bodybag_pilgrim

 A little while ago a friend of mine almighty_weasel put together some rules for a modern-day version of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. His rules were simple:

1: All team members have to reasonably exist in the modern day. Anyone written or portrayed in contemporary fiction is eligible, as are immortal characters written in times past or characters from the future with a history of Time Travel. Therefore James T. Kirk, with his history of time travel, is eligible, while the crew of Battlestar Galactica are not. Similarly, Merlin is eligible due to his immortality, while Conan the Cimmerian is not.

2: The only characters off-limits are those primarily published in the mainstream Marvel and DC continuities, so no Superman, no Captain America, no Batman, no Spiderman. Characters who have featured in these continuities but who have also featured in works outside them, such as John Constantine (you bastard), are eligible on those grounds. Other than that all other sources are available - TV shows, films, books, computer games, even webcomics.

3: Any characters who have been killed off are ineligible due to death. Similarly, any character from an older film or TV show who was the same age as their actor is disqualified if their actor is now dead. Actors who died young, or who died for reasons that would not have affected their characters, may be onsidered for exemptions by the non-existent authority that judges these things.

4: Differences in continuity? Not a problem! You, the writer, simply get to reconcile these things however you choose. Want The Doctor and Harry Dresden in the same universe? Go for it! You just get to explain how everything fits together. Go wild!

5: One of your 8 hero picks can be used to draft in an Organisation or Institution of some sort, which can feature a small horde of named or un-named characters who will mostly be restricted to cameo appearances. For instance, if you want The Laundry from the Charles Stross novels, then you can have them, or Task Force Valkyrie from Hunter: The Vigil.

6: As well as 8 hero picks, you get 2 picks to be the villain of the piece. One of them has to be a named individual to be the primary antagonist of the series, the other can be an organisation of Evil Mooks (such as the CIA, the Cosa Nostra of the Catholic Church), a secondary named villain to be the primary villain's henchman, or else a wild card - whatever you want. Same rules as drafting heroes apply.

Two of my friends thus far have published their lists in places I can see while I've been looking, and I've been pondering myself.

I set two further rules for myself:

7. Characters should have a plausible connection to 'official' Intelligence services or major organised crime but not be part of same, to allow for an international League with a reasonable connection framework.

8. One character – and one character only – is permitted to simply stumble upon the League rather than be recruited. There must, of course, be a justification.

Without further ado, then...

( The leader of my team... )

Haven't posted on here in ages. As mentioned before I've been transferring my attentions, such as they are when I blog, to my new 'professional' Wordpress. If I mention I consider myself half a cartoonist then people who've been reading this should be able to find the new blog, mostly containing continuing Justice League reinventions thus far, without my having given a terribly usable Google backtrack for future fans to find my personal life.

But this? This is my personal life in nature.

May 2006, I was at my computer at around 10am when my parents phoned with the news about Herbert James Fitzpatrick. He was 91. And my world stopped, for a while. I was numb, overwhelmingly so. It took hours before my brain finished rebooting.

Nimmy was my rock, growing up. More even than my parents, he was my touchstone on what was right. I always got the impression Dad had to do what I do, to think things through, before he could do the right thing. Nimmy had a moral compass installed from the off. He was good with numbers, with pre-microchip technology, with woodwork. He was a MASTER with carpentry, in fact. What he produced is beautiful and much is still in the family today.

Nan was wonderful, when I was young. But I didn't feel that connection. In fact, the distaff side of my family are all a little further from connection with me, which is presumably my fault rather than theirs; I'm the common factor there, after all. Don't get me wrong; I loved her. I love and admire my mother. I love and respect my sister. And any of you who've met me in person know how I feel about my nieces.

Last week Nan had a stroke. It took some time to recover, and I received an email from my mum just yesterday saying that the doctors had confirmed she was out of the worst of it, that she just needed to recover to the point where she would walk (tricky business even before then for a woman with over a decade's growing back trouble and four hip replacement surgeries in her past.)

Last night, in her sleep, the doctors turned out to be wrong. She had another stroke, and I have to suspect at around 4:30am, that being when I came awake for no reason I can deduce. Abduction based on legends of passings within families leads me to the idea that she went when I woke, or rather, vice versa.

