. While that is true in the comics, for the most part, there have been times where Banner has been able to control the Hulk and speak normally. The mid-eighties was one of these times. But, because many readers may be put off by a Hulk that speaks intelligently, the Hulk tells Toby, “Please, there’s no need to be afraid. My monstrous id has been completely suppressed by my academic super-ego.” The line has no bearing on the story. It furthers no plot, and it doesn’t even further that scene. It’s only role is as exposition, so the reader is not confused by the Hulk acting differently than the reader may expect. The line is not interesting, but it is inoffensive. The line is adequate, in that it does what it must, and then the story moves on.

The dialogue reminded me of a moment last week at the New Harmony Writers Workshop in New Harmony, Indiana. My workshop instructor was Stuart Dybek. During a discussion on one writer’s short story, Dybek told an anecdote (he seems to love anecdotes) of his son’s first novel. He recalled one section of prose and said that the section was not good but it got the job done. It was adequate, Dybek said. But, sometimes, adequate is the best we can do.

In university courses, I was taught each word must be perfect, must be chosen carefully. With my own creative writing, I pour over it dozens of times working out not only the characters and scenes, but every description, every line of dialogue, everything. I believe a writer must write good sentences, I do. And I also believe some writers spend too long concentrating on sentences and the story escapes them (one of the reasons I believe literary fiction is not very popular these days). Sometimes, though, I believe, as Dybek said, the best we can do is adequate. How many novels have at least one mistake in them? Or if you don’t want to call it a mistake, one thing that could be better? How many memoirs? Poems? Films? Comics? I’m not speaking about bad sentences, unclear constructions, or the reliance on clichés. I’m merely talking about the descriptions or dialogue or any other sentence that will not go down in history as interesting. These adequate sections do their job and are not so terrible to distract readers. I feel that I should avoid suggesting a writer should strive toward adequacy because I know that if every sentence is merely adequate, the story will suffer. But, perhaps writers should be happy with a story as long as it hits the emotional beats the writer set out for, even if a sentence or two will never be described as great.

Many years ago, I wrote mainly screenplays. I wanted to work in comics and in film. One lesson I was taught about screenwriting was that a good screenplay needed just three excellent scenes. If it had three excellent scenes, the audience would enjoy the movie. The other scenes couldn’t be bad, but they didn’t have to be great. At the time, I found it offensive, like the instructor was trying to say we couldn’t write a film filled with great scenes so to aim lower. But, I am starting to see the truth in that argument. When I think of a great film like Goodfellas, I don’t think of every scene, of every moment. I think of the long shot of Ray Liotta taking Lorraine Bracco through the club. I think of the montage set to “Layla.” I think of individual moments and lines of dialogue. That goes with any film, any novel, any memoir. Moments stick out to me but not the whole narrative.

Adequacy in small areas of a story should not be looked down on. Writer Mark Millar needed to tell the reader that the Hulk can talk, to not be confused. Perhaps he could have thought long and hard and come up with something amazing, but perhaps not. Not all parts to a car are beautiful. Not all parts to a house. There should be amazing moments in a story, as well as wonderful lines of dialogue and interesting descriptions, but don’t lose sight of what you’re trying to do. If the point gets across to the reader for something that doesn’t need a lot of attention, adequacy will do just fine.

_______

Photo by John King

Heroes Never Rust #99: 1985

24 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Heroes Never Rust

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Mark Millar, Marvel 1985, Tommy Lee Edwards

