Short Fiction Wednesday

Your Life Sentence by CC Finlay
The Red Bride by Samantha Henderson

I really hate those types of articles that start “As some one once said...” and then go on to offer some really famous quotation - “As someone once said, ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet...’” I mean honestly! If they don’t know that, how can you trust anything else they have to say? 

Was it him?

It is therefore with some annoyance that I begin this week’s short fiction Wednesday with, “As someone once said, drama is conflict.” Was it Brecht? Was it Shaw? Was it Chekhov? Gah! It doesn’t turn anything up on google... maybe it’s just a truism from days gone by? Maybe it was Aristotle? Answers on a postcard please! 

Anyway, whoever it was, it's good point. Fiction thrives on conflict: some one has something that some one else wants, and the story hangs on how they about getting it, or not getting as the case may be. There are others sorts of fiction, I suppose, that can work in the hands of someone that knows what they’re doing or strikes it lucky, but the vast majority of fiction uses this very simple formula (usually, as Sam Goldwyn observed, hinging on the matter of fighting or fucking).  

Ut!

Apropos of this recent post about old timey comics we loved, here's the man himself, Bob Burden, creator of The Flaming Carrot.

That's him on the right with Jonathan Ross in the middle and illustrator Tommy Lee Jones on the left, at Comic Con in 2010 (just this last weekend).

Nice shirt, Bob!

The Complete Nemesis the Warlock Volume 1: Books 1-4

Credo!

 The big questions for a long-time 2000AD fan are this: when did 2000AD change, and what did it change from and to?

I think it's clear that it started out as a fairly traditional boys comics, updated for the post-sixties era, taking in some of the creative lessons learned from Action and giving them a sci fi twist. Early thrills were pretty much boys' comics staples – Invasion! and M.A.C.H. One were old fashioned tough guys; Flesh was a twist on the exotic jungle great white hunter story, with Old One Eye at its heart as a kind of animal anti-hero like in those Jack London novels; Harlem Heroes was a sports strip; and Dan Dare was a very clear indication that they were aiming for that core “boy” audience, probably with an average age of about twelve and a long tail going back to six year olds and petering out quickly after about fourteen.

Judge Dredd – which only began in prog 2, remember! - was an early indication of the direction the comic would take, with social satire and black humour similar to the types of sci fi movies we saw in the late sixties and early seventies – Silent Running, Logan's Run and especially the triumvirate of Charlton Heston apocalypse movies, Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man and Soylent Green. This was definitely something new in a boys comic – I'd seen the space adventure comics that had been brought out by the Commando comics people, for example, and they were much more trad space adventures than really engaged sci fi in the way of Judge Dredd.

Well, maybe we'll get to Dredd one day, but today I want to take a look at a story that signalled a similarly profound break from boys' comics that had gone before and was one of the clearest antecedents for the way the comic is today, Nemesis the Warlock.

Short Fiction Wednesday

Bridesicle by Wil Mcintosh
Non-Zero Probabilities by N K Jemsin

 Sam Goldwyn ponders the two types of stories.

I think it’s Sam Goldwyn who said “There’s only two stories, fucking and fighting.” SF and fantasy tends to focus on the latter, with the former usually only present in its grosser forms, rather than in the form Goldwyn was - referring to (love stories, of course - what sort of movies do you think he made?) Both today’s stories are love stories in their own way.

Whatever happened to all the fun in the world?

An interesting essay in the Guardian today (or yesterday, rather) about the somewhat subdued non-genre comics scene.

Every few months since the dawn of time – or, at least, since Superman first fled Planet Krypton – articles have appeared in newspapers announcing: "Comics grow up!" God knows, I've written a few. You go from a jocular paragraph or two about "underpants worn outside the trousers", via the obligatory reference to Alan Moore's Watchmen and a cap-doffing to Art Spiegelman's Holocaust epic Maus, before rounding off with an overenthusiastic payoff.

 I too have grown heartily sick of such articles, although at the same time my own comics consumption has narrowed to more-or-less exclusively supers. In the olden days, when I was young and  full of spunk, I read a lot of "alternative" comics. I tended to like the funny ones, so I was a bit iffy on stuff like Love & Rockets and Cerebus, but I really loved the early Eightball (and I think Icehaven is possibly the best comic ever made), Chris Ware's hilarious Quimby Mouse and Potato Man, Reid Fleming the World's Toughest Milkman, Flaming Carrot and, of course, Robert Crumb and the Freak Brothers.

 Maybe it's still in a box somewhere...

I'm a sci fi guy in general, so I'm not that keen on things I probably wouldn't read if they were a book - the works of Seth, eg, or Persepolis or Tamara Drew by Posey Symonds thing (although I did read that when it was serialised int he Guardian, it wasn't really my cup of tea, as much as I appreciated the craft). What I really miss, though, are the wild satirical and funny books - some of the early stuff by Joe Sacco (although I like his reportage work a great deal), Charles Burns or some of the sillier things in RAW.

Ut! Remember this guy?

I like this article, because it sums up my problem with independent comics right now:

It's as if half the movie industry is Hollywood and the other half is Todd (Happiness) Solondz.

I am - as Monty Python memorably put it - an intellectual midget who likes giggling. I enjoy my "Hollywood" comics well enough, but I'd really like to see the comics equivalents of The Office or Mitchell & Webb, clever, funny, perhaps a dash of satire and black humour and fewer gloomy tales of dispossessed loners.

State of Change

Well, that's it: all ten part are out. State of Change is now available as a single pdf document here, but if you want to read it online the links, in order, are:

Part One: The Fear
Part Two: The Offer
Part Three: A Bit Like A Lobotomy
Part Four: The New Direction
Part Five: The Silver Machine
Part Six: Body Fuck/Mind Fuck
Part Seven: Psychedelic Super Nazis
Part Eight: Cuba Street Improv
Part Nine: The Not Quite Death of Arlo Makepeace Dylan
Part Ten: The End

I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think.

However....

All that said, Kick Ass was a fantastic movie.

ETA:

Yeah, okay, so i saw it the other night (in one of those teeny-tiny late run cinemas in town) and really enjoyed. One thing Millar does really well is hit those moments in an action narrative, all that hero's journey stuff, I guess: the Call, denial of the call, trip to the underworld etc etc. When it's connected with strong characters and a sharp execution - as here, and in the Ultimates vols 1&2 and (mostly) in Old Man Wolverine - it's breathtaking. When it doesn't work it feels empty, like he's going through the motions (the current Ultimate Avengers series). When he tries some other story arc - his FF run, eg - he comes adrift.

So, I think he's really good at one thing, and when that one thing works out it's hard to top him. That structural sensibility is not to be sniffed at: plenty of fine writers lack it. Sure, they have other fine qualities (fine prose, eg, or a fantastic imagination) but the structure stuff is what tips a story out and gives it forward momentum. Millars really good at that.