Tagged: Elayne Riggs

Residual Effects, by Elayne Riggs

News
November 14, 2007

I was going to continue my review of art I like, but since last week the new DC comp box arrived and I want to catch up before I write any more about that. Plus, I had a fairly major lifestyle change, more about which later. Meantime, the Writers Guild of America strike is into its second week and, while a resolution still seems fairly far away, I think it’s done a lot of good already in terms of consciousness raising. As with other recent revelations a lot of Americans have had, many people are starting to question why such a modern and powerful country seems so backwards when it comes to its citizens fairly sharing its bounty, whether that means providing health care for all or living up to its humane ideals in its treatment of captives or celebrating and supporting the collective strength of productive workers.

I think the WGA strike has resulted in a lot of folks who’ve never heard anything but anti-union talk since before Ronald Reagan fired the PATCO workers rethinking that knee-jerk (but craftily cultivated) attitude. They’ve learned that about half of WGA members are unemployed or underemployed in a given year, and they don’t buy the studios’ insistence that the strike is “millionaires versus billionaires.” They’ve learned that professional writing, like a lot of other entertainment-related professions that seem all-fun from the outside looking in, in fact represents a lot of hard work and long hours. They’re learning to deeply mistrust the line they’ve been fed for so long, a version of the famous Peter Stone dialogue from 1776 that “most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” Nowadays it’s become imperative to protect the reality of being able to survive. And they understand that residual payments are the way most WGA members survive between the relatively few successful gigs they’re able to score.

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A Few of My Favorite Things, by Elayne Riggs

News
November 7, 2007

Back in the days of Usenet, I used to hear a lot of variations of “Why are there so many negative reviews and so few positive ones?” As one of those reviewers who not only discussed the art half of comic books but who also wrote a lot of positive reviews in my 4½ years of doing Pen-Elayne For Your Thoughts, I would see this manifest more as “Why are the threads responding to the few negative reviews so long, as opposed to those on the far more numerous positive reviews?”

The answer was pretty self-evident to most of us reviewers. In general it’s much easier for people to perpetuate clever putdowns, or to pile on a negative thread, than it is to engage in the vocabulary of positive discussion. One of the things we would identify as a next-to-useless post would be someone merely typing “Me too” or “Ditto.” It added nothing of substance to the online dialogue, it just took up bandwidth. But it had the opposite effect of the real-life etiquette advice that “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It became “If you can’t add something of substance to a discussion rather than just agreeing with the original poster, you’re better off not contributing at all.” I suspect that what some of them actually meant was “Bored now. You’re being too nice; throw us some raw meat.

And of course, that was a shame. I’ve never found it that hard to say good things about comic books. I love comic books. I buy and read quite a wide variety of graphic literature, and as I’m generally not in the assumed demographic for much of it I’ve learned to adjust my tastes accordingly — that is to say, there’s still some subject matter that doesn’t appeal to me, but I’ll generally try to give most of my chosen reading a fair chance, and I think I tend to be easily pleased. Nitpicking details, while worth noting in a review, has never weighed as important to me as how the work made me feel, whether it held together as a whole and moved me during the time it took me to read it.

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Children of all ages, by Elayne Riggs

News
October 31, 2007

I’ve already spoken about how October is my favorite time of year, what with the baseball post-season and the foliage displays and the crispness in the air and, in 2007, my imminent lifestyle change and ComicMix Phase II debuting. There’s another reason I love this month — it culminates today in one of my favorite secular holidays, Hallowe’en.

[I emphasize "secular" because I distinctly remember when, as I kid, I was blatantly discouraged from trick or treating and otherwise celebrating the day, on the basis of the holiday’s etymological origin being the Christian commemoration of All Hallow’s Eve and therefore the holiday itself must be Christian. This is the same logic used by some fundamentalist Christians to denounce the holiday as Satanic — the flip side of Christian, and therefore Christian as well because non-Christians don’t really have this Satan thing going — because it emphasizes the supernatural. In fact, as with most seasonal celebrations coopted by early Christians, the holiday actually has pagan roots — in this case Samhain — which I’m perfectly fine with honoring, as those ancient nature worshippers may be the closest thing we have to modern sensible secular rationalists. I’m even half-convinced Christmas is becoming okay to celebrate because, despite the name, it’s essentially a corruption of the Saturnalia holiday. But I digress.]