I woke up this morning to an email from my mother. We've had a quick Skype chat. We all agree that she was marking time before this happened, and that she will be happier now. We all knew her mind had been slipping since shortly after Jim went, nearly six years ago now. My mother's Fridays will be staggeringly less stressful in the near future, and from now on.

And part of me is getting an attack of Catholic guilt that I'm not as broken up over this as I was - as I am, when I remember him - about Nimmy. It's not fair, it's selfish, and I'll be past it soon, I'm sure, and when I am I'll be able to remember her properly.

Part of me is sorry for Asta Kimpton. Of all my grandparents' closest old friends, she's the only one still living, and she's outlasted all her family. In recent years, all she had was Mary, was my Nan.

I met her a few times; she gave me a beautiful gift that I keep hidden away for feat of losing it. It's not really practical for other things.

There was a generation I knew only through these three and their stories, but it was a generation that shaped the villages of North Wales around it; I can point to a dozen or more major changes driven by my grandparents and their friends. It was a generation that had a deep and profound influence on me at first, second, and third remove.

My grandparents were all but the last of it, and it is all but gone.

Of one thing I can be glad; the last time I spoke to my grandmother, on Boxing Day, we'd gone to see her as a surprise. She was delighted to see us, and we said goodbyes. The last message I sent her was that she was in my thoughts, after the first stroke. By good fortune, I won't have that regret.

And now, I just wait for that to sink in.

Evening, all.

This is another step in my getting serious about writing, but...

I'm going to be, at the least, changing the purpose of this journal soon. Maybe shelving it.

I've written here about my brother. About my parents, at times about my love life, and about my fears for my grandmother's descent into ill health. All that sort of thing.

This is... only possible, for me, because this is a space for friends.

Sure, the public can stumble across it. Sure, that sort of thing happens - but with very, very few exceptions, notably my grandfather's death, I've steered clear of proper names.

The thing is... I have an audience now. A readership. And my brother, my sister, my parents, my family as a whole and even my friends... their privacy is not mine to dismiss. As a thing without names, a roman a clef sans clef, I can feel comfortable writing some of the things I've written.

But as time goes on, I start to realise that if I make a living as a writer, if I build a readership, some of that readership will come looking for my online presence.

So it's time to look at... not so much a professional blog as a professional's blog. Some of what's on here will get transferred across - the World's Finest series of revisions to superheroes will be completed there, and the originals left here. The online-era Desiderata will be transferred, too.

Watch this space... I'll at the very least leave some directions to the place, for those who wish to follow it.

And this place may continue to have the personal stuff, when I feel the need; fun links, all that sort of thing.

Or it may trail away. We'll see.

Happy hunting, gang...

So, with one of the Big Three down, it's time I turned my attention to one of the others. The next one, simply by virtue of my ideas being more fully-formed at present, is Batman.

Who Is Batman?

Batman is the dark nightmare of crime. For whatever reason, supercriminals are more likely to freeze up in panic for Batman than for Superman. Despite the latter's instantaneous speed of reaction, infinite reach, sharp intelligence, superstrength, invulnerability and supersenses. Superman can track you and arrive instantly ("Prankster, Toyman, do you know what radio waves look like? BECAUSE I DO!") where it'll take Batman some time to get there and he may or may not need to employ gadgets to find you once he does. Nonetheless, Batman causes them to freeze in terror in a way Superman doesn't.

Batman is hypercompetent. Since the Morrison run on the JLA, which opened with Batman deducing the secret and secret vulnerability of an opposing superteam and using that to take down several Superman-class opponents, and which continued to make Batman into something of a plot device in places ("Oh, that's right. You're the other new guy. How are we going to work this out if we don't have Batman around?"), his appearances in superhuman-level (as opposed to street level) comics have shown him able to pull his weight with the others despite being, very pointedly, Only Human. Or, more accurately, Only The Peak Of Human Potential.

Batman plays shell games. He's a planner, and often outflanks the opposition by treating the contest as something other than a traditional superstory, framing it as, for example, a corporate takeover or similar. He has plans within plans, even for taking down his own teammates, and has an extensive set of dossiers on the powers, abilities, weaknesses and personalities of the costume sets.

