And So It Begins (Babylon 5 Season 1)
I haven’t had a B5 marathon in something like 8 or 9 years. The last one was during the process of indoctrinating my wife in the geek ways. We started with Star Wars and then an introduction to the Whedonverse with Buffy. Once I had her softened up, I figured it was time for my second favorite thing in the universe (show reference!), and we embarked on a tour of Epsilon 3 and environs. At this far remove, I honestly can’t remember if we watched all of first season or not. I know that we ended with the dramatic finale of fourth season and never finished out the series. I probably haven’t seen the disappointing fifth season since it aired, so I’m hoping to revisit it with fresh eyes and to discover it’s better than its reputation.
So it is time. After struggling through Deep Space 9 last year, I’d been yearning for another look at the real thing. Then this series of weekly reviews of a re-watch popped up on the A.V. Club, giving me the last little nudge.
But before I tear into first season, let me just warn the virgins out there: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS. It’s a show that’s nearly 20 years old, so I don’t feel bad for you. Well, I do feel bad for you actually. So I’m going to give you two pieces of advice. 1. Watch the damn show. 2. Skip the first season. Slight caveat to # 2 — the first season episodes “Midnight on the Firing Line”, “Signs and Portents”, and “Chrysalis” will give you a lot of backstory for the buck and are rather good.
So if you haven’t seen Babylon 5 before, go here right now and watch it.
And so it begins.
After Watchmen
This past Wednesday, I went into a comics shop and bought new comics off the shelf for the first time in two and a half years. The pain I felt when I forked over $17 for four comics reminded me why.
The 2008 financial cock-up made a mess of things for many people, and my wife and I were no exception. I had to make some tough decisions. Cutting out new comics was a no-brainer. And it was painless. My interest in superheroes had waned over the interminable DC re-invention through multiple Crises, and no other “alternative” comics had caught my attention at the time.
I continued to buy trade paperback collections on occasion, at Dragon*Con or used from comics shops or with trade credit at McKay’s. When I got a tablet several months ago, I experimented a bit with e-comics. But as has happened several times in the past, my enthusiasm for comics has waned for the last few years. I can’t say that I’m regaining that enthusiasm, but I have read several good comics lately.
The first four Before Watchmen issues do not fall into that category.
While reading them, I wondered if I was being too harsh on them since these are only the first issues of 4-6 issue series. Any judgment of them is like judging the first chapter of a book. I don’t know what brilliant thematic resonance may be waiting for me in the entire arc.
To be “fair”, I went back and re-read the first issue of Watchmen. It would be more fair if I could somehow blank my foreknowledge of the rest of the series from my head, but the technology doesn’t exist. And no thanks.
In the first page, we have Rorshach’s brilliantly deranged journal (which sounds disturbingly like right wing radio jocks of the Naughties). The first three panels have writing that is so captivating that it was used for the movie trailers: “…all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save us!” …and I’ll look down and whisper “No.””
Minutemen, the title chosen to launch Before Watchmen, begins with an excerpt from the Epilogue of Hollis Mason’s Under the Hood, and then lampshades how bad the writing is by having him say to his dog, “This is terrible. I’ll just have to face facts, girl. I’m no Tolstoy. Going for a deep, philosophical ending isn’t going to work. I guess we’ll just have to stick to being ourselves, huh? What say we start unpacking some of our stuff?” Project much, Darwyn Cooke? *
Silk Spectre gets off to a slightly better start, and if the Watchmen label weren’t on the front, I’d probably be generous. But the snow globe on the first page–how does the husband/king get pulled out of the castle before Laurie drops it? Again, the writing is pretty bland, including such gems as the generic platitude that “Kids are smarter than we think.” This is not tight scripting. It’s all very loose. I may sound like a broken record since I’m going to keep repeating this, but: This level of writing could be forgiven in most any other comic (even one with a $3.99 cover price), but these creators had the ginormous balls to put fucking “Watchmen” on the cover of their crap.
Silk Spectre does have one of the best lines of these four books in its first three pages: the original Silk Spectre says to her daughter: “Oh Sweetie, you’re too young to hate. Wait until you’re older and the world gives you a good reason. Trust me, it won’t let you down.”
