Matt O’ Rama

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COMICS: Much to the surprise of many, including retailers who had seen it for sale in the Previews catalog, Marvel Comics announced on Wednesday that they would be cancelling one of the only titles published under its now all-but-defunct Epic imprint, an adult crime story called Gun Theory. The surprise wasn’t that Marvel was cancelling the series, they seem to be in the process of killing Epic completely, but that they were cancelling a 4 issue series after only 2 issues had been sold and that it was the only creator-owned series published by Epic which was announced as a home for creator-owned work. The actual creator-owned status of the book is in question as well, as it turns out. Apparently the indicia of the book assigns all copyright to Marvel but the author of the story says he owns the series and Marvel only had publishing rights. If the two creators did, in fact, sell their copyright to Marvel, it’s really too bad for them because they have no recourse, no way to take the series somewhere else to publish it. If Marvel has only the publishing rights, they can get those back and take it somewhere else. Nobody’s made a statement about it beyond the one linked above so everybody has to wait to see what will happen. I for one hope they retained ownership of the thing and can take it somewhere else. I read the first issue and didn’t care too much for it (I felt it was waaay too decompressed storytelling-wise and some of the dialogue seemed a little forced) but I hate to see any creator screwed over like that so I hope they get the chance to finish out the story and get their due money-wise. This is one of the many benefits of owning your work. Brian Wood published Channel Zero with Image but (if I recall correctly) they didn’t even publish the whole series due to low sales. Then he took the series to AiT/PlanetLar, published it as a trade paperback collection and he still gets royalty checks from it years later. If he had settled for doing the book as a work-for-hire for somebody else and they’d cancelled it, his only recourse would have been to whine about it, which is what a lot of creators end up doing when the publisher screws them in some fashion. The writer Steven Grant had a great quote on this subject (it’s vulgar so stop reading if you don’t like that sort of thing): “If you’re going to be their pussy, don’t cry when you get fucked.” Amen.

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MUSIC: I’ve been listening to the new Strokes album Room on Fire and I like it other than one small problem, it’s only 30 minutes long. I love the thing but at $12 on sale I’d like at least as much entertainment as I would get out of a hour-long TV show or a $12 graphic novel. The Kings of Leon album Youth and Young Manhood is about 45 minutes and that’s about right. Of course I’d like as much music as possible and would hate to see any band put crap songs on an album just to fill time but 30 minutes? I’m already commited to buying it since I downloaded the whole thing in MP3 but the songs are good enough that I want more of them.

As far as the album goes, it’s really good. The rock stuff is right on and the slower songs are great as well, a testement to the lead singer. I’m a big fan of the return of rock music to the music industry and I’ve bought 3 or 4 new albums in the last month, way more than I usually buy. I really like the aforementioned Youth and Young Manhood a lot. It’s gotten the most play of anything on my computer at work recently except the bunch of Flaming Lips songs I downloaded (and plan on buying the CDs of because I have no idea why I never listened to much Flaming Lips in the past). I’ve only listened to Room on Fire a few times but it’s great. I also really like the album by Jet called Get Born. I can’t comment on the influences of these bands because I had absolutely horrible taste in music as a kid and never, ever listened to anything good so I don’t know who is stealing from who, what influences are most important to which band, all the stuff that people are arguing about with these new rock bands. I just like the music, just like I like listening to the original rock from the 60s and 70s. If you like rock music I would recommend all three of the albums I just mentioned. If you have any recommendations of stuff old or new along the lines of these bands, I’d love to hear about them. Post them in the comments section if you would be so kind.

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ART: This weblog post is probably the most bizarre argument I’ve read in quite a while. The thing is all over the map as far as reasoning (I count 3 unrelated reasons for his beliefs) but basically the author’s main idea (I think) is that artists do not “control” their work by default because they let other people look at it so they shouldn’t try to control it at all.

…I think it’s a good and chastening thing for a creator to be reminded that he/she does not have anything like a god’s power over his/her creations–or, at the very least, if the creator is a god, he/she is more like a member of a (really overpopulated) pantheon. Zeus, for example, can try to make things come out his way, but he’s always got to worry about Hera or Poseidon’s interference. There ain’t no Yahwehs at the typewriter! A lot of “indie creators” don’t seem to realize that…

I’m not even really sure how to argue with that because it’s just such bullshit. Artists need to be told, should be made to understand, that they have no control over their work? What kind of adult wants to ‘chasten’ other adults for their artistic decisions? It seems like his problem with ‘indie creators’ is that they stubbornly refuse to sell their creations to the highest bidder so they need to be taught a lesson. I won’t even go into the legal reasons for controlling your work because Mr. Fiore doesn’t, although I think the legal/financial reasons are as strong as the artistic reasons. He doesn’t even really go into the artistic reasons, besides trying to say that art “by definition, [is] embedded within culture. That’s what makes it art!!! And once you plug into culture, you are no longer in control.” I know I only went to college for computer science, not critical theory or art theory but this whole essay, this sentence included, is full of gibberish to me. I have a hard time faulting someone for using $5 words where a $1 word will do but this is just ridiculous.