According to various people, Batman is the dominant personality, Bruce Wayne a front; others call Batman just another asset in Bruce Wayne's revenge-driven war on crime. Still others suggest that they're both masks. I'll admit to leaning toward a variant of this one; they're both aspects, certainly, but for me it's a question of mood. Both are USED as tools, but that's the thing; Bruce uses everything as tools. His body, his looks, his fortune, his name, his BUTLER...

Batman is also something of an urban legend. In a spectacularly inconsistent way, he is often depicted as the only Justice Leaguer no one's seen a photograph of. A nightmare, a range of different images. This brings us back to the 'dark nightmare of crime' schtick.

This is a lot of jobs for one person, isn't it?

What Does The Justice League Get From Batman?

A strategist. A deniable operative - no photos of him, after all. A holy terror for criminals to fear. A detective. A purely human representative; no lab accident, battlesuit, or alien device needed, no government experimentation. A window into the upper echelons of society through money.

...This is a lot of jobs for one person, isn't it?

--

So. It's time to turn Batman into our new, renovated variant. Straight away we can erase the last of Batman's jobs; our celebrity Superman provides that window in any case, and arguably does it better. But Cal Ellis is no deniable operative, nor do his tastes run to strategy.

Bruce Wayne made his decision, as a young man, watching his father bleed out in front of him, to fight crime. To make criminals feel the panic, the blind, unreasoning terror that he was feeling in that moment. He didn't know the kind of help he'd have in that, though.

His father had been killed, in the late 1970s, by a group of bigots, a slowly-emergent kind of bigot - one who hated the slow rise in numbers of metahumans. The movement has fallen into effective silence, with the rise of the costumed hero, as the perception of the metahuman changes - nowadays, it's acknowledged that there are many of them, and that they're powerful. And while the bigotry exists, it's a little risky to make any comments openly. His father, by the way, was not a poor man, but neither was he so terribly rich.

Young Bruce, accordingly, isn't the pure human on the roster, because really, that doesn't gibe well with the deniable operative. We'll get to pure human soon enough, but for now, that makes Bruce a strategist, a deniable operative, a holy terror, and a detective.

...This is a lot of jobs for one person, isn't it?

So let's split that. Bruce Wayne originated the Batman, creating an urban legend, and a true terror. He wasn't so much the strategist, though; he wasn't even a detective. He was just a guy who beat on criminals when he found them, and who happened to have a certain deep-down metahuman power, the effects of which are twofold. First, he projects an aura of absolute fear. (He's not even aware of this himself, but when he puts on the costume, he adopts an 'attitude' that happens to be psionically backed.) Second, that same aura seems to scramble cameras.

That started in the latish 80s, when Bruce was about seventeen. His appearance on the scene roughly coincides with Cal Ellis; the two occasionally debate who started first, but it's tricky to tell. By five years in, Pamela Isley was one of his primary antagonists. This remarkable botanist had distilled a number of interesting chemical formulae, and the laws of comics writing meant that her seductive aura and Bruce's terror-aura were always going to make them repeating foes.

Somewhere along the way, they had little Damian. These days, Damian is the second Batman, manifesting the same abilities as his father. Less of a fighter, he's a good detective, having set out to fill gaps in his father's arsenal along the years - Isley and Bruce's 'custody battles' having seen him thoroughly acquainted with both his father and mother's secrets early on in life. Gotham's terrified - descriptions of the Batman tally even less than before, and people are starting to swear that he can be in two places at once. They know the secret'll get out sooner or later - but that's not the point. It works for now.

In the 1990s, Cal followed Metallo to Gotham. While he was there, he saw Batman - and he saw someone about to kill him. Superman being Superman, he intervened. The two had a lengthy argument, but an idea occurred to Cal a month later, at a time when he needed to investigate a scheme he believed Luthor to be setting up - but couldn't afford to be seen doing so in case he was wrong. He found Batman again, and offered to fund some new equipment in return for a favour; something deniable.

