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Category: Culture

Tales of ink and paper

February 24, 2003
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Saith Steve Lieber, comic book creator:

Thanks for asking. I’m working with a novelist on his first comic book project, and doing the research for another one that’ll be all me.

A fan replies:

Sounds good… Any publishers lined-up, or is that much further down the line?
(And any hints on the novelist’s identity?)

And Lieber spills:

No publishers lined up yet, but I guess there’s no reason to be coy. It’s Sean Stewart. He’s an s.f./fantasy writer, probably best known for GALVESTON, an amazing novel that won the World Fantasy Award in 2001. (Actually folks here might know him better as the story guy behind the webgame for the Spielberg film A.I.) He’s taken a serious interest in comics recently, and has a really good feel for how they work.

Woo hoo!

Small gathering

February 22, 2003
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If I still lived in San Francisco, I would go to Potlatch 12 this weekend. It looks distinctly like Readercon, an East Coast literary SF convention that started up after I left Boston. It seems to have good guests, there’s going to be a writer’s workship, it benefits Clarion West, and they make a good attempt to put panel notes online. Which is just so cool; I’ve always thought it’s a shame that SF cons don’t tend to preserve their panels. Wiser heads may realize that this is in fact a blessing.

Oasis time

February 21, 2003
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Phew. I finally hit the Warren Ellis run on Excalibur. After all the really bad stuff, it was a total breath of fresh air.

Ellis’ work on Excalibur is not of the quality of Stormwatch or Planetary, but it is very good superhero work. Despite his current distaste for writing ongoing superhero books, I think it’s an excellent form for him. Working within someone else’s continuity must be a pain in the ass, but the challenge seems to bring out his ingenuity.

It doesn’t have the same overarching story that his other superhero runs have had. He did a couple of good arcs, including the superb “London Burning” arc, and you can see him working on developing the style that led to the longterm plotting of Stormwatch, but this is definitely early Ellis. The characterizations are awesome. He turned Kitty Pryde into an adult, and Pete Wisdom is a neat anti-hero without being anything like Wolverine or Gambit. He’s an adult anti-hero. You don’t get a lot of that in superhero comics.

I’d recommend seeking out issues #83-103 of Excalibur, along with his miniseries, Pryde and Wisdom. You can skip the Age of Apocalypse stuff, which was four issues under the X-Caliber title. Slogging through the crap was worth it for the Ellis, but you shouldn’t subject yourself to the same pain and his issues are completely legible even if you haven’t read any of the earlier material.

I have also read all the Ben Rabb issues, which conclude the series, but I’ll talk of those when I’ve regained my strength.

Dust in the wind

February 17, 2003
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Daniel Keys Moran is sharing his current novel in progress, The Sheriff of Shokes, on his forums. (If that link fails, try this.) You’ll have to register to read it. The Sheriff of Shokes is not set in the Continuing Time, but it is related. DKM explained this once.

Who is this Moran person? He wrote four pretty good novels back in the late 80s and early 90s. You can get them today via QuietVision, and I recommend them. He’s one of the most graceful writers I’ve ever read, blessed and cursed with epic wit. Occasionally it gets in the way, but he’s just so much fun to read.

His setting is the Continuing Time, which is a vast interconnected timeline covering about ten millennia. He says it’s very detailed and that he has notes of gargantuan proportions that explain everything. Thirty-odd books, planned out and in some cases partially written.

Alas, he more or less ground to a halt as far as publishing anything goes back in 1994. In a chronology he sent out then, there are something like 30 Continuing Time novels, and we’re never going to get to see them, which is pretty sad. He’s passionate enough about his work to make me want to see the entire series, but not passionate enough to get the damned things done. Now that print on demand is a reality, there’s no “my publisher sucks” to fall back on. And he married his old editor, so he’s got someone who can edit books handy. No excuse for not giving us a book every couple of years.

Still. It’s worth buying and reading that which we do have.

Ow ow ow ow

February 16, 2003
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Feeling pretty traumatized. The Claremont/Davis Excalibur is good, and the Davis sans Claremont stuff is all kinds of fun if you like that kind of thing, which I do. But eventually Davis goes away and it becomes all fill in authors and lousy art and X-Men crossovers.

Conveniently, you can tell where the really horrendous stuff begins, because there are hologram covers. No kidding. I’ve never owned a comic with a hologram cover before. I feel kind of unclean.

But yet hm

February 14, 2003
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Well, I’m of three or four minds about this. OK, so Mike Meyers has struck a deal to do what he’s calling “film sampling.” I.e., he’s gonna insert himself or other actors into old movies. Remixes. See also Kung Pow.

I want to see what Meyers does with this concept, cause I think he’s comedic gold, even after the last two Austin Powers flicks. But I hate the way the Variety story calls films “properties.” But I think that this sort of remixing will demonstrate the value of having more creative works in the public domain, since it’ll show what people can do given the right to edit. Except that Meyers isn’t gonna be working with public domain movies. And how the hell does this jibe with the whole ClearPlay issue? Are they really saying “It’s OK to screw with the director’s original vision as long as you own the rights to the movie.”?

Well, of course they are. Still, this move blows the hell out of comments like “There are those who would revise a film for what they claim to be benign reasons. But there are others who would alter for pornographic and obscene reasons. To allow one, it would seem you must allow the other.” That’s Jack Valenti talking, there.