Dear Fanboy's Notes Subscribers - As of right now, I have migrated off of MT to Wordpress. The blog URI is still http://www.highclearing.com. However the XML feed addresses have changed. There are three "everything feeds" available currently:
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Marvel Team-Up - Spider-Man's Greatest Bible Stories. Someone's gonna get in trouble for this one!
See, They Never Left in the First Place - The one, the only, the awesome, eminence . . . uh, purple, dean of the comics blogosphere, Neilalien himself, turned Five yesterday (in blog years). My hat's off to you, sir!
Follow-Ups - Loose ends from yesterday. Anent the torture "reality show" Eve writes, "I mean, people volunteer for sex all the time, and that tells you less than nothing about rape." Also, did I ever get around to saying explicitly that Battlestar Galactica, and the Lear revisit it inspired, helped me understand how much of America's embrace of torture is driven by anger? It did. In college, when someone would come back from what they said was "a good movie," I had a roomate who would ask, "Did it change the way you look at life?" Well there you go. (I've been focused almost exclusively on the country's fear, missing its rage.) Also, Mrs. Offering used to get on me for overusing "anent," but I think I laid off it long enough to get away with this one.
UPDATE: Meant to mention. Andrew Olmsted didn't like Friday's BSG nearly as much as I did. I think he's wrong at just about every turn, but not provably so. I think the show's creators are largely in control of the seeming loose ends; he doubts they are. Time will tell, but it does set one to musing how literary and paraliterary works acquire authority (let's gloss it for now as confidence that the creator knows what he or she is doing). I will say I don't think there's any "telepathy" going on necessarily, though I could be wrong. I do suspect that the Cylons, as artificial intelligences, probably have access to the material in an awful lot of computer databases. Were there background check records somewhere covering Starbuck's horrid upbringing? Seems plausible.
Of course, the other possibility is that God knows all and the Cylons know God.
Fear and Vaunting on a Little Screen - Drama, fiction are tricky. The file cabinets of Burbank, California bulge with letters from people complaining that some studio has, by portraying some outrage, endorsed it. But context is all. And context can be . . . tricky. When Cornwall bursts the jellid eyes of Gloucester we should not conclude that Shakespeare is pro-blinding. We should conclude, rather, that Shakespeare wants us to understand something about when impotent rage and absolute power collide.
Which brings us to Friday's episode of Battlestar Galactica. Oh, I should have given you a spoiler warning about King Lear: at some point Cornwall blinds Gloucester. There will be more spoilers as we go, and not about King Lear.
Context. When I decry (over and freaking over again) the portrayal of torture in 24, I think it is with an adequate attention to context. The context seems to be that it's simply one more thing the relative good guys do to stop the absolute bad guys, like car chases, shootouts or, most grotesquely from a dramatic standpoint, staging a gas station holdup. The least we can say is that the show offers no comprehensive critique of the practice. The current season is an incomplete work. Perhaps tomorrow's episode, when Jack Bauer is scheduled to torture his girlfriend's estranged husband in front of her, will alter our understanding of the show's stance on torture completely. I hope so, really.
In the meantime, let's talk Battlestar Galactica. In Friday's episode, the government catches a humanoid Cylon and Commander Adama dispatches his surrogate daughter, Starbuck, played by Katee Sackhoff, to interrogate him. She goes into it knowing that he'll try to get into your head. When he tells her he's secreted a nuclear bomb on one of the ships, she breaks out the truncheons. It starts with "a little smacky-face" and proceeds to submersion in water. Starbuck herself never raises a finger against the subject. She has people for that. The very fact that she has people for that is itself disquieting. The helmeted security guards in black battledress look menacing and, I think, are meant to. They respond with alacrity to Starbuck's direction. There is no moment of refusal or even surprise.
Good science fiction is always building the world of its story, and good drama is always showing us more than the words alone convey. What makes the episode so horrifyingly effective is Sackhoff, the show's best actor. Edward James Olmos has a bigger rep and resume - see his IMDB listing vs. hers - but in terms of contributions to the current series she has realised the most textured character.
And what she gives us in this episode is . . . rage. Fiercely controlled rage. It's in the glint of her eye, the curl of her lip and the sour sigh that replaces the character's trademark giggle. When the Cylon, writhing on the floor and still trying to get into her head, tells Starbuck that she has always wanted to believe that she is a cause of other's harm because that would mean the WORLD was a right place at the cost of herself being a wrong thing in it, we instantly believe him (it?) because we've been watching her live that belief for most of an hour. Seeing Sackhoff's portrayal of Starbuck as torturer opened my eyes retrospectively to hints of the character's self-hatred and anger in previous episodes. I now understand her great guilt, over her responsibility for the death of her lover, Adama's younger son, is an aspect of a prior, larger hurt.