That arrangement set the model for the liason that Batman maintains with the Justice League; he helps out, never an official member, protecting his legend, and the League, in their turn, look favourably upon the things Bruce Wayne feels need funding. From time to time, Pamela Isley has even been roped in - though on such occasions she grows densely-woven armour of vines around herself, adopting a different approach and a deeper, almost masculine voice. The Justice League know her as Swamp Thing and credit her in their accounts as the fictional Alec Holland.

So, that covers deniable operative, holy terror, and detective, but leaves the League down a strategist. The League's primary strategist is coming, but they do have a secondary operative in that role, one whose eye in the sky allows her to run strategy from outside the fray; sometimes, this is more than a little useful.

That strategist comes through Batman. In 1999, Bruce Wayne became aware that a trio had sprung up to threaten master catburglar and gangmistress Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman, on his turf. This all-girl trio patterned themselves after birds - Dinah Lance, the Black Canary, Stephanie Brown, the Robin, and Barbara Gordon, aka (at the time) Hawkgirl, and the third to use that name. Gordon had family ties both to one of the few Gotham cops to tolerate Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and on her mother's side to Carter Hall, the second Hawkman. After his wife died, he offered the mantle to Barbara, and during one of his periodic deaths (the guy seems to die and come back a hell of a lot) she inherited his fortune.

Gordon took Carter's death seriously, retiring from fieldwork and reinventing herself as a stellar computer hacker, tactician, and information/intelligence expert. She offered her information to Dinah and Stephanie, and to Batman once the Birds of Prey, as they called themselves, and he finally got on the same page. Through Batman they reached out to Wonder Woman, the Justice League's leader, and Barbara Gordon has been an official JLA operative, working from home at one of the world's most expensive computer setups, ever since. Indeed, she's shepherded the young Green Lantern from his debut to his status as one of the Earth's greatest heroes; they have something of a relationship forming, though her heart remains with a certain Bludhaven cop...

So the votes lay primarily in the direction of the Justice League of America. I've pretty much GOT to start with the Big Three, and out of those three, the one who's likely to be trickiest to reinvent is Superman. So here we go - Superman.

First, let's take a look at the character as he stands.

Who Is Superman? You all know the story. Kal-El, fired from Krypton in a spaceship in that planet's dying moments to land on Earth, where he's raised by Kansas farmers to values that are some of the best America has to offer, discovers he has incredible powers (these being due to the light of our sun, but that's only semi-relevant). He takes on a bright, iconic costume and becomes an inspiration, at the same time hiding behind glasses as Clark Kent.

From the Justice League perspective, the Planet/Lois Lane side of his story is less important, but the Clark Kent side is extremely important. I've seen multiple interpretations of the Batman/Bruce Wayne question - Bruce is real, Batman is real, neither is on top, it's just about whether he's wearing a mask - but Superman, Clark Kent, and Kal-El are a triangle, and all three are important to the character's dynamic.

Superman is the icon. Many classic moments revolve around the core of the character grappling with his need to live up to the iconic perception the world has of Superman - his talk with Wally in the JLA arc introducing Zauriel ("This is the guy who was worried about living up to his image. He's wrestling an angel.") and the award-winning issue of Hitman that proves Garth Ennis actually doesn't hate superheroes, seriously guys, enough, being two particular standouts to me - but at the same time, there's, say, Morrison's JLA: World War III arc ("Think of all those times Superman has saved us. This is our chance to pay him back."), the central plot of the sacrifices in Moore's 'What Do You Get The Man Who Has Everything?' and many others.

Clark Kent is the human. Specifically, Clark is the NICEST GUY YOU WILL EVER KNOW. Forget the clumsiness, the chronic lateness - that's cover story, not character note. Clark was, for want of a better word, raised right - and it's Clark Kent who's friends with Batman. It's Clark Kent who gives Krypto to Superboy because he needs a friend. It's Clark Kent who constructed the icon with his mother, because he knows someone has to stand for things. As much as any comics fan ever has, Clark Kent wants to be Superman.

Kal-El is... I nearly wrote that Kal is the reason Clark isn't Superman. This is both a massive simplification and total bullshit. Kal is another perspective; an outsider, a set of responsibilities outside Earth and his parents' role that creates tension, sometimes. He has two sets of parents to live up to, and they want very different things. (What they want depends on what reboot this is and what Krypton's being written as this week.) It takes all three to make the character.