Heroes Never Rust #99 by Sean Ironman

1985

I grew up reading comics, specifically X-Men comics. At first, my father would come home with a bag full of random comics for me, my brother, and my sister. My siblings lost interest over the years, but my interest grew. As a teenager, I would go weekly to the comic book shop. My mom never really understood my interest in comic books, but in her defense, reading comics in a time before superhero movies took over Hollywood and made hundreds of millions of dollars was very different. She would look at the covers of my weekly purchases and point at a muscular male character and joke that I was reading comics because I could imagine myself as that character. If a female character, drawn voluptuously as many female comic book characters are, my mom would joke that the reason I didn’t have a girlfriend was because I was looking for a woman who looked like that. I never understood why she thought I read comics because I wanted to be one of the superheroes. I’ve never understood that argument for any story in any medium. I have never wanted to be Superman, Spider-man, Cyclops, Wolverine, Batman, or any other superhero you can name. I have never imagined myself in their costumes or living out their adventures. But, on trips to visit family in New York during the summer, I would imagine Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters (later renamed Xavier’s Institute for Higher Learning). I didn’t want to be a specific character, I only wanted to be me, but I wanted to live in a world where the X-Men existed. Being a superhero, with all the powers that would come with it, wasn’t nearly as interesting as living in a world of superheroes. The world of Marvel Comics with all those locales and interconnected stories and continuity sparked my imagination (the importance of world building may also be why Marvel films are reliable hits these days). I must not have been the only one to want to live in the world of Marvel Comics.

A few years ago, Marvel 1985 was released. Written by Mark Millar and with art by Tommy Lee Edwards, the six-issue miniseries sees the villains and heroes of the Marvel Universe enter our world. Toby Goodman, a Marvel Comics fan, sees the Red Skull one day in his neighborhood while walking with father. Toby lives in our world, in 1985. From May 1984 to April 1985, Marvel Comics released Secret Wars, a crossover between Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four in which a cosmic entity known as the Beyonder creates a planet for the villains and heroes to do battle. In Marvel 1985, the villains have snuck into our world. There are no big entrances in the middle of New York City with portals opening in the sky and villains pouring out. The Red Skull, Dr. Doom, the Vulture, and the Mole Man live in an old house in the woods., the kind of house kids probably thought was haunted. I grew up in a South Florida suburb, and we had no house that was haunted, but we still had the houses we treaded carefully by as we passed by on our bikes. We still wondered what happened on the inside of those houses, mostly owned by childless couples or single men, who were rarely seen in their yards. The cars were parked in the garage, and we would only see the garage door open, a car pull away, and then the door close. After someone moved out of a house, we could sneak in, but without furniture and personal belongings, the houses were no longer interesting.

Most of my youth was spent reading and watching popular fiction: comic books, sword and sorcery fantasy, science fiction. Even in comic books, I wanted the fantasy. Characters without superpowers were not interesting to me. Real life to me was going to school a few blocks away. It was watching my parents work jobs they hated and living paycheck to paycheck. I wanted those houses on our block to contain something new and exciting. I liked the X-Men most of all because a mutant could be anyone. They didn’t need to be super smart, or super athletic, or super rich. They didn’t need to be in the right place at the right time and just happen to get struck by cosmic rays or radiation. The X-Men were just people, kids who reached puberty and gained mutant powers. In some ways, the X-Men were the most believable out of all the comic book characters. How many of us feel like we have more to offer, that there’s something inside that people haven’t seen? Comic book universes allowed us to imagine. Not imagine us with superpowers, or at least not just superpowers, but us coming across some bizarre and otherworldly creature walking through those strange houses.

My mom wouldn’t allowed me to play Dungeons & Dragons because she thought people who played were much too into it and weren’t able to separate fantasy from reality. But, we knew going through those houses that there weren’t really strange creatures, horrific monsters, or alien technology. But, that’s not the point to imagination. How many things do we have today that were once a part of a person’s imagination? Imagination lets us see a different world, and we might come back from our imaginations with something we could use in the real world. I’ll admit, though, we don’t need imagination. Many people live their lives without exercising their imaginations. But, those lives seem so empty to me. Imagination lets us be kids again, riding through our neighborhood staring at houses and creating stories.