Comedian opens with Edward Blake sitting on a bedside listening to “The Wanderer” on the radio, then cuts to him playing football with the Kennedy’s. Not comparable to him being throw out a window, but the slow open is a valid choice, too. Eddie’s reference to “taking out the President” seems like it could be foreshadowing, but it turns out to be a dialogue red herring.
Eddie being best buds with the Kennedy’s seems a bit out of character for the hard-ass that we’re familiar with from the original series. But he does break down over the death of JFK at the end of the book (a tough guy break down–takes a swig of whiskey and squeezes the shoulder of another guy), so perhaps the thematic implication is that the Comedian was turned into a monster when the dream of Camelot died. If so, it’s pretty sloppy–after all, he kills Marilyn Monroe for Jackie-O and from the original, we know that he raped Sally Jupiter when he was in the Minutemen.
Nite Owl probably has the best opening. Kind of cliched dialogue from the father about Dan Dreiberg dreaming too much and not having a job, but when Danny opens his bedroom and we have a long shot of the room with his Nite Owl memorabilia, it’s a very Watchmen framing device.
Ultimately, that’s what’s missing from Before Watchmen: a connection to the original series. When I was wondering a couple of months ago whether this series should even exist, I suggested that a new Watchmen should be audacious rather than reverential. I couldn’t have imagined that we would get one that was neither. The art, the panel layouts are very typical for modern superhero comics, not matching the unusually geometric 9 panel framework that Watchmen established. The writing is very loose and mostly conversational, no match for the very tightly written original… so carefully written that Rorschach’s grunt is “Hurm,” a reference to the developer of the Rorschach test. (Which the character uses three times in one page of the Nite Owl book, as compared with only three times total in the first issue of Watchmen.)
I recently read the first book of Bendis’ Powers, which I enjoyed quite a bit. There are now a lot of books like it. J. Michael Straczynski, writer of Nite Owl and Dr. Manhattan, has even written a couple himself, the less than stellar Rising Stars and the excellent Supreme Power (the first series of which is probably my favorite of the revisionist superhero genre after Watchmen). This isn’t like the 80’s, when very few comics had ever broached the topic of realistic superheroes in such a gritty way. Now most superhero comics attempt to inject a sense of realism into their fantasy, and many many of them have put their heroes through the grimdark wringer.
So what is Before Watchmen bringing to the table?
As best I can tell from these first four issues, nothing much. Like a man watching a car wreck, I’m morbidly curious to see what else can go wrong with these bastard children. But $17 was enough to pay for turds, no matter how well polished they were.
* I wrote this before checking what the rest of the interwebs response to Before Watchmen was. I was surprised to see that it has been mostly positive. This interview with Darwyn Cooke makes me a little more forgiving of his self-deprecating Minutemen opening. Though I doubt I will put myself through the expense or emotional turmoil of reading the rest of the series, I will keep an eye on the reviews.
[Top]If you can’t sell it, give it away
It’s been about ten months since I “indie-published” my first novel, Chrysalis.
(I don’t really like the term indie publishing, because that signifies books from the small press, rather than what most of the ebook crowd are doing, which is self-publishing. But that term is loaded, too, since for so long it was synonymous with the vanity press. I guess it’s much like using “graphic novels” instead of comics; neither term is really apt, but they’re all we’ve got.)
I was kind of curious to see what response a book would get with no promotion. Nobody knows who I am, so no one would be looking for my book. All it had going for it were the cover that I had Photoshopped together and my words inside. (Which may have been two strikes against it, but just keep those opinions to yourself…) A few weeks after I clicked the publish button, we did a little announcement on Facebook, and the first few sales trickled in. 14 in all, undoubtedly from friends and family.
Even with such a pitiful number, it was a little rush to get that tiny royalty check, barely enough to pay for the photos I’d licensed for the cover.
Then, for the next eight months, it’s been mostly silence. I published to B&N’s Nook as well, where I got another single sale, presumably from another friend, but that’s not even enough to trigger a royalty payment, so that was my donation to B&N. Randomly, in March, there was another sale on Amazon–not sure if that was a late friend & family purchase or a stranger.
