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orlissa · 3 years

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Short History of the American Comic Book Industry, Part I (1929-1954)

No-one asked for it, but I can, so here it comes:

The 0th hour

The turn of the century: comics exist as political cartoons and comic strips in Sunday newspapers

Then we have The Funnies (1929-1930), which was, well, like a comic magazine, but not really. It was published weekly/monthly, was sold at newsstands, had new materisl, but it was described as “more a Sunday comic section without the rest of the newspaper.” It also folded quickly.

But then in 1933 some clever guys at the Eastern Color Printing Company had the great idea to reprint Sunday comics, so the printers wouldn’t be standing idle during the night. This became The Famous Funnies, which was given away as a promotional item by Procter & Gamble. It was a HUGE hit.

So the next year came Funnies on Parade, which is considered the first real American comic book. Because it was sold for money! (10 cents) And it had new material! First in black and white, then soon in color. And people loved it, and bout hundreds of thousand copies of it.

And then of course people started to realize that there was business in comics, and within a couple of years, everybody and their mother was publishing comics.

The Golden Age

Started with Superman—with Action Comics #1 in 1938

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were high school buddies, had actually been working on the character since 1933. At some point, he was meant to be a villain. At another, he was meant to have been sent back from the future. They got $130 for the script.

He is also a Jewish assimilation fantasy (PSA: most of the big name from the early days of comics were Jewish) and kinda like Moses—somebody who is different, and is loved for being different.

And it was a total fluke that he ended up on the cover of Action Comics. If I remember well, publisher Jack Liebowitz decided on the cover the day before the issue went to printing.

Superman was everything that people loved: sci-fi, fantasy, mythology, pulp. They loved it.

Soon, everyone is doing superheroes. Like, everyone. There are a bunch of publishers, too, because everyone wants a slice of the profit. Most characters never get their own series, and are soon forgotten.

Batman came in 1939. Marvel also started publishing comics that year, but back then they were known as Timely comics. Their first characters were Namor and the Human Torch, but not the Johnny Storm Human Torch. Nope, this was an android.

People love comics, everybody is reading comics, and the most popular titles sells more than a million copies per issue. But it’s embarrassing to work on comics. If you want to be taken seriously as an illustrator/writer, you won’t admit that you’ve worked on comics. I bunch of comics from this era is uncredited.

Stanley Lieber started working for Timely at 17, in 1940 (he was a relative of the boss’ wife, that’s how he got the job). He wanted to be a serious a writer, so he knew he couldn’t have his real name featured in comics. So he signed his stuff as Stan Lee instead.

Most comics are about three times as long as the ones today, and they feature a wide range of different stories: superhero stuff, talking animals, western, slapstick… There is a huge variety of genres. Each story is about 10 pages long, and those are separate, self-contained stories. Comics are printed in cheap, bad quality paper, and they’re not meant to last, so there’s not really any point in creating much of a continuity.

Only Timely is kinda doing it by sow the seeds of the shared narrative universe.

Also, of course, Wonder Woman also debuts in 1941. Holy cow, her creator, William Moulton Marston, was some character. Even more so than how he is depicted in Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, which does a great job at showcasing his theories and a terrible job at showing the origins of Wonder Woman.

Atomic Age, transition, and witch hunt

The superhero bubble bursts after the end of WWII. The biggest characters were all about the war effort and patriotism, and we don’t really care about it anymore. The interest shifts to science fiction, horror, true crime (these two mostly read by returning GIs, NOT by kids), and most superheroes are forgotten. Some people call this period the Atomic Age of Comics

William Moulton Marston dies in 1947, and Robert Kanigher takes over writing Wonder Woman, replacing WMM’s bondage-infused “feminism” (the quotation marks are justified) with traditional femininity. Now it’s not about Diana bringing peace, but about her getting Steve marry her.

Captain America fights commies for a couple of issues in 1954, and it’s surreal.

Also, TV sets were becoming more popular, so kids turned to TV instead of comics.

Criticism against comics it also growing. Because it’s bad. It’s immoral, and it hurts the kids’ eyes, and it goes against physics and stuff.

The real problem is that for the first time, kids are deciding for themselves what to read—comics are cheap enough that they can buy them themselves.

People actually hold comic burnings in the late 1940s.

Then here comes Dr. Fredric Wertham, psychiatrist, who was working with juvenile delinquents in Harlem, and he had this idea that kids turned to crime because they were reading comics. And he was loud about it.

In 1954, he published a book titled Seduction of the Innocent, where he said stuff like Batman and Robin promoted a gay lifestyle (I’ll give it to him, those early Batman comics were pretty gay), Wonder Woman was a bad role model for girls (they weren’t supposed to want to be like her, because WW was independent and badass and stuff), and Superman made people believe physics didn’t matter.

He was wrong on many counts, of course, because, as said before, every kid was reading comics, and those who came from stable families didn’t turn to crime.

He eventually made such a noise that a senate subcommittee was set up to discuss whether comics were bad or not.

The side against comics was represented by Wertham, a charismatic professional. The side for comics was represented by the business heads of the comic publishers, who had no idea about the content of their publications. Because it just cannot go wrong, right?

(Except for William Gaines, the head of EC Comics, who said at the hearing that a cover featuring a severed head is in good taste for a horror comic. Not the best response in the given situation.)

In the end, the committee decided that there was little credibility in Wertham’s claims, but comics still might be a problem, so the industry should regulate itself.

So they formed the Comics Code Authority (CCA) as a self-censorship body for comics

They issues an editorial guideline that said stuff like good always has to win, authority figures cannot be shown in a bad light, crime cannot be shown, words like terror or horror cannot be shown on the cover, no monsters, no indecent clothes, etc.

If anyone wanted to publish a comic, they had to submit it to the CCA, and it decided if it was okay by the guidelines or it. If it was, it got a stamp—the seal of approval—on the cover.

The seal had no legal standing, but there was an agreement with the wholesalers that they would only carry comics with the seal.

On the short term, this led to the bankruptcy is a lot of publishers. It basically killed off the horror genre. On the long run, it created a market vacuum, that was filled in by a new wave of superhero titles (the Silver Age is coming, baby!), and also helped to establish the underground comix movement.

