Karnak, Part 1 of 2

My apologies, friends: love to give you a complete script at this juncture, but time’s a’pressin’. I do guarantee that this script will be finished off and polished up in the next three (3) days…and, I guess you all know me well enough by now that you won’t be surprised to hear: “Blue Shadows” is on the way.

But, bugger all that, for now.

Here’s Part 1.

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INTRO PANEL: Poet…Physician…Adventurer…Scientist! Minor prince of the secretive superhuman race known as the Inhumans, his is the power to determine the weak spot in any object, and destroy it with a single well-placed blow! Brother of Triton, cousin to Black Bolt, Stan Lee Presents: KARNAK THE SHATTERER!

 

PAGE ONE

Panel 1: A long panel consisting of the entire first tier of the page (slightly shortened by my inclusion of the Intro Panel, natch), it’s a slice of a very large picture of the Moon, seen as though from a fairly close orbit and roughly on a WNW-ESE slant across the page, with the terminator making what we understand to be the crescent-moon shape on its surface…as though our POV is that of a lunar orbiter rushing across the sunlit surface to the dark side. Say the lunar surface takes up most of the bottom left-hand side of the image, many beautifully-detailed craters etc. Off more to the top right, there’s the Earth, hanging in space. The view is from too far up to make out the Blue Area, which is right on the terminator itself as of this moment. One other point of note: since I’ve arbitrarily suggested that Attilan gets its sunsets and sunrises when the moon is in its crescent phases, that means that the Earth is in a particular phase as well, as seen from the lunar surface. Can’t be bothered figuring out just what that is now, though, although off-the-cuff it seems to me that the phases must match up, and that the Earth will be in crescent phase too…embarrassing, but this is like the difference between arithmetic and calculus, the most common mathematical mistakes are always arithmetical ones…ask me about stellar evolution or Hawking radiation and I’m there, but the phases of the moon…Christ, you’ve got to be as smart as a fisherman to figure that stuff out…anyway…

 

Capt.: Night falls, on the Moon.

Capt.: But – as its latest inhabitants have learned – not all at once.

 

Panel 2: I know there’s a better way of tweaking this artistically, but the basic idea is that this is another one-third panel, another whole horizontal tier (although possibly this drawing could be divided into a dyptich, if that looks better). This time it’s the city of Attilan, as if seen from the top of a small rise just outside it, its bright and beautiful Kirbyesque buildings suffused (as is the grey regolith to either side) with an orange-gold sunset light. It looks quite idyllic: tiny black humanoid figures soar about the futuristic spires like far-off crows or ravens. The sky around the city is a calm violet, fading to black; overhead, the stars are beginning to shine.

Capt.: The lunar sunset’s shadows creep almost imperceptibly up the streets of Attilan, city of the Inhumans.

Capt.: In some places, the glimmer of twilight will cling for almost the full three days of transition, the city sinking feet-first, slowly, into the comfort of its long monthly sleep.

Panel 3: Slightly larger than one-sixth panel, looking out of a darker alleyway onto a main street, to reveal the somewhat indistinct figure of Karnak walking roughly from our right to our left. We can see just enough of the alleyway to notice a couple of Inhuman women wrapped in robes indicating him as he passes, and we may also notice some turned heads on the street, the odd face peeking out of a window; our hero excites some interest, apparently.

Capt.: It is one of the Moon’s gifts to the Inhumans; a wonderful, extended time for contemplation.

Capt.: Yes, wonderful; particularly if the Inhuman in question has as much to contemplate as the man called…

 

Panel 4: Slightly smaller than one-sixth panel, filling out the page. Close-up on Karnak’s face, startled, as his head jerks suddenly up, and turns slightly toward his left shoulder.

Iridia: (I imagine the word-balloon at the top and to the right of this panel, quite large and with jagged edges as she calls out:) LORD KARNAK!

Karnak: Eh?!

 

PAGE TWO

SPLASH. Seen from above and an angle: Iridia’s shadow falls over Karnak, who is pictured in an automatically-defensive kung-fu posture…but already he’s beginning to relax from it a little. One of his hands is positioned so it looks like he’s shading his eyes. It looks like the golden light that’s shining on the street around him has been blotted out by a blue-ish butterfly-shaped angel, whose shadow is somewhat centred on him.

Karnak: What? YOU!!

TITLES (along the bottom border of the page): “THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP!” Below this, the credits.

PAGE THREE

Panel 1: Two-thirds splash from Karnak’s point of view; we see perhaps his head and raised karate-chop/eye-shading hand in the foreground, while Iridia floats above him, gorgeous and smiling. The sun peeks over her shoulder. She has tracked him down. And, a word on my dialogue-conventions: when I double-name a speaker, it isn’t always that they have a completely separate new word-balloon…sometimes it’s just a connected word-balloon, and sometimes it is a separate one. Mostly, I hope it’ll be clear from context what I mean. But, I haven’t figured out how to make it explicit yet, so if it gets confusing what I mean…go for economy of space.

Karnak: Iridia!

Iridia: Well of course it’s me! I’ve been looking for you for hours!

Karnak: You have?

Iridia: I just wanted to thank you for talking to Boligar…Lord Karnak, it’s like he’s a new man…

Karnak: Well, it wasn’t a very difficult problem, Iridia –

Karnak: — And, please…it isn’t necessary for you to call me Lord Karnak, you know.

Karnak: At least, not when no one’s watching.

 

Panel 2: One-sixth panel, as Iridia hovers in front of him.

Iridia: HA! But you forget, I’m not one of the “little mothers”, Karnak! So of course I must call you “Lord”, and you should not be telling me not to! Would you ask a simple Inhuman woman to show such disrespect to her Royal Family?

 

Panel 3: Karnak’s hand is on his chin, and he looks half-rueful, half-amused..

Iridia: (off-panel) Besides, whoever said no one was watching?

Karnak: Hmm…you know, I was to meet Gorgon, in the park…

Iridia: Perhaps I could fly you there, my Lord?

Karnak: If you wouldn’t mind…

 

PAGE FOUR

Panel 1: Full-tier panel, seen from just above the two as Iridia, carrying Karnak by the hands beneath her, flies up out of the street below.

Iridia: Poor Karnak! It’s not easy for you, is it?

Karnak: (looking back down at the street, and the people in it watching them leave) It is not. But we all have our sacrifices to make, I suppose…

 

Panel 2: One-sixth. Karnak and Iridia wheel over the park, where below there is a crowd of Inhuman children gathered around a large brown figure.

Iridia: Really? Even Gorgon?

 

Panel 3: (inset panel; Karnak’s face, lugubrious)

Karnak: Yes…even Gorgon…

 

Panel 4: One-sixth. A kid’s-eye view: we are looking up at Gorgon, who’s laughing uproariously. Behind him, Iridia and Karnak spiral to the ground.

Gorgon: Oh ho! So you want to hear about the Fantastic Four, do you? Perhaps about the time Ben Grimm and I battled in the aeries of the island called Manhattan, on Earth?

Inhuman Child #1: Yes, please, Gorgon!

Inhuman Child #2: Tell it again, Gorgon!

 

Panel 5: One-sixth. We’re looking slightly over Gorgon’s shoulder as Karnak approaches and stands in the bottom left-hand corner of the panel behind him – basically we’re looking from what would’ve been Karnak’s POV about one second earlier if he was about two feet taller, looking down at the kids sprawled out on the ground soaking up Gorgon’s stories.

Gorgon: Well, hmm…now that I think about it, children, I’m not sure I wish to relive that particular memory just now. Besides, I’ve told that one before, I think…and you must be getting bored with it, surely…

Inhuman Child #3: Tell it!

Inhuman Child #4: Tell it!

Gorgon: No…no, I’m not sure I want to. Besides, it may frighten some of you, and then what would your mothers say? And then what would Medusa say?

Karnak: Gorgon.

 

Panel 6: One-sixth. Gorgon stands, turning back from our POV among the children to greet Karnak.

Gorgon: Cousin! You arrive at last!

Gorgon: And with the fair Iridia, by Agon’s gift!

Iridia: Hello, Gorgon. You appear to have been besieged while waiting.

 

PAGE FIVE

Panel 1: One-sixth. From above, perhaps: the children are to Gorgon’s back as he faces Karnak and Iridia. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder.