It’s obvious that once someone reads your book or looks at your painting, the image is in their head and you can’t hope to control what they do with it. This is not, however, a reason to give up on controlling your work. In referencing Tony Isabella and Black Lightning Fiore makes it clear that he’s talking about real control, the physical say-so about what happens to your characters in the real world, not in someone’s head. For background, Tony Isabella created the character of Black Lightning as a work-for-hire creation for DC Comics and he’s now mad about what he sees as DC’s shabby treatment of the character. Fiore says that Isabella shouldn’t be arguing about the treatment of his creation because as soon as he created it and “plugged it into culture” he lost control. I don’t think Isabella should be complaining either, but it’s because he willing sold the rights to DC as a work-for-hire. If he had retained control over his work he wouldn’t be in this mess because presumably he wouldn’t have done something with the character he didn’t like, no matter how much David Fiore wants to believe he “[doesn't] know what the hell they’re going to do next.” This is a completely different argument and one that’s a little too personal for my tastes. Writers let their characters run free as much as they choose to and it has absolutely nothing to do with controlling your work.

I’m not sure this makes much sense but the post in question is really all over the place and hard to read. He makes a basic point that I wanted to address though. I don’t think he’ll read this or respond but I would love to discuss this if only he would get past his love of College Smart Guy wording.

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BOOK REVIEW: One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
A lot of people have seen Jack Nicholson’s performance in this movie, one of his best, but not a lot of people are as familiar with the book which is a shame. The changes they made for the movie are very important and the book has quite a lot more to say, as usual. In the movie, McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) is the main character, the story revolves around him. In the book, the main character and narrator is the Chief who everyone thinks is deaf and mute so they let him get up close to their conversations, a very effective narrative technique. McMurphy is still the protagonist of the book, but you learn a lot about the Chief as well and he’s definately now one of my favorite literary characters because of the added detail. One of my favorite parts of the book is how much more sympathetic of a character McMurphy is. It’s been a while since I’ve seen the movie but the book-McMurphy really seems to care a lot about his fellow inmates, something I don’t remember from the movie. It’s rare for a tough-guy character to be given any emotion but Kesey did a really great job with him in the book. If you liked the movie, you owe it to yourself to read the book (or listen to it as I did, read on for more on that).

The first audiobook I listened to was Jonathan Franzen’s How to be Alone, a collection of his essays from various magazines. I got it free for subscribing to Salon.com (along with 3 magazine subscriptions and a book, a hell of a deal). I had no idea what to expect but I ended up loving the experience of listening to that book. In listening to a couple of other audiobooks, I’ve found that the person reading the book makes all the difference. I listened to Life of Pi and I couldn’t imagine reading the book after listening to the actor they had read it. I don’t know if he was Indian or not but he did a perfect accent that I couldn’t have replicated in my mind if I tried. It was a whole different experience and one I really enjoyed. I was sad when the book was over, not just because it was an amazing book but that I wouldn’t be listening to Pi speak any more. I really recommend listening to Life of Pi if you haven’t already read it. I felt almost the same way with Cuckoo’s Nest. The actor reading the book did an amazing job. Without overdoing the voices like some actors do, I could really tell the difference between all the characters just by how he performed each person. He didn’t even have to resort to the standard high-pitched women’s voices that some actors do to make the women stand out. I was very impressed.

What made me realize just how important the actor is to the audiobook experience is the new one I’m listening to, The Da Vinci Code. I would never had read this book if they hadn’t had it face-out on the shelf at Hastings to rent (only $2 a week!). The writing on the book isn’t particularly good (The first cringe inducing moment was when the bad guy said “My work here is done” after shooting someone. Yikes.) but I probably wouldn’t mind that if the actor doing the voices wasn’t so over-the-top with the characters. The book, so far at least, is set in France so everyone speaks in ‘zee stan-dard French, ac-cent’ and he does the high-pitched women’s voices so combined it’s a bit grating. I’ll finish it and have a more full review later but now I can see why it’s become popular but I’m not a big fan. I hope once the real action starts that it’ll get better.

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COMEDY: Kim and I went to see the Comedy Central Live standup show last night with Lewis Black and Dave Attell. There were also two opening acts but don’t let the fact that I can’t remember their names lead you to believe that they weren’t funny. Everybody had a good set but as I expected, Dave Attell was the only one who killed.

