Having read one of my earlier posts in the week, HOLIDAY MEN artist Nick Johnson has taken it upon himself to start referring to me as Skipper (a nickname I've somehow avoided up till this point.)
He is also agitating in favour of a scheme that would see us dress up as Gilligan and The Skipper at some future signing event. This is unlikely to happen, though I might be convinced to go as Mary-Anne.
Making matters worse, I noticed that in one of my last e-mails back to Nick I actually referred to him as "Little Buddy", only recognizing the pop cultural significance of the phrase after I hit Send.
>shudder<
I actually used to do an exceptionally brief comedy bit I called Dark Gilligan, back when I was in my black floppy sun/Gilligan-style hat phase. Basically, I'd lean back on something, bend my head down so the brim of the hat blocked my eyes, make like I was taking a last drag on a cigarette before flicking the butt away. Then I'd look up just enough so I could give a Clint Eastwood glare from under the hat brim at whoever was around and say, "F*** you, Skipper."
And then I'd laugh and laugh.
A
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
On Comedy
Via Jane Espenson's blog, an episode of NPR's This American Life called A Tough Room.
The first sizable segment examines life in THE ONION's writers room. As interesting as the dynamic of the writers was the narrator's commentary, especially the remark about how the writers dissect a joke is the opposite of funny. I frequently go through that sort of process when I'm doing comedy, and generally end up at a point where I have no idea anymore whether something that was hilarious at the time is any good at all. At that point, it's nice to have editors, co-writers, or a substantial amount of time to go without looking at the work, so I can come at it with fresh eyes.
I've got to admit, there's something very rewarding about reading a bit you forgot you wrote and getting a laugh out of it.
...
Maybe it's time to pull THE TOKEN GOBLIN back out of the drawer and give those materials a read...
A
The first sizable segment examines life in THE ONION's writers room. As interesting as the dynamic of the writers was the narrator's commentary, especially the remark about how the writers dissect a joke is the opposite of funny. I frequently go through that sort of process when I'm doing comedy, and generally end up at a point where I have no idea anymore whether something that was hilarious at the time is any good at all. At that point, it's nice to have editors, co-writers, or a substantial amount of time to go without looking at the work, so I can come at it with fresh eyes.
I've got to admit, there's something very rewarding about reading a bit you forgot you wrote and getting a laugh out of it.
...
Maybe it's time to pull THE TOKEN GOBLIN back out of the drawer and give those materials a read...
A
Monday, February 25, 2008
Bringing the Ha-Ha
When working in a comedic vein, I tend to employ a blitzkrieg approach. If I think something's funny, it's in. If I think someone else will think it's funny, it's in. If I think someone else MIGHT think it's funny, it's in. Basically, if I can conceive of ANYONE, ANYWHERE having the minutest of smiles tug at their lips when reading a bit, odds are it's going in.
It's not a great approach, parrtly because I've got a superhuman sense of humour and can find something to laugh about in almost anything--a tendency which almost got me punched out in 2002 when I told a friend with family in New York that if I gave it a little effort, I could find the lighter side to 9/11. The ensuing argument pretty much defined the concept of "too soon" for me, though the idea of an appropriate time to make light of something doesn't really make sense to Mr. Bleak, here. I still get a giggle out of the dead cop's brother who said on television that his sibling "died doing what he loved." Which prompted the question "He loved bleeding?"
Anyway. In one of life's little synchronicities, today I came across two examples of laugh-out-loud funny subtractive comedy. Well, they made me laugh out loud anyway. And then I coughed. And then I almost choked. And then I coughed some more. And now I've got a sore throat. And I'm feeling nauseous, but I don't think that's related.
The first, Sesame Bleepin' Street, comes from Christopher Bird's generally quite entertaining blog, Mightygodking.
The second has been making the rounds of the various blogs I read, so I'm not sure where I saw it first. It's called Garfield Minus Garfield. Basically, someone with arguably way too much time on their hands is going through Garfield strips and photoshopping Garfield out of them. The results are surreal, sometimes reading like the bleakest PEANUTS strips as read by someone experiencing a bad acid trip. If you thought Jon Arbuckle had a miserable existence with Garfield around, wait'll you see what it's like for him without a fat, joke-cracking cat...
Laughing is good. Coughing, choking, and wanting to vomit, not so much, but I'm not complaining. Much.
A
It's not a great approach, parrtly because I've got a superhuman sense of humour and can find something to laugh about in almost anything--a tendency which almost got me punched out in 2002 when I told a friend with family in New York that if I gave it a little effort, I could find the lighter side to 9/11. The ensuing argument pretty much defined the concept of "too soon" for me, though the idea of an appropriate time to make light of something doesn't really make sense to Mr. Bleak, here. I still get a giggle out of the dead cop's brother who said on television that his sibling "died doing what he loved." Which prompted the question "He loved bleeding?"