What Does The JLA Get From Superman? Superman is, theoretically, the First Superhero. Despite some very awkward, hamhanded attempts to make that literal - time travel stories that see him inspire the chronologically-first superhero - this is mostly rooted in his iconic status. To the civilians, he is entirely trusted. To the other heroes... he's been doing it longer than they have. He's an inspiration. He'll keep them safe, and he's a moral centre. This, and his broad-array powers, is what he brings to the Justice League.

So, let's take that, and let's remodel things.

---

So. Superman. Let's keep the bulletproof nature, the strength, and the flight. Let's keep, too, the senses, and let's just cut the all-round superspeed - his flight speed is incredible, but that kind of fine-manipulation speedwork is the Flash's bailiwick.

But let's ditch Krypton.

Yeah, I know. But we don't need that. Part of the character is an outsider who embraces a culture; we've also seen Krypton-as-future-Earth, too, which does the same thing but gets needlessly Messianic. Let's make Superman more literally superhuman; that way, any stories involving his supercousin or his superdog or her supercat or her male lesbian superhorse or his iconic foe, a supercriminal from his home planet, don't fuck with his gimmick.

Cal Ellis, to use a name we've seen associated with the Superman mythos before, was born in, let's say, the 1840s, in what is now Kansas. Cal's family were black slaves and, occasionally, the white plantation owners who'd dabbled in their genepool - and dabbling in their genepool is going to be a motif here. Cal's line had been bred for exceptionalism; the details can be brushed over here but there's a fair amount of flashback stories to be had. He was strong, fairly quick, extremely perceptive, and very smart - well, no. His father was. Cal was expected to be better.

Then came The Event. We can look at all sorts of things as to what did it, but the long and the short of it is that Cal's father and his owner colluded to use a magical artefact to send the boy 'away', due to various troubles - again, were this a longer treatment, I'd fill this out in detail. As it stands, we'll play loose.

Cal ended up in the mid-70s, aged about two, and... stronger. Quicker. His eyes saw more than they should, and ears heard from states away when he concentrated. Later on he would discover that his strength translated into resilience, and he'd find the joy of flight. Somewhere along the way he'd learn to cause a spark and light a fire with nothing but eyes.

The magic that sent him away and did this to him left its mark on him. As with the original Superman, magic is his greatest vulnerability.

From here, Cal's story mirrors the original to some degree. He's adopted by the Kents and raised by them with the kind of moral values and determination to live up to them which make him the League's moral compass. His costume is bright, shiny, noble, and I'll leave it up to the artist what precisely it looks like. There's no mask - and, indeed, this Cal is open about his identity, but speaks up about the rights of other heroes to hide theirs. He's currently engaged to his true love - Lori Lemaris, cousin to the King of the Sea, the hero known as Aquaman. It's another indication of Superman's ability to accept and respect other cultures, and the celebrity whirl of their relationship has brought the surface world closer to their Atlantean cousins. Which, in and of itself, weighs on Cal - at the back of his mind is that his relationship imploding could set the situation between the two human species back decades.

 This Superman is not the first hero, nor is he the Justice League's leader. He's been active for about 25 years, though, since he was a teen, and he holds the respect of the superhero community as a result - his upright nature and ability to reduce a quandary down to its basic elements so the right thing to do becomes obvious are legendary. When the League needs someone to speak to a member of a culture they don't know well - aliens, people from the future, scientologists - it's Superman who goes to talk to them.

He's noted for being the member of the League who's always there for his teammates. He can play mother hen, but he'll also rescue you in a fight. He asks about your life, remembers the answers, and genuinely cares about your ups and downs.

---

The first hero is someone else. So is the leader; those roles won't be lost. Frankly, Superman has enough to do. He very definitely plays up the melting pot aspect - he lives in Metropolis, and he knows his way around country and urban traditions and oddities both. As a celebrity, he's become as at home among the rich and spoiled as he always was around the Kansan farm communities. There was a disastrous attempt at a rap career, but out of respect no one mentions that.