_______

Photo by John King

Heroes Never Rust #82: Epilogues: Your Last Shot

25 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Epilogues, Mark Millar, Nemesis, Steve McNiven, Wanted, Watchmen

Heroes Never Rust #82 by Sean Ironman

Epilogues: Your Last Shot

The fourth and final issue of Nemesis features a great deal of violence as the police chief eventually overcomes and kills Nemesis. The villain dies with three pages remaining for the comic. These pages fast-forward years after the Nemesis encounter and acts as an epilogue. Like I have mentioned in previous posts, there is not much to Nemesis in terms of story. The comic is filled with beautiful artwork displaying action scene on top of action scene. But, there are no real twist and turns. It is all pretty straightforward. Nemesis wants to kill the Chief. He proceeds with an elaborate plan. In the end, the Chief kills him on the White House Lawn. With the comic being direct, there is not much impact with the ending. The good guy wins. The bad guy dies. In those final few pages, however, the comic offers up, or at least attempts to offer, a greater mystery, something to stay with the reader after the comic is done.

Epilogues are a tricky thing. At what point does the ending begin to pander to the audience? At what point is the sequel set up, instead of the first story closing? The best epilogues, to me at least, close out a mystery found in the comic. Or if it is not a mystery, at least it calls back to the main story.

Since this is a blog on superhero comics, I will stick to giving examples of epilogues in superhero comics, but the same ideas work in novels, short stories, film, and other genres and mediums. In Watchmen, the reader is given two epilogues. One featuring Silk Spectre and Nite Owl visiting the original Silk Spectre in a nursing home and one closing out Rorschach’s story. In the first, closure is offered by telling readers what Nite Owl and Silk Spectre will do now that the world has been changed by the events of the conclusion, and it even offers a touching last scene for the original Silk Spectre and her love for the Comedian. In the second, an employee at Pioneer Publishing Inc. finds Rorschach’s journal, which he had been writing in throughout the comic from page one. It solves a mystery that the reader did not even realize was a mystery and shows that Rorschach will have succeeded in his mission after death, or at least it offers the possibility. These epilogues work because they give the comic closure after the big finale. The world continues on and new things are afoot, but the epilogues serve to end the comic.

Mark Millar, the writer of Nemesis, had an incredible impactful epilogue in Wanted. In that comic, Wesley Gibson succeeds, and then the final two pages talk directly to the reader about how the reader is killing himself or herself at jobs he or she hates and basically be a sheep. It works well because it continues the theme from the comic and even brings up the idea that the events in the comic take place in our world. Again, the epilogue succeeds because it offers closure to the ideas presented in the comic, like a conclusion paragraph in a research essay.

Epilogues seem to have trouble, like the one in Nemesis, when they are geared more toward bringing up new ideas. In Nemesis, the epilogue takes place so many years after the events of the rest of the comic and brings up the idea that there is an organization funding the wealthy who are bored and want to play supervillain. It helps explain how Nemesis has access to so much throughout the story, but that never seemed to be a mystery. It seemed more like a plot hole. The final page shows a man, barely shown except for his beard, sitting on a tropical beach as the sun sets (or rises?). The epilogue tries to give something for the reader to think about, and I love the idea of an organization funding bored rich people who think they are better than the rest so they become supervillains. Honestly, I would not be shocked if something like that does not happen in our world.

The problem is that the comic brings up an interesting idea to go nowhere with it. It sets up a sequel, but because the comic takes time to set up a sequel already, I feel as if I am being sold something. I am not given a story to enjoy and think about—I am given a product to purchase. The epilogue is more concerned with making people money than with art. That is why it fails. If the comic wanted to explore the idea of a supervillain’s funding, then it should have used it more throughout the whole story, even if we were never shown the full extent of the organization. Funding should have been brought up a couple of times by the characters in the story. Perhaps have the Chief try to track down Nemesis by bank account. Something like that. Ideas in storytelling should be explored, not just thrown out into the world.

Epilogues, at least as I think of them at this moment, seem to succeed more the closer in time they take place to the actual events of the story. The epilogues in Watchmen take place soon after (the actual time is left up in the air) the conclusion, as does the epilogue in Wanted. When the epilogue takes place years later, like in Nemesis, it either brings up unnecessary ideas or tries to pander to the audience. I cannot think of one that does it in a comic, but I am thinking of the epilogue for Harry Potter, which takes place many years later to basically give the reader the rest of the characters’ lives or to show them live happily ever after. The writer needs to ask the tough question of whether the reader needs the epilogue or wants the epilogue (or even possibly neither). If the epilogue is needed, go for it. If the story needs another beat, needs a sense of closure, nothing is stopping you. But, if it is an attempt to show the characters all happy to please the reader, or if you feel something in the story is lacking so you need to throw out a curve ball in the end to make the reader think, then maybe you should skip the epilogue, or just revise the main story. I am sure there is an exception to what I have said (when is there not?), but epilogues are tricky (especially multiple epilogues in one story). Remember, as a writer, you came to explore a story, not live out the characters’ lives.