The CCA had a huge effect on the industry for decades, but it started to lose its power by the 70s. By the 90s, only four companies were in it. On of those, Harvey, went bankrupt in the 90s. Marvel left in 2001. DC, and finally Archie, in 2011.

#history of comics #mine #comics #golden age of comics #fredric wertham #cca

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bygosscarmine · 4 years

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Guardian: The Great And Lonely God

or like any reasonable English-speaking fan would call it*

Goblin

*DramaBeans referred to it as The Lonely Shining Goblin, as usual tracking toward fandom needs with utter disregard for what official outlets say

an aesthete review

SPOILERS ABOUND BUT THERE IS NO CUT you know you’d scroll by without reading if you didn’t care anyway so it doesn’t matter

So. It feels like even longer ago that Goblin came out because there was so much lead-up hype, and also, a lot has happened in my life since January 2017. This is the first fresh Korean drama I’ve watched in possibly that long or longer. I picked it up in the last month or so because I’m studying Korean and wanted to reconnect with it in a more natural context. And I hadn’t forgotten that though there were issues in the story premise, and mixed reactions to it as it aired, I had wanted to see Gong Yoo in a drama like this really badly.

Looking at Gong Yoo’s filmography, I can see why I feel like he’s been in hardly any dramas. After Coffee Prince, which is one of the dramas that really sold me on Korean TV as particularly interesting) the only other project he’s done was Big. This was a drama that was also highly anticipated and panned by most of the reviewers I knew. I had loved him in Biscuit Teacher Star Candy the way one loves a particularly gifted actor in an early effort--he’s charismatic and pretty (and 26 though playing a teenager).

I’m sure preference comes into play with the weight of movies in his career, but also he’s a little less of a mutable person than some major players in drama. Try to imagine swapping him for Lee Dong Wook in roles, for instance. Lee Dong Wook can be playful or dead serious or just incredibly dumb, because in some ways he’s a clean slate. I’m not sure why this is true, but it enables him to move from secondary leads to lead and back again with a variety of characters.

Gong Yoo is in a class with Kim Sun-Ah or Hyun Bin: he can embody characters in ways that feel immediate and real, but there is a certain core to them that comes from his own person. It’s a strength, but one that requires a character to fit in a certain way.

The Goblin, fka Kim Shin, needs an acute actor who can carry off both the kind of inner intense conviction that would fuel a hero to the kind of death and rebirth the character suffers, as well as a softness and hopefulness that makes a love story work.

Even considering my bias, don’t think it’s too much to say Goblin works because of Gong Yoo's abilities in that regard.

While fantastic elements are fairly common in Korean dramas, getting a full-fledged fantasy that treats its fantastic elements with the sort of care a procedural would matters of law or a hospital drama would matters of medicine is not as wide-spread.

Goblin both creates a consistent world of fantasy and does not overdo answering questions. The important points are clear, the ambiguities are not plot-breaking. While in the case of what happens once the sword is pulled out, one of the rules does seem to be broken by the drama, for the most part, all promises are kept. I have my issues with Kim Shin continuing on in an immortal form when I think a normal human life span from here out could do (barring the fact that they force him to wait for another reincarnation) but this is me as a fantasy specialist critiquing a choice the writer made, not a point of the mythology not working.

The main sticking point of the drama for most critics is the age gap.

In a way, I’m not as bothered by age gaps when it comes to immortal beings--there’s not a huge difference between being 19 and 30 when your partner is 396, right?

I’m sure I’m not the first to say this, but the writer could have worked around this, and almost seems interested in doing so with the time-skip--only to have their second lifetime meeting also happen when she’s in high school.

I’m at a college right now and I’m 33 with a lot of classmates who are between 18 and 21. They are having adult relationships, but in real life I do give a look askance when the dude seems much older. And younger than 19 is really young.

If 29 was a fine time for them to be together in the end, with a much more intimate relationship, how long does Kim Shin wait the second time around?

Anyway, let the man die and come back as the same age, is what I’m trying to tell you.

Overall, the writing did a good job of allowing our heroine to be her age, and the romance to develop according to her pace. If there hadn’t been a second advent of her as a teenager in his life, with his years still running on ad infinitum, it would have seemed fine.

The fact that Ji Eun Tak, Goblin’s Bride, is a sort of classic Cinderella figure could have been an issue, too. However, I felt like she was given a lot of dimension so I rarely remembered that she was embodying a trope. Her clear memories and relationship with her mother help with that--she may live with uncaring relatives, but she has known herself to be loved and that centers her.

I also liked that her will was so important. In the back and forth between her and Kim Shin before it’s truly established that she is his destined bride, she gets to make choices about her relationship with him and while he withholds information a good deal of that is to allow her more choice.

This is a deployment of fate that feels full-bodied--the fate isn’t just something determined from the outside, even though we hear the voice of the gods in the actual narrative. Because of who these people are, they choose what has been predicted for them.

And the story is largely from her point of view, even as Kim Shin’s perspective and history shape so much of the plot. Her obsession with candles takes over the house Goblin and Reaper share, so at the end, Reaper has candles in his room. Her relationships are what center the story so much that the reminder that Deok Hwa doesn’t know her yet comes as a surprise before AND after the memory wipe. Everyone else connects in spokes around her--even Kim Shin and the Grim Reaper have to find their friendship footing around her status between them, where before they were just odd roommates.

What Ji Eun Tak wants is very important to this story, even when it is initially denied to her.

She is the only one who says no to the tea of forgetting, and gets no word of argument or explanation from her Reaper.

Altogether, I really enjoyed this show. Even the ending (which I had gotten vibes about that warned me of disappointment) which I didn’t love made sense in the logic of the rest of the story, including its failures.

It was a beautifully shot series, though with erratic editing in some of the chapters, and the intensity of the storyline carried off the high drama that might otherwise have turned maudlin.

If I were to watch it again, I’d be tempted to skip the last part of the last episode, leaving it in my mind that Kim Shin finally grew old, that by suffering his absence without memory was enough heroic suffering for Ji Eun Tak, and that when Reaper has done his duty and escorted Sunny into the afterlife they all come back together as childhood friends in a Reply 2079 reboot story.