Gorgon: What, these ones? I’ve fought off worse than them in my time…

Gorgon: But…has Karnak brought you to accompany us for this morning’s work, beautiful one? It’s been long since I’ve seen you spread your wings under the Terran sky…

 

Panel 2: One-sixth, head-and-shoulders shot, as Iridia replies to Gorgon: he is at the right-hand side of the panel, and we see him in three-quarters as Iridia faces him almost straight-on from the middle, with Karnak disappearing off the leftward edge of the panel

Iridia: No, Gorgon. I’m afraid Lord Karnak has not invited me; ours was a chance meeting.

Iridia: But I think I should like to take over from you here, if I may…

Gorgon: Eh? Oh, well…yes, of course. If you would prefer it…

Panel 3: Longish panel, perhaps two-thirds of a tier. As Karnak and Gorgon walk away across the park, Gorgon’s hand on Karnak’s shoulder, Iridia kneels down to talk to the children – their dialogue is in smaller print, smaller balloons. I know the script seems to indicate K+G being on the left, and Iridia on the right, but I don’t exactly have a 100% firm idea about the composition here…it could be reversed easily enough, if that worked better. See, I’m trying to do something here about once per page, where the ordinary flow of action in the panels gets subtly reversed, but without calling too much attention to itself…it’s a whole meta-thing, thematic-reinforcement gobbledegook, but it might not look so good in reality as it does in my head. For example, in this panel having K+G walk away to the left in the spacious area of the background, while Iridia is pictured at a larger size in the foreground, facing off the page toward the (unpictured) children in about a three-quarters view, but then speaking in smaller print as if she’s farther away…and then next panel having K+G come in from the left foreground, towards Crystal in the middle-right. You see what I’m saying: it doesn’t quite make sense, I guess. But it’s on purpose. But! It may look stupid, and you [the imaginary artist of this opus, of course, readers] might just decide “yeah, that’s a dumb way to do this, they should be walking towards us at first, and then re-entering on the other side or this side…” Etc. I’d like to do it, if it’s at all possible. But if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But anyway:

Gorgon: It isn’t like you to be late, Karnak.

Karnak: I was…lost in thought, I’m afraid. It’s this elongated time of day – it encourages one’s mind to wander.

Karnak: I only hope we have not kept Triton and Crystal waiting, as well…

Gorgon: Crystal? Cousin, Crystal has not been on time for anything in years! And besides, we are still her seniors, are we not…?

Iridia: Now, now, children. Gorgon and Lord Karnak have important work to do today…but, I wonder, have I ever told any of you the story of my first meeting with Gorgon?

Inhuman Child #1: Does it have the Fantastic Four in it?

Iridia: No…but it does have Black Bolt…

Inhuman Child #3: Black Bolt!

 

Panel 4: One-ninth or so, or whatever’s needed to complete the tier. Karnak and Gorgon exit the park, walking out of the left foreground. Crystal and Lockjaw are standing there waiting for them, middle-right.

Crystal: There you are! You were so late, Lockjaw and I came to find you!

Panel 5: One-sixth. Gorgon bends down to pet Lockjaw, who slobbers on him a bit, while Karnak deals with the wrath of Crystal. Which actually isn’t all that bad.

Karnak: Has Triton returned from his explorations yet, cousin?

Crystal: Well, not as of ten minutes ago he hadn’t…

Panel 6: Crystal raises her arms; Lockjaw’s antennae begin to glow, and Kirby dots and bright light start popping out from it and around the four of them as they fade away.

Crystal: But maybe by now…

 

PAGE SIX

Panel 1: Full tier. They appear in a flash of light in the middle ground of a large underground chamber filled with Kirbyesque machinery – maybe located to our left, we see a large viewscreen and bank of computers that show a Mercator projection of Earth, with certain points clearly marked out on it: somewhere in the Himalayas, somewhere in the South Seas, Manhattan, Atlantis…nowhere in Greece, Siberia, or anywhere that Eternals cluster, but basically everywhere else on Earth that Kree or otherwise Kirbyesque technology exists in profusion is illuminated…and if this placement in the panel is correct, then perhaps it’s to the right of it that we see a similar projection, this time a cutaway of Attilan and the old Kree city it rests on top of, and the network of water-conduits that were established during Byrne’s run on FF marked out there by a grid. If we look closely, we can see that the map shows points of egress from the system of conduits into other underground chambers, that are highlighted in a way that’s similar to the Kreetech sites on the other viewscreen. Meanwhile in the right-middle foreground (again, if that works), is a large well of water that Triton is just clambering out of, his back to us. He’s got a kind of sling or pack over his shoulder, that will prove to contain some interesting Kree gadget.

Crystal: …He will have!

Triton: Karnak! Gorgon! Crystal! And just in time!

 

Panel 2: One-sixth, as Karnak rushes to help his brother out of the well.

Karnak: What news today, brother? Success?

Triton: I believe so…I found a new network of conduits off the branching at H-6 several hours ago, that led to an egress deep in the old Kree ruins under the city. Far deeper than I’ve ever gone before…

Panel 3: One-sixth. From his sling, Triton hands a Kree device about the size of a large jackfruit to Karnak, who has Crystal and Gorgon standing behind him.

Triton: …I believe this device is almost certainly kin to the scanalyzer we found last week — but as you can see, it is far more complex. If I’m right, it should increase our equipment’s resolving power at least by an order of magnitude…

Crystal: But this is wonderful! Black Bolt will be so…

Panel 4: One-sixth. Triton, still not quite on his feet, staggers to the right, and Crystal rushes forward from the left to support him. Our view is from a little above, just as though we were a couple steps up on a ladder.

Crystal: Triton! You’re not well!

Triton: Only…a little weak, cousin. The water of the Kree is highly oxygenated, but rather too pure for living organisms to enjoy swimming in for long…it does not have the flavour of life in it.

Panel 5: One-sixth. Triton is now sitting down, perhaps at the panel’s left, and our POV is a little closer to the ground. Gorgon brings him a glass full of some restorative liquid or other from the right..

Triton: Rather like travelling through a long sleep, but without dreams…

Crystal: (The back of her head, with its groovy hairband, is at the bottom of the panel as she faces Triton) But…is this what it’s like for you, every time?

Triton: I can bear it, Crystal. And besides…

 

PAGE SEVEN

Panel 1: Triton’s dialogue continues into a caption, over a full-tier panel of a hillside by a lake, quite obviously on Earth. The four Inhumans have arrived at one of their archaeological Kree digs, somewhere out in the country, and Karnak’s team is bustling about as Lockjaw frolics with Gorgon, and Crystal stands beside Karnak at the lake’s edge, with crossed arms. In the foreground, in the middle of the page, Triton dives forward to plunge into the waters of the lake.

Triton (capt.): “…there is a simple cure for this torpor of mine, as Karnak and Gorgon well know.”

Crystal: I had no idea it was so hard on him, Karnak.

Karnak: Are you sorry you came along today, Crystal? I could simply have borrowed Lockjaw from you for the afternoon, as I’ve done before…

Crystal: No…no. I did want to visit Earth again, after all…and besides…

 

Panel 2: One-ninth panel. Crystal in profile, gazing out at the lake.

Crystal: …as my sister might say, I should know what sacrifices other Inhumans are making, for the good of Attilan.

 

Panel 3: Same image; Crystal turns to Karnak.

Crystal: She wants to see you after we’re finished here, by the way.

Karnak: Medusa does? In what capacity?

Crystal: …

Crystal: She didn’t say.

Boligar: (off-panel) Lord Karnak!

 

Panel 4: One-sixth panel. Boligar arrives in the frame: his power is to assume monstrous shapes that he plucks out of people’s unconscious minds, by the way, which makes him a pretty perfect Inhuman. But, he has no “real” shape of his own. I picture him here as something like a walking thundercloud, crowned with lightnings, but then again clearly I’ve stolen that idea from somewhere, so…

Karnak: Ah, Boligar! How go things with our sentry? We shall be sorry to lose you, my friend…even Gorgon could not discourage unwary humans from stumbling onto our excavations as you have done this past year!

Boligar: Well, Lord, if it comes to that…I could stay on, for a while yet…

 

Panel 5: They turn and walk away from us into the mouth of the excavation, Karnak’s hand on Boligar’s large, hulking shoulder.

Karnak: Nonsense. This is your wedding season, and you deserve to enjoy it. In all the Great Refuge, we can surely find someone with compensatory talents to fill in for you while you’re otherwise occupied…

Karnak: By the way, what form is this, that you wear today?