This isn't just another car chase. It is symptom and cause of deep corruption in the perpetrator, as well as unconscionable pain in the victim.
What the show hints is that the corruption extends beyond Starbuck. We know that humans created the Cylons. We know that the Cylons are fervent monotheists and convinced that humanity is irredemably sinful. The Cylons claim to believe that God so came to abominate humankind that He had humans create the Cylons as their more righteous successors. Having seen the Cylons in action, I think they fail to see their own corruption - we see a lot of it in this very episode - but the show certainly hasn't troubled to demonstrate that the Cylons are wrong about humanity.
BSG problematizes torture to a degree far beyond the mild difficulties 24 attributes to the practice. It's an interesting contrast because both shows are, at different levels, about post-9/11 America. BSG is the superior show because 24 merely exemplifies the national mindset (We're the Greatest and Most Powerful Nation Ever! And We're Besieged on All Sides!) while BSG uses it. (We must not say "interrogate.") In Starbuck's tormenting of the Cylon we see bigotry (you're just a toaster), disparity of power (equivocated because of the Cylon's superhuman prowess), and impotent, Cornwallesque rage. We have a ticking bomb scenario with, it turns out, no bomb. On the other hand, we have a Good Cop in President Roslin who breaks a solemn vow and is right to do so. We have, after all, a genuine menace, programmatic religious zealots who really are trying to exterminate mankind (so far as we can tell), and who really may be automatons at a level humans are not. (If Adama is not a Cylon, as the Cylon Loeben claims, then his whispering it to President Roslin at the moment of his deliverance looks uncannily like a software looping error.)
I don't have a grand conclusion for you after all that wind-up. It's entirely possible that, television being television, BSG is writing checks it won't be able to cash. It could get to the point where the money people don't want to harm the salability of their product. By holding a funhouse mirror, as opposed to a makeup compact, to 21st Century America, science fiction can reflect things that might otherwise inspire us to smash the glass. But truth is like an eclipse, dangerous even when viewed indirectly. It has always made TV people in particular nervous. You can put your eye out with that thing.
UPDATE: Franklin Harris corrected my earlier misstatement that Starbuck's sweetie was Adama's elder son. Unqualified Offerings regrets the error. However, as Franklin must understand, he is not eligible for a no-prize because he didn't resolve the continuity error for me by explaining how I could have been right after all.
Meta - I confess it. I'm sitting there tonight watching Battlestar Galactica, and it did occur to me that there were a couple of dozen folks around the world thinking, Man, Henley must be flipping right now.
More after I stop flipping.
Scheming Bitch Blogging - No, not 24 this time. Kevin Drum (who walks right up to the line of violating the sacred oath he had to swear to never link to this site when Washington Monthly hired him to blog) has your 24-blogging today. Kevin thinks that the show is a sly morality play on the "torture doesn't work" theme. It's either that or, taking the show as a fantasia on America's self-image, an object lesson in how the complex of "fear and vaunting" Garet Garrett identified as the characteristic of Empire degenerates into sadomasochistic ritual. The question of which it is makes me genuinely interested in where the show goes next. In addition to wondering how the promised scene of Jack torturing his girlfriend's estranged husband in front of her plays out, I want to see how the character of torture-victim Sarah develops. She was unpleasant before her victimhood and she's unpleasant now, which is dramatically appropriate. I may be imagining it, but the actress who plays her seemed to convey a barely repressed rage as she observed not one but two different terror suspects, against whom there is far stronger evidence, being treated better than her.
But this isn't about 24 and torture. It's about Battlestar Galactica and gender. Something I had to face watching Friday night's episode, which I enjoyed greatly (see Olmsted for some examples of wobbly plotting) is that, while I've lampooned 24 for its parade of "scheming bitches," Battlestar Galactica has them too. Obviously Tricia Helfer's Number Six counts here. But both versions of the Cylon Boomer are running highly sexualized cons on different servicemen. What saves it for me, and keep in mind I'm a man, is that we don't get just scheming bitches. Neither Starbuck nor President Roslin make the scheming bitch list. Diversity! I've got other gender-related thoughts running through my head, but they're not the kind I can get lined up before work.
UPDATE: Of course, BSG's scheming bitches have strange depths to them. There's Number Six's Tielhardian obsession with God, and Boomer's apparent divided loyalties. (Previews for next week suggest we're about to find out how much of that is genuine and how much red herring.)