...At the same time, the time inversions of the opening matching up with the first and last episode are pretty sweet, and I wouldn’t have missed that little bit of clever resonance just for a less messy headcanon version.

#Goblin #Guardian #kdrama #The Great and Lonely God #korean drama #review #spoilers #Goblin spoilers #Guardian spoilers

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fuckyeahjamieandclaire · 7 years

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It turns out love can conquer crow’s feet. Executive producer Maril Davis on the period drama’s decision to let love, not age lines, drive Claire and Jamie’s reunion arc despite a 20-year time jump.

There’s always been plenty to envy about Claire and Jamie, the star-crossed couple whose centuries-spanning romance propels the period drama Outlander. They’re capable, brave, and beautiful, blessed by an unbreakable bond, strong convictions, and even stronger sex drives. Since the series’ first season, their ear-pleasing accents, smoldering, soul-searching looks, telegenic love-making, and repeated rescues of each other’s lives have set a high standard, relationship-wise. But recent episodes of Outlander have introduced us to yet another quality we wish we had in common with Claire and Jamie: They’re almost immune to aging.

By their third seasons, many TV series settle into a rut—a familiar and welcome one, in the case of some comfort TV, but less so for hour-long dramas with fantasy elements, which traffic in twists and upheaval. But disrupting the status quo wasn’t a struggle for Outlander, an adaptation of Diana Gabaldon’s book series, which comprises eight novels (with a ninth on the way) and assorted shorter works. Through 37 episodes, the Starz series’ story is still closer to takeoff than landing, working through the third book in the sequence, 1993’s Voyager.

The events of Voyager dictated an unorthodox interlude for a program that’s centered on the interplay (and intercourse) between two charismatic and chemistry-laden leads: an extended separation and a mutual 20-year time jump. At the end of Season 2, the pregnant Claire (a 20th-century English nurse who in the first season accidentally slips into the past through, um, a mystical stone) and Jamie (her 18th-century, red-haired highlander lover) are forced to break up by the impending Battle of Culloden, at which Jamie, a Jacobite rebel, expects to be (and nearly is) killed.

To protect their soon-to-be-born daughter Brianna, Claire (played by Caitriona Balfe) returns to the 1940s. Believing that Jamie (played by Sam Heughan) did die, she does her best to move on, relocating to Boston, raising Brianna, becoming a doctor, and growing apart from her first husband, Frank, who’s caring and attentive but lacks Jamie’s highland lilt, kilt collection, and Men’s Health cover physique. Jamie, meanwhile, survives battle, torture, and imprisonment (nothing new for him), grows and shaves a big beard, fathers a son, pivots to printing and smuggling, and gets married again out of loneliness, all while carrying an eternal torch for Claire. Midway through the third season, after almost five episodes apart, they reunite in the mid-1760s, two decades older but no less in love—and, curiously, looking a lot like they did the last time they were together.

“I wanted to look—well, the same as when you last saw me,” Claire says with some trepidation during their first conversation, admitting that she’s dyed away the single gray streak that had appeared in her hair in earlier, Boston-centric scenes. Mission accomplished, Claire. Neither member of Outlander’s leading duo looks any worse for wear after 20 years of imprisonment, parenthood, and pining for lost love.

For Outlander’s creators, the time jump presented a production dilemma, not because of the story (which Gabaldon had already plotted out) or setting (most viewers aren’t well-versed in the intricacies of 1740s vs. 1760s style), but because of the actors’ appearances. In real life, a two-decade difference isn’t invisible, no matter how much St. Ives Oatmeal and Shea Butter Lotion you lather on because of Balfe.

Heughan, 37, and Balfe, 38, were both 34 when the series premiere aired in 2014, but their characters were considerably younger. “Jamie’s kind of early 20s, Claire is late 20s when it starts,” Outlander executive producer Maril Davis says by phone. Three years passed between Claire’s first time jump back to 1743 and the Battle of Culloden, which, Davis says, would put both of them in their “mid- to later-40s after the [20-year] time jump.” Although the creators talked about shortening the story’s time jump to reduce the need to alter the actors’ appearance, they found that they couldn’t do it without omitting too many plot points from the characters’ time apart.

Aware that the time jump was looming, the producers started doing screen tests last season with Balfe and Heughan, in consultation with head of hair and makeup Annie McEwan, who had worked on Season 4 of Game of Thrones before joining the Outlander crew. After experimenting with various looks, the creative team decided, essentially, that both Balfe and Heughan were too hot to convincingly tamper with by obscuring their actual features. “We have two actors who happen to be incredibly beautiful people,” Davis says. “It is hard to make them look bad, damn them.” Originally, the pair’s first post-reunion sex scene featured a reference to stretch marks, but the writers lost that line from the script, Davis says, when the makeup crew informed them that stretch marks “don't read very well on camera.”

Even apart from the specific challenge of wrinkling, graying, and thickening two age-resistant actors, the transition from 20s to 40s is a particularly tough one. “It's hard to make young people look incrementally older,” Davis says. “It's obviously a little easier—and I put ‘easier’ in quotes—if you're aging someone up from like 30 to 80. … With two actors who look so young anyways in their real life, we realized that we couldn't do major jumps without it looking fake, and also taking a lot of extra time in hair and makeup, as well as using a lot of extra prosthetics.”

For Davis, a veteran of more explicitly sci-fi (and more makeup- and prosthetic-reliant) productions such as Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica, Outlander’s understated approach to the aging process didn’t come intuitively. “There were some times that I said to our hair and makeup team, ‘Can we go farther? Because you can't read some of these lines that you're painting on camera,’” Davis says. “And they were horrified. They were like, ‘Are you kidding? Oh my god, we can't go any farther.’ It's interesting, because you also have to take the advice of people that have been in the business doing the hair and makeup a long time, knowing that they can only go so far until they feel uncomfortable because it doesn't look real anymore.”

In addition to the aging uncanny valley, there’s the time cost to the talent and crew to consider. A heavier hand on the cosmetic side—on top of the prosthetic flogging scars already applied to Heughan’s back in shirtless scenes for much of the series’ run—would mean much more time in makeup chairs, staring blankly into mirrors as fake years and real hours add up. Though according to Davis, Balfe and Heughan, who were frequently consulted, never expressed any reservations about hiding their youth under veneers of age. “They're both very game for whatever we want to do, and so this isn't a vanity thing,” she says. “Neither of them, I don't think, at any point has ever said, ‘I have to look good, so don't make me look too old.’”