Boligar: I hardly know, my Lord. It was the dream of a small human child, I think, who almost came up the hill on the other side…I must say, from the look of me, she must have been quite imaginative…

Panel 6: Karnak and Boligar walk into the darkness of the hill, with Karnak slightly in front; we see them face-on as they enter.

Karnak: Ha! Perhaps we could have used her, then. To make sense of our find.

Boligar: No doubt, my Lord…

 

PAGE EIGHT

Panel 1: Full tier. Karnak and Boligar enter a large underground chamber that was once a Kree research station, now stripped of machinery that various Inhumans are carting out.

Boligar: …After all, even if it is from a thousand years ago, the Kree’s technology puts that of most other alien races to shame.

Karnak: Hmm…yes, it does, doesn’t it?

Karnak: You know, sometimes I wish Reed Richards could be here to see this…

Karnak: (calling to a reptilian Inhuman labourer, just clearing out the last of the Kreetech) Ophidar! Is it certain that everything of note has been catalogued?

Ophidar: And removed, Lord Karnak! Once the Lady Crystal and Lockjaw have finished transporting this last load, the survey is complete!

Panel 2: One-ninth panel. Karnak and Boligar stand in the gloom underneath the hill looking on it for the last time, Karnak in front and Boligar in back. They crowd the panel somewhat. Karnak is contemplative.

Karnak: Good…

Boligar: Lord Karnak, I…

Boligar: Iridia and I had discussed…we wanted to ask you…

 

Panel 3: Another one-ninth. Karnak and Boligar face each other, under the hill.

Karnak: Yes, Boligar?

Boligar: You’ve helped us so much…and we only wondered…

Panel 4: One-ninth. Karnak’s smiling face, in the gloom.

Boligar: (off-panel) …Would you consent to speak for us, at our ceremony?

Karnak: What? Boligar, I should be delighted to speak for the two of you!

Karnak: By Agon, this is a surprise! Of course, it would be my honour…

Panel 5: A bit more than one-ninth of a page. Karnak’s dialogue continues in a caption, as Gorgon’s hoof is about to come down powerfully in close-up on the green grass on the hillside.

Karnak (capt.): “…my privilege to be involved in this wonderful step forward for both of you.”

Gorgon: BEWARE, INHUMANS! STAND ASIDE!

Panel 6: A bit less than two-thirds of a tier, filling out the page. Without too much direction from me, Crystal and Lockjaw cling to Triton, and Karnak and Boligar stand nearby, watching Gorgon observe the results of his stomping…which is the dramatic collapse of the Kree hillside into ruin.

Gorgon: GORGON NOW SPEAKS!

Triton (capt.): “And that makes thirteen…”

 

PAGE NINE

Panel 1: One-sixth panel, with Karnak and Triton sitting, lounging really, in a mess of Kirbytech scattered all around, in the chamber back in Attilan with the viewscreens. They’re facing each other. I see Triton on the right and Karnak on the left, although the dialogue listing indicates the reverse (this is another one of my possibly-misguided Big Thematic Ideas). Karnak’s fingers are steepled in front of his face.

 

Triton: …Thirteen sites plundered, and then destroyed forever so that no human will come to any harm by discovering them. Thirteen out of twenty-two; but now with the improvements we’ve made to the scanalyzer, we will almost certainly be able to put that provisional number behind us, and widen our net.

Triton: So…so far, so good, brother.

Karnak: Mmm.

Triton: You met with Medusa.

Karnak: Yes.

Triton: And?

Karnak: And…

 

Panel 2: One-ninth panel, with washed-out colour to show it’s a flashback. Medusa’s face (and hair, of course), lips parted hotly with strong emotion.

Karnak (capt.): “…It perhaps did not go quite as I might have wished it to.”

Medusa: Karnak, I don’t like it either!

Medusa: But as the new Head of the Genetics Council, I must be seen to be impartial! Especially me!

Panel 3: One-ninth, washed-out, now we’re looking at Karnak from Medusa’s POV (a bit of face and of course some some hair floating around). He looks a trifle downcast.

Medusa: Black Bolt is relying on us both. And – I hate to say this – but it’s only for another year…

Karnak: And I am not refusing, cousin. But…it is a little hard, you must admit.

 

Panel 4: One-ninth, and continuing in the flashback style: Karnak is entering Rikasa’s house (that’s our new character – be patient, all will be explained), as a hand holds the door open for him. He doesn’t look happy.

Medusa (capt.): “But you will meet her today?”

Karnak: “Yes, of course.”

Karnak: “But I cannot promise to be pleased.”

 

Panel 5: Long, two-thirds of a tier panel, which is Rikasa welcoming Karnak to her parents’ sitting-room, an elegant lavender chamber with tasteful furniture. Rikasa extends one arm to indicate Karnak should go in and sit down. Obviously he and she are both entering from the left, I think. It’s a plein Americain, maybe our first one so far. Everything is straight and rectilinear, the “democracy of form”. Rikasa is an near-human formed Inhuman: I picture her with blue skin, perhaps a couple or four attractive antennae rising from her forehead, not Black Bolt/Lockjaw style antennae but the more expressive wavy kind. She’s pretty.

Rikasa: Won’t you make yourself comfortable, Lord Karnak?

Karnak: I think it would be as well if you simply called me Karnak, Rikasa.

Karnak: Where are your parents, if I may inquire?

Rikasa: They have retired, my Lor…I’m afraid they have retired, Karnak.

Karnak: Ah.

 

Panel 6: One-ninth, as Karnak and Rikasa sit down. We are looking over Karnak’s shoulder at her; she seems very proper.

Rikasa: They wished to meet you, of course. But their forms are strictly nocturnal, and the long lunar day requires them to keep to more central apartments.

Rikasa: However, they have asked me to give you their apologies, and to suggest that a meeting might be possible after the twilight passes…?

Karnak: Of course. It would be my pleasure.

 

PAGE TEN

Panel 1: One-sixth. Looking down from above at the two of them. Karnak makes a gesture with his hands, over the table in between them…opening up conversation gesturally, breaking the ice.

Karnak: It must be a difficult adaptation for them, from life on Earth to life here on Luna.

Rikasa: Perhaps. But I think they have found compensations in it, too.

Karnak: Yes…yes, no doubt. As we all have.

Rikasa: Well, not quite “all”, Karnak. I barely remember Earth before the Exodus…

 

Panel 2: One-sixth. We see them in profile, facing each other. Rikasa is smiling.

Rikasa: In fact – strangely – the clearest memory I do have about life on Earth…

Rikasa: …Is of you, Lord Karnak.

Karnak: Hmm…well now, as I said, Rikasa…

Rikasa: Lord Karnak. Do you remember it? My grandfather had just produced his “Second Hercules” symphony…

Karnak: Ah!

Rikasa: …And Black Bolt had invited us all to the Palace, to celebrate it.

Rikasa: Of course, my cousins and I were not permitted anywhere near Black Bolt…

Karnak: …Oh, Agon.

Rikasa: …So we tortured you, instead.

 

Panel 3: One-ninth. Close-up of Rikasa, who’s smiling a lot, now, and it’s important that she looks both extremely mischievous, and extremely attractive…perhaps this is where the washed-out flashback colour gets just a little brighter, slightly, in the middle…before fading out again in preparation for us rejoining K+T back in the underground Kreetech room. Well, but I leave it up to you. Me, I’m seeing Rikasa’s face turned slightly down, and a lock of hair (if she has hair) flopping over her face. Girlish. Well, and I guess you know a little too much about what makes me tick now, you bastard! Curse you!

Rikasa: Because you were so very forbidding, you see.

Karnak: (off-panel) The misplaced coronet…

Rikasa: Yes. That was me.

Karnak: By the Kree, woman…

 

Panel 4: One-ninth. Karnak’s face, slightly downturned. He is thinking hard.

 

Panel 5: One-ninth. He looks up again, smiling, maybe even laughing, having figured it out.

Karnak: Ha! It was invisibility, wasn’t it?

 

Panel 6: Full tier: a mural, extending out from Rikasa’s face (profile; just make sure she has a lot of personality, after all this is Rikasa loosening up) at the far left: and I’m sorry, barring Ditko-isms I don’t know how to illustrate this properly, we should probably discuss this over the phone a little bit…

Rikasa: No, not invisibility, Karnak.