_______

Photo by John King

Heroes Never Rust #81: Personal Taste, or Bad Craft?

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Craft of Fiction Writing, Heroes Never Rust

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Darin Strauss, Half a Life, Mark Millar, Nemesis, Steve McNiven

Heroes Never Rust #81 by Sean Ironman

Personal Taste, or Bad Craft?

If it has been unclear in my last two posts, I’ll come right out and say it here—I dislike Nemesis. I think it represents everything wrong with comics in the last ten years. It’s a comic consisting of shock after shock. So many shocks that nothing is shocking. Or important. Or cool. Or dangerous. Or interesting.

Every scene fights to be the scene that is memorable. Nothing has lasting effect. Nemesis reads quickly because there is no depth beyond the death and explosions and violence. There is some talk of the personal life of the good guy and, at the end, apparently there has been a mystery as to the identity of Nemesis that seems like it comes from nowhere. To me, this is terrible. I would not suggest this comic to anyone. But, does that make it a bad comic?

The more I read and write, the more I come to believe that work should be judged by authorial intent. Though the literary community likes to make fun of books like Twilight, that book cannot be judged under the same criteria as The Scarlet Letter or The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I tell my students Dumb and Dumber cannot be judged under similar rules as Schindler’s List. While that is an extreme example, I think the reasoning is sound. Even an author’s own new work cannot be judged against the old work. I enjoy Frederick Barthelme’s work, but I feel it would be wrong to judge Bob the Gambler with the same rules as Tracer. The novels are trying to do different things. In a way, I am trying to play fair in an unfair world.

If we should judge storytelling by authorial intent, then what makes a bad novel, essay, poem, or in this case, comic? How can we judge what the author intended with the piece, without reading an interview? Leo Tolstoy wrote, “The presence in various degrees of these three conditions — individuality, clearness, and sincerity — decides the merit of a work of art as art, apart from subject matter. All works of art take rank of merit according to the degree in which they fulfill the first, the second, and the third of these conditions.” So, a work of art could be clear and sincere, but in terms of individuality, be lacking. But, a great work of art would have all three. Of course, this is only Tolstoy’s view, but I agree with him.

People tend to create rules for how or what a piece of writing is supposed to be. For example, many people seem to think that a character has to be likeable for a story to be good. Some people think foul language makes a story bad. But, there are always exceptions to these rules.

For example, I have been told a few times that I should not begin a piece of creative nonfiction with something shocking. Yet, Darin Strauss’ Half a Life begins this way: “Half my life ago, I killed a girl.” That’s pretty shocking, and it works well for that memoir.

The critic Robert McCrum wrote, “You’ll rarely get a better first line.” Were the people who told me I should not begin with something shocking wrong? Many people tend to take the attitude that there are exceptions that prove the rule, but I always take that as someone who has been proven wrong and no longer wants to take part in the argument. To me, there are no rules for good or bad, and writers (and readers) would do well to remember that. One of my favorite things to do with students in a beginner’s class is to discuss a story or essay, come up with why it works well, and then assign a reading that does something completely different and contradicts what we just discussed.

Nemesis is a comic. It follows the rules of comics, or sequential art. It features a series of images with text to tell a story. The sequences are easy to follow. The art is well drawn. The panels are laid out to not cause confusion for the reader. Characters are distinct. A lot happens and characters have to deal with real conflict. I could not care less about any of the characters, or the mystery of Nemesis’ plan, or the good guy’s family issues presented in the third issue, or even who wins or who dies.