One reason Hallowe’en is so cool for me is because of its emphasis, at least when I was growing up, on being a holiday for kids. As far as I can discern this mentality came about with the holiday’s commercialization (just check out the Wiki on Hallowe’en to see how many modern rituals involve spending money, from parties to costumes to decorations to candy), and of course since hyper-capitalism cannot be confined to just that segment of the population largely dependent upon others’ pursestrings, today it’s big business with "children of all ages." But I still think Hallowe’en has a particular power over children’s sense of wonder about the world around us, whether or not the lines between living and dead, between the ordinary and the magical, can indeed be blurred during the time of year when (the northern half of) the Earth starts preparing for its winter slumber.

So I like to give out comics to those few straggling trick-or-treaters who find their way to the group of houses hidden behind the main road where we occupy our top-floor apartment. Because I believe that, like Hallowe’en, comics still have tremendous appeal to kids, even as hyper-capitalism has led to their greater acceptance by and obsession for many adults. And so during the year I cull the Cartoon Network books from our DC comp boxes and go through the stuff I have from Free Comics Day to see what’s all-ages appropriate.

I do have a bit of a dilemma with the latter, though — I like all-ages stories. Most of the time, I like them more than the teen-targeted or "mature" readers-only books.

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More Artistic Vocabulary, by Elayne Riggs

News
October 24, 2007

Well, I said I’d be back and, since there were a number of terms I didn’t recall until after last week’s column went live, I figured I’d take note of them this week while I still remember what more I wanted to say.

For instance, I can’t believe I neglected to talk about surface form versus underlying construction. I consider it one of the most important criteria for judging good comic book art. The more I learn about how visual storytelling is done, the pickier I find myself becoming when it comes to appreciating crafting level. Art doesn’t need to look polished to be of professional level (although my particular taste does lean more towards smooth and streamlined rather than blocky and rough). It just needs to show that the artist understands the rules about how things are logically built. It’s like any other creative endeavor — if you’re going to break the rules, you first need to prove you know what they are and are able to follow them.

I have to admit, not being an artist, that I’m not so sure about construction rules myself, certainly not enough to be able to articulate them for you the way my husband does for me. But I do know that one of the biggest mistakes many comic book readers make is confusing style with substance. When they judge a comic they’re usually looking at the final polish given to the work rather than judging what lies beneath that polish. And that’s understandable; if you don’t know how a piece of furniture is supposed to function in its environment, or even whether it’ll hold what it’s supposed to hold, you’re pretty much going to base your opinion of that furniture by how pretty it looks in the catalog or showroom.

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An Artistic Vocabulary, by Elayne Riggs

News
October 17, 2007

For a few years in the ’90s, I wrote weekly comic book reviews which I published online in the Usenet rec.arts.comics groups and CompuServe’s Comics Forum. As I was one of only a handful of women reviewing comics at the time (I remember there was me, Johanna Draper and Denise Sudell online and of course Maggie Thompson in print), my "Pen-Elayne For Your Thoughts" reviews were noticed and commented on fairly frequently, both by other readers and by the professionals who worked on the books I discussed. (My review of a Legion annual prompted the book’s inker to email me, and a couple years later we were married.) It was a cool self-publishing gig which led to all sorts of goodies, from being "recognized" by name at conventions (especially helpful when working the Friends of Lulu booth) to being sent freebies and previews to drum up interest and get the comment threads going (about the actual story rather than the anticipation thereof).

I cherished my interactions with pros, particularly artists. Writing I understood. I’d been a writer for decades, I intrinsically got the process. But art — here was a foreign realm, one to which I could never hope to aspire. These folks created magic that I’d never hope to duplicate. I felt a driving need to at least familiarize myself with the hows and whys of graphic sequential storytelling. After all, I reasoned, if you take into account time spent in the actual creation of a comic book story, the art is far more than half of what goes into it. Every line on the page has a reason to be there, and I wanted to find out what it all meant.

In order to do so, I needed to cultivate an artistic vocabulary.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: The Fifth Freedom

News
October 10, 2007

Last week was the American Library Association’s annual "Banned Books Week." What bothers me most about Banned Books Week isn’t its concept, but its name. Even its proponents admit it’s not about banned books, but challenged ones. Even at our country’s most fascist periods (like, um, now), I don’t believe our federal, state or local governments have actually banned books in decades, if ever. But apparently "banned" has a more alliterative cachet than "challenged" or "endangered" or even scrapping the misnomer altogether in favor of something like "Freedom to Read Week" which is more in keeping with the point of the event — to "celebrate the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stress the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them."