Anyway. In one of life's little synchronicities, today I came across two examples of laugh-out-loud funny subtractive comedy. Well, they made me laugh out loud anyway. And then I coughed. And then I almost choked. And then I coughed some more. And now I've got a sore throat. And I'm feeling nauseous, but I don't think that's related.
The first, Sesame Bleepin' Street, comes from Christopher Bird's generally quite entertaining blog, Mightygodking.
The second has been making the rounds of the various blogs I read, so I'm not sure where I saw it first. It's called Garfield Minus Garfield. Basically, someone with arguably way too much time on their hands is going through Garfield strips and photoshopping Garfield out of them. The results are surreal, sometimes reading like the bleakest PEANUTS strips as read by someone experiencing a bad acid trip. If you thought Jon Arbuckle had a miserable existence with Garfield around, wait'll you see what it's like for him without a fat, joke-cracking cat...
Laughing is good. Coughing, choking, and wanting to vomit, not so much, but I'm not complaining. Much.
A
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Oh, dear lord...
Quite outside of any conscious intent, my mind just cast Nick Johnson as Gilligan to my Skipper.
This is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.
***
H-MEN #1.7...
...is almost ready. I will never give a piece a title Ward dislikes EVER AGAIN.
***
MY LAST POST...
...was so blindingly brilliant and insightful that the person it was written in response to is giving me a t-shirt. I should ramble on about stuff I know nothing about more often, save a few bucks on my wardrobe.
(That's a joke. As anyone who read THE WHISPER OF MY SOUL can attest, my wardrobe budget can be found between the cushions of a homeless person's couch.)
***
SPRING CLEANING
Had the latest in a series of sporadic organizing/cleaning sprees this weekend. Primed the recently drywalled half of the basement, cleared a lot of clutter out of the office (part of which will end up in part of the recently primed basement, which is looking increasingly likely to turn into some kind of studio space for me), and generally didn't get a whole lot done this weekend outside of thinking a lot about an idea that's almost but just NOT QUITE coming together, and several ideas that aren't coming together at all. In the absence of pressing creative engagements, I'm casting about, looking for the Next Big Thing to concentrate on.
I hate this part of the process.
A
This is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.
***
H-MEN #1.7...
...is almost ready. I will never give a piece a title Ward dislikes EVER AGAIN.
***
MY LAST POST...
...was so blindingly brilliant and insightful that the person it was written in response to is giving me a t-shirt. I should ramble on about stuff I know nothing about more often, save a few bucks on my wardrobe.
(That's a joke. As anyone who read THE WHISPER OF MY SOUL can attest, my wardrobe budget can be found between the cushions of a homeless person's couch.)
***
SPRING CLEANING
Had the latest in a series of sporadic organizing/cleaning sprees this weekend. Primed the recently drywalled half of the basement, cleared a lot of clutter out of the office (part of which will end up in part of the recently primed basement, which is looking increasingly likely to turn into some kind of studio space for me), and generally didn't get a whole lot done this weekend outside of thinking a lot about an idea that's almost but just NOT QUITE coming together, and several ideas that aren't coming together at all. In the absence of pressing creative engagements, I'm casting about, looking for the Next Big Thing to concentrate on.
I hate this part of the process.
A
Friday, February 22, 2008
Andrew Waxes Philosophical on Videogames
Originally intended as a comment to a blog post by Zeros 2 Heroes founder Matt Toner, asking for thoughts on the notion of comics to videogame translation.
When reading it (if anyone can be bothered), it should be borne in mind at all times that my knowledge of videogames doesn't extend much further than Pong. Nevertheless, until I see otherwise, I do separate writing for videogames into a separate category than writing for traditional narrative media. The former is more involved with concocting scenarios (much like a role-playing game referee), while the latter's concerns are more on telling the story the creator wants told. Looking at it from the other end, a reader/viewer of traditional narrative media take the role of witness, while gamers are participants.
Says the guy who doesn't know the difference between a Wii and Intellivision.
In case it comes across that way, I don't think there's anything wrong with anybody taking part in those activities from any side of the equation. Most important to me is that the writing is still writing, it's just writing focused on a different set of goals than those I've generally focused on (I'd still like to take a crack at writing for a videogame somewhere down the line, something that the paragraphs I just wrote are going to make highly unlikely, I know.)
Anyway. What I wrote:
I read a quote yesterday that crystallized what it is that makes it difficult for me to engage with many video games. From an MSNBC story that starts off about a guy trying to blame videogames for the latest American college shooting spree, and turns into an examination of videogames as educational tools, by Ian Bogost, creator of a health-promoting Sims-like game called FATWORLD:
'Unlike television or even novels, instead of telling stories, video games represent systems and complicated interactions between multiple dynamics,' Bogost says. 'They're a model of the world rather than an individual story within it.'