This was a weighty decision, because the ramifications for the series could extend far into the future. Unlike some shows or movies that might insert a brief flash-forward in a single scene or episode, Outlander is committed to the time jump for the long term. Whatever aging the crew applied to Balfe and Heughan now would sentence them to the same look for years to come on a series that may still be relatively early in its run (which already has been renewed for a fourth season). That’s not only a nuisance, but potentially an acting inhibitor, as Davis says Heughan discovered while wearing his wild beard in the third season’s second episode. “If you have something on your face like that, sometimes it's a little harder to talk, you're more aware of it, it takes you out,” Davis says. “So all of these things are factors, and same with if we were getting into heavy prosthetics to make actors appear much older than they are.”

The end result of all the discussion and screen tests is a difference so subtle that you have to squint to see it—just like the new, older Jamie has to squint to see small text without wearing his reading glasses. Specs aside, he looks almost unchanged. “With Sam, we've kind of weathered him, adding more shading to his face,” Davis says. “We've got some lines that the hair and makeup department have put in themselves, and then greying at the temples for him, as well as with Caitriona. We realized because her skin is also so young that we'd have to sell a lot of it with the gray in her hair.” Of course, even that gray is gone now, at least temporarily, although Davis says its absence stems from an impulse to portray Claire’s humanizing insecurity, rather than a need to preserve the stars’ romance-novel looks (which she acknowledges are part of the show’s appeal). “So much of our talk about appearance is motivated from a character standpoint,” she says. “I don't think we ever go, ‘Oh my god, they have to look amazing because this show is trying to sell a fantasy element.’” But who’s to say that the mystical stones don’t have anti-aging effects?

In navigating the time jump, the producers’ overriding desire was to avoid distracting the audience by going overboard on aging. “You don't want to be taken out of the moment, sitting back watching at home,” Davis says. At times, though, the lack of aging is its own sort of distraction. My wife and I giggled through one supposed-to-be-tender scene as the script tried to sell us on these nearly identical-looking 30-something specimens as people pushing 50. “I don’t look like an old man?” Jamie asks self-consciously, shortly before exposing his still-chiseled chest. And Claire, after completely disrobing to reveal her youthful frame, tells an admiring Jamie, "You must really be losing your eyesight." Nobody’s buying it, guys.

The aging-related dialogue is less jarring when it alludes to the absurdity of the situation, as when Claire marvels to Jamie, “Most men in their 40s have started to go soft around the middle. You haven't a spare ounce on you,” or when she greets the family lawyer by exclaiming, “You look exactly the same!” (No Battlestar fat suits here.) In other scenes, though, the actors convincingly convey the passage of time through emotion, even though they both remain outwardly radiant. “We had so many discussions with Caitriona and Sam about this internal aging, because some of it, you are trying to sell this gravitas of 20 years of loss through their acting, which I think they do so well,” Davis says.

The best asset Outlander has in hand-waving its characters’ immutability is an audience that’s willing to suspend disbelief. “Let's be honest, we could've kept these two apart for a week and it would've seemed like an eternity,” Davis says. “I think for the fans it probably seemed like 100 years—for us as well. So I don't think we needed to add to that at all.”And if—like a lot of the Outlander faithful—you’re the sentimental type who doesn’t mind some soapiness, you’ll accept that love can conquer crow’s feet. “I think in a weird way, that 20 years just kind of faded away when they saw each other again,” Davis says. “In some ways, it was like so much time had passed, and in other ways it was like no time had passed at all because that love had never died.”

With the reunion episode’s semi-awkward aging exchanges behind it, Outlander soon stops dwelling on appearances: The following week, Jamie fireman’s carries a man from a burning building, and the week after that, not-so-newlyweds Claire and Jamie tear off their clothes and writhe around on the floor. Most Outlander watchers wouldn’t have it any other way.

Judging by the books (spoilers!), there’s still a chance that we’ll see an actually old-looking Claire and Jamie in future seasons. “If we're lucky enough to do all the books, they're in their 60s in the current books,” Davis says. “So we do want to also have somewhere to go, and we do need to use, as a base, our two actors, who are very young, and so we want to be with them on this journey.”

But based on this season, don’t be surprised if the 60-something couple doesn’t look a day over 45. “Time doesn’t matter, Sassenach,” Jamie says in Season 3’s sixth episode, using his pet name for Claire. “You will always be beautiful to me.” And also, most likely, to everyone watching at home.

#outlander #outlander starz #maril davis #caitriona balfe #sam heughan #jamie x claire #tv news #people: caitriona balfe #people: sam heughan #A. MALCOLM #3x06 #tv: s3 #queue

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thecaffeinebookwarrior · 7 years

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Internal Conflict: Five Conflicting Traits of a Likable Hero.

1. Flaws and Virtues

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but characters without flaws are boring. This does not, as many unfortunate souls take it to mean, imply that good, kind, or benevolent characters are boring: it just means that without any weaknesses for you to poke at, they tend to be bland-faced wish fulfillment on the part of the author, with a tendency to just sit there without contributing much to the plot.

For any character to be successful, they need to have a proportionate amount of flaws and virtues.

Let’s take a look at Stranger Things, for example, which is practically a smorgasbord of flawed, lovable sweethearts.

We have Joyce Byers, who is strung out and unstable, yet tirelessly works to save her son, even when all conventional logic says he’s dead; We have Officer Hopper, who is drunken and occasionally callous, yet ultimately is responsible for saving the boy’s life; We have Jonathan, who is introspective and loving, but occasionally a bit of a creeper, and Nancy, who is outwardly shallow but proves herself to be a strong and determined character. Even Steve, who would conventionally be the popular jerk who gets his comeuppance, isn’t beyond redemption.

And of course, we have my beloved Eleven, who’s possibly the closest thing Stranger Things has to a “quintessential” heroine. She’s the show’s most powerful character, as well as one of the most courageous. However, she is also the show’s largest source of conflict, as it was her powers that released the Demogorgon to begin with.

