Past, present and future.

It's been a very long time since I've written anything here. There are two main reasons for this. One of which is that I became aware of the website "TvTropes." Since discovering it I've realized that it's done a great job of what I've tried to do here. There may be some cases where there are some Objectivist-specific may need discussed that would justify a blog like what this has been up until now, but not enough reason for me to continue doing this.

Secondly, I started this blog (and blogging in general) as a way of fighting off writers block. Shortly after I started this blog, my comic writing hit a very active period where I finished the first draft of the script for my first graphic novel (which is what I was stuck on to begin with). But I had tons of energy to apply to writing my script but I didn't really want to spare any (or at least as much) for blogging.

About a year later I'm at a point of writer's block again. My script needs some rewrites and I need to either get my art up to snuff or break down and find an artist, but I noticed I haven't been doing much writing for a while.

I still have Superhero Babylon where I try to regularly contribute. But even though we try to keep things open about what topics are fair game, there have been some topics there that it hasn't really felt right to go on about because of how things are set up over there.

Specifically I'm talking about Horror. I tend to focus on the more heroic aspects thereof when I do write about it, but sometimes it requires going into too much detail for a person who isn't already a fan or who has no intention of trying it out no matter how glowing of a review I write is willing to take.

When I started this blog with the title I chose someone kind of joked that it sounded like something that would focus on horror. Wasn't true at the time, but I think it will be now. So far I have one idea I'm ready to try out along those lines. I don't want to go into too much detail about what it is, but if all goes well I should be starting it soon.

I don't know how many people were following this back when I was writing regularly, but I figured it would be fair warning to let anyone who cared about this blog "Thanks, but I'm changing focus." I'm still going to remain as Objectivist as one can while writing about a genre of fiction that Rand herself by and large dismissed. If you're no longer interested in this, sorry to see you go. If you're new or old and willing to stay aboard welcome.

Introduction to Dissecting the Machine

Storytelling has really been my life. I started coming up with sets of characters and scenarios when I was very young and one of the big driving forces in my life has been the idea of doing this well and constantly learning to do it better. But the truth of the matter is that even if the drive comes naturally, the skill to use that drive does not.

At the end of the day I'm a "nuts and bolts" guy when it comes to aesthetics. I'll read a novel and compare it to the film adaptation to see where things were improved or worsened. I'll compare different adaptations of the same story. I watch different edits of the same film. I listen to director commentaries and watch deleted scenes and try to determine if they handled the tough decisions correctly.

I can watch a film or read a novel and see it like an engine and understand how moving different elements of the story or "pressure valves" can drastically affect the overall work. It can turn an unstoppable psychopath into a lovable loser who can't catch a break. It can turn a bold man who takes charge of his own life into a neurotic wreck who can't keep anything together.

Ultimately more so than any other form of art a story is a machine. The characters, setting, events and everything that goes into a story are little more than Gears, tools and pressure valves which make this machine run properly and perform the task it was built to do.

My goal here is to discuss the ideas behind how the machine itself works. To name, describe and discuss all the tools that make a good story and point out how they have been best applied in the past and can be applied in the future.

The nature of visual literary arts

The origin of this piece has many roots, most notably the works of Scott McCloud and Will Eisner in defining the nature of how storytelling works in the medium of comics. The works I'm speaking of are linked in the sidebar so I won't link them here. I'm not going to say my ideas here are more "advanced" versions of their arguments so much as more integrated and applied. Said integration and application came about after a number of discussions with different people over time.

A good place to start is comparison to one of the closest ancestors to comics, static visual art (painting, line drawing, etc). Painting tends to be about essentials, but it's more the essentials of a specific moment in time. Like when you think back on your first kiss or something like that, how you remember what you were wearing, what color the walls were, how you were standing, what the expression on her (or his don't want to leave anyone out) face looked like just before etc.

Specifically, a painting captures just everything that would hit you about a particular moment. It's the essentials of everything that moment was, but enough to bring it all back and completely re-create the moment over and over again. In painting you're saying with a single image "this is what life is to me."