The quality of narrative in videogames has long been their greatest weakness (IMO). Action seems to take precedence over character--you're allowed some limited roleplaying in stuff like World of Warcraft, but my understanding is that even then, except under exceptional situations, there's no defining narrative, no beginning, middle and end...it's all middle.
At least that model has a social networking system going for it, so the big payoff doesn't necessarily need to be in the form of reaching the satisfying end of a story well-told.
If I thought they had a chance in hell of overwhelming the more traditional narrative media, I'd actually a bit alarmed by narrative-oriented videogames, which, if I'm to understand some Bioware staffers I've talked to, are constructed more or less with the desired storyline, plus a bunch of other options that will eventually take any semi-competent player to the desired conclusion via what's presumably an inferior storyline.
This is actually why I stopped refereeing live roleplaying games and started writing seriously--my players kept f#%&ing my stories up. The kind of videogames I'm describing seem designed to have the stories f'd up, which I'd think must be terribly frustrating (a frustration somewhat alleviated by a decent to substantial paycheque for what is, after all, still writing.)
It seems to me the comics that are most likely to lend themselves to videogame adaptation are ongoing, action-oriented series--ones that, like a videogame, exist more or less constantly in the middle of a story that will never reach an end. Spider-Man can fight Doc Ock a million times and neither of them will ever die (permanently). That sort of arrangement seems reasonably transferable to a videogame medium--though in that case you end up with a situation where the player might actually reach a completely unsatisfying story conclusion, having Spider-Man get killed because the player lacks the skillset to beat the villain du jour.
Still, that seems like the best, or at least the easiest, sort of comic to translate to videogame.
Less easy, or to my mind convenient, are what I'm going to call 'graphic novels' (a term I try to avoid because it unfairly denigrates the idea of the 'comic book', but which in this case is easier than constantly repeating 'comics that actually function as complete stories.')
Any story with a defined beginning, middle, and end is going to provide a number of challenges to someone trying to bring it to the videogame medium. I'm guessing the videogame fan's priorities are substantially different than mine, so provided there's a certain level of entertainment to be had in whatever journey/challenges the player has to make in the game could make for an enjoyable gaming experience.
For myself, I'd rather have an enjoyable narrative experience. And while comics and videogames both (and movies and a lot of other narrative forms, for that matter) tend to be collaborative efforts, at the end of the day, I don't have to go through the first five segments (pages/minutes) of a comic/novel/movie before I 'get it right' and am able to experience the next five. I just get the (presumably) best story the creator(s) could produce, period, end (if you'll pardon the pun) of story.
So, to finally get around to something resembling an answer to the question at hand: a graphic novel would offer easier transition to film or, depending on how open-ended the concept was, television. But the existence of an established, ‘proper’ ending could lead to problems, both technical and aesthetic (does anyone want to play a game where they know, ultimately, the protagonist/player's struggle is going to be in vain?--Not that there are a lot of comics out there that end like that, but as an extreme example of what I'm thinking of.) On the other hand, action-oriented comics that are designed, up-front, as intellectual properties with no defined ending would, I'd *think* (I'm totally talking out of my ass here, if you couldn't already tell) would be easier to translate to videogame format, while presenting potential problems when it comes to adaptation to other media (esp. movies, where some form of artificial, probably producer-mandated world-shattering climax to the storyline is going to be required--which leads to the question of how one will come up with an equally world-shattering/satisfying conclusion to each sequel.)
None of which is to say any comic couldn't be translated into a videogame. It's just a matter of what a given comic/graphic novel's owners'/creators' storytelling priorities are, how skilled/talented the people adapting a property to a different medium are, and how much money the people who see the business potential in facilitating that adaptation are willing to shell out to make it happen. I'm sure someone could make an entertaining game based on Charles Burns' BLACK HOLE. But it'd be a hell of a lot easier to make one based on The Punisher.
Foley
When reading it (if anyone can be bothered), it should be borne in mind at all times that my knowledge of videogames doesn't extend much further than Pong. Nevertheless, until I see otherwise, I do separate writing for videogames into a separate category than writing for traditional narrative media. The former is more involved with concocting scenarios (much like a role-playing game referee), while the latter's concerns are more on telling the story the creator wants told. Looking at it from the other end, a reader/viewer of traditional narrative media take the role of witness, while gamers are participants.
Says the guy who doesn't know the difference between a Wii and Intellivision.
In case it comes across that way, I don't think there's anything wrong with anybody taking part in those activities from any side of the equation. Most important to me is that the writing is still writing, it's just writing focused on a different set of goals than those I've generally focused on (I'd still like to take a crack at writing for a videogame somewhere down the line, something that the paragraphs I just wrote are going to make highly unlikely, I know.)