Rikasa: It’s rather difficult to describe. Most people, they see space as essentially smooth, do you know what I mean? Continuous. But to me, it isn’t continuous. To me, space is…

Rikasa: …Like a million fragments. Like a jigsaw puzzle, with all the pieces turned face-down. And until you pick them up, they might be anything. They might be the right piece, or the wrong piece. They might be a picture of this, or of that. And they wait for you, wait to see what they’ll become, when you look at them.

 

PAGE ELEVEN

Panel 1: Full-tier, and again a mural we should dicuss over the phone to get a clear picture of, but this time the mural is expanding out of the right side of Rikasa’s face seen straight-on, which is even more expressive than before, if that’s possible.

Rikasa: But, I can look at them, before they become anything at all. And I can move them around. Anywhere that people haven’t looked, that they haven’t searched, that they’re not aware of…I can hide things in there. Swap out the places that people are looking at, for the spaces they’re not looking at…I can reorganize them, cluster them together…

Rikasa: For example, since only you and I are in this room, I could easily seem to disappear by exchanging the part of the room you’re looking at, with me in it, for the part of the room that’s behind your head, that you can’t observe…

Rikasa: Of course, if this room were full of people, it would be much harder to find unobserved spaces to hide myself in…

Panel 2: One-ninth. Karnak’s face, as he thinks hard.

Panel 3: Same.

Panel 4: One-ninth. Karnak looks up at Rikasa, grinning.

Karnak: My dear Rikasa…

 

Panel 5: Full-tier. Karnak and Triton back in their underground lair, in full colour. Only, the scene’s flipped around to the other side: Karnak is on the right, and Triton on the left. Another one of my little thematic tricks. Karnak’s line continues in caption from the last panel.

Karnak (capt.): “…How would you like a job?”

Triton: You said that to her?

Karnak: I did, indeed.

 

PAGE TWELVE

Panel 1: Full-tier: Triton whips his head around. Karnak steeples his fingers.

Triton: She’s here now, isn’t she?

 

Panel 2: Full-tier: same picture, but suddenly Rikasa is in it…my preference is that she’s standing in the foreground, to middle-left, seen from behind.

Rikasa: Lord Triton.

Panel 3: Same scene, but Triton has turned his head back around, and sees Rikasa.

Triton: It’s just “Triton”, Rikasa.

Triton: …Oh, by the damned Kree, Karnak.

Triton: I thought we were agreed, that we were going to wait before we did this…

 

PAGE THIRTEEN:

Panel 1: One-ninth. We are facing onto Karnak sitting, looking like a schemer: this has already all been decided, now you should just go along, whether you’re my brother or not. He still has steepled fingers.

Karnak: Why wait, brother?

Triton: (off-panel) The golden light has addled your brain, brother…!

Panel 2: Two-thirds of a tier. We look up at Gorgon, from a hoof’s-eye-view, and he has Lockjaw on a leash.

Gorgon: Ho! Let’s not forget who is senior, cousins!

Gorgon: I have brought Lockjaw! We may go where we please!

Gorgon: The game is afoot!

Triton: (off-panel) Oh, Agon…

Globe Of Blogs

It’s always turning:  old blogs drop off, change frequency, new blogs become middle-aged…upstarts arise…and none of us know how long we’ll last, either as dedicated posters or dedicated readers.  After all, this stuff is pretty new!

When I started up my blog, it was around the time when a big pile of established bloggers were changing their habits and falling to the wayside, and there was, I recall, much gnashing of teeth about The End.  However, this all went over my head anyway, because I was new…and I think I came into this at the right time, because suddenly what I saw out there started to shift in tone to something that really caught my interest.  There’s about a handful of bloggers I think of as being of “my generation”, or at least “my iteration” — folks who seem to share my point of view a little, or at least whose concerns match up decently with my concerns, and whose thoughts tend to halt my scanning and make me settle down to read.

But every once in a while I ask myself:  how long can this go on?

Well, a little longer anyway, it seems:  my iteration’s obviously not quite stopped iterating yet, because Thomas has finally gotten himself a blog!  Hooray!

Do check it out.

Watering The Milk, Part 1

By the way, Marvel?  Little thing that bugs me, that I haven’t mentioned up ’til now.

Your “Previously, On Buffy The Vampire Slayer” intro pages?  Fuck off with those already.  It’s just one less page of story, and yes:  I noticed.

Wanna know how many super-convoluted inter-Marvel crossover stories I managed to follow as a little kid without benefit of those pages?  All of them, jackasses.  And now you’re doing decompression and losing a page?  You really think your new storytelling is so complex that a new reader can’t be brought up to date with about fifty words of exposition, tops?

You guys just think you’re so fucking cool, don’t you?

Well, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:  you’re losing me as a reader, bit by bit.  I don’t even read those intro pages, they bore the crap out of me.  They’re useless.  And how goddamn useless are you, if you can’t even bring a reader up to speed in-story?  Feh.  The freakin’ Clone Saga didn’t even have these intro pages, did it?

For Christ’s sake get your shit together.

By the way, Joss Whedon:  using those “Previously…” intros on the Buffy TV series was a sensible and intelligent move.  Due to the fact of it being a TV series.  I admired the way you went for a recreation of a comics vibe, there.  I thank you for that;  it made me watch more avidly.

But by the way, Marvel:  this isn’t TV, and you’re de-creating a comics vibe for me with this bullshit.  Kindly pull your head out of your ass and stop it.

Also, subcaptioning is a coward’s captioning.  Ellis made it work on his Authority, but he had a specific reason for doing it.  You don’t.  Also, the Meltzer-style “identified” captions…yeah, they could go, too.  Man, you’re just lousy with tics and crutches these days, aren’t you Marvel?  Do you even know how to plain tell a story anymore?

…Christ, I sound like John Byrne, don’t I.

See what you’ve driven me to, Marvel?!

My Inhuman Pace

This is harder than I thought it would be.  “Improvisation” went much quicker:  fifteen pages in one night.

I started on “The Mirror And The Lamp” day before yesterday.  I’m only one-third of the way along.  It’s actually started to take time away from other things I should be doing.

It’s fun, don’t get me wrong.  But ai ya, who would ever do this all the time, if they weren’t getting paid for it?!  It’s a freakin’ job, is what it is!  And worse, I know I’ve got the second issue, “Blue Shadows“, to do after this one!

Because I’m an idiot!

Anyway, that’s where we are.  Expect something by the end of the week, I guess.

Comments are back working, anyway.  So that’s something.

Some Stuff, That MEMES Are Made Of!

Short digression here:

No, following along with the Marvel Editorial Simulation that Sean K. was involved in didn’t actually give me the idea, but it sure helped…when about two seconds ago I came across (at Blog@Newsarama) mention of somebody saying they’re a big DC-over-Marvel fan (understandable) because at the present moment DC is way more progressive than Marvel (true), like just take for example Amazons Attack (whaaa-aat?)…

And then I thought, no, see, wait…it’s obvious that things have simply gotten to the point where, if only for sales reasons, DC and Marvel alike simply must have a big Crossover Event, isn’t it? I mean, don’t we all know that? So, given that necessity…

Is that Amazons thing so bad, really?

Okay, it is bad. But let’s not kid ourselves: it could also be a lot worse. And these people are kind of working under the gun, here. Plus, we shouldn’t forget that a lot of the crossover “naturals” have been cleaned up long ago, in fact most of the good crossovers were the inspiration for the first bad or middling quality crossovers in the first place! And even those derivative crossovers I’m speaking of, well…yeah, they’re pretty old, too. Like, twenty years old.

So it’s gotta be tough, coming up with new Crossover Events. The mine’s played out, but you’ve gotta keep digging anyway…

And therefore…

MEME! If you were in charge, and you had to manufacture a big-ass Crossover Event, and you didn’t have a time machine that could take your readership back to 1987, or 1977, or even 1967…

Well, what would your big-ass Crossover Event be?

I’ll be answering this question myself in pretty short order (off the top of my head, I’m torn between three possible crossovers, entitled Bend Sinister, The Erskine-Horton Letters, and The Plot To Kill The High Evolutionary, respectively — well, I am a Marvel guy after all), but I must post the thought now even though I myself am not quite ready, and open the floor to suggestions.

So what would be your Crossover Event? If you had to do one.

Mr. Kleefeld, you may sit this one out, if you like.

Ed, Sean, Erin, Matthew, Andrew, Johnny B, and Thomas

WordPress is just eating my comments everywhere WordPress exists, so the replies I’ve made to you all have not gone through. Their Support staff are on holiday, too, so nothing to be done about it for now…have to wait ’til Monday, I guess.