In a comic you're saying in effect "the sum total of everything in this narrative is what life is to me, from its darkest lows to its brightest heights, everything." Comics are about essentials pared down as far as possible. To this end comics work on the idea of the visuals as narration.
In a sentence, they are two completely different languages; the language of self contained art and visual literary narrative. Probably the biggest difference between static fine art and comics is the fact that comics use amount of detail as a specific narrative tool. You have to make more choices about what is and isn't essential in any given scene in relation to your plot.

Artists of the standard school of comic art know the importance of essentials. By keeping it very simple as black and white, either or: your mind assimilates the story information in a more controlled manner. By drawing a quick shot of your central character walking/running against either a blank background or flowing lines you realize he is moving towards a goal (or away from a fear) and it gives you insight to his value judgments (he doesn't care about what's going on around him). This is a standard employment of this tool. Another is your central character interacting with a single prop and/or background element against either an all black or all white background gives you insight as to the importance of that object to the character and again how the world around him has ceased to matter to him.

Fine artists use blends of several colors (possibly even avoiding the central color you would associate with an object) to render the color of a singular object in a certain light. This is the perfect approach for fine art/illustration. Say using a number of yellows oranges and browns to render an apple. But if that approach in rendering an apple was taken in a comic, literary significance is given to that apple by the artist, meaning this apple is very important to the story, and you should spend lots of time noticing it because it's very detailed and those details catch your eye.

Conversely, imagine you see a character walking into a large panel with several trees, a swing set, a few lampposts, some children playing, lovers kissing on a bench and your central character sitting alone on another bench reading a thick book. Think about how long it would take for all of that information to imprint itself on your memory if you were in that scene in that particular park. How much of a long relaxed stay in that area it would take for all this information to register in your mind in this manner. This is another narrative tool.

The literalistic set dressing of modern films lends itself to the idea of actually experiencing an event happening before your eyes. This leads to deeper immersion but it also allows for too much potential distraction. When a story takes place within a room, every element in the room is reproduced on the screen. If a director uses this to an advantage it can have great effect. This would entail only using set dressing that directly forwards the premise. Some great if ironic examples of this can be found in films like I know who Killed Me (a bad film with great art direction)or Memento (a great film all around).The drawback to this is that on the off chance that you choose a plant, piece or art, piece of furniture, or photo that might draw someone's attention away from what your prime focus is, you take the chance of diverting the viewer's attention away from where you want it. A truly good director would always be aware of this but that breed is getting rarer as time passes.

Many of the great original silent films had a strong expressionist element to their overall design, which lent itself to deeper abstraction applied to the stories. Like how in the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari each piece of set dressing lends itself to the overall impression of fear and confusion which the film's premise demands. Metropolis is often considered the last of the “German impressionist films,” and after Metropolis films demanded a move toward the more literalistic set dressing of today.

Selective and even abstract set dressing has the down side that it pulls itself away from literal interpretation and it requires a bit more thought on the part of the viewer. But since it operates on a more abstract level it lends itself to selectivity. Every piece has to fit the concept, and every piece leads the viewer exactly where it he supposed to be, and pulls him deeper into the premise.

While this approach no longer works well in film, it is quite effective for both comics and stage plays. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that one of comics' biggest innovators (Will Eisner) had a father who had a background in set design for the stage. It also comes down to the fact that, both of these mediums tend to be more essential based. If it doesn't directly forward the premise, you're not going to build it onto the stage or draw it.

The iconography in comics is kind of a double edged sword. In comic strips/straight drama it already draws on a large amount of shared human experience. So in that context something like Garfield, Dilbert, or on the level of deeper narrative Strangers in Paradise or Hepcats requires that people be able to place themselves in the story as easily as possible, it's important as many people as possible should be able to see themselves as Charlie Brown, (or Lucy or Schroeder) as Dilbert (or Dogbert or Wally), as Francine (or David or Katchoo). It is common experience brought to the lowest common denominator and exaggerated to the point of abstraction. It is odd that this seems to apply most strongly to both the lightest and deepest type of writing. The link may be that they are two of the most relatable types of stories.

