Tag: comic book (Page 2 of 3)

The Cat in the Sprawl: Blake Snyder’s Genres and Postnarrative Fiction

July 23, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 23 Comments

The industry-standard storytelling program Save the Cat!, developed by late screenwriter Blake Snyder, provides two chief implements for writers of fiction.

The first is the “beat sheet,” which is just Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey by another (more user-friendly, less academically dense) set of names: “Crossing the First Threshold” is renamed “Break into Two”; “Tests, Allies, Enemies” becomes “Fun and Games”; “Approach to the Inmost Cave” is simplified as “Midpoint”; and so forth. The beat sheet offers an easy-to-use mythic blueprint for outlining a narrative.

Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” or monomyth

The second tool, which is really Snyder’s principal innovation, are his genre classifications—the ten different narrative variations on the hero’s journey, each with its own central dramatic question and particular set of story conventions: Monster in the House is about a killer in a confined setting (Jaws, Halloween, Fatal Attraction); Dude with a Problem depicts an innocent hero thrust suddenly into a life-or-death battle (Die Hard, The Martian, Home Alone); Golden Fleece stories are about a quest undertaken for a defined and/or tangible prize (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ocean’s Eleven, Stand by Me), etc.

The beat sheet offers the writer a universal macrostructural narrative foundation; the genre categories prescribe the requirements/expectations germane to each of the ten subtypes of story models. The most successful narratives are recognizable as a single genre only, whereas some of the biggest bombs and/or creative failures of recent memory (47 Ronin, Winter’s Tale, The Mountain Between Us) mixed and matched tropes from multiple genres, leaving the audience bewildered and disoriented.

Of course, the hero’s journey/beat sheet doesn’t apply to fiction in the new “postnarrative” mode of our hyperlinked Digital Age, which “is not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, [New York: Penguin Group, 2013], 34). So, given that, do Snyder’s genre types, then, have any relevance for nonlinear, open-ended “rabbit-hole” fiction—like Lost, Mr. Robot, This Is Us, and Westworld—for which “an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point” (ibid.)?

In a previous post titled “Saving the Cat from Itself,” I argued that postnarrativity, as a form, hadn’t yet been codified—merely identified—and therefore it would be a mistake to impose Snyder’s templates on series like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. Beyond that, I haven’t much explored the matter, let alone settled it.

In today’s guest post, longtime friend of the blog Dave Lerner, a.k.a. dellstories, takes on the issue of whether the genre classifications of Save the Cat! have any applicability to postnarrativity. Feel free to post follow-up questions for Dave in the comments section below, and kindly pay a visit to his Patreon page. Take it away, Dave!

Changing the Narrative: Why Some of Our Most Popular Stories Affirm Our Most Pernicious Beliefs—and How Storytellers Can Rewrite This Bad Script

June 25, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 55 Comments

I can’t say it was by deliberate design, but the blog this year has been heavily focused on the power of storytelling as a cultural lodestar, one that reflects the changing times as much as it influences them. Like gravity, or capitalism, narrative is a governing force in our lives that mostly operates invisibly, if for no other reason than we’ve gotten so accustomed to its ubiquity.

“As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations. Our children demand we tell them stories before they go to bed, so we lace those narratives with the values we want them to take with them into their dreams and their adult lives. Likewise, the stories and myths of our religions and national histories preserve and promote certain values over time. That’s one reason civilizations and their values can persist over centuries” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, [New York: Penguin Group, 2013], 16).

Taking those values “into our dreams,” as Rushkoff puts it, is a crucial proviso, because it underscores the subconscious way storytelling works: A good story seduces you with the promise of entertainment, incrementally winds you up into a state of suspense, and only lets you out when it’s made its point—when it’s imparted its takeaway moral. Over and over we submit to this experience, fondly recalling with friends the parts of a story that made us jump, or laugh, or cry, but seldom do we give much consideration to its underlying ethos; that sort of subtextual scrutiny, let’s face it, begins and ends in third-period English.

But if fiction is the means by which our mores and traditions are conferred, then it is also, accordingly, the way in which bad ideas are inculcated, even by trustworthy artists. Much of this is owed, quite innocently, to utilitarian narrative patterns that have, through mass-repetition, developed into accepted sociocultural precepts.