Anyway, they were really great comments, very pithy, definitely in the top ten of all comments ever made anywhere about anything. It’s a real shame.

Oh, well.

Anyway, Ed, clarify your reachability, willya?

Flashback! To “Alpha Flight…!”

As promised…here’s Part 2.

We were speaking of Attack Of The Clones, weren’t we?

(shudders)

Unlike X3, AOTC isn’t much of a movie for that whole “failing to a purpose” thing, being instead the domain of pure sloppiness and elementary mistakes. I won’t lie; I was rooting for the iceberg in this one. Seriously, those Jedi don’t deserve to live. Well, for one thing, they simply don’t want it bad enough! I was actually a fan of The Phantom Menace, just me and another twenty-odd people in North America (and yet it’s just as somebody said, everybody supposedly hating Phantom Menace didn’t stop twelve guys coming to your Hallowe’en party dressed as Darth Maul, now did it?), and was predicting great things for AOTC…imagine my shock, then, to see how badly it played its hand. Underneath the muck, you can still see the attractive skeleton of George Lucas’ flow chart of plot…but barely, because AOTC is King Among Movies for missing its own point. The Jedi talk, but they don’t think:

SAMUEL L. JACKSON: Hey, Yoda…

YODA: Yeah, Sam?

SLJ: All this trouble we’re dealing with these days…all the mysterious shit that’s going on…you think it might be related to those Sith guys we were fighting last movie?

YODA: What do you mean?

SLJ: Well, remember how we said Sith always travel in pairs…

YODA: To hide their numbers.

SLJ: …What?

YODA: Nothing. Go on.

SLJ: Uh, okay…well, and then we caught one, but the question was always, did we catch the student, or did we catch the…

YODA: Hey, I’m kinda hungry all of a sudden. Wanna go eat?

SLJ: …

SLJ: Yeah, what the hell. Let’s eat.

DIE, JEDI, DIE!!! Seriously, I don’t even know who the Sith are, you know? Or anything about what their beef is. Do the Jedi owe them money? Did they steal their girlfriend? No idea. Musta been something…

Worse than this is Count Dooku, who as we discover in the freakin’ credits of the movie is also “Darth Tyrannus”. Now here’s how this went down: moving on from the natural (if unasked) question “who is Darth Tyrannus?”, it seems we’re not supposed to be entirely sure if Dooku is just a misguided good guy, or an out-and-out bad guy, are we? And yet, this tension is blown for us in the very first second he’s on screen, when he says “let’s kill the spunky heroine”. Oh, but that’s not what you do when you’re trying to create mystery, I’m afraid. That’s just bad set-up, damn it. And where oh where is the scene at the end of the movie that reveals Dooku and Tyrannus to be one and the same guy – SHOCKER! But oh, that’s right: that was a dropped stitch, too. So a tension we’re supposed to be feeling is absent, but we have other things to concentrate on, like the army of clones made from the roughest, toughest, most cunning bounty hunter in the known universe…all bought and paid for at no small expense, and yet part of the order was also that everything that made the bounty hunter such hot shit was to be carefully edited out of the clones that were made from him. Uh…what? But, I’m afraid that doesn’t make any sense, does it? Even if it does explain a few things in Episode IV…but never mind, pass on, here’s something else: Naboo is some crazy planet, huh? I mean, not only do they elect their Queen every couple of years, but they draw her exclusively from a pool of the planet’s teenage girls! WHAT?!? And this didn’t merit a line of exposition either? No, of course not, because it was just a plain and simple screw-up; it was clearly not thought through at all – somebody obviously felt some new emotional explanation for Padme was needed, and they just jammed some silly notion of the kind of politics we have, onto the politics that they have. For me, I look at something like this and it screams “INEXPERIENCED SCRIPTWRITER” in fifty-foot tall letters of fire…

Phantom Menace failed (and fared) a little bit better than this: though “Naboo” is unquestionably a silly name, and CGI armies fighting with each other is something my backbrain pronounces eminently ignorable, and the whole idea that somebody had to go blow up a big battle-station of some kind in space to end the conflict made me laugh – is this seriously the only strategy anyone ever has for anything? – there were redeeming virtues here nonetheless. The planets and the vehicles all had perceptible characters, for one thing, and that’s not nothing. The CGI-matte painting was exquisite. Liam Neeson was believable as a Jedi – whatever that means. Ewan McGregor’s Alec Guinness impression was charming. And the story moved along a bit, there was something of a sense of space about it, and it seemed to promise that once the odder ideas about how to blend one generation of filmmaking style with another were worked through, that things would settle down in time for the next movie. And, that did happen, but unfortunately everything that made TPM a success despite the odd ideas got tossed then, too, as a baby and its bathwater. AOTC was a movie with very little in the way of spaciousness to it: everything was quite screwed-down, and I felt bad for the characters, not because I empathized with what they were going through, but because I empathized with how shallow and boring their lives were…but, then again, how could they have been otherwise? As someone said (and I can never remember who), the plot is a beast that must be fed, and woe betide the characters who try to stand in its way. As a viewer or reader, there are times when you forgive, make allowances, tolerate discordant elements. Style goes a long way; stylistic choices may wind up producing failures, but (I’ll argue) it’s usually unfair to call these failures mistakes. After all, they’re not the result of sloppiness, are they? But the result of some sort of misguided diligence instead. They’re more Count Dooku than Darth Tyrannus, if I may be permitted that; they contain lessons even at their worst. They are not just so many rusty nails of plot nailing the characters willy-nilly to the wall.

But sometimes style doesn’t come into it so much. Sometimes, things are just plain mishandled, and then it’s much harder to tolerate and make allowances. Certainly the Wachowski brothers had good intentions with V For Vendetta, and out of those intentions they did in fact produce a movie that practically vibrated with the stylistic choices they’d made…and yet, was it really any good? Because, it was more than a bit clumsy, too. What shines in the movie is what’s lifted basically in whole pieces out of the comic, but the problem there is that it’s rather difficult to adapt cinematically: Evey’s ordeal is of course indispensible, and (to say the least) hard to improve on, but it suffers from not being much of a part of the rest of what’s going on, and as a piece of cinema it just kind of lays there. And yet, to get rid of it is to make a completely different movie! Some parts of the comic, such as V’s address to London, fit snugly into the expectations of the filmgoer, and on top of that they work well, too; additionally, some parts of the movie that were made up specially for it also work pretty well (the scenes of Evey under the bed spring to mind). But, even given this, most of the movie-parts work against the comic-parts quite strongly, and in the end you have to ask, whose fault is that? Many, many parts of this movie are just too much, as far as sloppiness goes…certain parts even made me physically start with shock, such as the music over the closing credits. Ouch! What? Oh my God. No, you’re joking. I’m a fairly forgiving viewer of movies, and I can tolerate a lot of things that I’m not necessarily crazy about, but the whole trick of cinematic-adaptation surgery is to get closer to the essentials of the original story, not farther away; so that the Wachowski brothers’ V For Vendetta starts to look more and more like something its titular character would enjoy blowing up, as it moves on…that’s not good. And it doesn’t exactly raise one’s hopes for Watchmen, does it? Particularly for those of us who might’ve been unlucky enough to have read that treatment of it that was floating around online a while ago…you know, the one where Dr. Manhattan goes back in time to prevent Jon Osterman’s accident from taking place…V, I’ll meet you and Rorschach at the train station…if I’m late, just start without me…

Still, something might have been made of it. It didn’t simply stink. But as with the matter of Rogue in X3, you get the sense that a big chunk of this story is just a bit too hot for its adapters to handle; the Wachowski brothers do seem to be pretty good scriptwriters, but they also seem to be not quite good enough, to reshape all of Moore’s material and expect it to be neat and tidy and picture-perfect. No doubt there is someone out there who could have brought this off a bit better, could have relied less heavily on the old Hollywood spackle to get the job done. Even scenes that I didn’t like, might have worked. But just making stylistic choices doesn’t automatically mean you’ll also be making art, or even very very good trash. V For Vendetta is not so bad, and must seem pretty neat to those coming fresh to the story, but it’s not so good either, and some parts of it are actually awful. And that’s a problem, damn it: because “awfulness” is not something we should be willing to overlook. Back in X3, things fall apart, and as a result the wrong messages emerge from the script…style, yes, sure. But these messages are really quite bad, too, and so whose fault is that? Mine? Nope, not mine; I just rented the thing. You can’t pin this on me. If I’d've made it, it would’ve been different.