You tend to notice that the artwork in adventure (super-hero, sci-fi, fantasy) comics tends to be far more realistic. I think this has to do with the fact that you're introducing a premise that takes a greater degree of abstraction to find something which can be applied to your life and consciousness. Superman needs to be seen as a real person that you could (and should) bump into on the street (or at the very least someone who you could believe would be on the cover of Newsweek or Time). Brian Michael Bendis had some interesting thoughts on this in reference to his work on the comic Daredevil. I'm paraphrasing but it was to the effect of

"I'm asking you to make a pretty big leap initially. I'm asking you to believe this guy got hit in the eyes by radioactive waste, DIDN'T DIE, and to top that off even though he was blinded, he can now do things that most Olympic athletes can't. That's a lot to ask out of someone right off the bat. Since the audience paid their part of their bargain (they're still reading aren't they?) I owe it to them to keep the rest of it as believable and relevant to life as I possibly can."

That may sound like a plea to naturalism, in Bendis' case it might even have been (I can't speak for him). But I take it as recognizing the bond which art must have to reality and the reader's consciousness to be valid. It seems kind of funny that as often as stories like this are described as escapist, when people are actually honest they realize how important it is to tie even the most outrageous ideas to reality for the story to have any depth or connection with a reader.

Ironically another book Bendis writes points out an exception to this rule. His comic "Powers" is the story of a few officers on the "Powers" division of a city's police force (i.e. the division of the police that deal with the legal wrangling of super-heroes and villains). It is written very realistically (as realistically as can be) and thus employs a cartoony style in the art. It's kind of like a special bond between the creators and readers. Since the key points are done so well it works on a more relatable level than most comics in this genre.

So what should a person, be they reader or creator, take from this. Is a hyper-realistic and super detailed approach best, or is a more simplified and impressionistic approach the one which should be taken in this medium. All I can say is that it simply depends on the creator and the creation, these two factors dictate the style I'm simply outlining what the choices are and what their nature is.

Fearless Aesthetic Self-Analysis

There was an episode of a show called Dead Like Me. The premise of the show was that once a person dies they spend a long period of time working as a reaper, acting as a normal living person among the legitimate living. The lead character is a young girl who died far too young who's working as rookie reaper in a small team among veteran reapers.

Among the reapers there are many rules, one of which is you're not supposed to go back to meet your family. The lead reaper is agressive about stressing this rule to the rookie. This continues until she breaks the rule and gets heartbroken because she doesn't look like herself and she just said something that sounded crazy to her mother. She's cut herself off from her old family forever. After she does this all that the lead reaper says to her is "you all right?" and gives her a hug.

Many people resist the idea of aesthetic self analysis for a number of reasons. This mainly applies in Objectivist circles. Among many there's an idea that your tastes have to measure up to some strangly defined set of criteria and that if you follow this mentality, you either measure up to this and you're a good person, or you don't and you're dispicably evil. At least that's how many see it.

But the truth for myself and many people in another group is that the Objectivist aesthetic is a challenge and any time you've honestly experienced something which not only fit into that mold but matched your particular values and personality, nothing else will do. After you've been exposed to this it's both tempting and scary to run everything you happened to enjoy earlier in your life through this new lense.

It's tempting because you bubble with excitement about new things you'd never truly appreciated before. New levels to understand a story on, a new context to appreciate a melody through. Some times it truly blows your mind when you discover something so great and so new.

What seems initially scary is the idea of being found guilty by an unseen jury of a deficient sense of life. But the scariest thing about re-evaluation of your nostalgic loves isn't that you are going to be a horrible person for loving a bad work of art. It's likely that you'll still love your most treasured works of art just the way you remember it forever... you'll just learn that this version of it never really existed.

One of my earliest influences as a writer was the horror genre in general and the idea of "final girl" Today my view is that much of the genre itself is dismal, poorly executed, and the best example of a malevolent universe premise you'll ever see. But the idea of a heroine will for me always be exemplified by Alice Johnson from Nightmare on Elm Street 4 & 5. In some ways I appreciate her even more now that I realize what she had to rise above.

There may still be many things of value to be derived from flawed work of art, but once you view it through this lense it will never be quite the same again but it will ultimatly you'll be richer for the experience. Fearless aesthetic self analysis is a difficult process, but an important one.