(I won't often touch on the rogues' galleries, or much of the supporting cast - but it's worth noting here that Cal is close friends with former Planet intern and current red-carpet lensman Jimmy Olsen, and maintains a friendly, flirty relationship with 'the only reporter to cover the Washington AND Justice League beats', Lois Lane. Lois, meanwhile, is romantically involved with Lex Luthor, who hosts the only business affairs show worth watching - he's completely open about the show's portfolio, and has yet to start an episode having lost money overall from the last instalment. But Lois' secrecy myopia persists - she doesn't know why Cal and Lex tend to exchange barbs when they meet, or that her man is prone to influencing the market via HIGHLY criminal and inventive means...)

OK, so.

A few weeks ago now I was linked by a friend to the Dresden Codak author's reinventions of the Justice League, Bat Family, and a Legion of Doom to go with it. This friend's reward was a torrent of displeased invective; a week later, another friend linked me to the same thing, and with this conversation taking place over TeamSpeak, he was doubtless dismayed to find I could do an hour on what I found wrong with it.

(I'll not go into much of it here. That's not the point, and eight or nine people have had an earful of the bile by now.)

One of the things that disagreeing with their reinvention did was leave the thought floating through my mind: "If I can't shut up, I should put up."

The goal now, therefore, is a series of blog posts. I will take on both the JLA and the Avengers, assuming that my momentum holds, and will examine both teams' major icons and why they work - and then I'll look at them in the context of the team they're part of, and attempt to reinvent the teams character by character, making sure that the aspects they bring to the team still exist.

Yes, I'm a nerd. Yes, I'm comfortable with this.

Let's set some ground rules.

1. The Big Three - Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman for the JLA; Cap, Thor, and Iron Man for the Avengers - are equals. If one is good as-is, the others are; if you can't make any of them work without significant overhaul, they all require significant overhaul.
2. Identity - Succession is a major thing in DC, and still somewhat significant (Genis-Vell being a primary example) in Marvel. The person behind the codename is up for alteration, where it's called for. Since both universes hold a wide array of characters filling different archetypes, names for these are likely to be drawn from somewhere they'll have weight. As much as anything this is for fun.
3. Lineup Change - If need be, I will alter the lineup, possibly even adding to it or subtracting from it, to make the team cover the same bases as before.

So, if anyone's interested in this project, I'm taking votes now...

Do I do the JLA or the Avengers first?

I'm in a musing mood. And this being LiveJournal, it seems reasonable to muse aloud on it.

A while ago westslide posted a call for people to use LJ more. Tumblr, twitter and Facebook all have something a little different about them, after all - they CAN all be used to macroblog, but they're built around different ideas; tumblr is very much designed as an idea/image accumulator that happens to be public, twitter is an interesting experiment in public conversation and what I understand to be called Titty Tuesday, Facebook is having one of its periodic spasms of trying to work out what its owners want it to be, but its core architecture is a bulletin board with microconversation facilities and a built-in game/timewaster board.

Livejournal is for macroblogging, as the term has evolved by virtue of there now being new forms of blogging. Different art. Very much about musing, rambling, whining, and ranting. I've always intended for this to be about the first two more than the latter two. Don't always manage it.

In any event, the recent effort sunk into using it more often is in part a response to that; I have this space, and it's useful in experimenting with my thoughts, etc. And it can have more significant consequences.

So. For now, I'm musing on The Player's Guide To S.I.S.U. Most of you reading this know what that is - the webcomic I and nordicladyfi have been prepping since last July and publishing steadily (150 pages so far) since the big May 18th launch.

Now, thing is... we work ahead, somewhat. I got page 180 finished earlier today... well, yesterday, technically, but we've only just moved past midnight. That drops December 10th.

Recent events in my friends' lives have led us to rejig the upcoming plot slightly - and I find myself, when that happens, filling in those connected. And that's a wider net than you'd think - the people portraying the Players, with one obvious exception, don't need to follow what's going on in the PCs' lives. But when something happens to a PC, I feel oddly like the Player as well as the PC should know.