Would Eleven be a better character if this had never happened? Would Stranger Things be a better show? No, because if this had never happened, Stranger Things wouldn’t even be a show. Or if it was, it would just be about a bunch of cute kids sitting around and playing Dungeons and Dragons in a relatively peaceful town.

A character’s flaws and mistakes are intended to drive the plotline, and if they didn’t have them, there probably wouldn’t even be a plot.

So don’t be a mouth-breather: give your good, kind characters some difficult qualities, and give your villains a few sympathetic ones. Your work will thank you for it.

2. Charisma and Vulnerability

Supernatural has its flaws, but likable leads are not one of them. Fans will go to the grave defending their favorite character, consuming and producing more character-driven, fan-created content than most other TV shows’ followings put together.

So how do we inspire this kind of devotion with our own characters? Well, for starters, let’s take a look at one of Supernatural’s most quintessentially well-liked characters: Dean Winchester.

From the get-go, we see that Dean has charisma: he’s confident, cocky, attractive, and skilled at what he does. But these qualities could just as easily make him annoying and obnoxious if they weren’t counterbalanced with an equal dose of emotional vulnerability.

As the show progresses, we see that Dean cares deeply about the people around him, particularly his younger brother, to the point of sacrificing himself so that he can live. He goes through long periods of physical and psychological anguish for his benefit (though by all means, don’t feel obligated to send your main character to Hell for forty years), and the aftermath is depicted in painful detail.

Moreover, in spite of his outward bravado, we learn he doesn’t particularly like himself, doesn’t consider himself worthy of happiness or a fulfilling life, and of course, we have the Single Man Tear(TM).

So yeah, make your characters beautiful, cocky, sex gods. Give them swagger. Just, y’know. Hurt them in equal measure. Torture them. Give them insecurities. Make them cry.

Just whatever you do, let them be openly bisexual. Subtext is so last season.

3. Goals For the Future and Regrets From the Past

Let’s take a look at Shadow Moon from American Gods. (For now, I’ll have to be relegate myself to examples from the book, because I haven’t had the chance to watch the amazing looking TV show.)

Right off the bat, we learn that Shadow has done three years in prison for a crime he may or may not have actually committed. (We learn later that he actually did commit the crime, but that it was only in response to being wronged by the true perpetrators.)

He’s still suffering the consequences of his actions when we meet him, and arguably, for the most of the book: because he’s in prison, his wife has an affair (I still maintain that Laura could have resisted the temptation to be adulterous if she felt like it, but that’s not the issue here) and is killed while mid-coital with his best friend.

Shadow is haunted by this for the rest of the book, to the point at which it bothers him more than the supernatural happenings surrounding him.

Even before that, the more we learn about Shadow’s past, the more we learn about the challenges he faced: he was bullied as a child, considered to be “just a big, dumb guy” as an adult, and is still wrongfully pursued for crimes he was only circumstantially involved in.

But these difficulties make the reader empathize with Shadow, and care about what happens to him. We root for Shadow as he tags along with the mysterious and alternatively peckish and charismatic Wednesday, and as he continuously pursues a means to permanently bring Laura back to life.

He has past traumas, present challenges, and at least one goal that propels him towards the future. It also helps that he’s three-dimensional, well-written, and as of now, portrayed by an incredibly attractive actor.

Of course (SPOILER ALERT), Shadow never does succeed in fully resurrecting Laura, ultimately allowing her to rest instead, but that doesn’t make the resolution any less satisfying.

Which leads to my next example...

4. Failure and Success

You remember in Zootopia, when Judy Hopps decides she wants to be cop and her family and town immediately and unanimously endorse her efforts? Or hey, do you remember Harry Potter’s idyllic childhood with his kindhearted, adoptive family? Oh! Or in the X-Files, when Agent Mulder presents overwhelming evidence of extraterrestrial life in the first episode and is immediately given a promotion? No?

Yeah, me neither. And there’s a reason for this: ff your hero gets what they want the entire time, it will be a boring, two-dimensional fantasy that no one will want to read.

A good story is not about the character getting what they want. A good story is about the character’s efforts and their journey. The destination they reach could be something far removed from what they originally thought they wanted, and could be no less (if not more so) satisfying because of it.

Let’s look at Toy Story 3, for example: throughout the entire movie, Woody’s goal is to get his friends back to their longtime owner, Andy, so that they can accompany him to college. He fails miserably. None of his friends believe that Andy was trying to put them in the attic, insisting that his intent was to throw them away. He is briefly separated from them as he is usurped by a cute little girl and his friends are left at a tyrannical daycare center, but with time and effort, they’re reunited, Woody is proven right, and things seem to be back on track.

Do his efforts pay off? Yes -- just not in the way he expected them to. At the end of the movie, a college-bound Andy gives the toys away to a new owner who will play with them more than he will, and they say goodbye. Is the payoff bittersweet? Undoubtedly. It made me cry like a little bitch in front of my young siblings. But it’s also undoubtedly satisfying.

So let your characters struggle. Let them fail. And let them not always get what they want, so long as they get what they need.

5. Loving and Being Loved by Others

Take a look back at this list, and all the characters on it: a gaggle of small town kids and flawed adults, demon-busting underwear models, an ex-con and his dead wife, and a bunch of sentient toys. What do they have in common? Aside from the fact that they’re all well-loved heroes of their own stories, not much.

But one common element they all share is they all have people they care about, and in turn, have people who care about them.

This allows readers and viewers to empathize with them possibly more than any of the other qualities I’ve listed thus far, as none of it means anything without the simple demonstration of human connection.

Let’s take a look at everyone’s favorite caped crusader, for example: Batman in the cartoons and the comics is an easy to love character, whereas in the most recent movies (excluding the splendid Lego Batman Movie), not so much.

Why is this? In all adaptions, he’s the same mentally unstable, traumatized genius in a bat suit. In all adaptions, he demonstrates all the qualities I listed before this: he has flaws and virtues, charisma and vulnerability, regrets from the past and goals for the future, and usually proportionate amounts of failure and success.

What makes the animated and comic book version so much more attractive than his big screen counterpart is the fact that he does one thing right that all live action adaptions is that he has connections and emotional dependencies on other people.

