Peter David's Blog, page 48

The Three High-Verbals, Part 1

Originally published November 2, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1459

“It’s gonna be great!” said Harlan Ellison, which is usually enough to set off warning bells in my head.

The new great thing that Ellison had masterminded was to be my introduction to, quite simply, the big time. The Big Stage. The Rilly Big Shoo, as Ed Sullivan used to say. Ellison had put together an evening of debate, discussion, and mishugas at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The concept was that Ellison, Neil Gaiman and I would take the stage as—in the spirit of the Three Tenors—the Three High-Verbals.

Now I wasn’t particularly daunted about the concept of essentially lecturing at MIT, probably because I was too stupid to be worried about it. I’d spoken at dozens of conventions, perhaps hundreds by this point. No matter how hairy it got, it couldn’t possibly compare to the single most daunting challenge ever presented me. That occurred at a New York Creation Con one afternoon years ago, when I was standing in the back of the room and the panicked organizers ran up to me to inform me that featured guest Wil Wheaton not only hadn’t arrived yet, but was stacked up in air traffic over LaGuardia. But he was supposed to be on stage in five minutes. Unless he was packing a personal matter transporter, that wasn’t going to happen, and they begged me to get up on stage and “entertain the crowd”… i.e., stall. And I did it. Kept a packed ballroom with about two thousand people entertained with discussion and Q&A for well over an hour before Wheaton finally showed up. So I figured I could handle MIT.

Besides, the notion that Neil and I were going to be part of a trio with Harlan as the third was ridiculous to me. I knew perfectly well what would happen: Harlan would take charge of the evening, and we would just keep up and hold on as best we could.

So everything was put into place, the arrangements made, the event publicized…

Well, not really. In point of fact, virtually nothing was done to publicize the event until barely ten days before it actually occurred. The ball was not only fumbled, it was booted halfway down the field. Word finally started to leak out, however, and ticket sales were quite brisk as we filled most of the 1200 seat hall with minimal publicity efforts. If they’d actually mounted a genuine ad campaign, we could have had it SRO. I mean, Harlan singlehandedly could have sold the place out. Same thing for Neil. And at least thirty, maybe even forty people would have turned out to see me. And no, I’m not being self-effacing, just realistic. Neil pulls in three, four hundred people at a store signing. I pull in twenty. I like to believe that my readers simply have better things to do with their time than come out and see me.

Even my eldest daughter Shana pitched in. Armed with fliers, she went to comic book stores. The first one she went to, she said to the clerk, “Excuse me… do you know about a talk being given by Harlan Ellison, Neil Gai—” The clerk immediately cut her off with an exasperated, “No, I have no idea when or where it is or how to get tickets, and I wish to God people would stop asking me about it!” Quickly she explained, “You don’t understand. I have fliers here with all the details. I was hoping I could put them here in your store.” His eyes widened and he said eagerly, “You’re the person I’ve been looking for!” Which is usually a nice thing to hear when the person saying it isn’t a cop.

The evening came and I was utterly calm until Harlan gave me his pep talk.

“You better have your ‘A’ material ready. Only the best stuff,” he said as we waited backstage. “You’ve only done conventions up until now, and that’s like playing lounge acts compared to this. This is the main stage, the Big Time. Your introduction to the Big Leagues. If we pull this off, other schools around the country will ask us to speak there, so you don’t want to screw this up.”

Words to that effect.

As you might surmise, I was a nervous wreck by the time I stepped out.

The format was that I would come out first (alphabetically: David, Ellison, Gaiman) and do fifteen minutes of whatever I wanted. Then Harlan would come out, likewise do fifteen minutes, then ditto Neil. After that we’d chat it up and do Q&A with the audience.

I thought the format as conceived by Ellison was a worthy one, but doomed not to turn out as planned. Why? Because I figured Harlan would get on a roll and there was no way he was going to keep it to a quarter of an hour. I would turn out to be right.

When I came out, the audience response was positively thunderous. Easily the best reception I’ve ever gotten. I then announced myself thusly: “Hello. My name is Peter David or, as I will henceforth be known, the fat guy who is the opening act for Harlan Ellison and Neil Gaiman.”

And a heckler shouted something out. I don’t remember what he said, but I knew I had to deal with it quickly. So without missing a beat, I shot back, “Get your own lecture tour, asshole.” The response was immediate and thunderous as the audience roared with approval. I’d shown the guy who was boss, which actually is pretty easy when you’re up on stage and have a microphone.

I then told the crowd, “One of the topics to be discussed tonight is the art of writing. Now sometimes you go to a movie and people will claim, ‘Oh, this movie was so manipulative. The director totally manipulated the audience.’ The thing is, manipulating the audience is what writers do. It’s what we excel at. So when a movie director or writer is accused of being ‘manipulative,’ what’s really being said is that he simply got caught at it. But we all do it, all the time. We’re like magicians, and sometimes someone spots us with a card up our sleeve.

“Now the way I endeavor to manipulate readers is via the juxtaposition of humor and drama. I’ll use the humor to gain reader empathy for the characters and, thus, when something goes wrong, it will have that much more impact. And then I’ll present a dramatic sequence with something funny happening at some point just to give the audience a chance to laugh and therefore relieve the tension.

“So what I’m planning to do is manipulate you.” This got a loud laugh and applause, and then I looked in the direction of the heckler and commented, “Except for that guy, who probably spends most of his evenings manipulating himself.” More cheers. Yes, it was that kind of crowd. “I will read you something sad that will bring you to tears,” told them, and then will tell you anecdotes that will make you happy and laugh and forget any of the sad stuff.

Which was what I did. I couldn’t have been more upfront with them. I opened with my CBG column written right after the World Trade Center collapsed. Audience members were crying. Backstage, Harlan was dying, convinced that I was sucking the life out of the audience and assuring Neil, “Don’t worry, Peter’s depressing the hell out of them, but I’ll bring them back to us.”

He needn’t have concerned himself. The anecdotes—time-tested “A” list material about Harlan and Neil and a couple of young women who wanted autographs—brought the crowd from the depths of depression to a point where they were laughing and applauding. Yes, I had not only played upon their emotions shamelessly, but had even told them that that was precisely what I was going to do. So my conscience was clear.

Then Harlan came out. Forty five minutes passed rather than the allotted fifteen. About what I expected.

And then things that I hadn’t expected began to occur…

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. Friday will conclude the tale of the MIT appearance.)

 

TV review: Smallville series premiere

Originally published October 26, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1458

Television being a spectacularly imitative medium, producers like to present new shows in ways that will evoke something else which has been successful. One also wants to have as many recognizable elements as possible in order to prompt more people to watch the show.

And it was decided that Superman remains a consistently popular and attractive character (except when Nicholas Cage is slated to play him) and furthermore that Superboy may well appeal to a youthful audience. Not to a juvenile audience, as the previous half hour Superboy series did, but rather that desirable, hotly coveted eighteen-to-twenty four demographic that apparently has money to spare and sets many of the trends for the rest of us.

One can almost see the light bulb flashing over the producers’ heads as they considered a series about Superman’s early years, and came up with the perfect pitch: Kal-El’s Creek.

It really is pretty ideal, when you get down to it. In the first Superman film, some of the most visually striking images take place on the plains of Smallville. Young Clark’s aching desire to be one of the gang is palpable. He knows beyond question that he is infinitely superior to any of those local yokels who look down their collective noses at him, and yet he must keep that superiority under wraps, lest their scorn turn to something even worse: Fear. He may look like them, but he is not one of them. He is something outside, something unnatural. Normal teens feel alienated enough; imagine how problematic it is for a teenager who really is an alien, such as none we have ever seen.