Not long after that, I decided to sign up for Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library, to see if that would have any effect. The only catch, that I would have to delete the ebook from B&N, didn’t seem like much of a downside, considering the sales. But the Lending Library didn’t make any difference either. No one could find my book.
In all this time, there hasn’t been a single review either. This is the downside of self-publishing. You put your work out and there is no bang; there’s not even a whimper.
I’m not stupid. I know that some amount of promotion is necessary. But I don’t want to be the guy spamming Twitter or Amazon forums or whatever other corners of the internet saying, “Buy my book!”
The advice of several other “indie” authors is to have multiple “products” available, so that when a reader finds one book and likes it, they have something else to purchase as well. The data supports that, too–most of the big selling self-published books have been part of series. Since I don’t have another book completed, that option is out for the time being, though I am working on more.
However, my three month stint in the KDP Select (the Lending Library) was almost up, and I hadn’t used the other “perk” of the program. For five days of the three months, you can list your book as free. Doesn’t seem like much of a perk–giving something away instead of selling it. But it’s another avenue of promotion, and I figured I might as well give it a shot. This whole self-publishing venture has been a bit of an experiment anyway.
I set Chrysalis to go free for the five full days, Wednesday through Sunday. I changed the book description because the prior one (still listed in the sidebar of this blog) seemed a little bland.
Wednesday morning, I didn’t expect much. After ten months of nothing much, I expected nothing much again. To make matters worse, I woke up to an e-mail rejecting a story I’d submitted to the Writers of the Future contest. After moping around for most of the morning, I decided to check and see how my giveaway was going.
At 11am, 73 people had downloaded Chrysalis and it was listed at number 48 on the free suspense thrillers list. I almost fell out of my seat. I hadn’t tweeted about it, or announced it in any way. Who are these people who scour Amazon looking for free ebooks? (Google leads me to this website. Perhaps that’s it.)
It peaked on the chart this morning at #22, with 206 copies downloaded. At that point, my ebook was out-“selling” a James Patterson freebie. The pace has slowed considerably today, as the people who are willing to take a chance on an unreviewed book tapers off.
So what now?
It’s been a pretty cool experience to know that over 200 people have downloaded my book in two days. I know that it doesn’t mean a whole lot in the long run, but it’s been a nice morale booster. My biggest hope and greatest fear is that some small percentage of those who downloaded the book will read it and review it on Amazon. I hope they like it and fear they won’t. I now know that I should have done this freebie promotion sooner, as the quickest potential way to get reviews. It is a gamble, of course, since a few negative reviews could sink the book just as well as no reviews. Except that the right kind of negative reviews could be a boon. I dunno how many Amazon reviews saying a book is “too dark and violent and has too much profanity and sex and I just didn’t like any of the characters” have made me want to read the book.
What now?
Back to work on the next thing.
[Top]Feces, Meet Fan
A couple of weeks ago, Frontline kept me up late when I got sucked into their four-part expose on the 2008 financial meltdown, Money, Power, and Wall Street. As always for Frontline, it was an incisive examination of the topic, revealing nuances that the mainstream press mostly overlooked. And it doesn’t appear that anything substantial has been done to repair the damage. The government threw (and continues to throw) lots of money at the problem, while any teeth of reform have been filed down by lobbyists.
I, like most Americans, have my own life to live, and can’t obsess about how big money is corrupting our republic. I have moments of clarity like cold water being splashed on my face, then I bury my head in the sand again. (Which means the sand is going to stick to my wet face. How’s that for mixed metaphors?)
Then my wife and I were talking about generational differences last night, started by a seminar a week ago by a rather good presenter speaking about the challenges of teaching to the Millennials/Generation Y/whatever the hell they end up being called. I had a few quibbles with his generational divides, based mostly on my reading of The Fourth Turning many moons ago. Which got me wondering how Strauss & Howe viewed current events, and if they thought things were lining up for the Crisis period that they had predicted.
Neil Howe believes that the Fourth Turning began with the 2008 financial crisis. Makes sense to me.
A comment on that post led me to a blog called the Burning Platform, where the proprietor has written up a very long analysis of the current Crisis in three parts, entitled You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. His politics appear to be a bit askew (from mine [though so are Neil Howe’s]), with a dash of conspiracy theory thrown in, but the vast majority of his points appear sound to me. (Just, for God’s sake, don’t read the comments! 9/11 nuts, crazy fundies of all stripes, and New World Order gold-standard bearers, oh my!)