He’s unabashed in caring for Alfred, Batgirl, and all the Robins, and yes, he extends compassion and sympathy to the villains as well, helping Harley Quinn to ultimately escape a toxic and abusive relationship, consoling Baby Doll, and staying with a child psychic with godlike powers until she died.

Cartoon Batman is not afraid to care about others. He has a support network of people who care about him, and that’s his greatest strength. The DC CU’s ever darker, grittier, and more isolated borderline sociopath is failing because he lacks these things.

And it’s also one of the reasons that the Lego Batman Movie remains so awesome.

God willing, I will be publishing fresh writing tips every week, so be sure to follow my blog and stay tuned for future advice and observations!

#the author speaks #writing #writing tips #writing advice #stranger things #supernatural #american gods #toy story #batman #dean winchester #shadow moon #laura moon #dc cinematic universe #not my gifs

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moviemagistrate · 7 years

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“Wonder Woman” review

I’m sure I wasn’t alone in being not-particularly-excited for “Wonder Woman”, the latest entry in the DC Extended Universe; after all, I did see the other films in the DCEU. There was the two-and-a-half-hour long trailer “Man of Steel”, the ambitious but notably flawed “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”, and “Suicide Squad”, a film that if I were forced to choose between seeing again and taking my own life, I would spend far too long considering. With skepticism in hand, I saw “Wonder Woman”, and I cannot remember the last time I was so happy to be so wrong about a film. This isn’t to say that the movie doesn’t have its own fair share of flaws (it does), but in at least one significant area, which is to inspire hope for the DCEU, it works wonders.

After a brief framing-device setup, the movie tells the origin story of Diana, princess of an isolated island of muscular, Amazonian warrior-babes. In a slow-but-alright prologue, she grows from an eager young girl who is sheltered from combat by her Queen mother to a formidable fighter when suddenly, dashing American soldier Steve Trevor crash lands in their waters. From him, she discovers the ongoing conflict of World War I and sets out alongside him to Europe to help save humanity from what she believes to be the machinations of Ares, the wrathful god of war. Writing it now, this sounds like silly, comic book-y stuff (and it is), but it works within the context of the movie, and the plot isn’t really the reason the movie works as well as it does, anyway.

Let’s talk about Gal Gadot. I was among those who were skeptical when Zack Snyder first cast her as Wonder Woman in BvS, despite his usual excellent penchant for casting his films. A model with acting experience that mainly consisted of “Fast & Furious” movies (not exactly acting showcases) being put in the shoes of the most famous female hero in comic book history has a lot to live up to, and while her limited role in BvS was decent, it didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Such is not the case here in her solo film. Finally given a character with outward personality and depth, she is absolutely phenomenal in what is legitimately one of the best portrayals of a comic book character in any movie. Diana is an idealist, a good-hearted and eager young woman (despite being centuries-old) with no small amount of naiveté and innocence but also someone who is also fiercely strong-willed and independent, and Gadot nails every aspect of her character and every bit of her development throughout the course of the movie, as well as being surprisingly funny. Sure, you could argue that there are probably some actresses out there who could offer some better line-deliveries, but in terms of sheer charisma and how she carries herself and how she makes you believe that she is Wonder Woman, I’d say that Snyder’s mostly-superlative casting record continues. By the end of the film you’ll be convinced that Gal Gadot is a fucking megastar.

The main reason the movie works so well for me is Diana’s relationship with Trevor, played by Chris Pine. A likable, cynical rogue who isn’t too much of a stretch for Pine considering he plays Kirk similarly in the new “Star Trek” films, but a character who is still given enough dimension and gravitas to make him memorable, which the naturally charismatic Pine plays to a tee. Their lack of familiarity with each other’s worlds and their clashes in communication leads to some nice fish-out-of-water humor (see Trevor’s bemusement at the glowing water on the island or Diana’s reaction to her first ice cream), but it’s their chemistry that is the beating heart of this film. The characters’ opposing worldviews supplies the needed character drama, but also helps creates a bond that feels as natural and fresh as any pairing in recent history. Just try watching the boat scene about 30 minutes into the movie without smiling, laughing, or feeling the fireworks these two create. This leads to a bond atypical of most movies, where their deepening relationship is based not on superiority of one over the other, but one of equality and respect, where you actually feel these two grow both individually and together. I might be harping too much on this matter, but this is easily the best romance in any comic book movie (yes, even better than Cap and Bucky). Other film couples have chemistry; these two are cooking Heisenberg-quality meth together and making it look effortless.

The rest of the cast is solid, as well. Of note are Steve’s three buddies who tag along with him and Diana on their mission. They initially seem like the typical diverse comic-relief sidekicks, but are surprisingly well-written and are even given their own moments that flesh out and humanize them more than you’d expect in this kind of film (and I’m always happy to see Scotsman Ewen Bremner onscreen). Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright are alright as Diana’s Amazon queen mother and warrior aunt, but they’re only in the opening third of the movie and spend much of it speaking in stilted “Game of Thrones” dialogue. While the actors who play the villains are good, their actual characters are one of the film’s main weaknesses, somewhat lacking in terms of depth and being interesting. We never really understand why Doctor Poison stoops to creating her devastating weapons of war, and [SPOILERS] the “surprise” late-reveal of Ares can be seen coming a mile away. [END SPOILERS] It’s somewhat ballsy to take a historical figure such as German general Erich Ludendorff and make him the cackling bad guy in your movie (with some unusually accurate attention to detail like his view of war and his pagan Norse worship), and while entertaining, he too suffers from a lack of depth and motivation beyond conquering the world (which again should be noted, is not entirely historically inaccurate).

Patty Jenkins is the first time a woman has directed a major superhero film (not counting Lexi Alexander’s low-budgeted but face-explodingly awesome “Punisher: War Zone”), and she brings a uniquely feminine perspective to Diana’s story, from her upbringing in an all-female society to her learning of the frustrating world of mankind to her loving and compassionate nature. Jenkins has only directed one movie 14 years ago and has only done a handful of TV stuff since then, so her ground as an action director is understandably a bit shaky. The action itself is pretty good, but between the slight over-reliance on Snyder-esque slo-mo and over-editing, you can kind of tell this is Jenkins’ first time doing this sort of thing (not helped by some shockingly crappy CGI). However, she makes up for this by spacing out the action well over the course of the movie, and giving each fight weight, story meaning, and character development for Diana. Along with Rupert Gregson-Williams’ pounding soundtrack, this comes together best in an outstanding mid-movie charge across no man’s land to liberate a Belgian village.

