HANDS OFF MY CAKE!

AICN comic book roundtable discusses Marvel's Spider-Man reboot and don't much care for what they see.

I've been following Marvel's Spider-Man shenanigans from the sidelines, mostly to point and laugh, but more and more ( I see the ongoing decline of mainstream comics to be one of serialization )

( Once you used to see kids buying comics, no longer )

( How do solve a problem like your audience knowing 20 years worth of X-Men history? )

( These puppies weren't meant to last forever )

( The cake is a lie? :( )

( True fact: serialization creates continuity whores )

So how do you solve a problem like serialization and the rigid adherence to continuity it creates? Stop producing serials.

It's like TV. Why is UK TV better than US TV? Why was Season One the best season of Battlestar Galactica? Why is US cable TV better than broadcast?

The answer is the same for all: each involve producing fewer episodes in a format structured so that there's a beginning, middle and end (even if that end is a cliffhanger).

Transplanting this model to comics would mean ditching the long-running serials in favour of limited runs where a creative team signs on for a specific number of issues, say from four to 24, to tell a specific story with hard edges so that there's a beginning, middle and end. By getting rid of the serialized format that encourages audience to think of stories as part of an unbroken line of history, writers would be free to tell more innovative stories without editors worrying about fitting that into some arbitrary character history. It would also be possible to tell stories that take place over a couple of days but involve 24 issues without causing continuity problems for either the rest of the "universe" or the character's other adventures. It would also be possible to try out ideas like "Clone Spider-Man" or a new Batman without the convoluted and often illogical plot twists required to bring these ideas into an ongoing serial (or worse, those required to undo them).

If publishers are going to insist on treating these characters as static, they need to look at presenting their adventures in a format that encourages the ongoing reinvention of these characters without alienating audience. Changing the publishing paradigm from one that caters and cultivates long-term readers of a particular character to one that rewards the readers of a particular story would renew readership and invigorate these characters.

It certainly couldn't be any worse than "Infinite Crisis".

Linkspam And Also Poetry

Linkspam from around the Intartoobz:

You are all Jet Li's bitches.

Sarah Jane Adventures better than Torchwood? I'm a big fan of Torchwood's first season and I'm liking the second large. The ep of the Sarah Jane Adventures that I've seen was cool but not great so it's hard for me to judge relative merits. But, as The Evening Herald opined yesterday, I can't help but wondering if some of the "Torchwood is crap" sentiment springs from resistance to a show which is headlined by an openly gay man who is not camp and a career woman who is not girly.

Positive review of Teeth - kind of interested in this movie except for the gore and spurting blood bits. I saw Black Sheep in November and that overdrew my personal gory movie bank for the next year, I think.

From cleolinda, In the midst of the Heath Ledger media insanity, Star Jones stands out as a voice of reason. Yeah, I'm kind of shocked, too.

Also from Cleo: Warren Ellis is a douchebag (additional commentary in, appropriately, comments): ( exerpt )

Yo, Ellis - your enfant terrible/Intertoobz iconoclast routine is tired. Also, when making the decision to be a scold, always doublecheck that you aren't merely being an asshole and that the target of your ill-advised ire actually deserves it. That said, way to burn bridges, man. Also, you and John Gibson in the same boat? Nice. Very nice.

While I'm on the subject (of suicides real and alleged), I'm reading Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes' book of poetry about his life with Sylvia Plath. I find it the most astonishing love poetry but others in my class think it was a mercenary attempt to cash in on his relationship with Plath, which I think is bullshit - if you're going to 'cash in' why wait 35 years? My tutor probably has it closest to right when he said that this was Hughes' attempt to have the last word on an issue that had dogged his career. Birthday Letters was published in January of 1998, Hughes died of a heart attack while undergoing treatment for Colon Cancer in October of that year.

I wondered at the difference in attitude between myself and my disapproving classmate. She is older by 30 years, I would say, than me and though she may herself have been divorced, I understand that her parents' did not. But I look at the friends I went to high school with, all in our mid-30s now (when did I get so old), and see that, of our parents, half divorced during our childhood. To live through that experience gives me a different perspective on Hughes' silence on his first famous marriage while assholes engorged on their own self-important sense of outrage were chiseling the Hughes name off his wife's headstone, a name she shared with her children. I think refraining from commenting was neither uncaring nor an admission of guilt but a deliberate decision not to defame the memory of his children's mother or give fuel to scandal by engaging in a public debate. A divorce is not the same as the death of a parent but it still represents the end of a family and I've seen the wounds left on children by parents who allow their own sense of hurt and outrage outstrip their concern for their children. So while only those involved know the truth of it, I choose to respect Hughes for his discretion.

As I say, the poetry itself is astonishing, although I've been told it is not Hughes' best work. But I find it striking and rich with both passion and regret:

From "St. Boltoph's"

First sight. First snapshot isolated
Unalterable, stille din the camera's glare.
Taller
Than ever you were again.


From "Chaucer"

"Whan that Aprille with his showres soote
That drought of March hath perced to the roote..."
At the top of your voice, where you swayed on a the topf os a stile,
Your arms raised- somewhat for balance, somewhat
To hold the reigns of the straining attention
Of your imagined audience - you declaimed Chaucer
To a field of cows.


From "The Blue Flannel Suit"

You waited
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judged you, and I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what gripped you, as you sipped,
Were terrors that had killed you once already.
Now, I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die.