And the notion of such a TV series couldn’t have come at a better time for the WB, seeking to fill the superteen angst hole left in its schedule by the defection of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (On a side note, I now find my comfort level challenged in terms of letting ten year old Ariel watch Buffy. I’ve had no trouble in the past letting her be exposed to the fictional, monstrous doings in Sunnydale, because in the face of evil, she’s also watching acts of tremendous bravery by flawed but fundamentally good and heroic people. But I absolutely, positively hate having her view commercials for unspeakably sleazy programs such as Blind Date. I may have to start taping it and deleting the commercials altogether, so that I don’t have her pondering such depthless notions as trashy TV shows that “put the ‘hot’ in ‘hot tub.’”)

Thus we have Kal-El’s Creek or, as it’s more popularly known, Smallville.

The pilot episode opens in the year 1989, as the peaceable townsfolk of Smallville (population around 20,000) are going about their business, when they are suddenly under fire by the mother of all meteorite storms. Chunks of what we, the savvy comic book reader, know to be the remains of the planet Krypton, chew up half the countryside, and also cause three year old Lana Lang to see her parents annihilated before her horrified eyes.

As we all know, or could at the very least have surmised, the rocks from space also herald the arrival of the smiling baby of steel, miraculously unscathed. He is found and adopted by Jonathan and Martha Kent, at which point we jump to “Today” to find a very different Smallville than when we started. The population has more than doubled, and—like Roswell, New Mexico turning itself into a permanent haven for tourists by milking the “flying saucer crash” for all it’s worth—Smallville has now become a tourist attraction, home of the falling meteors.

It’s also the home of the exceptionally hunky Clark Kent, played with smoldering intensity and mounting frustration by Tom Welling, a disgustingly good looking actor who—in certain shots—looks so much like a young Chris Reeve that you can only pray they never do an episode in which he rides a horse, because it’ll be too upsetting to watch. He hungers for the exotically attractive Lana (Kristin Kreuk), whose mere presence literally makes him weak in the knees, for a fairly clever plot reason that I won’t reveal. Lana, however, is busy dating—for no discernible reason—Clark’s nemesis, the swaggering athlete and bully Flash Thomp… I’m sorry, “Whitney” (Eric Johnson.) Clark is desperate to prove that he’s everything Whitney is and more, fantasizing about mopping up the entire football field with singlehanded gridiron heroics. Instead he suffers silently, reflecting the sort of angst that anyone in that situation has ever felt: If only she knew the real me, she’d love me instead of that idiot.

But Whitney is not the one that Clark has to watch out for. That honor belongs to young Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum). In fact, he’s the one that everyone should be watching for, lightyears away from Gene Hackman’s campy movie Luthor, and trumping even John Shea’s crafty villainy in Lois and Clark. Rosenbaum craftily plays him as a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Claiming that he’s nothing like his ruthless millionaire father, Luthor exudes a magnetic charm. He seems utterly likable. But at the same time you get a definite cat-and-mouse vibe from him as he cultivates his relationship with Clark, and when he silkily delivers in-joke lines such as, “Tell me, Clark… do you believe a man can fly?” you find yourself wondering just how much he knows. The Clark/Luthor scenes are the moments when the show really crackles.

Taking the cue from the hero-creates-villain/villain-creates-hero scenario popularized by the first Batman film, we see that the meteor shower results in Luthor’s going bald at a young age (which, frankly, beats the notion that Superboy blew it off through a freak chemical accident.) That shower is also held to account for literally hundreds of other weird things that occur in Smallville, probably so the producers can have a rationalization for this particular town encountering all manner of superpowered oddities. I’m not entirely sure there needed to be a reason, but if they had to come up with something, what were you expecting? Smallville was situated on top of a Hellmouth?

The script by Al Gough and Miles Millar endeavors to blend the dreaminess of a Dawson’s Creek with the tense urgency of—well—a young Superman discovering his destiny and defending his town. The blend works well sometimes, less so other times, and stumbles badly in Clark’s confrontation with the danger du jour at the climax, although the direction by veteran David Nutter is never anything less than confident and occasionally inspired. The acting all around is sincere, and a subplot involving two of Clark’s friends on the school newspaper (Samuel L. Jones and the lively Allison Mack) investigating the strange doings in Smallville has some promise to it. Cynthia Ettinger and John Schneider as Ma and Pa Kent, unfortunately, are far too youthful to have the homespun charm that we’ve seen in others assaying the roles. Obviously they’re going for a different effect here, but it comes across initially as just kind of colorless… except for one moment when a skeptical Clark, in learning of his origins, says, “And where’s my space ship? Hidden in the attic?” only to be stunned when his chagrined dad replies, “Actually, no, it’s in the storm cellar” and shows it to him.

There is, of course, one intrinsic problem in doing things this way: As a viewer, you have to check at the door any knowledge of who and what Clark Kent eventually becomes, because with the way it’s set up in Smallville, it’s just not gonna work. For instance, in the Silver Age, Luthor and Clark were portrayed as boyhood friends, or at least acquaintances. But in that continuity, Clark’s dual identity was already in place as the mild-mannered, bespectacled teen. What we’re seeing in Smallville, in the rugged features of young Clark—with his bangs and his lack of eyewear—is the face of the future Superman. There is absolutely no way we can believe that, six, seven years down the line, Lex Luthor—Clark’s close friend—won’t take one look at Superman and say, “Clark! Dude! What’s with the blue and red tights?”

As for me, I’m waiting to see what happens when Clark’s x-ray vision kicks in and he realizes he can look through clothes, or the wall of the girls’ locker room. They may get around it by indicating that when he uses it, he sees bone and musculature, which is hardly erotic. But can you imagine Dawson acquiring such a power and not using it for the obvious? Or Pacey, for that matter, or even Felicity? Didn’t think so. The trick with Smallville is going to be keeping it real… because if they stress the superheroics too much, without the budget to pull it off, and lose sight of the humanizing heroic journey of Clark Kent, then the show’ll be gone faster than a speeding bullet.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

You Ain’t Never Had a Friend Like Him

So New York Comicon was a lot of fun. Had my picture taken with Clark Gregg. Met an entire cosplaying Young Justice, including Empress, Slo-Bo and Secret whom I’ve never seen cosplayed before.

But here was the high point.

Two guys came up to my table at Artists Alley and had me sign some books. They seemed genuinely enthused to meet me, which was nice. And they were about to leave when I noticed one of them was wearing a t-shirt with what looked like a stylized Jafar on it. I’d never seen it before and asked about it.

And the other guy said, “This is the stage manager for the Disney show ‘Aladdin,’ and I’m the genie.”

It took a few moments for what he was saying to register on me. I looked at him closely and realized that, yeah, this guy was James Monroe Iglehart, the Tony-award winning actor. I said, “My God, you were great on the Tonys!”

James actually jumped back, startled. “You saw the Tonys?!” he said in genuine astonishment, as if the Tonys were broadcast on Hulu or something.

I also praised him for his tribute to Robin Williams that I’d seen on Youtube.

We chatted eagerly. I realized that he was as thrilled to talk to me as I was to him. I told him we hadn’t seen “Aladdin” yet because every time I’d tried to get tickets, I hadn’t been able to. He immediately said, “I have four house seats every show. Just tell me when you want to come.”

I wound up taking him up on it immediately and the following Sunday I was there with Kathleen, Caroline, and Caroline’s friend (nicknamed “Pixie.”)

