Life on Queen Street

· Things I really kinda love - Amanda Tapping & SANCTUARY:

Tapping is charming as hell and Helen Magnus is a different kind of SF badass - both explicitly feminine and explicitly hardcore (like Scully if Scully had been allowed to actually have balls?). SANCTUARY has not always avoided the pitfalls of genrefail but the show's premise - that diversity is valuable in itself & worth protecting - is a refreshing change from 'kill the monster/alien' SF and so typically Canadian that the very idea makes me grin.

· Things I kinda hate: Katee Sackhoff and other actors/fanbait writing comic books.

I've read comic books for over 30 years (eep!) and it's not something just anyone can do. The rapid repacking of high-profile monthly titles into six or eight-issue trade paperbacks disguised the fact that Joss Whedon's run on Astonishing X-Men was largely awful, unreadable as a monthly, suffering from poor pacing and tiresome exposition. Kevin Smith, while slightly better at writing for the medium, was congenitally unable to meet a deadline. And don't even get me started on Peter Petrelli and his "please make this into a movie" vanity project. The good comics out there (and there are a few - some of them are even published by Marvel/DC) have one thing in common - the writers write primarily (although not necessarily exclusively) for comics. Because distilling a story into chunks of 22 visual pages is a skill just like any other technical understaking - it's not something you can do just because you read Betty and Veronica or Detective Comics as a kid.

· Things I'm kinda undecided about - Riese the Series:

For starters, it insists on calling itself Riese the Series, a title which feels like if it isn't some sort of taxonomical party foul, it should be. For seconds, our hero, Riese, is protected by her wolf companion, Fenrir, and I have a rule about "no telepathic pets" in my entertainment. I don't even like Pets of Special Narrative Significance and let's face it: companion wolves? Done to death.

That said, Riese the Series, a Vancouver-based web series about a mysterious wanderer in a strange steam-punky world is sort of interesting, if mostly in a "name that Stargate/Smallville/Sanctuary/BSG actor" way. The first "chapter" is broken up into five or so installments, released on youtube at two week intervals. We're up to episode three and soon, I hope, something will actually happen.

I feel slightly guilty crabbing about Riese the Series. I admire the creators' initiative and the use of the internet to create new and different stories (SANCTUARY also started life as a web series and the two projects share a determination to tack away from standard genre asethetics) but Riese the Series has yet to nail down my interest.

Maybe it needs more wolf.

In the past week, I've been (at various times):

( Don't talk to me about healthcare. No, seriously. )

( Welcome to Canada: Consular services now available in 'Whites Only' and 'Fuck You'. )

· On a related note, I finally found my boxing handle last night: Hellfire H______, pleased to meet you.

· One an unrelated note (except possibly my passion for justice), DC's Batgirl reboot hits the stands next Wednesday. DC's house blog, The Source posted a preview that is frustratingly vague on the identity of the new Batgirl. About the only thing that is clear is that it's not the last holder of the title, Cassie Cain. Fanboy speculation is split between Stephanie "Spoiler" Brown and Barbara Gordon's protege, Misfit. No one seems to consider Barbara Gordon, the Silver Age Batgirl as a realistic candidate... except me.

True, Babs is supposedly stil paralyzed, although the last two pages of the leadingly-titled Oracle: The Cure potentially offer a fix to that problem*, and the first five pages don't seem particularly Barbara Gordon-esque (except for the weight-gag: "thank you" strikes me as an older woman's response rather than a teens). While the Phil Noto cover-art certainly matches his earlier illustrations of Batgirl and Barbara (he always paints her with blue eyes), that really doens't mean anything. At the same time, the five-page preview really doesn't sound like Spoiler or Misfit, either. Batgirl in those pages also strikes me as too capable to be either Spoiler (the Batarang move and where would she get the outfit?) or Misfit (any of it) and not good enough to be Cass (who's supposed to be one of the top two martial artists in the DCU) - I could just buy it as a just-getting-back-into-the-game Barbara Gordon, out for kicks.