Sorry.

But there it is: you have to be bloody careful when you’re dealing with other people’s expectations. Basically, it’s a no-win situation: you have to push the envelope in order to succeed at all, but pushing the envelope also entails a certain amount of failure, no matter what you do. It’s just, what kind of failure is it, that you’re going to choose?

It’s a problem well-known to the creators of superhero comics: you get a “run” on Batman or Spider-Man, and that’s your piece, and you know you’ll be judged on it. It’s actually part of the job description. So there’s very little room to run completely free; the neat ideas in your head can’t all come out, just because you happen to have them (current Marvel editorial policy notwithstanding), because the toys have to go back in the box at some point. Which I imagine can be a bit frustrating.

So…you think maybe this is what happened to John Byrne?

Here’s a guy who has become actually a little notorious for not putting the toys back in the box, starting with the tail end of his work at Marvel on the Avengers teams and moving on smartly into his owned properties. I’m still surprised by how casually he can drop a series, just stop working, leave it forever, never resurrect it or tidy it up or polish it off. It’s astounding. But, that’s creator freedom for ya! It’s like bachelor living: don’t wanna pick up those socks? Leave ‘em. Wanna eat nothing but fish sticks for a week? Go for it. There’s no doubt Byrne knows how to construct characters and stories and plots, and words and pictures. He’s very good at it. But, remember when I said Grant Morrison was a lot more conventional a writer than he lets on? I think Byrne is a far more unconventional writer than he lets on. He’s impatient and mercurial, calculating and capricious, sometimes even a little savage…and, above all, he goes for it. How strange; because “it” is still just all the standard spackle of superhero comics, the grunt-issue Marvel boilerplate. Byrne’s not going off and doing The Invisibles or From Hell or Beanworld (oh my God, John Byrne’s Beanworld, can you imagine? But then in a way, every Byrne story is a little bit like Beanworld…um, yes, I should probably elaborate on that at some point…), he’s going off and doing Next Men and Danger Unlimited. And why? Basically, because he’s a man of his time; a genre specialist who works in science-fictional superhero stories that are oriented to the “hard” style of (let’s say) Larry Niven, in a way he’s just like Ditko: his prejudices and preferences always shine through whatever he’s writing. Because wherever he goes, Byrne has the same point to make about human nature. And he does make it: we expect to find a lot of sentimentalists working in the mainstream of superhero comics, but Byrne’s anything but that. He believes in systems, and conflicts, and engineering problems big and small as the right road to explicating the human psychology. Think I’m praising him? Well, he’s no Alan, and he’s not the Two Steves either, and he’s neither Kirby nor Ditko (all my usual touchstones, eh? God, I’m so transparent), but he does get a certain kind of a job done. He just wants the freedom to do it. Or, he did.

It all starts with Alpha Flight.

(Gee, I hope all these connections hold up…)

Alpha Flight was a pretty interesting comic book, for John Byrne and Marvel and me. Meticulously planned-out (in both the good and the bad sense of the word), every character had every bit of their backstory prepared for them by the time the first issue hit the stands, and their character-logic was tight even as their motivations and choices and thoughts were (at least by Marvel’s standards at the time) a lot looser than what you’d find in Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four. This looked a lot like complexity, at the time, and maybe it even was – Heather and Mac’s decision not to have children was definitely something I had never seen before in a superhero comic, and probably won’t ever see again, the fact of Sasquatch and Aurora’s sexual relationship is tossed off so casually in a few panels that it almost seems like it shouldn’t be that shocking (but of course, why should it be?), Northstar is gay from issue #1, Mac is prone to depression, self-doubt, and impulsive behaviour, Puck is a dwarf – but at the same time things were more simplified in Alpha Flight, than they were complexified. Byrne’s self-inked art and boldly unadorned titles tells us almost right away that he’s making a departure from a lot of standard Marvel clutter – many people don’t like Byrne when he inks his own pencils, but most of the time I believe they’re referring to situations in which they perceive that he doesn’t really care, or he’s being a prima donna, or something like that. In Alpha, though, the decision to self-ink strikes me as much more of a deliberate stylistic choice on his part, a way of making art that better serves his storytelling goals. Alpha is simplified: the characters are moral, but unencumbered by the logic-loops typically found in superheroic ethical codes – it’s natural to want to kill your enemy, for example, and that motivation rarely results in paralysis – and human frailties and imperfections are acknowledged, but they’re not fetishized. In Alpha Flight, to borrow a phrase, it isn’t what you’re like inside that matters, but it’s what you do that defines you, and that made for unusually stripped-down storytelling at the time – Byrne’s style here, in both script and art, strongly resembles, and perhaps is even made to suggest, something like a fanzine aesthetic of roughness and economy, only wedded to an obvious confidence in the author’s mastery of his craft. He mixes things up a lot: sometimes he provides lovingly-detailed backgrounds in a particular style, and sometimes he provides those details in quite another style, and still other times he shows himself to be a fan of the solid-colour background. In fact, he employs the solid-colour background with such frequency here, it’s almost like he’s being inked by Vince Colletta! The panels are big, blocky, and square; the perspective rotates fluidly; instructive captions are everywhere, exuding a detached, but very specific, narrative voice. Virtually every panel contains an explanation, of something, as Byrne continues to develop the authorial tone he first employed in his story “The Man With The Power” back in FF Number Whatever-It-Was…of course he’s more restrained than (say) Englehart, a bit more of a bricklayer, but his stylistic allegiances are quite visible regardless: unlike many of his colleagues at Marvel and DC, he’s not writing New Wave melodrama but old-school thriller, and he’s terse because he intends to be terse. Because bricklaying is an honourable profession too, you know…just try building your houses without it…

But the terseness of Byrne’s plotting (if not always, exactly, his scripting), when combined with another couple of little details I’ll get into directly, brings us interestingly close to the aesthetic on display in X3 (remember X3?): as the backup “Origins Of Alpha Flight” feature shows us repeatedly – and this was probably my favourite backup feature of this type ever – what goes on “off-screen” is even more important than what goes on upfront in plain view. In Alpha Flight, the past is inescapable, and the past controls everything…not that there are no coincidences, but there is pattern everywhere, that creates momentum in character arcs that can’t be overcome. At the beginning, this is sensed as a tantalizing impression of order underneath the accidental happenings and circumstances of the plot, encouraging the idea that this comic book will be worth buying for years and years, as it gradually explores the possibilities inherent in its detailed backstory…then, more towards the middle, tension mounts, and a real feeling of worry develops, that things are beginning to move pretty fast…too fast, maybe, as we suspect it might be best not to get too attached to these characters…and then finally it becomes apparent that things really are moving too fast, rushing with unseemly speed into a crushing end-point of pattern from which the possibility of liveliness is unlikely to re-emerge. This cycle actually goes around about three times under Byrne’s pen, each time more tightly than the last, until at the end it becomes quite frustrating: as readers, we feel that we have not had as much time with Alpha as we would have liked, as though we’ve somehow come into the story too late…

But, we’re not alone in that. Alpha’s own members have all come into their story too late, too. Snowbird is late, Talisman is late, Shaman is late, Marina is late, even Mac himself is late…in fact the only person who’s not late is Heather, because she’s been a constant presence since the beginning. Of course this is really Heather’s story, so perhaps that’s fitting…on the other hand, it wears on you after a while. If poor Marina’s arc flashes past faster than anything I have ever seen, what about Tom Smallwood? You’ve got to feel for the little bastard; he’s barely there at all. Aurora and Northstar practically flicker and strobe as they pass through their intense changes…hey, wasn’t it just a minute ago that they were parting the waters of the St. Lawrence, mirror images of each other? Weren’t we going to stop and take some time to explore how Jeanne-Marie’s different personalities dealt with her brother’s sexuality? Or, at least weren’t we going to build that tension up a little bit? We didn’t, though; instead, at some point it was all just gone, and so quickly…