So there James is on stage, knocking “Friend Like Me” out of the park. And when he was done and the massive ovation kept going, he shouted out thanks to the orchestra and something else and then added, to my shock, “And Peter David, I love you!” Don’t misinterpret–James is married to a lovely woman. This was a shout out. Still, it was pretty astounding. Kathleen and Pixie didn’t hear it but I turned to Caroline and said, “Did he just–?” and Caroline nodded.

Afterward we all went out to dinner. We got to the restaurant and were told that there would be a wait of 45 minutes to an hour, and there was a ton of people waiting. In a low voice I said to the hostess, “Just FYI, we have a Tony award winning actor in our group, if that makes a difference.” She looked at me skeptically and I nodded toward James. “He plays the Genie in Aladdin.” She looked at him and recognized him.

We were seated in ten minutes. So that was nice.

Over all it was a great day and we now have a new family friend. One who is a huge Batman fan, so anytime he wants to come out here and see my Batcave, he’s welcome.

PAD

Dragon*Con 2001: The Good and the Bad

Originally published October 19, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1457

Dragon*Con: The Good and the Bad.

Good: I was scheduled to be on two panels early Friday afternoon… both slated to be held before my actual arrival. For instance, a panel that was to consist of myself and Paul Jenkins was scheduled for 2:30 PM, at which time I was still 30,000 feet in the air. Paul showed up ten minutes late—figuring it was no big deal because I’d be entertaining folks in his absence—to discover that just about everyone had already left because they figured neither of us was going to show. So why is this “good,” you ask? Because Dragon*Con always schedules me for panels before I arrive. Isn’t it nice to know there are things in this world you can absolutely count on? Furthermore, I was also scheduled for panels on Sunday after I left, but I tricked them: I changed my airline reservations to depart Monday so I was actually able to attend the panels. Plus they forgot the other tradition of scheduling me opposite myself (for instance, having me on a Star Trek panel at 4 PM in one place while having me doing a reading at the same time somewhere else.) So all things considered, it wasn’t as disastrous as in previous years.

Good: I had the opportunity to perform, for the first time, with Atlanta Radio Theatre, taking on a small part in the dramatization of a Robert Heinlein story called “Solution Unsatisfactory,” about the horrors of nuclear war. (I would tend to think that it would have had even more emotional resonance now, considering the events of recent days.)

Bad: Kathleen attended with me (no, that’s not the bad part; the honeymoon isn’t over that fast.) During the course of the convention, she pitched in at the Del Rey booth in the Exhibitor’s hall. Since she’s an editorial assistant at Del Rey, she felt some sense of duty to help out, even though she wasn’t there on Del Rey’s dime. At one point, while she was helping hand out free books to eager fans, she placed her backpack down in a secure area behind the booth. Except… it turned out not to be secure at all. When she went to retrieve the bag—a blue Eddie Bauer backpack—it was gone. Filched. Stolen. Some of the contents were replaceable, such as a manuscript she was working on and her Palm Pilot. But the loss of other items in the backpack were personally catastrophic: Our entire album of wedding photographs, taken by the professional photographer. We’d brought them down to show to Harlan and Susan Ellison, who were in attendance at Dragon*Con. It’s possible to replace the album, but it will probably run us well over a thousand bucks to do so. There were dozens of other pictures as well, of the wedding reception and honeymoon, which we’d spent hours culling from hundreds more. Plus, worst of all, absolutely irreplaceable portrait shots of the girls and us, done by Disney photographers while we were on the cruise. There’s simply no way that Disney would still have them on file. They’re gone, all of them.

We figure one of two things happened. Either the thief grabbed the bag, went through it and snatched obviously valuable things like the Palm Pilot, and dumped the rest, which means our wedding and honeymoon pictures are in a Georgia landfill somewhere. Or else—more chillingly—the thief is a fan who discovered he’d lucked onto a wonderfully singular souvenir. One of a kind shots of Peter and Kathleen David’s wedding, complete with candid photos of Harlan Ellison, Bill Mumy, George Takei, and others. Wowee zowee, kids! Lucky, lucky fan, and you got another one you can add to Ellison’s “Xenogenesis” essay.

As bad goes, that’s pretty freakin’ bad. Not fly-a-plane-into-a-building bad, obviously, but a personal setback, nonetheless.

Good: The evening banquet on Saturday. Highlights included Andy Hallett (the Host from “Angel”) being pressed into MC’ing duties at the last minute, sometimes rising to the challenge, sometimes… less so. And my presenting Harlan with the “Julie” award for achievement in multiple media (named for Julie Schwartz, who was also there) , and then later watching Harlan and John Rhys-Davies trading increasingly bizarre jokes back and forth. (Yes, yes, I admit, I chimed in with a few, too.)

Bad: The food. Yeah, well, what else is new.

Good: The Iron Artist. I frankly cannot believe this worked. Dragon*Con approached Ellison and I separately (and then told each other that the other had agreed to it, apparently thinking we wouldn’t check) about the notion of doing a send-up of the TV series “Iron Chef.” The notion was that Iron Artist Don Bluth would take on a challenger (in this case fantasy artist Larry Elmore). There would be a “secret ingredient,” and the two artists would then have to produce a work of art in forty-five minutes using that ingredient. The notion was that Harlan and I would MC the thing.

There was a lot of initial dickering, including over the ingredient considering that Dragon*Con reps were thinking too closely to the source material and apparently believed that having genuine food colors (blue juice from blueberries, for instance) would be a good secret ingredient. Harlan and I pointed out the folly of that notion: Who’s going to want to buy artwork with food smeared on it? It’s gonna rot and get all disgusting. Harlan’s contention was that the ingredient had to be thematic, relating to art style, not an actual physical component as in the original series.

So Sunday morning, Harlan (clad in a long black leather coat and sporting a rubber Doctor Doom mask) dramatically announced, “And the secret ingredient which you must include in your drawings is,” and he whisked a cloth off a silver tray being proferred by Kathleen to reveal a solitary black cube. “Cubism!” he declared, and then added, “…in pastels… from the early Norman Rockwell period.”

I thought Bluth was going to have a cerebral hemorrhage on the spot. He just started going into convulsions. Larry Elmore, for his part, looked like someone had just smashed him across the face with a 2 x 4. Both of them were clearly wondering just what the hell they’d gotten themselves into. All I can say is, hey, guys, it could’ve been worse. You could have had to crush blueberries onto the canvas.

Harlan and I then slipped into characters: He, the knowledgeable art commentator, me the utter dunderhead. He would be asking the judges (pulled from the audience) what they thought of the techniques being displayed by the artists, while I would ask them incisive questions such as, “What do you think my high bowling score is? Go on, guess.”

Bluth wound up winning hands down, cleverly doing a cubistic verison of the famed “Little girl with the bathing suit bottom” Coppertone ad (which made sense considering Rockwell did a lot of commercial work early in his career.) Elmore gave it a valiant try, but his design went more toward Peter Max than Norman Rockwell. As for the majority of what Harlan and I actually said: I have no idea. We desperately vamped for forty-five minutes, entertaining without a net while the artists worked. I remember a line here or there, but most of it is a complete blur.

Bad: Dragon*Con totally botched the taping. It was literally a case of two Dragon*Con people saying to each other, “I thought you put a blank tape into the recorder.” So if anyone out there has a complete tape of Iron Artist, please let me know. If nothing else, I promised one to Don Bluth.

(Should anyone have information regarding the wedding pictures, or an Iron Artist tape, please contact Peter David at Second Age Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport NY 11705. Thank you.)