You all know the rules: sin equals death

Genre conventions are part of a pact storytellers make with their audience, a set of tacitly agreed-upon expectations: an action thriller will have violence; a slasher film will feature teenage sex; a romantic comedy will pair ideologically (and adorably) mismatched lovers. The best stories find a way of at once honoring and challenging those tropes (Scream, The Dark Knight); most, however, simply take them as an uncontested given. Commenting on the erotica blockbuster Fifty Shades Freed, comedian Bill Maher noted:

“Psychologists have to explain how in the age of #MeToo, the number-one movie in America is about a woman on a leash. Or, how in romantic comedies, there are only three plots: she married her boss; stalking is romantic; and ‘I hate you and then I love you’” (Bill Maher, “New Rule: Hollywood’s Grey Area,” Real Time with Bill Maher, February 16, 2018).

To a certain extent, given their sheer volume, archetypal scenarios are unavoidable. And most writers, I suspect, don’t promulgate them with an actively malignant agenda: I don’t imagine screenwriter J. F. Lawton, for instance, set out to make the case that prostitution is romantic when he conceived the neo-Pygmalion fairy tale Pretty Woman; that was simply an incidental if unfortunate concomitant. Artists, after all, have consumed thousands of stories, too, and are therefore as susceptible to the subliminal indoctrination of culturally ingrained—and narratively reinforced—worldviews as the rest of us. Some of our most cherished American myths even help to explain how we’ve arrived at this dangerous moment in history.

Counter Culture: Over the past Quarter Century, a Small Specialty Shop Became a Bronx Institution

May 31, 2018 / Sean P Carlin / 24 Comments

Before the geek underground went mainstream—before the Internet exposed its numbers as legion; before corporations fully understood that superheroes were woefully underexploited billion-dollar assets—there was no better place to both talk and learn about pop culture than the neighborhood comic shop.

When it opened in 1991, Magnum Comics & Cards wasn’t the first direct-market specialty store in the northwest sector of the Bronx where I grew up, but it was inarguably the liveliest, the one with the most personality. That was owed, in no small part, to its colorful proprietor, Neil Shatzoff.

A photo of the shop I snapped on December 30, 2010

Holding court from behind the register, Neil would speak with juvenile exuberance and encyclopedic authority on pop esoterica: why Brian Dennehy would’ve made for a better Commissioner Gordon than Pat Hingle (I agree, but, hey—at least we eventually got Gary Oldman); why Joel Schumacher’s track record for dark-skewing commercial cinema (The Lost Boys, Falling Down) made him a promising candidate to take over the Batman franchise from Tim Burton (well, it seemed like a good fit on paper…); why Kevin Smith’s unproduced Superman Lives script was budgetarily impractical and narratively quixotic (turns out, it was twenty years ahead of its time). His disquisitions were all the more entertaining for his impish, whip-fast wit; reflecting on the Academy’s arbitrary predilection to honor films over movies, he once noted: “Gandhi won an Oscar for Best Costume Design, and all they did was throw a couple of towels over him.”

COMIC ESCAPADES

All throughout high school, I’d pop by the shop every Wednesday to get my weekly fix of superhero soap opera—the now-classic Death of Superman and Batman: Knightfall storylines were unfolding at the time—and, more to the point, to listen to Neil wax pop-cultural. A decade my senior, he supplemented my cinematic education—the way an older sibling’s musical tastes might rub off on you—by introducing me to genre essentials that were just a little before my time: The Thing and An American Werewolf in London and Thief (the feature-film debut of Michael Mann and spiritual precursor to Heat) and the Dirty Harry series. (Though I can’t say for certain, it’s possible the first Dirty Harry sequel, Magnum Force, influenced the name of the shop itself).

It was by way of the file cabinet–mounted TV behind the counter that I first became aware of things like aspect ratios and audio commentaries and director’s cuts; Neil was an early adopter of LaserDisc, and would dub them onto VHS and play them in the store. Imagine my surprise to learn there was a “secret” longer version of Aliens (by seventeen minutes!), or a definitive two-hour documentary on the making of Jaws. In the days before such things were standard-issue features on DVDs, there was only one guy I knew who had access to all that amazing arcana, and he delighted in sharing his zeal for it with his customers.

This Counts, That Does Not: On Canonicity in Media Franchises

January 20, 2017 / Sean P Carlin / 34 Comments

It may surprise you to learn this, but the events of Star Wars never actually happened—the majority of them, anyway. I mean that sincerely—not for a minute should that be interpreted as snide or condescending. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself…

In 1983, George Lucas brought his Star Wars trilogy to a close with Return of the Jedi (oh, those bygone days when movie franchises actually reached—wait for it—a conclusive resolution). Throughout the eighties, the series lived on by way of a pair of made-for-television Ewok movies and the Saturday-morning cartoons Droids and Ewoks, which continued to stoke interest in the franchise—and its lucrative action-figure line… for a while. But by the end of the decade, with no new big-screen productions to energize the fan base, Star Wars had resigned its position at the top of the pop-cultural hierarchy.