But, I believe that is what the creators are going for here. Maybe they want the reader to be a bit more invested than I am, but I believe the story is meant for a different audience than myself. At no point is there a scene that slows the story down to get the reader to care for the characters or to explore the mystery of Nemesis. Characters move from action scene to action scene. From violent encounter to violent encounter. The comic is meant for an audience that prefers those summer blockbusters that require no thought. It is meant for an audience that wants realistic, detailed drawings and incredibly drawn fight scenes. It is not a thinking man’s comic.

Should it be? Does that make Nemesis bad? I think not. It is not for me, and I can understand that. More readers should understand the difference between bad craftsmanship and their personal taste. I feel art is held back by people who have egocentric, rigid aesthetics. Perhaps if more people could say, “This isn’t meant for me,” instead of, “This sucks,” artists would be freer to explore. Perhaps artists would not be so afraid of their work being judged.

Maybe. Maybe not. But, I find myself unable to judge work based on anything other than authorial intent and the execution geared toward that intent. I cannot judge a steak poorly because it does not taste like swordfish.

_______

Photo by John King

Heroes Never Rust #80: Ridiculousness in Fiction

11 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Heroes Never Rust, Mark Millar, Nemesis, Steve McNiven, Suspension of Disbelief

Heroes Never Rust #80 by Sean Ironman

Ridiculousness in Fiction

As the story speeds along in the second issue of Nemesis, the situations get more and more over the top. That’s not necessarily bad, unless you wanted a different type of story. In the last few decades in comics, there’s been a push toward realism in superhero stories. In the eighties, comics like Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again and Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen began a study of superheroes in the real world. There was outrageousness still to be found, but comics had definitely taken another step closer to our world. For decades prior, there were steps, such as the Marvel Universe in the 1960s with characters like the Fantastic Four and Spider-man, but in recent years realism has taken a firmer hand in comics storytelling. You can even take a look at the films based on superhero comics. Up until a couple of years ago, the idea filmmakers went to was how do we take these comic book characters and put them in the real world.

This has begun to change, however. First, in the comics themselves, and then this past year, we’ve had more outrageous ideas in many of the films, such as Guardians of the Galaxy and X-Men: Days of Future Past. I like a bit of ridiculousness in my comics, in most stories come to think of it. The more I write creative nonfiction, the more my fiction gets a bit ridiculous. But, and here’s where I have the issue, when does the outrageousness become too much? How does a writer fit in ridiculous events and characters and yet still have the reader buy the world? Because at the end of the day, no matter what type of story the writer is telling, the reader has to believe that the events can take place in the story’s world.

The more I read, the more I think it has to do with pacing. Pacing isn’t focused on as much as it should, I think. Or perhaps in the creative writing classes I took in undergrad and grad school it wasn’t. But, to me, pacing is one of the most important craft elements a beginning writer should focus on. The reason a lot of realistic superhero stories fail is that they spend so much time on trying to explain why the superhero does what he or she does and how they were created. Take the Amazing Spider-man series with Andrew Garfield (a terrific actor stuck in crappy movies). He can’t just be bitten by a radioactive spider and the story move forward. The movies try to explain that Peter Parker’s father did something to him so that he could have survived the bite. By spending more time on this idea, the audience begins to question the outrageous idea. And at no point is the audience going to be given a good enough explanation on why Peter Parker gained powers instead of dying. Pacing is really just the speed at which the audience is given information. The faster it moves, the less time the reader has to question what is going on. If the writer spends too much time on an idea, the reader gets to run that over and over in the head and find holes and start disbelieving what is going on.

In Nemesis, the supervillain does some outrageous acts in the second issue. He has an underground bunker that I think Bill Gates would have difficulty financing. He blows up a football stadium, steals the Hope Diamond, breaks into the Pentagon and fills the building with nerve gas killing nearly everybody in the building, has his car split in two and rides a hidden motorcycle out of it to escape the police, grabs a rocket launcher in mid-air and fires it to destroy a helicopter, and swims through a sewer grate in the Potomac like he knew exactly where it would be. Keep in mind that this is in twenty-five pages (and he has the President of the United States still held captive from last issue). That’s a lot for the reader to buy. But, the comic moves along at such a quick pace that the reader doesn’t have the time to question what is happening.