 

 

Movie review by Gwen! David: Ghost World

Originally published September 28, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1454

Enter, a bunch of teenagers sitting around in a room, bored. It’s the summer before their senior year in high school, and a week and a half before school actually starts. They want to make this week and a half count. Unfortunately, there’s nothing to do in this godforsaken town. Their plans to go to the beach and have a picnic dinner have been smashed by the rain.

Teen One: He gets off work at five, right? And then he’s coming to pick us up?

Teen Two: Yeah. But we kinda have to figure out what we’re going to do before he shows up.

Teen Three: Hmm… nothing to do.

Silence

Teen One: Hey, I read that email you sent out. Isn’t there some new movie out with Steve Buscemi?

Teen Three: Yeah, it’s an awesome movie called Ghost World. I highly recommend seeing it.

Light bulbs go off over each of their heads

Teen Three: Hey, let’s go see that. Do you want to?

Teen Two: I’m up for it. Sure.

And off they went. Peter David’s daughter, her best friend Cayley, a French kid, and a designated driver schlepping out to Huntington, a good 45 minute drive, to see a movie. And they lived happily ever after…

* * *

Yep, it’s me again. Gwen! David. My dad took me a few weeks ago to see Ghost World with Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi.

It’s based on a Fantagraphics comic book, with the same title, by an author named David Clowes. The comic book revolves around two girls, Enid and Rebecca, who have just graduated high school, and are trying to decide what to do with themselves in a world where nothing is appealing to them. The movie has pretty much the same basis.

The film starts out with best friends Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) graduating high school. At first they are relieved that the monstrosity that is high school has finally ended, until Enid finds out that to officially graduate, she must take a remedial art course over the summer, because she failed it during the year. A lot of the movie revolves around Enid’s infatuation with the much older Seymour, a man in his mid thirties whose life revolves around collecting old records. In the beginning, she becomes friends with Seymour, because she finds him pathetically amusing. But she soon becomes obsessed with him. This takes a toll on her relationship with Rebecca, especially because they had been planning on getting an apartment together after high school. This is until Enid loses interest in just about everything except for Seymour. Much to Enid’s surprise, Seymour gets a girlfriend, and they have a great relationship. However, because he now has a girlfriend, he starts to see less and less of Enid. This greatly upsets her. At one point towards the end of the film, she goes to Seymour’s house and talks of moving in with him. At first he is reluctant, but then later, he takes what she’d said seriously, breaks up with his girlfriend, and asks Enid to move in with him. It’s not until then that she realizes what she’s done, and how she was just talking. She was pretty much testing him out… seeing if he was listening to what she was saying. She was half joking, and when he takes her seriously, she doesn’t know what to do. The seriousness of her relationship with Seymour, on top of her falling out with Rebecca causes her to become perplexed with her new situation. Enid begins to feel that everyone and everything she had depended on was leaving her. Not knowing quite what to do, she boards a bus to a destination unknown, with nothing but a hatbox, and the dream that she will go somewhere that no one knows her, start a new life, and never tell anyone back home what happened to her.

Now, I think I’m supposed to say how this relates to me… or something like that. Okay, here goes: I feel I can relate to Enid on many levels. I am now a senior in high school, and still don’t quite know what to do with myself. Enid wants to move forward with her life, but in trying to do so, ends up staying still. She has her own style and believes in doing things her own way, no matter what other people think; she doesn’t let them get to her. She is a bit gloomier than I am though. I very much want to go to college (please buy my Dad’s books, and donate to the Send Gwen! to college fund!), while Enid has no interest at all in it. Also, Enid’s only real friend is Rebecca, while my social circle encompasses many people.

When I saw Ghost World for the second time with my friends, I asked them what they thought. They all said they liked it very much, and could also relate to the characters.

After reading the comic and seeing the movie, I suddenly realized that I didn’t quite understand the basis for the title. I mean, there are no literal “ghosts” anywhere in either of them. I have a few theories as to the where it comes from:

Ghosts haunt people. To most people, ghosts are a scary thing and should be avoided at all costs. To Enid, the outside world is a terrifying place. Being thrust into it, is like having an encounter with a ghost. You want to try to touch it, and see what it’s like, but at the same time, you’re frightened by it, and want to run and hide.
Enid goes throughout the movie trying to make a dent. Trying to be heard. She wants to have an effect on people, whether it’s good or bad. She’s gone through so much of her life with people not paying attention to her, and not listening to her, that she begins to consider herself a ghost to not only the people, but the world around her. Hence, she lives in a Ghost World.
Throughout a large part of the picture, we see things from Enid’s perspective. We see that when she does things, she does them without considering or even caring about their impact on the people around her. So it’s possible, that she considers herself the only real person there, and that everyone around her is a ghost.

I really feel that David Clowes and whoever else wrote/directed/produced this movie did a fantastic job. Most of the films you see now that are about teen life show us as a bunch of stupid idiots who are too stoned to realize that there’s more to life than sex, drugs, and rock & roll. All the plots are really far-fetched and have holes big enough to drive a Mack Truck through. Granted, lots of teenagers I know are complete morons, but most of us are only a little dopey sometimes. We’re really quite smart and have a lot of interesting ideas.

All in all, I’d like to say go see Ghost World if it’s playing in your area, and if it’s not, find somewhere that is playing it, and go see it. It really makes you think…

(Gwen! David, Student of… stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

On Writing Aquaman

Originally published September 21, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1453

To a great degree, I look upon my time writing Aquaman as a spectacularly ambitious failure.

I took on the series for two major reasons: First, The Atlantis Chronicles remains, all these years later, some of my favorite work. When the series was being produced, DC’s top people—and I mean top people—spoke enthusiastically about it being a perennial favorite, kept perpetually in print a la Watchmen with additional spinoff titles and even merchandising. None of it ever materialized. DC remains resolute in not even offering a trade paperback collection, despite fan request (and with Bob Greenberger over at Marvel now, the only person there who ever continued to spearhead a collection movement is gone.) So I was hoping that by taking on Aquaman, and incorporating storylines and elements which originated in Chronicles, that it would finally spur a TPB collection of that series. Still hasn’t happened. By this point, I’ve given up hope. Ostensibly the project is simply undoable… despite the fact, interestingly, that they managed to collect it just fine in Italy.

Failure number one.

Secondly, I took on the series because I wanted to establish Aquaman as a character who not only would be taken seriously, but would forever be a major player in the DC Universe who could sustain a comic series after my eventual departure.

So I left the series. A couple years later, it was canceled, and then Aquaman was killed off in “Our Worlds At War.”

Failure number two.

Now I have no idea whether Aquaman is really, truly, permanently dead. I haven’t been able to bring myself to ask anyone at the company. I certainly hope he’s not. Aquaman has always been one of my favorite heroes, simply because he’s the only one who might actually exist in some form or other.

Think about it. If there were guys like Superman, Batman, et al running around, we’d know about it. There’d be coverage in every newspaper, every TV station. There’d probably be whole cable channels devoted just to them. But we know they’re not there, and consequently, they remain steadfastly in the realm of pure fantasy that can never be fulfilled.

But the ocean is a vast, mysterious place. There are depths which have never been subjected to any sort of human scrutiny. I can sit on a shoreline and stare out at the waves and think, “Maybe…” Maybe there really is someone out there who can survive at sea and talk to fish. Maybe there really are mer-creatures, or cities of such beings. Not to sound too Criswell, but you say, Prove that it is? I say, prove that it isn’t!