My personal hunch is that we will see Barbara Gordon kicking ass in the book at some point - why the false suspense about who the new Batgirl is otherwise? At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised if we find that there's more than one Batgirl out there, either. I'm not thrilled with the idea of Spoiler taking over as BG - I think she's more interesting as a foil for Tim Drake (although Red Robin is a terrible book) and I'd like to see new characters grow into their own rather than cycling throw the Batcharacters like a revolving door.

At any rate, we'll see in another week.

· I'm both looking forward to District 9 and intrigued to see the different responses. One of the things that frustrates me about the anti-racist dialogue on LJ is the overwhelming USian perspective. Representative of the English-language population of lj, I know, but frustrating for me as a Canadian. I'm interested to see how the North American interwebz respond to a movie set in Johannesburg made by a white South African who now lives in Vancouver but grew up during the last days of Apartheid rule in SA and produced by a New Zealander. It seems to me that there are many perspectives on history and racism at work in District 9 and none of them (other than Sony's marketing department) are USian. Also, as a Canadian, do I enjoy the idea of a story where aliens arrive somewhere other than the United States? Hell. Yes. Squared.

*If the Anti-Life Equation somehow fixed Barbara's injuries by transferring the damage to the Calculator's daughter, that would give an angsty-guilt-ridden edge to Babara's character of the sort that the Batbooks seem to love. I'd imagine trying to find out if she could restore the girl's mobility while loving her own restored freedom would form a large part of Barbara's arc. There would also be an interesting debate in Babs' own mind about whether or not the good she could do out of her wheelchair outweighed the harm to the girl.

Kate Beaton, who I predict will one day rule Canada, on Comic Book Resources:

We can only hope that she will be a benign and munificent dictator.

And the Dark Horse Presents strip itself.

I've been wanting to write up my thoughts on the new TV season for a while and it's always been the last thing on a list of six things I needed/wanted to do, which is why I never got around to it. Today, I put it at the top of the list and Shazam! here I am, writing up my thoughts on the new TV season.

Last year this time I was in Ireland and consuming all my TV via the miracle of Flash Video, including new shows like CHUCK, PUSHING DAISIES, LIFE, PRIVATE PRACTICE, BIONIC WOMAN and BURN NOTICE; and old standbys like GREY'S ANATOMY, UGLY BETTY, DEXTER and FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS.

I was greatly enjoying CHUCK, PD and LIFE. BIONIC WOMAN was cancelled for lo, it was bad and the new show-runner wrote Katee Sackhoff's bad/anti-hero cyborg Sarah Corvus out of the show, which removed any sane person's reason for watching. GA was deep in the suck – the characters unrecognizable from the show's second-season high-water mark, the plots stupid beyond words as the show drifted from its "life and times of surgeon trainees" into bad melodrama land – UB was starting to flounder – really, who wants to watch their eponymous heroine torn between her conscience and her soon-to-be-someone else'-baby-daddy boyfriend? – and FNL was showing everyone why you don't mess with what works. But 30R was a solid weekly half-hour of glee, DEXTER was giving a seminar on anti-heroes and how to write them and L&O: SVU, while not groundbreaking in anyway, was reliably entertaining, if grim.

Then November and the writer's strike (fomented by the AMPTP in a deliberate attempt at union-breaking, which may end up backfiring on the producers in the long-run as the abrupt implosion of the US economy this fall chokes off the supply of hedge-fund money that was paying for a large chunk of studio excesses at a point when Hollywood, still arguing with SAG, has very little product in the pipeline), which lasted four months and shut down production on all series TV on the US networks as the productions ran out of scripts.

TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES started in January. By March, I had totally lost my mind for it. Then it came back and… I'm all suspicious and unsure that it can/will tell the story I want it to again, which is a problem that's entirely about my expectations and not the show itself, which is good (which is a post of it own).

The writer's strike ended (yay!), I moved back to Canada (boo!) and Fall TV started up in September, just in time for my post-MA brain slump (uh, Brain, please come back, I need you).