A Fanboy's Comments on a Fanboy's Links - Speaking of the Hibbs article, this is the part that jumped out at me, for self-interested reasons:
Another observation: People who want Manga seem to only want real Manga – taking American comics and putting them in Manga format does not seem to adding sales. There are 5 manga-format American comics on the list, if I’m remembering everything right: the four Spider-Man related “Marvel Age” books and Michael Chabon’s Escapist v1. All of which, I think, would have appeared on the charts anyway, if they’d been in a more traditional format. Can’t prove it, however.I do know that manga formatting hurts sales in at least my corner of the Direct Market. For example, I’ve yet to sell a single copy of any of the reformatted Elfquest books since they were released – despite having 2-3 people a month coming and asking for Elfquest. They simply don’t like the format. We’ve also seen underwhelming results of things ranging from My Faith in Frankie to Emma Frost and it’s my strong belief that “non standard” formatting isn’t a trick the public seems interested in falling for. It doesn’t track on BookScan either.
Self-interested because RGB Bill and I had pretty well decided to write and draw our always-in-progress graphic novel to a manga format so as not to miss the biggest, newest wave in rackability, despite the fact that I'm not all that fond of the format, myself. I don't mind large-trim manga - Uzumaki or A Contract with God dimensions - they're roughly as big as a lot of prose trade paperbacks. But to little Chobits-size books are smaller than I enjoy. You either lose a lot of detail in the art and a lot of flexibility in panel layout or you cram an unreadable amount of material heedlessly onto the page.
Format matters. Just going from "magazine-size" trim to "large-manga" dimensions means, in practical terms, stepping down from a six-panel grid to four (roughly). Slimming Shrinking down to the smallest manga package probably means two to three panels on most pages. That makes a huge difference right back to the writing stage of the project, since it's the writer's responsibility to pace the action from page to page and give the artist a fighting chance to produce attractive layouts. I've been working on an eight-page short story for Bill as a tune-up for the full graphic novel. Wanting to practice "manga scripting," I worked to describe an average of four panels worth or story per page. Consarn it, I'm gonna go back and up that to six now!
A Fanboy's Links - Brian Hibbs offers his annual analysis of Bookscan's 2004 sales figures for "graphic novels." Well-caveated and astutely considered.
The Comics Reporter finds a mysterious newspaper strip oddity - a covert outbreak of Tourette's Syndrome by The Ghost Who Walks. For what it's worth, it looks to me less like it says "FORCE IT UP YOUR @ASS" than "OR STICK IT UP YOUR @SS." ("FOR STICK IT UP YOUR @SS?") And I think the clues to the target of the cartoonist's ire are probably to be found in the nearly legible letters in the first half of the line above the naughty bits. Part of it looks like "ARHSDA," which means, I gotta say, nothing to me. Any insights?
Also, the international Fantastic Four trailer.
Lovey-Dovey - Comics-bloggers have been posting 100 things they love about comics for Valentine's Day. Fred Hembeck started it off and Alan David Doane went nuclear. Here's my own list, explanatory links to be added at my leisure:
1. The last page of Ghost World.
2. Swapping books with Nate, Bill and Mark.
3. Eve Tushnet's reviews.
4. The diner scene in Planetary #1.
5. The snowscapes in the recent Conan adaptation of "The Frost Giant's Daughter."
6. Inset panels.
7. Avengers 113.
8. The issue of Jonny Quest narrated by Bandit.
9. Reading trade paperback collections in a comfy Borders chair.
10. Buying DC's Cartoon Network titles with my children.
11. The change of Mrs. O's expression from contemptuous to captivated as she deigned to read the first issue of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
12. The conclusion of the Defenders' Sons of the Serpent storyline where the guy in the crows says, "But that don't mean ya gotta go around burning them to death either."
13. Rorschach.
14. The recent She-Hulk story with the Ghost.
15. Peter Parker telling Mary Jane his secret identity in Ultimate Spider-Man.
16. The All-Chaykin issues of American Flagg.
17. The Regency Elf.
18. Finder: Sin-Eater I and II.
19. The Beat.
20. Eightball 22.
21. Mother Come Home.
22. Plucking the first printing of the first issue of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns off the shelf.
23. "The Death of Speedy."