My tenure on Aquaman started with a four-issue arc which was originally intended to be incorporated into the then-running series. I would have been perfectly content with that, but it was decided that the arc, titled “Time and Tide,” should be broken out into a separate miniseries followed by a relaunch. The following is my first written thoughts on Aquaman, produced as part of an overview for T&T.

In which we explore the origins of a hero who, in terms of mythos, has an origin that has an opportunity to be as sweeping as any hero of legend. What is presently known about him parallels such tales as Romulus and Remus, the Jungle Book, and Tarzan of the Apes.

Furthermore, the seas that cover 3/4 of the earth’s surface remain still one of the last, great frontiers that exists in our world. Aquaman is completely at home in that frontier. His ability to communicate with sea creatures is unique. His strength, which comes as a result of his being able to survive the ocean depths, is considerable. If he’s on land, he should be able to move faster, jump higher, be stronger, than any normal human. He has limited invulnerability–after all, his skin, bone and muscles have to be extraordinarily tough. An explosive shell will still kill him, but small caliber fire would merely knock him over or bruise him… as if he were wearing kevlar.

Instead of being one of the more limited characters in the DC universe, Aquaman is–if properly handled–one of the most ubiquitous.

And if he is, indeed, the nominal master of the water environment, then he is… to all intents and purposes… master of the world.

No one else on this planet can do what he does. Many people have super strength. Many are invulnerable. Science knowledge, magic powers, superspeed… there’s overlap in all areas. But there is no one else who can function at super-powered levels anywhere in the world. Whether on land or sea, Aquaman is a force to be reckoned with.

That was always my take on him, which flew in the face of those who believed him somehow inferior to other heroes. My contention was, if you take Aquaman and dump him in the middle of Gotham, and leave him completely on his own, he’ll do fine. If you take Batman, drop him in the middle of the Atlantic with nothing but the cape on his back, chances are you’ll never hear from him again… particularly if it’s shark infested waters.

Speaking of sharks, I consider them to be one of my few true successes with the series. Everyone loved the way I depicted sharks: Big, dumb bruisers with a short term memory of about twenty seconds, and no interest beyond sustenance. A typical shark moment was a shark cruising along with the following word balloon: “Food. Food. Food. Food. Food. Hello, Aquaman. Food. Food. Food.” In their doofiness, they were almost loveable. It was a stark contrast to the rep of “evil monsters of the deep” they’d had since Jaws, and somehow it felt right. I hate the fact that there’s no Aquaman series now; the real-life massing of sharks we’re hearing about these days would be perfect story fodder.

The single most controversial aspect of my tenure was, naturally, Aquaman’s losing a hand and replacing it with a harpoon (not hook, dammit.) People far and wide excoriated the move, even as they bought the book, which naturally was my intention all along. Although I was able to justify it on a thematic basis, the bottom line is that writers aren’t hired onto series in expectations that they’re going to produce a comic that people won’t want to buy. I feel there is some obligation to develop storylines which will make people feel they must purchase a book. Aquaman had a reputation as being a sales lightweight, so much so that when my taking on the series was announced, the response wasn’t, “Oh, boy, we’re looking forward to seeing Peter David write Aquaman!” Instead it was, “Geez, why is Peter David wasting his time on that undersea loser?” With that negative a reputation, I had to do something extremely drastic just to get people to sample it. It wasn’t an easy sell to the DC powers-that-be. I had to jump through a lot of memo-writing hoops explaining it before it was okayed.

Toward the latter part of my tenure, I was repeatedly told that the powers-that-be weren’t happy with sales. It was felt that something as dramatic as the loss of Aquaman’s hand should be done in order to stoke reader interest, which I considered ironic considering the amount of resistance I received to that happenstance initially. In one memo I suggested the following potential developments:

1) Aquaman seeks to free Mera, only to discover that his other-dimensional son has become a monarch of the other worldly realm in which he resides… and now wants to take over this one. (His arrival was actually foreshadowed back in the dream Aquaman had thirty or so issues ago.)

2) Aquaman is reunited with Mera once more and they create their own city.

3) Naiad, the water elemental, is obliterated by Triton, and he enslaves Corona. Aquaman subsequently battles Triton and dies a fiery death defending Poseidonis… and then becomes earth’s new water elemental. He still maintains human form, but has a whole new set of powers (drastically different from Naiad’s.)

4) Dolphin realizes that she completely screwed up, that Aquaman is the one she truly loves, she and Aquaman reunite and they get married.

5) Aquaman is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

6) Aquaman is made the Secretary-General of the United Nations

7) Aquaman shows up one day in Poseidonis with his hair cut, beard gone, back in his old uniform, his hand intact, and asking where Mera and Arthur Junior are. When people ask what the hell happened, he says he has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about, and claims that he was caught in a freakish whirlpool but escaped after a few minutes, and what do you mean Mera’s gone, Arthur’s dead, Aquagirl’s dead, Garth grew up, and I lost a hand? That’s insane!

8 ) Arthur becomes the adopted son of Poseidon.

Another potential story, not listed above, was when Harlan Ellison expressed great interest in the Devil’s Deep, the bottomless crevice I introduced in one storyline which I implied went all the way down to hell. Harlan proposed doing an extended journey storyline that he and I would write together, would take the better part of a year, and be the DC equivalent of Dante’s Inferno. I figured we could sell a few copies of that, right? The editor came back and said we could do it… as a single issue, twenty-two pages. Of course. Why have a year’s worth of Ellison stories to build up reader interest when you can have a one-off with no extended sales impact whatsoever? Feeling one issue couldn’t do it justice, Harlan said forget it, and that was that.

Of the developments I suggested, the one I was most enamored of was the earth elemental one. I even put the storyline into motion, which was going to culminate in Aquaman dying, Triton endeavoring to flood the world, and then Aquaman returning as the elemental. But that was shot down because I was told that, since Superman had returned after “The Death of Superman,” no one would believe such a cheap, obvious gimmick as Aquaman “dying.” So I had to (you should pardon the expression) scuttle the whole concept. Finally, after receiving one contradictory editorial instruction after another (have Aquaman operate as a loner, but show him as a leader of men; do stories set in Atlantis, but be sure to avoid having Aquaman be in Atlantis) I gave up and (again, pardon the expression) bailed.

And now Aquaman’s dead.

If he returns as a water elemental, you heard it here first.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

 

 

A Pair of Challenges

Originally published September 7, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1451

A couple of things this time out…

First, a public service announcement.

There has been quite a bit of coverage of Harlan Ellison’s lengthy, exhausting, and (some would say) seemingly hopeless battle against Internet piracy. For those who still have trouble wrapping themselves around it, let me put it to you this way:

If someone creates a website that has a few words of profanity on it, and someone else complains, some providers will shut it down or block access to it.

If someone creates a website that posts the entirety of a novel of mine, and I complain, those selfsame providers will say, “Too bad.”

If that’s okay with you, then move on to the next item. If you have a problem with that, and are interested in backing Ellison who likewise has a problem with that, then you might be interested in the following.

Acclaimed artist George Perez has elected to show his support for Ellison’s Kick Internet Piracy Campaign by crafting an illustration that features his character of Crimson Plague going toe to toe with Bill Tucci’s “Shi.” It’s 11 x 17 on bristol board, penciled and inked by Perez, and will be going up for auction on eBay. All profits will be donated straight to Ellison’s KICK Internet Piracy lawsuit.

Anyone who’s ever been involved in a lawsuit with even a “normal” opponent knows what a lengthy, draining experience it can be. So imagine being up against some of the largest media conglomerates in the world, with well-heeled lawyers on retainer, who figure they can pretty much do whatever the hell they want while stepping on your face. Now multiply that feeling by a hundred and you’ll have some inkling of the challenge undertaken by Ellison and his one attorney, Christine Valada. They need and deserve your support.