I’m fairly convinced that the chickens are going to come home to roost over the deregulated banking industry sometime in the next eighteen months. Perhaps appreciably sooner. The news about JP Morgan Chase underscores that these banks are still engaging in risky behavior and are too big and too dumb to stop it. Perhaps when the debt ceiling looms again later this year it will be the breakdown that leads an authority figure (presumably the President) to step forward and take extraordinary measures. I know that it’s cliche to bring up the Nazi’s in totalitarian rhetoric, but I hope that whichever President has the reins then is not a Hitler, or a Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but an FDR, a Lincoln, or dare we hope, one(s) who has(have) the mettle and foresight of the Founders. I worry how Obama will perform in such a crucible, but perhaps the last four years have given him the on-the-job training. Romney thrown into such a crisis I suspect would be an unmitigated disaster, but he has been such a cipher to this point that it’s near impossible to judge what his true leadership would be under extreme pressure.
Being a (more or less) liberal, I think Obama’s stated values (some of which have been compromised over his first term) would be better for the continued health of the country, post-Crisis. But perhaps it will not be this President who will be the great leader who will save us or destroy us during the Crisis, but the next one. After all, we’re probably in this thing for 10-15 more years.
I would like for this to all be conspiracy theory, but historical cycles are clearly real, and the timing looks too convincing to ignore. Must not stick head back in sand…
The good news (assuming Strauss & Howe’s cycles are correct) is that now is the time when we can achieve great solutions to the conflicts of our day and forge a new, better consensus. But no one says it’s going to be easy.
[Top]Facebook, it’s not you, it’s me. No, really, it’s you.
I think I need a break from Facebook. Hell, I think I need to stop using it entirely. Maybe limited to promotion, if that ever becomes a thing (that works).
“People are stupid.” It’s the mantra of a close friend, and I’d be better served by using it as preventative wisdom rather than disgruntled venom after the fact. I know that people have different opinions and we grow by discussing them and blah blah blah. This is the freaking internet. I’ve been here for over fifteen years. You’d think I’d know what it’s like out there by now. Facebook is like AOL ten years ago. Not your first destination for high-minded discussions.
Le sigh.
I’m too weak to go cold turkey. But I’ve got a new (spring? May Day?) resolution. Stop engaging in political discussions on Facebook. Just stop it. People are talking but nobody’s listening. It’s like the stereotypical family Thanksgiving dinner.
[Top]Gimme some of that new time religion
Sometimes I want to found my own religion, but then I remember L. Ron Hubbard. And Joseph Smith. Apparently, you can’t found a modern religion without being cynical or a crackpot.
See, I’ve been reading about Buddhism. Not just recently, but over the past fifteen-plus years since I took a course in college. There’s a lot of kooky stuff in there, like in all religions: karma and reincarnation and celestial Buddhas and magic and demons. But it’s also a religion that meshes fairly well with the secular, scientific modern world. At its core, Buddhism is an agnostic religion, at least when it comes to gods, and its tenet of mindfulness is close to the scientific ideal of observation.
I’ve said a lot over the years that if I were forced to pick a religion, it would be Buddhism. But several things have increasingly bothered me about it in recent years. An old Slate article by John Horgan that I just came across explores some of those conundrums. I could quibble with a lot of his statements, or at least rhetoric. (For instance, saying that karma and reincarnation “imply the existence of some cosmic judge who, like Santa Claus, tallies up our naughtiness and niceness” seems to fundamentally misunderstand the metaphorical process of karma. Might as well say that the processes of genetic variance and natural selection imply some god-like guiding hand to raise some deserving species to dominance and condemn others to extinction. In the case of both evolution and karma, the key difference from theistic religion is that there is no Santa Claus.)
But as you see, this quickly devolves into theology. That just leads to doctrinal schism and different denominations and to one side calling themselves the High Road and the other side the Low Road.