Putting aside the action stuff, Jenkins’ strength lies in the character scenes. The boat scene and others like it feel so natural and well-done because Jenkins knows the importance of slowing a movie down to let us take in the characters and making us care for them. In these scenes, she shows moments of such humanity and personal growth that it really catches you off-guard how moving this film can be. Later in the film, there’s a scene where a character sacrifices themselves and the camera holds on their face for a while, and seeing this person come to terms with their death will both break your heart and take your breath away. Moments like this involve you in a story more than any giant CGI clusterfuck or ironic Marvelquip. Speaking of which, the film itself has a refreshingly good sense of humor, that in deference to modern superhero tradition never feels forced and feels like it’s coming naturally from the characters and their quirks instead of soulless hack writers making pop-culture references.

Despite all that the film does right, it’s not without its flaws. Along with the aforementioned dodgy special effects and the so-so villains, the film also tends to get bogged down in exposition. It has not only the early backstory narration (which at least has context since it’s a story being read to Diana by her mother) and the third-act “villain explains their motivations” monologue, but also fairly frequent occurrences of “newly-introduced character tells us who they are and what the situation is”. It’s still done relatively well, and I prefer it to a movie rushing through just to get to the next studio-mandated action beat, but they could have been more economic with these parts. Also, the third act is a bit of a letdown. Without spoiling much, it disappointingly becomes another huge CG-battle after the baddie monologue, the kind we’ve all seen dozens of times. Maybe some producer or studio exec is hoping that these types of climaxes will one day go full-circle and become exciting again. Finally, the very last shot of the movie is kind of silly; it has no real purpose and is only there because someone out there mistakenly thought it’d look cool.

Nevertheless, I’m writing this review a few days after seeing it, and I’m honestly still shocked at how much I was thrilled, entertained, and even moved by “Wonder Woman”. It’s just so rare for me to find a movie that actually clicks with me on an emotional level that I can easily recommend it despite its relatively-minor foibles. I’m not convinced the DCEU has its shit together as this film could just as likely be an anomaly, but “Wonder Woman” is miraculous solely by giving one the slightest bit of hope that “Justice League” will be good. As long as Gal Gadot and Patty Jenkins make another one of these, I might just become optimistic about this franchise. You go, girls.

#wonder woman #film #review

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bigyack-com · 4 years

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With ‘Upload,’ Greg Daniels Takes a Leap Into the Great Unknown

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The new Amazon series “Upload” was in its final week of shooting last May, and Greg Daniels was chewing on everything he could get his hands on, including his hands. Time was waning, and the set — a convincing facsimile of a claustrophobic Queens apartment — was tricky to navigate. Daniels, the series’s creator, watched a monitor as the crew worked the tight spaces and the director shouted commands.He chewed his gum. Cut! — another take, please. He chewed his fingers. Cut! — let’s try again. He leapt from his chair, consulted the crew and came back chewing his thumb. Cut! — one more time for safety.“At least I get to sit back and let her direct,” Daniels said, nodding to the episode’s director, Daina Reid, which was maybe half-true. He had complete faith in his directors, he emphasized, but this was a passion project three decades in the making. There wasn’t much actual sitting back.“It’s hard not to micromanage,” he admitted.Perhaps more than “Parks and Recreation,” which Daniels cocreated, and more than the American version of “The Office,” which Daniels developed and oversaw, “Upload” is his baby, based on an idea he conceived as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” in the late 1980s.A sci-fi dramatic comedy set in 2033, in which the souls of the dying are uploaded to a virtual afterlife, “Upload” is also Daniels’s first major creation since “Parks” ended in 2015. And when it debuts, on May 1, it will do so in the wake of several other notable series focused on similar themes and issues. The pressure was palpable.“It’s been three and a half months of go, go, go,” Daniels sighed. “It’s been a little bit crazy.”As much as anyone in television, Daniels is responsible for a successful brand of TV comedy that feels as familiar now as it felt groundbreaking when “The Office” debuted 15 years ago. His half-hour, single-camera sitcoms, with their deep ensemble casts and tonal blend of cringey awkwardness and heart, offered viewers the easy reliability of the best multicamera comedies but without the one-liners and studio audiences.“Upload,” however, is new territory for Daniels. Gone is the hand-held, mockumentary aesthetic he is best known for. He took a more cinematic approach to “Upload,” which Amazon encouraged him to write as a single contained story. It is his first creation for a streaming service (his second, the astro-political satire “Space Force,” lands next month on Netflix). The plot — told over 10 mostly half-hour episodes that will drop all at once — is tight and binge-ready. The special effects are complex.It also has action. And a murder mystery. And cursing and nudity. And competition.“There are so many good shows,” Daniels said during a car ride between sets. Audience attention is strained, he said, so he packed as many of the things he likes into “Upload” as possible.“Part of the impulse here is to kind of do a genre mash-up — to have satire but also to have romance and the mystery,” he said. “There’s a lot to look at and a lot to think about.”