* * *

Once upon a time, it is said, comics covers—and the stories which accompanied them—were arrived at very methodically.

The editors and publishers studied the covers of the comics that sold better than other comics. They tried to discern what elements on those covers might have contributed to the improved sales. Then (so it’s been said) they would craft covers that utilized those key elements, toss the covers over to a writer and say, “Write a story that goes with this!”

So, for instance, let’s say that they notice a trend wherein any comic with a gorilla on the cover sells like hotcakes (have you ever wondered what hotcakes sell like? I know I have. But I digress…) They also notice that covers with sporting events also do well. You’re the editor of Superman. You digest this information. And as a result, you commission a cover which depicts the following: A gorilla with a red cape, on a baseball diamond, standing at home plate waving a bat, with Jimmy Olsen catching, Perry White umpiring, Superman on the mound about to deliver a pitch, the count reads O and 2, and the gorilla is thinking, “Little do they suspect that I’m actually Superman trapped in this body… and if I strike out on this next pitch… all of Metropolis is doomed!” And the cover blurb reads, “The Super-Gorilla Who Couldn’t Hit an Inside Curve!”

Great cover. Should sell pretty well. One problem: No story to go with it. So you holler for a writer, he puts on his thinking cap, and within a few weeks, you have a ten page spectacular which features scintillating scripting such as:

CAPTION: Suddenly, the Super-Gorilla unexpectedly leans in to bunt!

SUPER-GORILLA THOUGHT BALLOON: If I can just tap the ball down the third base line…

THIRD BASEMAN: Move in! I think he’s trying to bunt!

Next panel:

CAPTION: And… success!

SUPER-GORILLA THOUGHT BALLOON: I did it! Now… must run to First base…

THIRD BASEMAN: He’s running to First base–! On the bunt–! Which he made unexpectedly–!

You get the idea.

The thing is, if one removes the sales motivation from the process, that really does sound like a lot of fun. The whole “Here’s a warped cover notion; make a story to go with it” thing.

When Joe Quesada announced Marvel’s Words Worthless month, one of the criticisms leveled was that writers weren’t given a choice over participating. What seemed to me to be an intriguing challenge was deemed onerous by any number of people, many of whom don’t seem to voice objections with quite such ferocity when writers are told, “Your monthly title is going to be occupied with chapters 3, 9, and 15 of a forty issue crossover; whatever you were working on gets put on hold for three months. Deal with it.” Compared to that, Quesada’s challenge was a cakewalk.

Me, I think throwing down a creative gauntlet is a grand comic tradition. And the idea of presenting a loopy cover and saying, “Here, make sense of it” is one of the classics of that form. So here’s what I think Marvel should do next… or DC. I don’t care. Someone should do it.

They should hold a contest called “Because you demanded it!” And they should invite fans to submit their most bizarre, twisted, demented notions for a comic book cover (keeping it clean, of course.) Writers who want to get involved should do so, but with no strings attached. No “dibs” on who they get to write… and no backing out once they’re on board.

The editors would choose what they feel are the best dozen or so ideas—the ones with the most possibilities—and then get artists to draw the covers, whereupon they are sent to the writers. The writers are then obligated to come up with stories that somehow, in some way, tie in with the covers. Restrictions: No stories involving dreams, hallucinations, or drug-induced hazes (too easy) or stories that are out-and-out whacked out parodies; they should be told with the same sort of determined illusion of seriousness that characterized the best of the Silver Age DCs. The winning entries are then published, either as individual books or as a single trade edition, and the original cover art is awarded to each of the winning contestants.

I know I’d volunteer.

I love a challenge.

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. He started buying The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius because of the issue that had the gorilla on the cover.)

 

 

Undistinguished Competition

Originally published August 31, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1450

Although intercompany rivalry and jabbing between Marvel and DC is hardly anything new, in the past it was always done with a sense of… I dunno… style. And humor. Cast your recollections to the days of “Our Distinguished Competition,” which always sounded to me like a southern lawyer sparring with a northerner. Or just calling the competition “Brand Echh,” in a send-up of commercials at the time which wouldn’t compare themselves directly to competitors but instead use a generic substitute (as opposed to now when Advil will not hesitate to tell you it’s better than Excedrin, Bayer, Tylenol, Dristan, and sex all rolled into one.)

And DC occasionally took shots back, mostly aimed at Stan’s ego… and, most memorably, Marvel expatriate Jack Kirby basing the characters “Funky Flashman” and “Houseroy” on Stan Lee and Roy Thomas. As a young reader, that went right past me without ruining the stories, as the best in-jokes should.

But now, though… the kid gloves seem to be coming off. Friendly feuding is rapidly being replaced by what seems to be genuine dislike and personality clashes, at a time when the industry still needs a ton of work to become genuinely healthy. Under those circumstances, watching DC and Marvel wail on each other is kind of like watching a T-Rex and a triceratops going at it while sinking into a tarpit.

Joe Quesada, who I think is working his butt off to be Marvel’s cheerleader-in-chief, clearly does what he does because of passionate love for the field. I would like to think that that’s why every involved does it. But apparently not. According to Joe, industry professionals are wearing “self-loathing like a shroud.”

Oh. Is that what this thing is? I mean, I always thought it was mosquito netting, but no, apparently that sucker draped over me is self-loathing. Fancy that.

Despite how fabulous we think comics are, apparently “…in the end, we’re afraid that everyone will find out that we’re just horn-rimmed, pencil-neck geeks lusting over the pretty girl at the dance. We’re passionate about our art form (see, told’ja) yet even in that passion, we can’t avoid—can’t be anything but—self-effacing.”

Now I don’t think it’s particularly self-effacing to acknowledge that comics simply aren’t as popular or accepted an artform here as in, say, Japan. To note that, zealous prosecutors are actually able to have comics retailers found guilty of peddling smut by selling a jury on the notion that comics are just for kids. It’s not self-effacing to exhibit disappointment over the fact that, for instance, Buffy the Vampire Slayer draws in millions of viewers, but Joss Whedon’s excellent Fray, which should be a must for every Buffy fan, languishes in the lower realms of the sales charts because TV viewers either don’t know it exists or would never be caught dead reading a comic. It’s not self-effacing to realize the reality of the situation and vent frustration that it is not otherwise.

But if Joe really thinks the industry is too self-effacing then, in the words of the Joker, “This town needs an enema.” What’s required, then, is a spokesman who is not hesitant to sound off everywhere, to anyone who will listen, with no trace of modesty, just how incredibly terrific and cool comics are. Someone with enough personal charisma and natural ebullience that the media finds him irresistible. Someone who can work the late night talk show circuit, the college campuses. Someone people just can’t get enough of. Someone with years of experience doing it. Someone like… oh, wait… let me think… it’s coming to me… on the tip of my tongue…

Oh! Yeah! How about…

Stan Lee?

Stan Lee, Joe. Self-effacing and comics couldn’t remotely be mentioned in the same breath when Stan Lee was pushing our interests. So why isn’t Stan thumping the drums for Marvel…?

Ah… wait. I remember now.

Joe concluded, “We may look around ourselves and not like the reality of the situation, but here’s the key: With enough imagination, we can beat the heck out of any reality, and that ain’t no myth, brother!”

Good point. I’m going to put on my imagination cap now. And I’m going to imagine an industry wherein, when retailers express frustration over corporate decisions, they aren’t told that those decisions constitute an I.Q. test for them… with the direct implication that they’ve flunked.