So, of the shows I was watching last fall, I've kicked CHUCK and PUSHING DAISIES to the curb. ( Pushing Daisies - dropped )

CHUCK, ( kicked to the curb )

PRIVATE PRACTIVE ( a sign I should be doing something else )

Of all the shows I watched last season, I loved LIFE most after TSCC. It had so much going for it – unique concept, interesting writing, awesome production values (let's hear it for the music supervisor), a brilliant performances from Damian Lewis (who should be cloned so we could all have one) and strong supporting work from Sarah Shahi, Adam Arkin and Robin Weigert. ( so why have I broken up with Life, then? )

As for BURN NOTICE, ( on hold (again) )

( Returning shows: GA, UB, FNL & DEXTER )

Meanwhile, there's not much new this season that I've really liked: FRINGE lost me after the pilot – dude, if characters don't care about the planeful of DEAD people, there's really no reason for me to invest in the diagesis either. Status: kill it with fire.

I did check out THE MENTALIST and while it's not bad, Simon Baker's character verges on awash in emo-manpain for which I have no patience. OTOH, the supporting cast is interesting. But I remember almost nothing from the episode I saw on Tuesday except for Simon Baker's pretty eyes and Robin Tunney's wan irritation with Baker's character. Status: seriously, dude, I should read a book instead.

Finally, I've been watching MAD MEN, mostly because there's not a lot on Sunday nights that I watch. I think New York Magazine's Vulture blog nails the secret of MAD MEN's appeal (and ultimately, why it's most popular with TV critics): At times, Mad Men has seemed like a walking catalogue of mid-century American fears: women in the workplace, media manipulation, alcoholism, rape, abortion, race, and homosexuality, for starters. As such, it's depicted a culture that suffers from a kind of panophobia — a fear of all things — probably because everyone has become so unmoored from any traditional sense of security.

Which also describes the current undercurrent of North American culture, if you hadn't gotten that already. Like FNL (and, in a way, TSCC), shows that most accurately pinpoint America's insecurities tend to be most widely rejected by American audiences.

SpoilerTV has a video with MAD MEN's cast.

( Stuff I read online today - more on TV, comics, movies and Remembrance Day in Ireland )

My day was like this… only without the sex.

The first time I read this I thought it said “Nancy Pelosi hospitalized with broken pelvis” and thought it was funny. I don’t know why, I just did. Nancy Regan with a broken pelvis, however, is not funny. Poor old lady.

Incredibly cute baby overwhelms with incredible cuteness. And there goes my biological clock… where’d I leave the snooze button?

The Whedonites have finally gone too far: no way in Hell (or Hellmouth) is Buffy tougher than Ripley. This means war. Let’s see how tough you are with a Xenomorph around your neck, kid.

Jezebel says “The Truth Might Not Be Pretty But Obama Makes You Like It Anway”. I say ask Stephane Dion how well the truth worked for him.

Then again, Jezebel also takes something like 1,000 words to comment on a New York Observer piece about the attraction of fictional characters like Don Draper, the sexist, boozing, womanizing, emotionally stunted protagonist of AMC’s soaper Mad Men, when four would have done just as well: girls like bad boys.

Not necessarily the sharpest obsevers of contemporary life, Jezebel, is what I'm saying.

Part embittered Republican anti-Bush screed, part review of Oliver Stone’s W.

NOOOOOOOOOO! KILL IT WITH FIRE! NUKE IT FROM ORBIT! SAVE YOURSELVES!!!!

Henson goes dark with adult puppet movie – as long as it’s better than The Dark Crystal, I’m in.

Where Canada’s election ranks in the Guardian’s consciousness – 250 years of faithful loyalty to the Queen and what does it get us? Fifth billing after Michelle Obama’s itinerary. xp

Martin Kettle on why Britain should have been paying more attention (Nota bene - “hung parliament” is British idiom for a minority parliament). And the Irish Taoiseach is Brian Cox Cowan (50 %).

Spanish politicians respond to Basque separtists with… Iron Maiden?

Once upon a time, I really loved Frank Cho – now I just want to smack him around with a copy Blacklash (violence may not solve anything but sometimes the fantasy makes me happy). While I’m at it, I kind of want to hit the Marvel editorial board that wouldn’t let him have his Shanna series (contradictory? A tad).