It’s actually his conclusion that dovetails with the topic that’s been on my mind for many years:
All religions, including Buddhism, stem from our narcissistic wish to believe that the universe was created for our benefit, as a stage for our spiritual quests. In contrast, science tells us that we are incidental, accidental. Far from being the raison d’être of the universe, we appeared through sheer happenstance, and we could vanish in the same way. This is not a comforting viewpoint, but science, unlike religion, seeks truth regardless of how it makes us feel. Buddhism raises radical questions about our inner and outer reality, but it is finally not radical enough to accommodate science’s disturbing perspective. The remaining question is whether any form of spirituality can.
Argh. Again, I quibble with his word choice. “Incidental, accidental, happenstance.” They imply the religious disappointment of a lapsed Catholic asking about the meaning of life. It’s a non-sequitur. Only we create meaning. It does not exist without consciousness. And contrary to our self-importance, there is no evidence that the universe would be any the less without our meaning. “What is the meaning of an apple? Of dirt? Of pavement?” Nothing is incidental, accidental, or happenstance. Everything simply is.
(“Is” demonstrates the insufficiency of English when attempting to capture these notions that are at odds with the some-odd millennia of Western thought. “Is” implies stasis. Essence. The sine qua non of a subject. But what I mean is that, “Everything simply dances. Everything simply changes. Everything simply moves invisibly. Everything simply does what it must do.” That’s a lot of freight for a single word, and “is” doesn’t really carry it well, but we’re stuck with it for now.)
But I digress…
Horgan hits the nail on the head with his last line. Can any form of spirituality be compatible with the scientific method? I sure hope so, because the uncertainty of science is not compatible with the human brain. People seem to need the certainty of religion, or at least the comfort of religious practice. And while science as an abstract, devoid of the personalities that fuel its progress, seeks truth, something in the human mind craves certainty. Buddhism appears to be the only religion that attempts to make peace with the uncertainty of the universe (multiverse?) and of human existence within that often unfathomable emptiness that contains everything.
Yet Buddhism has thousands of years of often unwieldy baggage, so perhaps it is not the answer for modern suffering/ennui/existential doubt/uncertainty. Hence, I wish I could start a new religion, one with no god and one that made people comfortable with the perpetual disproof of the scientific method. I’m uncomfortable with some atheists who seem to deify science and make it into Science with the same sort of unassailable Truths that they decry in religion. Humans need some sort of spirituality that can embrace both the intuition of religious/creative experience and the reason of the scientific method. Without it, I’m afraid that the religious meme, which has been such a powerful thought virus throughout human history, will wipe out the brief flowering of scientific enlightenment that we take for granted today.
Unfortunately, I think I’d be a pretty shitty prophet, so I hope someone else is up to the task. And I hope they’re not a nutjob, fraud, crackpot, or thief. And that the high priests who inherit the new religion aren’t power-mad, duplicitous dicks.
What are the odds? History suggests nil.
[Top]Alan Moore is a whiny baby
Apparently, Joe Straczynski is upset.
The so-called blogosphere, comics section, has been calling out JMS on something he said on a panel at C2E2. From his FB post, he said, quote, “Did Alan Moore get a crummy contract? Yes. So has everyone at this table. Worse was Siegal and Shuster. Worse was a lot of people.” He goes on in his FB post to describe comments by Eric Stephenson, one of the heads of Image Comics, to the effect that JMS is saying that creative types should just accept that the world isn’t fair and should just accept it.
And JMS refutes that at some length, saying that what he meant was that all writers, artists, etc, have to work their way up through the business, starting out with crappy contracts (“get screwed”) and working their way up to better contracts as their clout grows (and as they prove they are better artists).
I haven’t read any of the internet kerfuffle that started this, I’ve only read JMS’ post on Facebook, so I don’t really know what anybody else is saying. With that caveat, I still think this brings up some interesting issues around Alan Moore and Watchmen.
First, going solely on JMS’ quote of himself, it didn’t sound like he was saying what he now claims he was saying. What it sounds like he is saying is, Alan Moore is a whiny baby. Frankly, it sounds like that even more now that he’s clarified his comment. He doesn’t deny that Moore got screwed in his Watchmen contract; he just claims that’s par for the course. The proper response for Moore would have been to use his new clout as the creator of Watchmen to get better terms for his next contract. Hell, DC even went to him several years ago and tried to give him better terms if he would agree to sequels and prequels, and he rejected the offer.