24. Daredevil: Born Again.
25. Sandman: A Game of You.
26. Jack Kirby's The Hunger Dogs graphic novel.
27. Understanding Comics.
28. The two-track narration in Spiders issue 2.
29. Copious softcover reprints.
30. The Gotham City issues of Alan Moore's Swamp Thing.
31. We3.
32. Mayfair's DC Heroes Roleplaying Game.
33. Marvel's Marvel Universe RPG.
34. Earth II.
35. The Trial of the Flash.
36. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
37. What They Did to Princess Paragon.
38. The last story in A Contract with God.
39. Gil Kane's wiry figures, especially someone who just got punched.
40. Joe Staton drawing Guy Gardner.
41. Reed talking to Galactus/Franklin Richards in Earth X.
42. "How do you get to Bahia?"
43. Vertigo, notwithstanding.
44. Bendis, notwithstanding.
45. Gene Colan drawing Daredevil.
46. George Tuska drawing Iron Man.
47. Herb Trimpe drawing Hulk.
48. Neal Adams drawing Batman.
49. "The Night Gwen Stacy Died."
50. The giant crashing through the wall in Pop Gun War.
51. The car up on blocks in Pop Gun War.
52. William Messner-Loebs' Journey.
53. The panel backgrounds in Church & State Vol. II.
54. Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth.
55. My script-formatting macros in OpenOffice.org Writer.
56. Subscription box pickup day!
57. Joel at Big Planet Comics in Bethesda.
58. John at Beyond Comics in Gaithersburg.
59. Watching Justice League Unlimited with Offering Boy.
60. Comics blogs in general.
61. Spider-Man movies.
62. Small Press Expo.
63. "I did it thirty minutes ago."
64. Jim Starlin's 70s panel layouts.
65. Jim Steranko's 60s panel layouts.
66. Irv Novick drawing the Flash.
67. Yes, Todd McFarlane drawing Spider-Man.
68. Hopey.
69. NuMarvel's recap pages.
70. For the Man Who Has Everything.
71. A certain Zot splash page.
72. Reading most of the Bruce Jones-Mike Deodato Hulk run in a week.
73. The larger-trim manga format.
74. Walking into the Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square the first time in 1978.
75. The storytelling skills of Dan Clowes.
76. Reading Frank Miller's Daredevil run as it appeared.
77. Journalista! (Oh well.)
78. The Comics Reporter.
79. Franklin's Findings.
80. Steve Englehart's Captain America.
81. Gerry Conway's Spider-Man.
82. Marvel's 1970s reprint comics.
83. Marvel's 1970s black and white magazines.
84. Figuring out that Mezzrow from Nexus got his name from a ticket stub.
85. Everyone else's Top 100 lists.
86. Waid, Weiringo, Fantastic Four.
87. Batroc Zee Leapair!
88. John Romita drawing Spider-Man.
89. The star-crossed lovers chapter of Uzumaki.
90. People who can write about how art works.
91. Getting comics-related e-mails.
92. Realizing eventually that this will be a life-long love.
93. Saving the most-anticipated title in the stack for last.
94. Reading the most-anticipated title first.
95. Learning that Iris Allen knew her husband was the Flash because he talked in her sleep.
96. Getting to borrow the O'Neil/Adams Batman issues from a high school teacher.
97. Making up Legion of Substitute Heroes identities for ourselves with my fraternity brothers.
98. Carla Speed McNeil's art in Frank Ironwine.
99. Daredevil: Underboss.
100. John Cassaday.
Homer Nods? - Some quibbles with tonight's BSG, maybe. Or maybe not. My first thought was that, while Adama was undoubtedly correct that the tribunal would become a witch hunt, I didn't think that the action we actually saw had demonstrated its witch-huntness dramatically. Then I wondered if the story's point wasn't subtler: the tribunal may or may not become a witch hunt, but as soon as it stepped on Commander Adama's toes, he shut it down. The ambiguities of power! Then I wondered if the story hadn't sufficiently demonstrated that the inquiry was going astray - the Sergeant and the tribunal get within sniffing distance of the real story but aren't good enough to get the rest of the way. Their zeal leads them off the scent entirely. Then I wondered if the show had shown us enough of the Sergeant's transformation onscreen to make her hubris convincing. The Sarge puts herself in the role of sitting in political judgment of Adama's command decisions. That's some serious hubris! I could see such an inquest coming to that point, but so quickly? Would it have been a better episode if the Caprica action have been ignored for a week, leaving more time to flesh out the shipboard inquisition? I realize they were playing with parallels and divergences between the shipboard Boomer and planetside Boomer's use of love to coopt a human ally, but that lovely architecture came at some dramatic cost.