Oh sure, lots of backwards-thinking people, the kind who usually believe every word in the Bible is true (rather than seeing the book as allegorical fiction and an interesting take on history by multiple authors, the way a lot of rationalists view it), seek to limit others’ imaginations and freedoms and generally stir up trouble by whining in the courts about any piece of fact or fiction they don’t like, from science texts to Harry Potter. And these attempts at censorship should be and are condemned and fought by patriots and book-lovers everywhere they crop up. Partly because of these efforts, no attempts have succeeded.

And yet, people’s hobbies and even lives have been ruined by this repression. Even in our hobby, the CBLDF abounds with stories of comic shop owners who paid for a misstep or a failure to predict ever-shifting "community standards" usually embodied by the community’s loudest kook.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: The Girls of Summer

News
October 3, 2007

The summer of 2007 is well and truly behind us now. The regular baseball season has wrapped, culminating in the promise of the playoffs and World Series, new network TV shows have debuted and returned, and October ushers in a new era for many of us. For ComicMix it means Phase II, the actual raison d’etre for this site (and I’m psyched to be sharing Wednesdays with EZ Street). For me it signals an imminent lifestyle change as the day job I’ve held for the last ten years is about to disappear, a part of my life destined to become an unpleasant memory in the very near future.

This job has taken much out of me emotionally this last decade, snipping away at little pieces of my soul and memory that I feared I’d never recover. But now that things are taking their course and I feel like I’m about to be paroled, I find many of those pieces are starting to return. Robin’s remarked that I remind him once again of the person I was when we met, the last time I was between jobs — healthier, happier, more energetic and optimistic, closer to my true self. And I’m having strange dreams that mix the past and present, where I can almost recall things that I’d thought gone forever.

The other night I dreamt I was back in college, only I was the person I am today. And for some reason, my roommate looked exactly like Sarah Silverman. (I often dream about celebs for whom I have no particular affinity in real life; the pheme of fame, as Stephen Fry calls it, seeps into my subconscious remarkably easily.) And I remarked to Sarah, in between trying to divvy up the laundry and other mundane chores, that I was impressed by all the youthful enthusiasm around me. "I remember when I used to have that kind of energy," I mused. "Heck, back when I was a day camp counselor I’d run around all the time…"

Then I woke up, thinking about day camp.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Still Life with Gadgets

News
September 26, 2007

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not exactly what you would call an early adopter. I’ve tended to view many modern trappings more like modern traps. I readily admit to being one of those mean people who applauded when Apple lowered the price on its iPhone, a product I anticipate never needing nor owning, nodding at the observation that the $200 extra for the debut version (sold to people who actually queued up to buy an expensive status symbol readily available in plentiful quantity in stores and online) should be considered a sucker tax. I believe our affluent society is way too dependent on and obsessive over technological conveniences which will either soon achieve sentience at which point we’ll happily welcome our electronic overlords, or will utterly break down at the next super-solar flareup and leave us with the self-reliance level of children.

That said, I have way too many of these evil machines in my own home.

I remember a time when I didn’t. During my first marriage to somebody as wary of tech as I was, we had a VCR with a wired remote, and a TV with rabbit ears where you had to actually get up to change the channel. (We lived in The Land That Cable Forgot to Wire until about four years after everyone else in NYC was hooked up.) Our computer and printer were hand-me-downs that my office was going to throw away. Usenet and email were nice, but the behemoths were still things on which I worked more than played. Even our kitchen, which of course wasn’t ours but the landlord’s, didn’t have high-tech things like a dishwasher or garbage disposal unit or broiler the size of an oven, and still doesn’t. (I still get annoyed at TV chefs who talk about adjusting racks in the broiler; to me the broiler is found all the way at the bottom of the oven and is about two feet high with the door that opens downward and one temperature setting — turning the oven dial all the way up — and you’re lucky if it works at all without causing the pan to burst into flames. Which still beats Robin’s experience, as he tells me they don’t have broilers at all in England.)

But now, a lot of things are different. My current husband, who can reverse-engineer gadgets as easily as he takes apart and analyzes comic book panels, was born to be a tech geek. If he weren’t such a terrific artist as well, some sort of tech geekery would be how he made his living. He’s the kind of person who was able to FTP pages to DC and Marvel before those companies were even set up to receive them! When Robin emigrated to marry me, he had to leave behind tons of electronics, as British outlets are different and it just didn’t make financial sense to bring over lots of things that required American adapters and doubtless would be obsolete by the time he got settled in. Yes, Robin’s one of those early adopter types whose first reaction to new tech is "Oooh, shiny and pretty!"