I’m going to imagine an industry wherein I don’t go to the San Diego convention every year and see what I can only refer to as Fantoms… talented writers and artists who were producing top selling work when the current crop of editors was in short pants… guys who built the franchises upon which the companies now rest. Fantoms, former fan favorites who now, like ghosts, haunt the conventions, searching for work, finding none, cold-shouldered by those self-same editors. Running into an attitude given the stamp of company policy by executives who emphasize that the search is on only for hot, new, young talent. Older creators get a pat on the head and shown the door.

I’ve seen my potential future in the Fantoms, Joe, some years back, and it scared the hell out of me. Guys who sold comics in far higher numbers than I ever did, only to be considered unusable, passe, outta here. I’ve worked hard to branch out into as many storytelling venues as I have because I’ve seen the comics writing on the wall, and it’s not my writing; it’s the writing of guys currently concerned with acne and braces. That’s not self-effacing. That’s survival in an eat-’em-up, spit-’em-out comics world mentality that I only see endorsed at the corporate level.

I’m sorry, Joe, you’re a great guy and all, and I think your heart’s in the right place. But Marvel doesn’t get to tell retailers they’re intellectually stunted or give long-time pros the gate and then get all misty eyed and claim we’re in the midst of a major downer. In this piano bar, at least, that doesn’t play.

And as for Bob Wayne’s subsequent San Diego speech… jeez louise. I mean, he must have had another speech prepared, but apparently he bagged the text in favor of one that was rife with potshots at Marvel. Some issues back, when I wrote about Marvel’s displaying the “Neener factor,” it never occurred to me that DC would then turn around and embrace it. “If DC was the kind of publisher that talked about IQ tests, I’m confident that those of us who love comics—retailers and publishers, freelancers and fans—would do just fine compared to anyone who suddenly drops into our world loudly announcing just how much smarter he is than the rest of us,” said Bob. The other guys suck and we’re cool. Who loves ya, baby? Neener neener neener.

Now DC’s done a lot right. Then again, so has Marvel. They dropped the Comics Code, a move I still support, and retailers are reporting that sales of Marvels are indeed increasing—due to a combination of quality in storytelling, canny assignment of talent, and good old fear that’s causing retailers to order more because they’re afraid they won’t be able to get reorders.

Certainly DC is entitled to take its bows, to receive its props, whatever you want to call it. But it could have done so taking the high road. Instead what we got was a speech that sounded for all the world like a parent in a divorce sitting the kids down and saying, “You know, daddy says he loves you, but really, mommy loves you more.” “Kids, I know mommy’s been talking to you, but you have to understand… your mother is the queen witch of the western world.”

I mean, c’mon! Wasn’t it remotely possible for DC to connect with the retailers without stirring up whatever anger and resentment they may already feel toward Marvel? What possible purpose is served for DC to indulge in self-aggrandization at the expense of the company to which they are bonded?

Yes, bonded. That’s what it comes down to. Because unlike divorcing parents who can split and go on to better lives without their spouses, DC and Marvel need each other. They’re linked. Because retailers are still surviving on profit margins cut too close to the bone. If Marvel goes belly-up one day, I do not want to lay odds on retailers being able to make up the short fall quickly enough to keep their doors open. And if hundreds of retailers go away suddenly, Diamond’s got a major cash flow problem. And if Diamond winds up on a slab, we’re cooked.

So you’ve got DC trying to act with the gravitas of an elder statesman, the reserved and caring guy, and Marvel behaving like a hyperkinetic ten year old, a swaggering teen, and a pep squad all rolled into one. And both companies are regarding each other with anger, annoyance, and total frustration that they’re stuck with one another. Watching DC and Marvel go at it is like watching The Defiant Ones, except Sidney Poitier is handcuffed to Howie Mandell. It’s entertaining on some level, and gets lots of ink, but ultimately it’s counterproductive and doesn’t solve a damned thing.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the tailor. Taking my cue from Linus Van Pelt, I’m planning to have my shroud of self-loathing made over into a nice sports jacket.

(Peter David, possible future Fantom, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)

 

Some X-Factor comments

First of all, I want to make clear that I very much appreciate the kind comments and even outrage from many fans who are objecting to X-Factor being cancelled. I think it’s swell that people have started a “Save X-Factor” Facebook page and tried to get “SaveANXF” trending on Twitter.

I would also like to say something to the people who are declaring that I’m obviously angry or petulant or whatever because I mentioned that the “wait for trade” attitude leads to books being canceled.

I love how people keep saying that I’m upset. That I’m complaining. That I’m whining. That I’m castigating paying customers. No, I’m really not, and if you people think I sound angry, then I am frankly astounded at the low tolerance level of an Internet that thinks nothing of posting the most vicious, nasty, mean-spirited and typically anonymous comments about creators in the industry and then howl with indignation when any creator (not just me, but any others on countless occasions) says anything that can be remotely construed as hostile.

No, I’m not upset. I simply stated truth. There are some titles that are considered must-buys on a monthly basis and the rest are “I can wait for the trade” and that latter attitude leads to books being canceled. That is simple fact. Now if people want to get angry with me simply because I’m speaking the truth, fine, go ahead. I really don’t care.

PAD

Reviews of Stuff: American Gods, A.I., & more

Originally published July 27, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1445

“Review stuff” was the mandate given us by She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (i.e., Maggie). But nothing was specified.

So I’m going to review the past week’s worth of my entertainment activities.

A couple of weeks ago, Neil Gaiman was in town doing a book signing promoting American Gods. Kathleen and I went, and opted not to be “fabulous” and just walk up to Neil (who was busy signing away and taking lots of time with each and every fan, of which about two to three hundred turned out.) Instead we just waited in line with everyone else. It was especially entertaining listening to fans, who had been following the entire McFarlane-“Angela”-“Miracle Man” imbroglio, angrily excoriating Todd and talking about all the people he’d been mean to, unaware I was standing two feet away.

Nevertheless, we wound up waiting two flippin’ hours, (by which point I’d been made by some eagle-eyed fans and they stopped talking about fan stuff because they knew I was standing there, so a lot of the charm dissipated for me) so when I cracked open the book, I thought, Damn, this sucker better be worth it.

Well, it definitely was.

Nominally American Gods is the story of Shadow, a recently released convict who finds himself in the employ of… well… a god, who goes by the name of Mr. Wednesday (and anyone who knows the derivation of the day’s name can pretty much figure out pretty quickly who he is.) Shadow is informed by his new employer that a major war is heating up between the old, recognizable gods, such as the Egyptian pantheon, and the newer gods whom Americans have come to worship: Gods of media, computers, cell phones, etc. And as Wednesday’s aide-de-camp, Shadow will have a significant, if infuriatingly undefined, role in the impending struggle.

But that is really only a backdrop for Gaiman’s leisurely examination of the ever-changing landscape of American faith. We live in a country where we question, more and more, the relevance of gods in our existence. There is virtually no mention of standard churches, religious organizations, Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism et al in American Gods. Jesus doesn’t show up and offer to roll up his sleeves and battle side by side with Buddha (which is fortunate, considering they just did that over in South Park.) They don’t factor in at all, almost as if organized religion itself is a side issue, churches such a big business that genuine faith—and the sacrifices, both spiritual and physical, that such faith entails—have gone by the wayside. Instead American Gods explores what, if anything, is truly important to Americans. What do we really care about? What sacrifices are we genuinely willing to make in order to show we believe? What is it, out there, that we believe in anymore? And what, out there, believes in us?