English national side avoids tripping over itself to defeat insignificant opponent in World Cup qualifier

What I would give my friends for Xmas if I wasn’t such a cheap bastard.

Finally… EW tells me today is National Grouch Day. That explains a great deal.

Oh, and can anyone tell me how to embed images in text on LJ?

eta - lj added some interesting formatted when I cut&pasted from Word but the links should work now.

Also: Kirk and Spock the Abrams version - I would need a negative integer to express my lack of interest in this movie but ignoring it makes me look less than au courant on pop culture.

The All-Father talks Avatar with Strombo.

And, filed under "essays I don't need to write anymore" - Slate on Red Dawn (spoilers) - guess who's playing the plucky insurgents now?

Two essays on the renewal of religous life in America that have nothing to do with the Sisters of Nazareth's prophecy that I'd be back.

*I* get so tired of hearing comic book writers like Ron Marz making comments like:

I get so tired of hearing of the sniping comments about "Witchblade" being a “T&A” book; always from ill-informed dopes who haven’t looked past the cover of the book in, say, the last five years.

The cover image from the issue in question is here. The variant cover is here.

Gee, Mr. Marz, maybe if someone took the tits and ass off the cover of your book, people would stop talking about it being a tits&ass book? The fact that the cover used to market your work regularly features one or more woman clad in garments that are improbable at best due to the forces exerted by gravity on the female body and regularly leave the women's asses hanging out might possibly have something to do with how people characterize your work.

Comic book writers work in a visual medium. Strangely, that inclines their audience towards judging a book by the visual presented on the cover. So either ditch the T&A covers or live with the T&A rep - this ain't Tolstoy you're selling. Playing the "I wasn’t interested in writing stories that were excuses for Sara’s clothes to fall off" card while your editors are putting out shit like this gets you no sympathy from me.

Either you support how the book is presented or you don't but blaming your potential audience for reacting negatively to the exact impression that these covers are calculated to create - namely "ooh, lots of mostly naked women inside" - is chickenshit.

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".

Keeping in mind that I never read Spider-Man regularly in any of its incarnations, I still find the whole "One More Day" storyline distasteful.

[For those that don't know/don't care, after Peter Parker revealed his identity in the incredibly distasteful "Civil War" crossover two? years ago, someone put a bullet in his Aunt May. I assume that Luke Cage restrained himself from saying "I told your dumb ass this would happen if people started going 'round revealing their secret identities an' shit." I get fuzzy on the details here because, frankly, I'd rather read the phone book or Leviathan than a Spider-Man comic even at the best of times, but I understand that to save May's life (or bring her back to life) Peter and Mary Jane do a deal with Mephistopholes (this all being an update of Faust) to sacrifice their marriage for May's life. So now Peter Parker's single and living with his widowed Aunt May in Queens New York once more, his marriage to Mary Jane have been wiped out of existence and memory. Apparently the only one truly happy with this development is Marvel Eeejit-in-Chief, Joe Quesada, who had some sort of nerd-rage hate-on for Mary Jane and believes that superheroes can't be husbands and fathers. I personally wonder what the comics-reading husbands and fathers, not to mention the married patriarchs among cops, firemen, ambulance workers, members of the armed services, social workers, doctors and everyone else who puts themselves out there for the greater good each day feel about this pronouncement. But, as usual, I digress.]

To help sort out some of the confusion, Marvel has printed a helpful two-page primer on the new normal of Spidey's world, including such tidbits as "Spidey unmasked during Civil War but no one remembers who was under the mask so Spidey's secret identity is TOTALLY SECRET again. Now. Whatever". [Insert eyeroll here] Because the solution to a really stupid creative decision is to, obviously, pretend like it never happened. Oi. [eyeroll x 2]

Needless to say, there is nerd-rage and wank aplenty in comicland over "One More Day", including reports that writer JM Straczynski (of B5 fame) tried to get his name taken off the last few issues. From what I've read, the consensus seems to be that this was an ass-stupid idea and throwing out 20 years of comic book continuity, not to mention the various plotlines and their repercussions arising out of the "Civil War" event of the last 2-3 years, is both irritating and offensive to long-time readers. The argument from the other side of the aisle on the continuity issue (an even larger bugbear for comics fen than media fen, if that can be believed) is that if you enjoyed the story and thought it was good when you read it a) you got your money's worth and b) it doesn't make the story less good now.