George Lucas looks to the horizon

Lucas, who had always been a forward-thinking businessman as much as he was a visionary filmmaker (he negotiated a reduced fee for writing and directing the original Star Wars in return for ownership of sequel and merchandising rights, which the studio deemed worthless and was only too happy to relinquish), had plans to revisit the Star Wars galaxy in a prequel trilogy that had been part of his grand design when he was developing the earlier films—hence the reason, in case you never thought to ask, they are numbered Episodes IV through VI. Even though the prequels themselves were some years off—production on The Phantom Menace wouldn’t commence until 1997—he began laying the groundwork to return Star Wars to its lofty place in the cultural consciousness by commissioning science-fiction author Timothy Zahn to write a trio of novels set five years after the events of Return of the Jedi—what later became commonly known as “the Thrawn trilogy” (named for its chief antagonist).

The books were released successively in ’91, ’92, and ’93 (my best friend Chip and I couldn’t get down to the local bookstore fast enough to buy a copy of each upon publication, though being a year older, he got to read them first); they were New York Times bestsellers that not only got their intended job done—reigniting public interest in a dormant media franchise—but also led to an endless, ongoing series of novels that explored every facet of the Star Wars galaxy: No character or event was too small to be the focus of its own story. Thus, the Star Wars Expanded Universe (SWEU) was born. Han and Leia had twins! Luke got married! Chewbacca sacrificed himself for the Solos’ son Anakin! A universe of stories, far beyond the contained narrative arc of the classic trilogy, took on a life of its own and captured the imagination of a generation that invested itself in the ongoing space opera collectively known as Star Wars—a vast, complex continuity that Lucasfilm maintained with curatorial oversight to prevent inconsistencies and contradictions in the expansive mythos, which comprised movies, books, comics, TV shows, RPGs, and video games.

The Force awakens? For many fans, it never went dormant

When Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, however, they had their own ambitious plans to expand the franchise, and didn’t want to be tied down to every addenda in the extensive mythology. And just like that, everything other than the feature films and then-current Clone Wars animated series was “retconned”—still commercially available, mind you, under the new “Legends” banner, but henceforth declared noncanonical. This was an outrage to many of the longtime fans who considered these “expanded universe” adventures sacrosanct—who’d invested time, money, and interest in the world-building fictions of the Star Wars continuity that had been undone with the stroke of a hand. Some of their favorite stories were now apocrypha, whereas the much-derided prequels, on the other hand, were still canonically official. Where was the justice—the sense—in that?

The Man Behind the Mask: On the Creation of Batman—and Rewriting Authorship Itself

November 17, 2016 / Sean P Carlin / 17 Comments

Pop quiz: Who created Batman?

Even if you think you know the answer, it’s very possible your information is outdated.

Detective Comics no. 27, the first appearance of Batman

In 1939, illustrator Bob Kane (1915–1998) was tasked by DC Comics editor Vin Sullivan to devise a character for Detective Comics that could complement—and ideally capitalize on the success of—the costumed hero who had the year earlier made his debut in the pages of Action Comics: Superman. Inspired in equal measure by Leonardo da Vinci’s 1485 design sketches of an “ornithopter,” a 1930 mystery movie entitled The Bat Whispers, and the 1920 silent film The Mark of Zorro starring Douglas Fairbanks, the commercially savvy Kane managed in short order to assemble the Bat-Man “from an assortment of pop culture debris that together transcended the sum of its parts” (Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human, [New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2011], 17). Part nocturnal predator, part avenging angel—with a secret identity as a millionaire playboy, to boot—Batman was the Gothic (k)night to Superman’s sunny savior of the day. An enduring icon had, against astronomical odds, been created, albeit removed from a narrative framework:

“‘When I created the Batman,’ admitted Bob Kane, ‘I wasn’t thinking of story. I was thinking, I have to come up with a character who’s different,’ and as an artist he was clearly more concerned with pictures than plot. [Writer Bill] Finger, however, was a born story man, blessed with enough pictorial sense to realize what would work in comics” (Les Daniels, Batman: The Complete History, [San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1999], 23).