Anyway. What I wrote:
I read a quote yesterday that crystallized what it is that makes it difficult for me to engage with many video games. From an MSNBC story that starts off about a guy trying to blame videogames for the latest American college shooting spree, and turns into an examination of videogames as educational tools, by Ian Bogost, creator of a health-promoting Sims-like game called FATWORLD:
'Unlike television or even novels, instead of telling stories, video games represent systems and complicated interactions between multiple dynamics,' Bogost says. 'They're a model of the world rather than an individual story within it.'
The quality of narrative in videogames has long been their greatest weakness (IMO). Action seems to take precedence over character--you're allowed some limited roleplaying in stuff like World of Warcraft, but my understanding is that even then, except under exceptional situations, there's no defining narrative, no beginning, middle and end...it's all middle.
At least that model has a social networking system going for it, so the big payoff doesn't necessarily need to be in the form of reaching the satisfying end of a story well-told.
If I thought they had a chance in hell of overwhelming the more traditional narrative media, I'd actually a bit alarmed by narrative-oriented videogames, which, if I'm to understand some Bioware staffers I've talked to, are constructed more or less with the desired storyline, plus a bunch of other options that will eventually take any semi-competent player to the desired conclusion via what's presumably an inferior storyline.
This is actually why I stopped refereeing live roleplaying games and started writing seriously--my players kept f#%&ing my stories up. The kind of videogames I'm describing seem designed to have the stories f'd up, which I'd think must be terribly frustrating (a frustration somewhat alleviated by a decent to substantial paycheque for what is, after all, still writing.)
It seems to me the comics that are most likely to lend themselves to videogame adaptation are ongoing, action-oriented series--ones that, like a videogame, exist more or less constantly in the middle of a story that will never reach an end. Spider-Man can fight Doc Ock a million times and neither of them will ever die (permanently). That sort of arrangement seems reasonably transferable to a videogame medium--though in that case you end up with a situation where the player might actually reach a completely unsatisfying story conclusion, having Spider-Man get killed because the player lacks the skillset to beat the villain du jour.
Still, that seems like the best, or at least the easiest, sort of comic to translate to videogame.
Less easy, or to my mind convenient, are what I'm going to call 'graphic novels' (a term I try to avoid because it unfairly denigrates the idea of the 'comic book', but which in this case is easier than constantly repeating 'comics that actually function as complete stories.')
Any story with a defined beginning, middle, and end is going to provide a number of challenges to someone trying to bring it to the videogame medium. I'm guessing the videogame fan's priorities are substantially different than mine, so provided there's a certain level of entertainment to be had in whatever journey/challenges the player has to make in the game could make for an enjoyable gaming experience.
For myself, I'd rather have an enjoyable narrative experience. And while comics and videogames both (and movies and a lot of other narrative forms, for that matter) tend to be collaborative efforts, at the end of the day, I don't have to go through the first five segments (pages/minutes) of a comic/novel/movie before I 'get it right' and am able to experience the next five. I just get the (presumably) best story the creator(s) could produce, period, end (if you'll pardon the pun) of story.
So, to finally get around to something resembling an answer to the question at hand: a graphic novel would offer easier transition to film or, depending on how open-ended the concept was, television. But the existence of an established, ‘proper’ ending could lead to problems, both technical and aesthetic (does anyone want to play a game where they know, ultimately, the protagonist/player's struggle is going to be in vain?--Not that there are a lot of comics out there that end like that, but as an extreme example of what I'm thinking of.) On the other hand, action-oriented comics that are designed, up-front, as intellectual properties with no defined ending would, I'd *think* (I'm totally talking out of my ass here, if you couldn't already tell) would be easier to translate to videogame format, while presenting potential problems when it comes to adaptation to other media (esp. movies, where some form of artificial, probably producer-mandated world-shattering climax to the storyline is going to be required--which leads to the question of how one will come up with an equally world-shattering/satisfying conclusion to each sequel.)
None of which is to say any comic couldn't be translated into a videogame. It's just a matter of what a given comic/graphic novel's owners'/creators' storytelling priorities are, how skilled/talented the people adapting a property to a different medium are, and how much money the people who see the business potential in facilitating that adaptation are willing to shell out to make it happen. I'm sure someone could make an entertaining game based on Charles Burns' BLACK HOLE. But it'd be a hell of a lot easier to make one based on The Punisher.
Foley
Monday, February 18, 2008
A Very Special HOLIDAY MEN Episode
This week at The ChemSet: A HOLIDAY MEN episode like no other!
Read it and weep. I know I'm going to.
A
Read it and weep. I know I'm going to.
A
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