Perhaps the fast pace helps the reader feel safe, as if the writer knows exactly what he is doing. The more I read the more I believe that to be true. Anything can happen in the story, but the reader needs to feel like there is a solid authorial plan. Nemesis could do whatever he wants—Hell, even after all the crazy things he does, he ends up getting caught and tells the cops that this is all just part of the plan. How can someone really plan something so complex? Well, they can’t, but it’s just part of the suspension of disbelief of the story. The comic sets it up pretty early on that the story is going to play loose with reality. The characters are going to do outrageous things and the reader can’t think too hard about it. It’s up to the reader at that point if they are going to read the book. If they’re on board, great. If not, oh well. After all, haters gonna hate.

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Photo by John King

Heroes Never Rust #79: Skip the Obvious

04 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Mark Millar, Nemesis, Steve McNiven

Heroes Never Rust #79 by Sean Ironman

Skip the Obvious

Two weeks ago, I met with an undergraduate student to discuss her thesis, a collection of essays. One of my suggestions for her essay about the sickness and eventual death of her grandfather was to skip the paragraph about how upset she was over his death. I told her that it was unnecessary because it was already understood that she was upset because of the language used throughout the essay up until that point. I said that it is important in nonfiction to not tell the reader the obvious. If you write an essay about a loved one dying and went on about how sad you are about that person dying, the reader will begin to skim the page. Then, this week, I sat down and read Mark Millar’s and Steve McNiven’s Nemesis and I realized that this same approach is used in comics. It’s basically the same lesson that many writers already know—skip the door—but it goes beyond just choreography.

On a smaller level, skipping the obvious is used all the time in comics. In the first sequence in Nemesis, a SWAT team enters a building, the wrong building, and they run into a trap and they are blown away as they activate a bomb. This sequence uses the typical skip the door approach. Readers are given an aerial shot of the building at night. Then, the SWAT team runs toward the front door. Then, they are walking carefully up a staircase. Two members of the tem kick down a door, and walk into a room full of explosives. And finally, the outside of the building explodes. The reader will, of course, put together the information in the gutters—the team moving through the building.

But, a few pages later, the approach is taken to a greater level. Part of the villain’s plan involved a train that ran near the building where the explosion took place. The explosion also destroyed the tracks. In a full-page shot, the train goes over the rails. But instead of showing the train explode, the destruction, the page stops short. The train is only a few feet from the ground. The next page features the villain celebrating. There’s no explosion. No sound of the train crashing. No bodies. The story just continues to the next scene.

Nemesis is not high art. It’s a widescreen comic about a supervillain who hunts the world’s top police officers (at this point in the comic, seemingly for no reason but for fun). Perhaps it’s just me being a pessimist, but I feel about Nemesis the same as I feel about many of Mark Millar’s comics these past few years—they are storyboards for a film he’s trying to sell. The comic is far from subtle. But, Millar does show some restraint in the first issue, even with having panels of a few thieves being shot and one man being hit by a train.

Being subtle, though, doesn’t have much to do with skipping the obvious sections. I doubt Millar and McNiven chose not to show the train being destroyed because they wanted to be subtle. If they spent too long on the train, they would have less room for other scenes. One of the constraints comics have to deal with that many short stories don’t is that comics are a set length. The length may change depending on the publisher, but one issue is usually 22 or 24 pages, not counting ads. And even in prose, while it’s not as strict, I know about the length of an essay or a short story as I write. I know which stories can be 6000 words and which have to be 3000.

If a writer (or in the case of comics, an artist too) decides to spend so long describing the obvious, the reader will lose interest. Partly, it’s an issue of not treating the reader as if they are stupid. And partly, it’s an issue of pacing, to me. Pacing is really just deciding how much space you have to give the reader certain information before you move onto the next set of data.