Shadow’s odyssey is an odd conglomeration: Part “Road” movie if Hope and Crosby were on acid; part Deathbird Stories as Gaiman examines the sometimes symbiotic, sometimes parasitic relationship between gods and their worshippers; and part Shirley Jackson, as a small and seemingly idealized town becomes a microcosm for American society: What evil sacrifices are we willing to accept in order to protect our concept of the common good, and are those sacrifices justified, or do they taint the end product? And yet with all these literary forebears, American Gods is nevertheless a unique and thought-provoking piece of literature, Sandman taken to the next level of examination. I wasn’t one hundred percent blown away by the resolution of the God War itself, but by that point I was so involved with all the other aspects of the book that it almost seemed secondary, and it didn’t diminish the impact of what Gaiman was trying to say with the rest of the work. Highly recommended.

* * *

I finished American Gods yesterday and immediately started the trade paperback collection of Warren Ellis’ thought provoking Come in Alone column which ran weekly for a year on the Comic Book Resources website. I read it from time to time in its run, but it’s nice to have it all in one place, and see the cumulative impact of Ellis’ genuine love for the medium and frustration at its shortcomings.

Being self-obsessed, of course, I can’t let Warren’s following observation slip past without comment: “I mean, I’m sure Peter David has a fine old time on Supergirl, but I have to be honest; watching him piss away his gift for dialogue and the inventiveness I’ve seen from him in person on thin little books that will never be seen again past the week of their release is a bloody waste.”

My first response is, as one would expect, “Gee, thanks… I guess…” But then I figured, hey… it’s not like I’m in a field where anything is guaranteed. I spend a few days writing an issue of Supergirl, it’s out there for a week, and people enjoy it. This is as opposed to a writer who’s not Neil Gaiman, spending months crafting a novel so that it can go out to bookstores with no promotion or advertising, be buried among other books, sit there for a few weeks unnoticed, get the covers ripped off and pulped, unseen by anybody. Or spending a year on a film that’s supposed to be a theatrical release except studio politics sends it straight to video and only one out of every twenty video stores even carries it. Or spending two years on a play, in staged readings, workshops, rehearsals, so that it can be trashed by critics who didn’t get it and close in New Haven.

It doesn’t mean that I’m not always striving to get my work out there in new and more challenging venues… but in the meantime, there are worse fates than those thin little books.

* * *

Major, major spoiler warning: I am now going to ruin the ending of A.I. I do this with a clear conscience, because Steven Spielberg already ruined it. In fact, anyone who asks me if they should see it, I tell the same thing with all seriousness: Go see it, but when the words “2000 Years Later” appears on the screen, motor out of there. If you absolutely insist on staying, then pretend you’re at home watching a DVD version, and you’re now screening an alternate ending that’s part of the bonus materials. You know, like that dippy ending to Terminator II set in Washington, D.C. The kind of thing that makes you wonder what an otherwise capable filmmaker could possibly have been thinking.

A.I. isn’t Spielberg’s first endeavor to take a classic fantasy story and cast it in science fiction terms. That would be his other lettered film, E.T., which was essentially Peter Pan, complete with lost boys, dazzling flying sequences, and a Tinkerbell-like glowing resurrection. But A.I. is even more blatant. Spielberg, working off a treatment begun by Stanley Kubrick, endeavors to craft a tale that recasts Pinocchio with a robot boy named David, who decides to seek out the Blue Fairy so that he can become a real boy and earn his mother’s love (don’t ask). Gepetto is William Hurt’s scientist, who crafts the closest thing to a son he can produce; the cricket is incarnated as a talking Teddy Bear; the crafty fox shows up as Jude Law’s “Gigolo Joe,” a character who starts strong but eventually devolves into exposition man; Stromboli the sadistic puppeteer shows up as the ruthless overseer of a “Flesh Fair” in which robots are trashed for sport; Pleasure Island becomes Philadelphia by way of Blade Runner; we even have David searching for his mother underwater. I kept waiting for Monstro to show up.

I will admit that I was not convinced by Sixth Sense that Haley Joel Osment could act. He spent that whole film looking terrified and speaking in a low whisper. That’s no challenge. Any adorable kid actor who contemplates what his career is going to be like when he’s not cute anymore (ex: Macaulay Culkin) should be able to carry off gut-wrenching fear. But his work in A.I. has me convinced. His impressive performance provides the emotional soul that’s missing from the script.

Even with its shortcomings and by-the-numbers pacing, the first hour and forty minutes of the film works powerfully enough. And then we get the ending: The real ending (i.e., the one Kubrick would have gone for) and the Spielberg ending, which wrecks the good ship A.I. on the shores of overreaching sentimentality.

The real ending has David in a submersible vessel in a Coney Island flooded because the polar ice caps melted (although you can’t pin the cinematic mess on Kevin Costner this time around.) The sub’s headlights pick up a statue of the Blue Fairy, part of an exhibit in the submerged remains of a storybook amusement park. Having finally found his goal (he thinks) David then proceeds to beg the Blue Fairy to transform him, over and over, like a broken record. And the camera slowly pulls away as an omniscient narrator tells us that David continued doing so, without let-up, until he ran down and the world froze over.

It’s powerful, moving, heartwrenching. Because what David has learned, in striving to be a “real boy” by pursuing a fairy tale, is that fairy tales don’t exist. They’re fantasies, contrivances. They’re not real. David goes as far as he can in his personal quest, but he is forever destined to fail in it because one can only fail in such a quixotic endeavor. Finding Blue Fairies is what happens to fantasy constructs, while failure in impossible tasks is what happens to real people. He gets his wish to be real, but in a backhanded manner: In his failure, he finds some measure of reality. Considering the oceans freeze, it’s literally cold comfort.

Not good enough for Spielberg. We then go two thousand years later, where David is thawed out by… well, frankly, I’m not sure what the hell they are. Aliens? Maybe. An advanced form of machine life? Perhaps. Either way, they come out of nowhere. After lifting from fairy tales and literature, Spielberg then blows it by resorting to one of the hoariest dramatic contrivances of all: Deus ex machina. (Or, perhaps Machina ex Deus, if you subscribe to the notion that these are machines.)

Let us put aside for the moment that if you’re doing CGI creatures, why the hell give them two arms and two legs as if they’re going to be played by human actors? The problem is that once these creatures show up, everything goes out the window. David asks if they can make him real. They say they can’t. Why not? We’ve never seen them before, and their capabilities are purely at the writer’s whim. Why can’t they say, “Sure, no problem, we’ll grow you a body from human cells?” or “Sure, we’ve got a frozen artifact right here, we’ll just transplant your consciousness into it.” David, upon presenting them with a hank of his mother’s hair (again, don’t ask), requests that they recreate her for him so they can be together forever. “You can only spend one day together,” they explain, giving a bullcrap cosmological double-talk reason why this is so. But there’s no excuse for it, really, except to provide an ending in which you see more incredible manipulation and string-pulling than you would at a puppeteer’s convention.

A.I. was obviously a labor of love (as opposed to, say Jurassic Park II, which was just labored). But as anyone can tell you, if you truly love something, you have to be willing to let it go. Spielberg didn’t do that. Instead he held on to it, like a dog worrying a bone, until the only thing left was a feeling of annoyance and the firm belief that Kubrick—had he been there—would have wielded a pair of scissors to end the film properly. Instead A.I. winds up becoming A.OY.

So how was your week?

(Peter David, writer of stuff, will be spending most of his time at the San Diego Comic Con signing autographs at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Booth and the Claypool Press booth. In addition, he will be doing readings from his work Saturday afternoon.)