This whole thing isn't how I normally write. For one thing, I have a plot document, which Ann and I can refer to. For another, I'm usually thinking 3-4 scenes ahead of where I'm writing, as opposed to the scene I'm on.

(I place a LOT of trust in my gut, when writing, and for that matter when GMing, to make sure that this approach to writing still ends up with a good ending, if not the ending that I actually expected to see. Here, it's obviously impractical.)

What I'm mostly thinking about is synchronicity (as opposed to apophenia). Those of you who know me face to face likely already know that I'm a strong believer in synchronicity, considering riding its streams one of the few things qualifying as occult/magical I dabble in to any extent, and without getting into spoileriffic details, it keeps coming up here.

Things are... working. Things are working pretty damn well. A lot of that, honestly, is down to our cast - I've already mentioned just how different this is from my usual writing method, but even if I normally wrote plot documents, checked and tested these things, what the cast bring to it (including speculation, at one point, on the character they portrayed's sexuality) and their performances has shifted pacing, characterisation, and aspects of plot. It's a very different experience, more akin to directing than writing, I suspect.

(I have yet to direct anybody in anything, ultimately).

But let's take synchronicity for a moment. Setting aside plot points that could be considered spoilery, we recently shot a scene featuring Tarkka-Ampuja, everyone's favourite orcish sharpshooter, and another orc who, in order to prevent spoilers, I shall call Denise. Yes reason*.

Both the cast member behind Eve and Tarkka and the cast member behind Denise happen to have blue eyes. So does a prop eye that was used briefly in the scene. It feels oddly appropriate to note orcs as having blue eyes... which ties into plotlines for the second arc, at least as it currently stands.

And suddenly, just like that, the cast member to take advantage of that suggests themselves...

Which is weird, but useful. I find myself wondering how writers, artists, and cartoonists using more traditional styles of webcomic art handle this sort of thing - if it happens, as I assume it does.

If I were writing SISU as a comic novel, I'd be considering things very differently. The serial format seems to change most of this, maybe all of it... in ways that rather confuse me, at times.

I'm not explaining this very well. Have to try again at some point.

* - the opposite of no reason, obviously enough

Because it'll be featuring in my upcoming game, and I could do with some peer review on the ideas in here.

( Charismancy - the school of magick behind the showman who just HAS to be there )</p>

I have no idea, as yet, where this entry is going to go. I nearly wrote it a few days back, but apparently Semagic's idea of draft saving involves not bothering; the last draft I have on record is from a year ago and change.

So, if you're willing to come along for the ride, feel free.

( Read more... )

It has been, quite literally, years since I posted a Commentary. Apparently I do come back to things.

It having been so long since the last Commentary, I ask regular readers to bear with me while I catch up new readers - and myself - on what the format is supposed to achieve, and how it's supposed to achieve it.

The basic theory is that a single book review is useless without context. A reviewer might praise Twilight as a revolutionary new take on the love story, not having read the books from which it draws its structure. Or they might slate Lovecraft as unimaginative, drawing on ideas made cliche by other writers. If you can supply the context yourself, you know to take these writers' advice with a pinch of salt; if you can't supply that same context, you're going to begin with a dubious set of assumptions concerning the books. You might be put off books you'd actually enjoy, or you might buy ones you'd hate - but this is just an extreme example. Let's touch on an example that can happen regularly.

Way back in the late 90s-early 00s, the Future Publishing magazine SFX was a guaranteed purchase for me. Pre-page slash, pre-new editor, pre-revamp, it reliably carried some features on developing US concepts (including perennial one-page feature 'Development Hell' which tracked the status of geek-related films. Watchmen had a slot in there every month, back when it was a Terry Gilliam project coming off the recent success of Twelve Monkeys. But the real reason I read SFX religiously was the reviews section.

Because I knew the reviewers. I had, by the end, something like seventy issues of SFX; in a couple of cases, they'd joined the magazine from others that I'd followed, and I knew their tastes. It was important to know whether I agreed or disagreed; I might think one of them was an idiot, but if I knew where he and I didn't see eye to eye, his review was still useful to me.

So the Commentaries are... an attempt to create a series of reviews, both with their own context and putting books in the context of others. Others can be reached through the Books tag.

( And without further ado... )