Not to say the show was bad, just that it has raised my expectations high enough that it can fall short.
Blogging is Just a Way to Pass the Time Between Episodes of Battlestar Galactica but it's nice to sit here listening to the latest Coverville show in the meantime. Let's run some Battlestar Galactica mail, eh?
Eric McErlain writes
I don't know about you, but I've watched Enterprise from the beginning, and didn't think it was so bad. Now, I usually watch both it and BSG back to back late on Friday nights on my TiVo, and ST:E can't help but suffer by comparison. BSG is so much better it isn't even close. So much of the backstory that once made Star Trek seem rich, now just feels like a dramatic straightjacket.Can you imagine what it must be like to be a writer on that show? You probably spend half your time worrying about violating series canon . . .
If the folks at Paramount are smart, they'll let the franchise rest for about a decade, and then bring it back with a re-imagining just like BSG.
Hm. "Ultimate Star Trek" doesn't sound like a bad idea, really. For the record, I didn't watch Enterprise. I saw the first half dozen episodes of Voyager, which meant I saw the polarity reversed five times. At that point I figured I was being cheated and tuned out. This means I never got in on the whole Jeri Ryan thing. But when you've got Tricia Helfer that doesn't really matter. Friends of mine did sell a script to ST: Next Generation once - the well-regarded "Tin Man" episode. Their names got squished together to comply with the show's no more than two names on a script rule, but they threw a big party for the broadcast premiere and we had a good time. I watched that season and the next, partly out of loyalty and partly because the fourth season was pretty good, the show's best year if you ask me. Never got into Deep Space Nine because I couldn't figure out why the Ferengi wasn't the good guy. And speaking of Ferengi, may we take the occasion of his retirement to commend Reggie Miller for his decades of basketball excellence.
Hm. That appears to be ALL of my extant BSG mail. So let's move on to 24 mail. Charles from Magnifisyncopathological finds yet another reason to hope the show is a dreamworks rather than a subcreation. I'm torn between thinking he's being a bit . . . well, anal with this one, and accepting his point as one more reason why I prefer my thrillers smaller-scale rather than large. If there's a Season Four, what are they going to come up with for a threat, terrorists who want to extinguish the Sun? That's what happens when you feel compelled to up the danger scale with each new story.
digamma is nonplussed:
Uh, you can't possibly thing "the woman who orders the torment", i.e. CTU director Erin Driscoll, is a sympathetic character. She fired Kiefer because he used heroin to infiltrate a drug gang with terrorist ties. As bad as she is, she's not even on her game, because of her crazy daughter.
I would say that Driscoll has been presented more sympathetically as the show has gone on, largely because she's paid more heed to Our Hero. And the schizophrenic daughter subplot is clearly intended to tug our heartstrings on her behalf. But even if she's not someone we're supposed to love unreservedly, that's not the same thing as the show portraying her decision to torture her employee on momentary evidence as blameworthy.
Mind you, I've calmed down a bit on that since the other day, as I suspected I would. Ben Nunn-Miller writes
Regarding your post about 24 from Feb. 9th, I saw the torture incident from that episode differently than you did.I don't think anyone is going to think that this is a normal activity, partly because 24 is unrealistic as a whole (I say this with 24 being my favorite show on TV right now), and also because it seemed to me like the others involved in it didn't really want to go along with it like Driscoll did.
I also disagree with your assesment that they are making the blame fall on the black woman or that they are trivializing or endorsing torture. I felt the show conveyed the incident as an advertisement for why torture is wrong and doesn't work (wrong woman, didn't examine the evidence, torture did not gain any pertinent information, etc.) Perhaps I am being naive, but I could see Driscoll being reprimanded for ordering the torture after the events of the day are over.
Ben and digamma may be right. I do wonder who will reprimand Driscoll, though, when Secretary Heller is standing right next to her watching Sarah get shocked insensate. And I don't think it helps that Sarah is, let's face it, a bitch. The danger with 24, and Battlestar Galactica too, even though it's a much better show, is that the diegesis encourages the viewer to identify with those who do unto others, not those unto whom it is done. But I'll cop to hypersensitivity on this point.
Rounding out our television coverage, Miniver Cheevy responded to my thoughts on the most recent Justice League Unlimited cartoon:
Since Henley is a libertarian, he doesn't see the obvious implication of this thinking, that people with super-powers should be pensioned off by the government, like farm subsidies.
Snarf, I say! Snarf indeed! And it would simplify Eve Tushnet's life, since her comics-blogging and "farm dole" opposition could collapse into a single, efficient preoccupation.