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Behind Closed Doors

News
September 19, 2007

A few months ago, Google’s map section came out with a new feature called Street View, which had a number of people up in arms. "They’re spying on us!" came the cry. "It’s creepy and inappropriate! Our privacy is being violated by having cameras in public streets capturing possibly embarrassing moments for posterity!"

I’d lay odds that many of these advocates are the same people upset about the restrictions on their rights to, say, film or photograph things on public property in some cities. It reminds me of a line Peter Stone wrote for Ben Franklin in 1776: "…rebellion is always legal in the first person — such as ‘our’ rebellion. It is only in the third person — ‘their’ rebellion — that it is illegal." Google Street Views is "their" invasion, filming in NYC is "our" right.

But what can you expect? We live in a society that increasingly blurs the dividing line between the public and the private. My Mom uses a phrase to describe the kinds of romance novel plots she likes to read: "the ones that stop at the bedroom door." I feel the same way about most entertainment I prefer, as well as about most of real life. I’m not one of those people who believes that public displays of affection are somehow ickier if they’re between members of the same sex; I’m one of those people who believes that most overt public displays of affection are equally icky and belong behind a closed bedroom door.

Of course, I’m clearly in the minority here. I recognize that we’re a culture obsessed with having it both ways. We raise up a storm of protest at violations of our privacy by others, especially government authorities — "keep your laws off my body!" — and at the same time reserve the right to self-violate.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: On the same page

News
September 12, 2007

Just as with the Twilight Zone, I have a favorite Star Trek: Next Generation episode that’s stuck with me for years. It’s called "Darmok," wherein Picard & co. attempt to communicate with the Tamarians, a people with an incomprehensible language. Blogger Barbara O’Brien picks up the plot synopsis: "Captain Picard and Dathon the Tamarian have an adventure together battling an invisible beast, and during this adventure Picard has a ‘Helen Keller at the water pump’ moment and realizes that Tamarians speak in metaphors taken from stories. For example, ‘Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra’ refers to two enemies, Darmok and Jalad, who became allies at Tenagra. As a phrase, it means ‘Let’s put aside our differences and be friends.’ So after much suspense and drama and the death of the unfortunate Dathon, by the end of the episode Picard knows enough Tamarian to say, ‘Bye. It’s been real.’"

One of the reasons this show resonates with me so much is that I’m keen on the necessity of communicating, whether through stories or essays or conversation. I wouldn’t have majored in English and linguistics at college if this idea weren’t one of the driving forces in my life. I’ve always believed that there has to be a way of making myself understood to anyone — probably as futile a notion as my childhood ambition of wanting every single person I met in my life to like me, to never make any enemies. But you know, I haven’t necessarily given up on that one either! And as I’ve noted a number of times, much of my life has been spent in trying to find the key, the conversational Rosetta Stone, that would result in my late father finally being able to understand me — a quest at which I never succeeded, but which led me to become a writer.

Communication is the implicit goal of storytelling. If you’re not making some connection with your readers or viewers or listeners, you may as well be writing in a secret diary. Now, I’ve mentioned before that I have a small tolerance for things like Easter eggs and other pop culture references stuck into TV shows, comics, etc. as a wink between writer and audience; you’ll notice those stories are often the first to become dated as well because their references are so time-specific. But that’s a far cry from deliberately not communicating at all, but faking it in a way that makes your audience feel as though they’re stupid if they admit they’re not in the know.

Fortunately this deliberate communication breakdown doesn’t happen with most stories I read, as I tend to choose my entertainment rather than having it (and any accompanying trendiness) choose me. But it does happen in real life, particularly so in this century so far. I don’t think I have to tell you what series of events brought this on.

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Tagged: Elayne Riggs

Residual Effects, by Elayne Riggs

A Few of My Favorite Things, by Elayne Riggs

Children of all ages, by Elayne Riggs

More Artistic Vocabulary, by Elayne Riggs

An Artistic Vocabulary, by Elayne Riggs

ELAYNE RIGGS: The Fifth Freedom

ELAYNE RIGGS: The Girls of Summer

ELAYNE RIGGS: Still Life with Gadgets

ELAYNE RIGGS: Behind Closed Doors

ELAYNE RIGGS: On the same page

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