Lewis Black was obviously sick so i give him a pass even though he was off all night. His stuff has always been hit-and-miss with me anyway. I like his topical material like he does on the Daily Show, where most people know him from, but I’ve never been a big fan of his everyday-life stuff like the obvious and unfunny bit he did about bottled water. Since this was the Comedy Central show, I expected him to be in more of his Back In Black Daily Show mode but he did mostly stuff like the bottled water thing and his “candy corn tastes like crap” material. That’s one of my favorite bits of his which says a lot seeing as I love candy corn and as I said, I like his topical/political humor more.

Dave Attell, as I said, killed. My coworker said most of the material was off of his recent album but since I don’t have it, it was pretty fresh to me. If you’ve watched Insomniac but never heard any of his standup, buy an album or better yet see him in concert. He’s got a very perverted view of the world so if you’re a prude, you won’t like his show, just so you know. There’s really no way to describe his material, it’s all over the map. He does a lot of alcohol humor, a lot of very funny sex stuff, some bits about his midget best friend he calls Baby Shoes, and a lot of improvised stuff.

Overall the show was very good. It was in the Kiva auditorium which means no smoking, so no stinking of smoke for me, a rarity at most concerts. I sat next to an older lady who only ever laughed at the alcohol jokes and inexplicably, at Dave Attell’s masturbation material. I wasn’t paying too much attention to him but I don’t think her husband was laughing either. Maybe they got the tickets as a practical joke from someone. If the tickets weren’t close to $100 (damn Ticketmaster fees!) I would love to send my mom to a show like Dave Attell’s just to see what she’d think.

All in all, if you like standup comedy and have a chance to catch this show, do. Dave Attell by himself is worth the cost alone.

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COMICS: A lot of webloggers and columnists (starting here, continuing here, here, and what led me to this piece, here) have been rehashing the old argument about the Death of the Floppy/Pamphlet/Single comic book. The last link in the list, Sean Collins’s, is the only one that really means anything in context of the world outside comics. The first couple of commentators give very ‘comic book industry’ answers as to why singles suck or don’t suck. They mention things like ‘they don’t travel well/they do travel well’ as well as the old chestnut of ‘singles are too collectible to read’. Collectible? Is this cribbed from Wizard, circa 1995? This type of thinking is exactly what has led me to my thoughts on the life and death of the single issue comic versus the Graphic Novel or collected trade paperbacks that are gaining in popularity. By the way, like a lot of comics conversations recently, this is all pretty much what Warren Ellis and others were saying years ago.

I don’t think the single is going away anytime soon. I do think, however, that they will be even more of a niche market than they are today. A lot of people are going to be reading comics in the coming years but they will be doing it in bookstores (and mainstream book type stores such as Isotope and Comic Relief), not in comic shops. There’s just too much good material and comics are getting into too much of our pop culture consciousness to be ignored any longer but as sales and time have shown, nobody wants to read single comics except comic book fans. In a few years at most, singles and single-based comic shops will be like stamps. A lot of people collect stamps and there are stamp collector stores but they are not really relevant to anyone outside the philatelist community. I’m sure a lot of stamp collectors would love their hobby to be a lot more popular but it’s probably not going to happen, the same with single comics. Since I’m not exactly on the outside of the comic book fan community, I may not even have enough perspective to judge whether we are already at the point I’m talking about, but I think we’re close if nothing else. Sales of singles are miniscule, bookstores are gaining in popularity as places to buy comics (look at the mainstream success and reviews for Sandman: Endless Nights and Persepolis), manga is proving that young people want to read comics and they want to read them in book format.

I think right now manga is the Cool New Thing but like most Cool New Things once the New goes away, the Cool will follow. But the kids who read FLCL and Chobits now will still want to read comics and they will know to get them from bookstores. This exposure to comics is the same thing that happened to computers, kids grew up with them and they are now an indispensable part of life. With the built-in base of kids exposed to comics early and often, combined with the large and varied audience of bookstore patrons, comics in bookstores have a bright future, as books.

It could be that the niche market for singles won’t be enough to support the current companies. Marvel and DC may have to significantly scale down their single issue production, maybe even get out of that market altogether. But you’ll still be able to buy Batman, X-Men, etc., in book format unless they don’t recognize where the market is going and it kills them. I’m not worried about the future of my book buying habit but I do see a point where I have to wait awhile for new comics the way I have to wait for the new novels I like.