And yes, I’m complaining. But, the X3 conversations I read online remind me that maybe I shouldn’t just complain. On re-reading, this frustrating “coming in too late” thing isn’t just Byrne getting bored and dropping stitches, not at all: the thread of latecoming is woven right through everything in Alpha Flight from the very first issue. It isn’t decompression. It’s something else. And I may not agree with it, but I don’t think it’s simply a mistake. In the battle against Tundra, Shaman arrives to deal with the monster by trying to reach the human soul within it. This would’ve worked in an issue of X-Men! But here, he can’t even try; it’s just too late. It’s too late! Just as Marina and Puck are “too late”, even though it’s Marina who nevertheless provides the means to defeat Tundra. Puck just shows up at the Hudsons’ door after the thing’s all over, for heaven’s sake. But it doesn’t end there. The examples really are far to numerous to list, so just a couple more big examples: Marina is hatched from an egg forty thousand years too late, Michael Twoyoungmen is too late to save his wife, too late to see his grandfather before he dies, waits and waits before beginning his training…is too late to recapture his relationship with his daughter. Snowbird is too late in recognizing the secret of Walter Langkowski. The whole of Alpha Flight is too late to the history of the Northern Gods’ struggles against the Great Beasts, only participating in it after the fact. The secret identity of Cpl. Anne McKenzie consumes about a page of storytelling space over five issues or so, her budding workplace romance simply (well, apparently) eliminated, just plain run out of time to get started as we hurry on to the end of her time on Earth. Northstar and Aurora we’ve covered. Kind of. Covered the Newfoundland Superman story that is Marina’s origin, too. Oh yeah! Almost-forgot about Snowbird’s post-cognitive powers! That one’s kind of a gimme, isn’t it…

You see it’s the same as X3. Things that nearly happened. Things that could’ve happened, but didn’t, should’ve made more solid and satisfying connections with the other things that were around them, but just missed them. And it’s all the fault of the causes of events being buried so deep in the past that nothing can be done to alter their inevitable outcomes – we’re all “too late”, characters and readers and viewers alike, and Omega Flight (can I say that again? Omega Flight,) just keeps coming back, and back, and back and back. X3 tries to fuse the double plotlines of Phoenix and Cure, and fails; Alpha Flight tries to fuse open-ended seriality with the completion of a cycle, and it fails too. Heather’s assumption to the role of main character is great, but we don’t take long enough to get there to feel comfortable saying goodbye to the status quo; the Final Battle against Somon the Artificier is the acme of Byrne’s experimental stylings, but then once it’s over, there’s not much more to do. By the time the Great Beasts are permanently defeated, Byrne’s painted himself into a corner, having not much left to say, and practically no undamaged characters left to say it with. The dynamics of the Alpha team that debuted back in issue #1 have been comprehensively demolished, and the only thing to do now is go back to square one and start building up something different out of what’s left behind.

Byrne isn’t up for it. He makes it as far as the West Edmonton Mall, then tries to put a big fat padlock on his changes in an (ultimately futile) attempt to save them permanently, and then he’s out.

Alpha Flight goes downhill from there. I love Bill Mantlo, but…yeah. It goes downhill. It never recovers. It just ends.

Like, perhaps, the X-Men movie franchise?

Hmm…you know, over on that inexplicable Make Mine Marvel blog, there’s apparently some PR going on that’s to do with the possibility of future X-Men movies. It really makes you think. How could this be done? I mean, the final scene of Xavier and Moira in X3 clearly tells us that there is, indeed, more X-nonsense on the way, but somehow while I did absorb the implication, I never really thought about it ’til now. Having dispensed with all Scott/Jean/Wolverine/Rogue material, having made Magneto right, and “killed” Charles Xavier, having taken X3 to the point of implosion that all dreams finish up in, and (not least) having interested me a little bit while simultaneously pissing me right off, what’s left to be done here? Obviously we all know that there will be, can be, no sequel to V For Vendetta…but that’s true in another slightly less obvious way too, because look at the Wachowski’s final interpretation strategy (which I disliked, of course) in film-only terms: how do you follow on from the crowd of detonation-witnesses all taking off their masks to reveal you, and you, and him, and her, and you were there, and you, and you…taken strictly on its own, in filmic terms, it’s an announcement that there’s nothing else to say. Well, this is kind of what I dislike about it: because there is more to say, specifically all the stuff in the comic book that they didn’t bother to say, but once all those masks come off it’s like parliamentary closure has been invoked. There’s just not going to be any more discussion about it. You might as well go home. We’re finished. That was the end. Sorry.

The third Star Wars prequel does pretty much the same thing. There were Sith, there were Jedi, you got R2D2 and C-3P0, a Clone War, Anakin turned into Darth Vader, Luke and Leia got born…we’re DONE. Sorry, that’s it. You’re back to 1977, this is as far as we’re going, we hit the stops we needed to along the way and now it’s OVER. Out of the car, please.

Can the X-franchise really do any more than this?

Well, I suppose it’s possible. But I’m not exactly sanguine about it.

“Kill me,” Jean begs Wolverine.

Well, he killed her.

Okay, we’re done here. I’ve finally touched on everything I said I would at the beginning, so…

Out of the car, please.

 

(p.s. Ed, what phone number can you be reached at now?)

A Couple Of Notes On SF TV Show Theme Songs

First of all, the JLU “Birds Of Prey” episode?  AWESOME.

But, it was the first time I noted a heartbreaking infelicity in the JLU theme song.

I don’t understand how it happened.

It makes me a bit sad, actually.

Look, I don’t know if you all know much about professional musicians, but usually they know what they’re talking about.  Theirs is the business of evoking emotional response, you see;  and even when they’re hateful, abominable misusers of this talent (*cough*Diane Warren*cough*), they’re still not stupid.

Did I like the theme song for “Enterprise”?

No.

But, it was well-executed.

That is, to be precise, it was well-synchronized with the filmic images it was supposed to imbue with emotional heft.

But then…they changed it!

And they made it shittier!

The mind reels.

I think you all probably know what I’m talking about.  As much as certain people (*cough*Diane Warren*cough*the Peggy Noonan of music*cough*) may do bad things, at least when they do them they deserve not to have the calculation removed from their cynical musical phrases!  At least that!  Come on.  I’ll cite an example, and honestly I don’t know what hellhound is or was in charge of making the changes I’m talking about, and it galls me to say that Peggy Noonan did something right, but…

The line is (shudder) “I’ve got strength/Of the soul/And no one’s gonna bend or break me” — and this was originally synchronized with the image of an astronaut’s foot on the lunar surface being picked up, to show his footprint.

I don’t say it wasn’t a perversion of all that’s right about music.  But.  It was an intelligent way of mixing sound with image so as to create the maximum emotional response.  And just in case you’re wondering:  “maximum emotional response” is code for shivers — even mild shivers — going down your spine.

So Peggy Warren accomplished that, in her original synchro-act for the producers of “Enterprise”.  Only, as I said, they changed it:  they messed up the emotional rhythm, and they made it worse.  You’ve got to understand, Diane Noonan’s music wasn’t designed with a lot of wiggle-room, here.  There was never anything, for want of a better word, “good” to fall back on in the “Enterprise” theme — it was, as they say, what it was.  Its charms were confined to, and only existed in, the synchronization.  Tamper with that:  and the whole utility of the music simply goes away.

And I noted this;  fortunately for me, I never really gave a damn about “Enterprise”.

I give a damn about JLU, though, and that’s why I’m sorry to report that there are hellhounds there too.  The JLU opening theme achieved a remarkable spine-tingliness by having its first break come with the iconic picture of Hawkgirl, that seems to include an homage to the good (but misunderstood) girls of Jack Cole.  But when I saw the FULLY AWESOME BoP episode of JLU, the timing was unfortunately off:  Shayera showed up, but the musical break came just after her cameo appearance.  It kind of ruined it.

Due to the fact, you see, that the idea that Shayera is an interesting character has been very carefully built up:  she’s supposed to be the heart of the Justice League at the same time that she’s supposed to be its most troubled member, and that makes her our entry, exit, point-of-view character.  She’s the Hugh Jackman Wolverine of the Justice League, if you will.  She’s the cool one.  She’s the one we love.

Which was a great move by the makers of the Justice League animated program, a great decision:  because we did need someone to love, actually, if we were to adore the show, and Hawkgirl was a boring-as-shit character in the comics, but in the animated series she got her chance to be excellent.

So why not let her stay that way?

Hellhounds of JLU, I beg you:  put the first break back where it should be, on the contemplative image of our heroic, troubled, complicated, unrequited crush.  Or just re-do the bloody thing, but properly.  Christ, I feel like Gordon Ramsey.  Just do it, okay, for fuck’s sake?  Just follow the fucking recipe?  Or make a new one, but for fuck’s sake don’t fuck with the old one?  Okay?