Here, in Nemesis, do we really need a full-page shot of a train being blown apart? Perhaps some readers want nothing more, but this incident at the beginning only serves the purpose to introduce the Nemesis character. It has nothing to do with the main plot. So, the story needs to show that he is dangerous and has done a great deal of planning, and then the comic needs to move on. People always complain that we see the same movies, watch the same television shows, read the same books. Nothing is new. Well, all we as writers can do is to ask if a certain scene or action or event or line of dialogue is necessary or if the reader will understand the greater story without it.

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Photo by John King

Heroes Never Rust #31: Red Son 1

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Comic Books, Heroes Never Rust

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Dave Johnson, DC Comics, Elseworlds, Heroes Never Rust, Mark Millar, sean ironman, Superman, Superman: Red Son

Heroes Never Rust #31 by Sean Ironman

Red Son 1

I’m going to try something different over the next few weeks. I’m going to study one issue per week for a storyline. Perhaps some people may read along. Over the next three weeks, I will take a look at the three-issue miniseries Superman: Red Son.

DC Comics produces an imprint called Elseworlds, where the characters readers know are taken out of their usual context and placed into different times or situations. It allows writers and readers to explore the characters in different ways without being confined by continuity. In Superman: Red Son. Mark Millar and Dave Johnson take a look at Superman by asking, “What if his spaceship landed in the Soviet Union instead of Kansas?” One of my interests in writing is the exploration of what makes us us. What made Superman a good person—his Kryptonian birth or Ma and Pa Kent in Smallville?

The first issue opens in Metropolis with Superman’s thoughts presented to the reader in red and yellow captions. “In the middle of the twentieth century, the telephones started ringing all across America as rumors of my existence started circulating.” Millar places us in a city most readers know with a character’s voice we know. But the end of the first page has thrown the reader thrown for a loop. Lois Lane answers the telephone and corrects her name as “Lois Luthor.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower goes on television to tell the United States of Superman’s existence. At the same time, the president attempts to comfort the country over the fact that Superman is more of a threat than a nuclear bomb. Instead of Superman offering the world hope, he has become a sign of fear for everyone outside of the Soviet Union and its allies. Right away the reader is given something familiar and something new, something to keep the reader grounded and something to propel the reader to the next page.

The most interesting aspect, for me, of Superman: Red Son is the treatment of Lex Luthor, who is granted the status of America’s last hope in defeating Superman. Luthor is the world’s smartest man, always has been, even in the normal continuity. The tragedy of Luthor’s character in the Superman comics is that he could have done so much for the world, nothing was in his way, but he let his hatred and jealousy of Superman get in the way and he became a criminal instead of a savior. Now that Superman is America’s enemy, Luthor is free to do both—fight and try to kill Superman at the same time as saving the country. In a way, the comic comments on the Cold War, or even war in general. The same things Luthor does would make him a criminal normally, but because he’s doing them against another country it’s not only okay, it’s worshipped.

At the end of issue one, Luthor creates Bizarro Superman, one of my favorites. He’s called Superman Two here. In trying to defeat Superman, Luthor creates a monster who causes more damage. One must keep in mind that until this point in the comic, Superman never fights against America. In fact, he saves lives in America when Sputnik Two comes crashing down to Earth. The thought comes to me now that America is quite the villain in Superman: Red Son, a comic released by a corporate-owned American comic book company. While the comic book storyline uses fictional conceits in Superman and clones, it keeps coming back to being about war. When the newest technologies to destroy Superman fail, Luthor, and America, attempt to create more.

Superman Two fails and Luthor calls off his marriage to Lois in order to focus his life on destroying Superman, who still hasn’t done anything against the United States. Luthor’s story in this issue ends with him turning full-on villain and killing his lab technicians. He loses track of everything else he wants to do in life and leaves his wife in order to go to war. The war against Superman, against the idea of Superman, draws resources and lives away from the betterment of society. War is the focus. War over nothing. War over fear of something different.

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Sean Ironman is an MFA candidate at the University of Central Florida, where he also serves as Managing Editor of The Florida Review and as President of the Graduate Writers’ Association. His art has appeared online at River Teeth. His writing can be read in Breakers: An Anthology of Comics and Redivider.