Finger, a friend and former high-school classmate of Kane’s, further fleshed out the character, whom he saw “as a combination of Alexandre Dumas’s swashbuckler D’Artagnan from The Three Musketeers (1844) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes” (ibid.), and wrote countless Batman scripts in the years that followed. By even Kane’s own admission, Finger embellished and contributed to many aspects of the mythos (including rechristening what was initially New York as “Gotham City”), yet was never credited as co-creator of Batman: “Bob Kane had made his deal with DC Comics on his own, and Finger was merely Kane’s employee” (ibid., 31).

The Exodus Is Here: On Saying Goodbye to the Who

May 31, 2016 / Sean P Carlin / 9 Comments

There was a lot of contentious shouting in our apartment throughout my childhood, so much so that it could be heard the moment I stepped off the elevator—I’m talking thunderous, mean-spirited bickering. All of it—every word—was filtered through the tinny speaker of the AM/FM radio that sat atop our refrigerator.

My father listened daily to The Bob Grant Show—at top volume. He didn’t particularly agree with Grant’s conservative politics, but he loved a good argument. (I wonder if he’d feel the same today, in this era of ‘round-the-clock cable-TV squabbling masquerading as news?) When he wasn’t listening to Grant in the kitchen, he had it blasting from the radio in our Plymouth Duster. I didn’t understand much, if any, of what was being debated, but I laughed every time Grant hollered, “Get off my phone, you jerk!” (He did so often.)

The endless caterwauling from Dad’s favorite station prompted an antithetical reaction in my mother (whether intentional or unconscious I do not know): When she had control of the radio, we listened almost exclusively to 106.7 Lite FM. Up till the age of ten or so, “easy listening” was effectively the only genre of music, save classical, I was aware of. It was probably upon hearing Ambrosia’s “Biggest Part of Me” for the thousandth time (or maybe it was Journey’s “Open Arms”—like it even matters) that I finally asked out of both frustration and genuine curiosity, “Doesn’t anybody sing about anything besides love?”

My mother considered that for a moment. “Love is what makes the world go ‘round.”

It wasn’t a particularly satisfying answer, and perhaps on some subconscious level she herself recognized that, because the following Christmas—this was in ’86 or ’87, I think—she gave me a cassette copy of the Who’s 1978 album Who Are You (which I recently rediscovered while cleaning out my childhood closet).

I’d had no awareness of the Who before that; Who Are You was my crash course in progressive rock, a style that came to speak to my more philosophical and intellectual proclivities throughout high school, college, and beyond. I didn’t always understand what the songs meant—many of Pete Townshend’s lyrics, I suspect, are a mystery to all but (perhaps) himself—but that was exactly the point: The music of the Who is a Rorschach—a receptacle into which you can pour you own feelings and experiences, and from which take your own meaning and catharsis. The lyrics—and the narratives of the band’s operatic concept albums—are so specific to Townshend’s particular imagination, but the broader themes are universal. Take any given Who song, and I doubt it means the same thing to any two people.

Challenge of the Super Friends: A Scholarly Counterpoint

March 4, 2016 / Sean P Carlin / 2 Comments

For those who read my recent analysis of the state of superhero culture—or perhaps, given its uncalled-for length, you’re still reading it—my friend J. Edward Ritchie, whose debut novel, Fall From Grace, was studied here on the blog, just this morning published a friendly, thorough rebuttal to it on his website. Jeff has been an avid comic-book consumer for most of his life, and spent many years in Hollywood pitching, developing, writing, and selling screenplays to major studios, so he comes from a background comparable to mine, yet brings a perspective to this matter all his own. I encourage everyone to take a few minutes to read his take and leave a comment (just so long as you make sure to agree with me!).

Upon reading “The Great Escape,” my wife suggested I change the blog’s tagline from “Writer of things that go bump in the night” to “Highly academic discussions of really dumb shit”! My thanks to J. Edward Ritchie for being my kind of discourser—for engaging in exactly the type of highly academic discussion I think this really dumb shit deserves.

Fall From Grace is available through Amazon.com.

The Great Escape: What the Ascendancy of Comic-Book Culture Tells Us about Ourselves

February 22, 2016 / Sean P Carlin / 19 Comments

Lest anyone doubt the real-world superheroic capabilities of a fictional character, let me state for the record that Batman taught me how to read.

For in watching the syndicated reruns of the Adam West series in the late seventies—the kitschy opening credits, specifically—my not-yet-literate mind eventually recognized a correlation between the splashy title-card logo and repetitive choral chant that accompanied it, and “Batman” became the first word I could read and write. Absolutely true story.

“Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba! Bat-man!”

I loved the old Batman show—the pop-art color scheme and Dutch angles (not that I took conscious note of such stylistics at the time) were like a cartoon come to life. The camp humor? Entirely lost on me: When Batman and Robin slid down the Batpoles and zoomed off in the Batmobile—staged in that glorious life-sized playset of a Batcave—the sense of adventure was kinetic. And when the villain-of-the-week left our heroes for dead in some Rube Goldbergian contraption—their fate to be determined in twenty-four agonizing hours!—the tension was excruciating.

Unlike most of my heroes at that time—Michael Knight, the Duke boys—the Dynamic Duo weren’t confined to the limited jurisdiction of their own fictional worlds, but rather popped up elsewhere, too, in animated form on The New Scooby-Doo Movies and Super Friends, and I never quite understood why no one had thought to put Adam West, Christopher Reeve, and Lynda Carter in a movie together; with no concept of copyright issues or irreconcilable aesthetics or what later came to be called “shared cinematic universes,” it seemed like a no-brainer to assemble an all-star superhero team from the preexisting talent pool.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Thirty-five years after I—along with an entire generation raised on the same pop-cultural diet, it turns out—first dreamed it, the team formerly known as the Super Friends are getting the tent-pole treatment next month with the release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Warner Bros.’ opening-salvo attempt at the kind of license to print cash shared cinematic universe Marvel has so deftly pioneered (to the envy of every studio in Hollywood). Fanboy anticipation is at a full boil, if enthusiasm on social media is any barometer; many are counting down the days with a breadth of fanaticism ordinarily reserved for the Second Coming, others forecasting the would-be mega-franchise’s stillbirth, but all are anxiously awaiting Dawn.

Not me, though. I can say with absolute and irrevocable certainty that I’ll be sitting out Batman v Superman—in theaters, on home video, on cable. In perpetuity.

But, more on that shortly.

Stoking the Fire: Finding Versatility in Genre Conventions

January 26, 2015 / Sean P Carlin / 0 Comments

Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy represents cinematic perfection to me: Batman Begins (2005) was the Batman movie I’d waited my whole life to see; then, much like Batman himself emerging from the cover of shadow when least expected, came The Dark Knight (2008), a gripping thriller à la Michael Mann’s Heat in which the Al Pacino and Robert De Niro roles were assumed, quite credibly somehow, by Batman and the Joker; and just as no artist before Nolan had tackled the early days of Batman’s crime-fighting career (including his apprenticeship and inspiration to go vigilante), no one had authored its concluding chapter, either, until The Dark Knight Rises (2012)—it is, if you take my meaning, the Last Batman Story. For a character that had been in continuous publication—across multiple media—for seventy years at the time these films were produced, Nolan managed to find new, vital aspects of Batman’s rich hagiography to explore.

A Profile in Superheroics: Norm Breyfogle

January 5, 2015 / Sean P Carlin / 2 Comments

In my analysis of the Joker, I made brief mention of Norm Breyfogle, the masterful comic-book illustrator whose work graced the pages of, successively, Detective Comics, Batman, and Batman: Shadow of the Bat between 1987 and 1992. Mr. Breyfogle began his tenure as resident Bat-artist at a very exciting time for the Caped Crusader: Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) had just rocked the comics world, heralding a brand-new era for both the legendary character and the medium itself, and Tim Burton’s Batman would go on to become the highest-grossing film of 1989, thrusting its titular hero out of the shadows of specialty shops and into the national spotlight, irrevocably changing both the comics and movie businesses in the process (probably for the worse in both cases, but that’s a subject for another article, I suppose).

Tag: comic book (Page 2 of 3)

The Cat in the Sprawl: Blake Snyder’s Genres and Postnarrative Fiction

Changing the Narrative: Why Some of Our Most Popular Stories Affirm Our Most Pernicious Beliefs—and How Storytellers Can Rewrite This Bad Script

Counter Culture: Over the past Quarter Century, a Small Specialty Shop Became a Bronx Institution

This Counts, That Does Not: On Canonicity in Media Franchises

The Man Behind the Mask: On the Creation of Batman—and Rewriting Authorship Itself

The Exodus Is Here: On Saying Goodbye to the Who

Challenge of the Super Friends: A Scholarly Counterpoint

The Great Escape: What the Ascendancy of Comic-Book Culture Tells Us about Ourselves

Stoking the Fire: Finding Versatility in Genre Conventions

A Profile in Superheroics: Norm Breyfogle

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