Heaven, for a price

People love the characters Daniels creates and writes — as in, actually love. The way viewers talk about Michael Scott and Leslie Knope, they might as well be real people. Pam and Jim could be a real couple. Put “Ron Swanson” on an election ballot, and he’d probably do OK.Along the way, the list of actors his series have turned into stars is impressive. Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, John Krasinski, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Pratt: All were relative newcomers before appearing in Daniels’s sitcoms. Fans of “The Daily Show” knew Steve Carell as a correspondent, but it was his role on “The Office” that catapulted his career.“Upload” has a sharper edge than Daniels’s earlier shows (including the animated “King of the Hill,” which he created with Mike Judge), but the cast has familiar qualities: charismatic, diverse, good-looking but approachable, and led by actors who have the glow of indwelling stardom but aren’t widely known.“I think that’s really exciting from a casting standpoint, is to find somebody and see how you’re going to break them,” Daniels said. “And I think there’s a pleasure for the audience in going into a show and being like, ‘I don’t know any of these people.’”One of them is Andy Allo, who plays Nora, a customer service representative at Horizen, a company that manages the virtual afterlife and its digitized human souls, known as uploads. (The reps function as the angels of this digital heaven.)In the series, Nora’s father, a religious man, is dying, and he hopes to join Nora’s deceased mother in the celestial afterlife, not some digital one.“It does bring in so many questions of your existence after death,” Allo said between takes. “Heaven, on this spiritual level, is what my dad believes in, but I work for this company that has created heaven.”Like today’s wireless companies (note the name), Horizen offers different data plans based on what families can afford. If customers exceed their limits, things get glitchy.“How darkly funny it is that you end up almost in a similar way and place that you were in real life?” Allo said. “It’s like pay-by-month” on the bottom tier, she added — heaven when you can afford it. “You get two gigs a month, and once you run out, you freeze.”Although Nora has dozens of other clients, she grows close with Nathan (Robbie Amell), a handsome young upload who took his charmed life for granted before he was critically injured in a self-driving car crash. Ambiguity surrounds the circumstances of his eventual death, drawing Nora and Nathan deep into a dangerous mystery.Meanwhile, Nathan is even more beholden to his rich and controlling girlfriend (Allegra Edwards) than he was before he died, because her family is financing his digital existence.“Being uploaded and essentially being owned as a human being, or as intellectual property, by my girlfriend throws a huge wrench in my life,” Amell said. “So although I get to continue living, it’s definitely not on my own terms.”To create the show’s complex mesh of realities, Daniels relied on multiple directors with prestigious, wide-ranging résumés. (Reid got an Emmy nomination for “The Handmaid’s Tale”; Jeffrey Blitz directed the Oscar-nominated documentary “Spellbound.”)Daniels was among them, directing two episodes including the 45-minute pilot. It is a rare role for him — “I am probably the worst director of the bunch that I have hired,” he said laughing — and “Upload” presents its own technical challenges. Dogs talk. Heads explode. Characters and objects (and useful body parts) appear and disappear.On an outdoor set, an actor whacked a nonexistent golf ball toward a green screen, then traded barbs with a patch of grass. In the finished version, the empty space became a hologram of another actor playing Arnold Palmer, who died in 2016.“The game just keeps getting harder,” Daniels said. “I shot the pilot, and then ‘Ready Player One’ came out. Spielberg is master of special effects, and he had, like, a 20-minute opening shot with no cuts in it, zooming through this world, going in and out of VR and the real world.”Thirty years ago, Daniels likely wouldn’t have measured himself against Steven Spielberg. But in the era of streaming and prestige TV, the competition had evolved.“I was like, ‘Oh God,’” Daniels said. “‘His one shot is like 20 times the budget of my entire pilot.’”

A convincing future

TV has become highly interested in post-mortem journeys of self-discovery, in shows like Amazon’s “Forever,” TBS’s “Miracle Workers” and Netflix’s “Russian Doll.” Daniels is aware of the micro-trend but doesn’t consider “Upload” to be following an increasingly well-trod metaphysical path.Ask about “Black Mirror,” and he is quick to tell you he devised and sold the idea for “Upload” well before the debut of “San Junipero” — an episode that won two Emmys in 2017 for its story set in a digital hereafter.Ask about “The Good Place,” however, and he is thoughtful to the point of appearing vulnerable. “The Good Place” wasn’t TV’s only comedy about the afterlife, as he noted. But it was the only one put out by his “Parks and Recreation” co-creator, Michael Schur.“I couldn’t believe that Mike had the idea for ‘The Good Place’ while I was doing this,” Daniels said. “I don’t watch ‘The Good Place’ because of the similarities. I don’t want to watch it.”Given the creators’ shared history, comparisons between the shows will be inevitable. Each is a high-concept comedy set in an afterworld with design flaws and equally flawed but charming staff. But “Upload” has a detailed and believable universe all its own.Perhaps its greatest distinguishing feature is the focus on technology and class. The tone is sometimes dark, not just darkly funny, and even frightening.Daniels said he’d wanted realism, a version of the near-future that was convincing and recognizable. A Tinder-like app lets people rate their hookups. Unemployment might keep you out of heaven.“For the pitch, I was referencing Kafka and Charlie Chaplin in ‘Modern Times,’” he said. “That’s, to me, why to do it, because it feels like it says something about income inequality and capitalism.”Traditional notions of heaven are about “both living past your body’s death but also, supposedly, some sort of fairness or ultimate reward for the good and the meek,” he added. “In this version, that’s not happening — it’s just the rich and capitalistic getting it.”That pitch had traveled its own Kafkaesque journey, metamorphosing as it went. Daniels conceived an early version while brainstorming “S.N.L.” sketches but ultimately decided to table the idea, and then later tried to turn it into a short story. During the writers’ strike of 2007-8, he took a stab at making it a novel. He didn’t pitch it as a TV show until several years later, selling it to HBO in 2015.HBO spent some time developing the concept, but then the executive who bought it left. Daniels resold it in 2016 to Amazon.“There have been other shows that dealt with the afterlife, but I think the way that Greg has designed the show is truly and fully unique,” said Ryan Andolina, the head of comedy at Amazon Studios. Andolina also bought Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag,” a favorite of Daniels’s, and he viewed “Upload” as another kind of auteur comedy. “Greg is very meticulous and specific, and had a very clear idea of what the show was.”It would’ve been easy for Daniels to make another network mockumentary, but he seems determined to push himself. “Space Force” will reunite him with Carell, who pitched him the show in July 2018, not long after President Trump announced his desire to create a new military branch of the same name.The Netflix series is not quite science fiction, though there are spaceships, and the cast and cinematic production signal a significant budget. Another thing it isn’t: a network mockumentary.“Mockumentary is terrific — it’s a really fun style,” he said. “But after nine years of ‘The Office’ and seven years of ‘Parks and Recreation,’ I don’t know, I felt like I wanted to do something else.”He paused, then laughed. “After dealing with this many green screens, I could see going back to mockumentary.” Read the full article

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