JMS seems to be saying that Moore needs to grow up and work within the system. After all, the comics’ publishing world is a lot fairer than in the days when Siegal and Shuster lost all their rights to Superman and were forced to work such jobs as janitor while DC made millions.
But wait… Siegal and Shuster got screwed, and then they never got a better contract. So if that’s what JMS meant, then his explanation doesn’t track.
I think it’s much more likely that JMS is upset that Alan Moore not only disapproves of the Before Watchmen prequels, but calls them “completely shameless.” It’s even possible that JMS is hurt, as he considers Moore to have written one of his favorite comic stories, “Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” I know I would be. If I had the opportunity to write a story in the Watchmen universe and its creator said that he only “wanted this not to happen,” I’d feel pretty shitty about it, too. And it might make me angry.
And if I was being constantly asked why I would work on Before Watchmen when Alan Moore got screwed by DC in the 80s, and I myself had been screwed multiple times by Warner Brothers (ironically, the current owner of DC) over the widely-praised TV series Babylon 5? Yeah, I can see how JMS might be fed up.
Thing is, JMS and Moore have different personalities. (Shocking, I know!) JMS seems more or less like a regular guy. Sure, he’s a sci-fi geek, but he works hard and plays within the system, and when he sees something that needs to be changed, he will fight for it, again, within the system. Alan Moore, on the other hand, is a wizard and a magician. I don’t mean that figuratively, either. When he broke with DC in the late 80s, he didn’t go across town to Marvel, instead, he started his own ill-fated publishing company.
If JMS is annoyed over the Before Watchmen blowback, Moore must be seething. An archly amused seethe, perhaps. He seems to want to put Watchmen behind him. DC never gives in to his demands until years later, and by then he doesn’t care anymore. He apparently left Swamp Thing not only over contracts, but also over the Mature Readers label. Money doesn’t seem to be much of a motivator for Moore; in fact, just the opposite–he’s refused money for any of the recent movie adaptations of his work. I think he wants respect on his own terms, and I think he hates corporate motives (for good or ill).
It comes as no surprise to me that JMS welcomes the chance to play in the Watchmen sandbox and that Moore proclaims a pox on all their houses. JMS is a craftsman and Moore is an artiste.
Funnily enough, I love them both. Watchmen is my favorite comic and Babylon 5 my favorite TV show.
And lastly, should Before Watchmen even exist?
Sure, why not? A large chunk of Alan Moore’s oeuvre is a mash-up of his prior influences. Lost Girls and A League of Extraordinary Gentlemen are re-imaginings of their Victorian source material. (And if there is ever a movie that Moore should be angry about…) Watchmen itself is at heart a realist examination of typical super-hero myth. So, absolutely, other creators should take a shot at Watchmen.
But will it be good?
Only time will tell, but the first reports aren’t promising. Unfortunately, the writers and artists seem to be sticking somewhat slavishly to the source material. What’s likely to come from a fannish “expansion” of Watchmen is lukewarm, watered-down gruel. To do it justice, a new Watchmen should almost be a re-telling. A new staging of Hamlet can shed new light on the play, but I don’t think anyone is clamoring for the details on the early reign of Hamlet’s father. I suppose what I mean is that a new piece of the Watchmen myth, if it is to be worthy of the original, needs to be audacious rather than reverential.
I don’t know who is up to that task…
[Top]Artificial Scarcity Feeds the Pirates
“In an abundance model, scarcity looks like a mistake.”
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s blog: Scarcity and Abundance.
Which has really interesting things to say about the state of publishing, but also is applicable to so much more in the entertainment industry section of our so-called digital age. Why do people get so upset that they can’t get the latest episodes of a TV show, right now, when they want it, and in whatever form they want it?
Yes, people are greedy and impatient, but that’s not the totality of the issue. People are not completely pathological or they would never pay for anything ever, and shoplifting would be a bigger issue than it is. iTunes and Amazon would sell no digital content if that were the case.
“In an abundance model, scarcity looks like a mistake.” Whether in books, or TV shows, or movies, or games.
[Top]