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LIFE: This is a great piece by conservative writer Andrew Sullivan about the ruling on gay marriages in Massachusetts. It’s probably the best articulation of the reasons why saying gay people can’t get married is ridiculous and offensive that I’ve ever read. It’s long but this is one of the issues that’s very simple but at the same time very misunderstood for a myriad of reasons. Just the other day I read this series of blog entries by Eve Tushnet outlining why she is against gay marriage that even if I didn’t have a job I wouldn’t have time to say exactly how wrongheaded it is but Mr. Sullivan’s piece pretty much shoots down all of her arguments.

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SPACE: Space.com article about the future of mining in space. I’m always overjoyed to see that people haven’t given up looking into space for the future, like the government and the media seem to have done. The best way to do anything is to assume it’s going to happen and work forward from there. Once you figure out what’s going to happen when we get into space in large numbers, it gives more of an incentive for people to accomplish the ‘getting there’ part. I’ve said for awhile now that the best way to get people into space is to give somebody a financial reason for it. Science and exploration are, of course, the most noble goals for space exploration but putting the dollar signs in Boeing’s eyes will probably get a reusable space vehicle much faster than going through NASA. Even when NASA works with Boeing on stuff the goal isn’t specifically lots of money for Boeing, it’s a ship for NASA. If you watched the show PBS did on the design of the new Joint Strike Fighter you’ll see how fast people can work to come up with and implement new ideas when there are billions of dollars on the line. I think the government should have a design contest like the JSF contest where the prize to the best design is a long-term contract on all space delivery vehicles. With a few billion and a 10 year contract somebody like Boeing or Lockheed could have a reusable space delivery vehicle within 5 years. You know there are a dozen aerospace engineers with mostly workable space vehicle designs sitting in their desks. There are a ton of smart engineers who want to go into space, let’s get them on it.

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COMICS: Eli Flores at Broken Frontier has an article on why there aren’t more ‘black/minority’ characters in comics. It’s a good article but focuses too much on the creators of the books rather than the fans. She also focuses on superhero comics, which is what I’ll do.

The main reason that I see for white males being the majority of characters in comic stories is that white males are the majority of customers in comic stores. Comics have never sought to appeal to minorities in this country, all the way back to Superman/Batman up through Spiderman/Fantasic Four and even now. Most white superhero comic book buyers (which is most comic book buyers period, not counting manga) want to read stories about people like themselves with fantastic powers. A large part of buying superhero comics is wish-fulfillment and it’s hard for people to project themselves onto a character with a different skin color.

I don’t think there’s much hope in trying to get more black main characters into superhero comics, honestly. Pretty much the base of fans for superhero comics is set and not growing at any appreciable rate. That means the same set of mostly white male readers are going to be buying the books and they’ve shown they don’t want to read about black characters, except in supporting roles. Since the readers don’t support books with black main characters (see Black Panther, an exceptionally well written comic about a great black character) there’s no incentive for writers to write black characters.

If you’re thinking that publishers should push books starring black characters at the black members of the superhero reading public, look at the math. Black people make up about 12% of the population of the US. Even assuming that the superhero reading audience contains the same percentages (a very weak assumption) you’re looking at sales of maybe 10,000 copies, based on the usual 100,000+ copies of the top-selling superhero book. Unless there are other factors at work, that book wouldn’t last long.

Really the only way there are going to be more black main characters in comics is by pulling in more black readers and superhero books have never shown any ability to bring in new readers in large numbers. If books like Grrrl Scouts could get out into the mainstream and into hip-hop magazines and the like, that would bring in new readers which would give publishers and writers more incentinve to write black characters. If you want to see more non-white faces in comics, supporting non-superhero books is the way to go.

Thanks to Journalista for the link.

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BOOKS: Publishers Weekly has a list of the Best of 2003 out and checking out the ‘SF/Fantasy/Horror‘ list (I always love how these 3 genres are grouped together in their own special ghetto whenever a list is made so right-thinking readers of Serious Literature don’t accidently read something from one of them) I see not one, not two, but five examples of what I call Embarrasing Fantasy Title Syndrome. Now, I have no idea if these books are any good or not, given that they are the ‘Best of’ list of a major magazine I would say they’re probably not crap, but the titles! Oh the titles!

Jarka Ruus: High Druid of Shannara
Talon of the Silver Hawk: Conclave of Shadows Book One
The Lone Drow: The Hunter’s Blades Trilogy, Book II
The White Dragon: In Fire Forged, Part One
Journey into the Void: Volume Three of the Sovereign Stone Trilogy

There’s not much to say really. These titles read like the names of Dungeons & Dragons campaigns made up by 15 year old dungeon masters who’ve only ever read Dungeons & Dragons books. As I said, this is not an indictment of the books themselves, or of the authors. But please, please, for the love of your readers who don’t want to feel like they’re reading D&D manuals, pick better titles!