The sick thing is that everything in the JLU titles is really the same as it ever was.  It’s only that punch that’s missing.

Okay, more beer!

This Year, We Get The Inhumans We Deserve

I just can’t do it.

Oh, not the Karnak story…as Sean W. predicted, I’m now deep into the plotting of issue #4 of my six-issue Inhumans miniseries entitled “The Mirror And The Lamp”…so no fear there…and also, ai ya, what is wrong with me…?

No, what I can’t do is finish the very big and intensively geeked-out post I was going to call “Of Spaceknights And Fortress-Keepers”…and that’s a shame, because I was quite enjoying it. Lots of looney stuff in there about the great unrecognized virtues (and unrecognized meaning) of Neil Gaiman’s 1602, about the intentional and unintentional design features of the Marvel multiverse and how the tension between them makes good storytelling possible, and about Blackbeard and Rama-Tut and the problem of family Bibles, the Watcher and Roy Thomas and the necessity of time wedges, and most of all about the epic battle in my head between The Sentry and ROM (yes, Keeper – you read that right), which ultimately saves the Marvel Universe from being…well, a place that lately just goes from bad to worse, let’s face it. Lots of stuff, too, about the measurement of “time” and “space” in the inter-multiversal manifold, about the uniqueness of Uatu among Watchers, the wonderful spirit of homage that was embedded in the post-Crisis DCU (and which is finally re-emerging now, thank goodness), the real secret of The Sentry (hint: he and The Void are NOT the same person, ha HA!), the three different types of time-travel that are possible in the MU, the Dire Wraiths, the Marvel Zombies, Superboy-Prime, Chris Claremont (have you talked to Jon J. Muth about that Curse Of Chalion comic yet, Chris?), Brian Michael Bendis, Tony Stark, the Legion of Super-Heroes, Animal Man, Geoff Klock, Warren Ellis, Captain Thunder (!) (you’re damn right!), Wizard magazine, the Baloneyverse, Ultimate Extinction (!!!), Wanda Maximoff, Civil War, Pariah, the Matter Mobilizer, Ragged Robin, Terence McKenna, Alexander Luthor, Geoff Johns (well, like Alex Luthor and Geoff Johns aren’t the exact same person anyway, I mean really), the naturalness of intercompany crossovers of whatever type or species, and finally the psychological origins of the staple fantasy-literature conceit known as time-travel.

Oh, and Watchmen.

I’ve been working on it for about four months. Off and on. I was actually eager to test the limits of what WordPress would accept in a single post, as well as the limits of my own geekiness, to see if there might not be a correlation between the two.

But, that’s all over now.

And why?

Well, because I just needed to look one thing up about the old Mark Gruenwald history of the Eternals, Titans, and Inhumans. I’m actually pretty familiar with most of the features of the Gruenwald Gymnastics, actually. I mean, I don’t really enjoy them. But I know my way around them. For my, y’know, sins.

But…I mean, I kept up, or tried to, in the post-Gruenwald days. Infinity War? Check. Hyperstorm? Sadly, check. Abraxas? Okay, well let’s not dwell on it overlong, but…check. I even suffered through the, how shall I put it, LAME Nineties reification of Starhawk. I did think I had it all pretty much taped out.

But I was SOOOOOOOOOOOO WRONG!

I arrived at Wikipedia somewhere around eleven o’clock last night. Innocently (naively?) typed in “Inhumans”.

And, what the fuck.

Seriously.

Ed, if you’re reading this, don’t type in “Inhumans” and start following links to the Eternals. DON’T DO IT, MAN! IT’S NOT WORTH IT! I simply can’t understand how Marvel’s cosmic landscape could possibly have gotten this…um, Byzantine? Baroque? Cubist? I’ll tell you how bad it’s gotten, how parasitical on itself it’s become: Thanos and Death are a freakin’ couple now, just as if they were on “Mad About You” (hmmm…), and Eternity’s like, some dude they know. And that makes my screwing-around with the Marvel Universe absolutely pointless. I keep treating the MU like it’s on Blogger, that’s my problem. Sometimes I step it up, and treat it like it’s on LiveJournal. Oooooh. Yeah. No. Things are quite past that point, and I’m a frickin’ dinosaur, already a fossil without realizing it. Because the MU is MySpace, now. It doesn’t have to make any sense, it doesn’t need my (ultimately) Roy Thomas-inspired Crisis-retcons, its continuity is now nothing more or less than a Friends list; and if it were a nerdy subculture it would be the Furries. No offence, Furries. But, some people think they’re a little bit “out there” because they carry a homemade tricorder around with them that they made out of an egg carton and some duct tape, you know? Some people escape by pretending they’re Luke Skywalker or the doctor from Babylon 5. These people, like me, are strictly linear thinkers. You folks (and God bless you for it) aren’t even content to escape by pretending to be Tarzan, or Mowgli, or even for the love of God real animals…somewhere out there is a Wolverine fetishist, gah! How ridiculous this man is! Let him come to one of your conventions and try to pull of some kind of tough-guy snarl there…because you are a seven-foot powder-blue angora Disney-style timber wolf! You read the Denny’s menu through a four-by-four nylon mesh stretched across your avatar’s throat! You make all other fantasy-escapists look weak-willed and impotent by comparison, as you order the grilled cheese; Han and Leia have got nothing on you and your lady, because you don’t have to make sense, you just are. And you’re the kings of this weirdness, my friend; honestly, no joke, I salute you. You make the rest of us look like conformist cowards. To you, watching “Trekkies” must be like watching Andy Warhol’s “Empire”: well, hour three, and so what? So let’s go and get a beer, or something, and say we watched it…yeah, oh yeah, it was so cool…I was riveted…hee hee hee…

Yes, I’m crazy: because I respect you as a better weirdo than me. But unfortunately, if weirdoes were continuities, you’d be Marvel. And I’d be, like, DC. Yes, even now. Even with what’s gone on. Did you know, Ed, that Eon had a child named Epoch? No, don’t look it up. You’ll find out more than you want to, I promise you. Remember that old Gruenwald Two-In-One with Blue Diamond? This is worse. It’s all worse. I’m simply shattered by it. It’s gotten out of hand. It’s turned into finger-painting. And I think I can dare to try and bring some sort of structure to it? Steve Englehart couldn’t bring structure to this thing; it’s become milfoil, and no propellor is safe from it. Any propellor that thinks it’s safe from it, is barking up the wrong elephant – yes, that’s how disgusted I was last night. At eleven o’clock.

When I gave up on this post.

Keeper, if you want to know the (rough sketch of the) circumstances under which ROM saves the universe and reverses everything since Disassembled, once the Watcher realizes there’s no such person as The Sentry and then the Marvel editors wait, biting their nails, for a call back from the relevant copyright-holder…

Well, just drop me a line, and I’ll let you know. After all, I did promise.

The rest of you can judge “The Mirror And The Lamp” when it appears sometime on Monday or Tuesday or so. Because it’ll take me that long to forget what I’ve seen! And forget it I must, because I’m determined that this year, we’ll get the Inhumans we deserve. Okay: at least I will. It won’t be Kirby, or even Gerry Conway for that matter. It might not even be good, in fact it probably won’t be. But, at least it won’t be all that stuff I saw on Wikipedia! Christ! My eyes! At this point I’d welcome the relief of being swallowed by a Kaptroid!

Meanwhile, expect the second part of the X3/Alpha Flight post sooner than that…fair warning, Erin. And also, expect me never again to look up anything Marvel-related on Wikipedia. Two words: snake pit…

And now, for some reason, it occurs to me that I’d really like it if Jack Russell were to become the Marvel equivalent of Dr. Thirteen…Azzarello, you there? Have you seen how Greg Land actually kills on his promo art for this? I know, I can’t believe it either, but it’s true, he really does…

It honestly may be the only way out. At this point. I mean if you go to Wikipedia and look up “Werewolf By Night”, you can at least understand what it says there.

So let’s try and cling to that, shall we?

Okay, more beer.

Can’t Seem To Comment

WordPress appears to have rejected me from the comments on my own blog, now how annoying is that? Particularly since I had such a snappy follow-up to Matthew’s comment on the last post…

But oh well! Lost opportunities, and so forth. But, to Erin: don’t sweat it, I actually thought you were just being clever, so I didn’t take any offence. You may want to skip the next post, though, ha ha!