I'd accept this logic if not for the fact that US superhero comics are serials and serials by their nature accrete meaning and history as they go along. Tossing out chunks of Spider-Man's history doesn't make the individual stories any more or less good as discrete entities but it robs them of their meaning and the long-time reader of the entertainment and satisfaction of watching those events emanate and payoff through the life of the serial. In effect, it would be like Ron Moore deciding that Season Three of Battlestar Galactica didn't count or Tolkein coming back from the grave and to announce that he was going to edit the Rohirrim out of his new slimline edition of The Lord of the Rings - who could watch "Unfinished Business" or read Eowyn's confrontation with the Witch King without feeling that the works, stripped of the meaning that comes from being part of a larger whole, have been diminished? I don't blame Spider-Man readers for being pissed. I don't even read the damn comics and I feel rather annoyed and condescended to by Marvel's attitude.

As I read through the comments and counter comments on ComicBookResources.com and Newsarama, it occurred to me that the Spidey reboot highlighted the limitations of the serial format. The Amazing Spider-Man has been, I believe, published on a more or less monthly basis since the 1960s; its now up to issue 540-something. In that time, I think Spider-Man has aged 15 years (and has now been de-aged again). Understandably, there comes a point at which even the most creative minds run out of stories to tell. With between 40 to 80 years of history weighing down on the superhero characters that dominate comics today, even the most creative minds also begin to run out of stories to tell that haven't been told before. I believe this is why we've ended up with so many crap crossovers and "special event" books published in the last 20 years (or basically as long as I've been reading and Not Reading comics) as publishers attempt to keep the market interested in ever more familiar permutations of characters that we already knew to begin. At the same time, the various gimmicks used to get the audience's attention have become increasingly trite and cliched through overuse - characters die, they're reborn, they marry, they divorce, they die again, they're reborn in the pages of another character's book so you have to wait six months for everyone else to figure it out, then they die again. No one believes that Mary Jane and Spidey are going to stay separated, instead everyone is talking about how long it will take to get them back together.

In the end, cheap, gimmicky, event-driven writing is as bad for the medium as a whole as it is for the individual books. Comicbook readers are an audience like any other and the normal rules apply - fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame one me, fool me three times and I'll admit Jim Lee's pretty, pretty art suckered me into buying All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder, fool me a fourth time and I'm out of here. The comic book marketplace is less than half the size today that it was 15 years ago. Crappy writing and big-ticket "events" like "One More Day", which ultimately don't go anywhere, have played a huge role in the attrition of the comicbook audience. And old comics readers (like me) aren't being replaced by fresh blood (my nephew). Their superheroes are on Teletoon or at the movies where the writing, characterization and diversity of characters are all better than in your average DC/Marvel monthly.

It is in TV and movies but not the comics themselves that I find characters like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the X-Men being reinvented with each passing era, much the way that the legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood are recapitulated and reimagined with each passing generation - from the Gothic Revival poetry of Tennyson to the feminist neopaganism of Zimmer Bradley. Whereas the monthly books, by trying to hold these characters in stasis - aging them, de-aging them, rewriting a character's history here, deleting a relationship there - renders them increasingly soulless entities. Change is not only an inevitability but it is the engine that drives drama. A narrative without change is one without both meaning and excitement. It is a pointless endeavour. Marvel Comics would do better to leave off their next big marketing gimmick and contemplate Ecclesiastes instead: "to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven".

ETA: Because it just wouldn't be a post about comic books written by me if I didn't include something about what I will now refer to as 'The Cause' a la Richard Jordan in Gettysburg - Something Positive's take on Women in Refrigerators.

*facepalmxinfinity*

Somehow the line "I may not be the detective you are but" coming from Dick Grayson to Tim Drake sums up every last fucking thing that's wrong with the DCU these days.

After 10 years, Scud: The Disposable Assassin returns!

*fangirl whibbles*