Tagged: Elayne Riggs

ELAYNE RIGGS: The PFVM Principle

ELAYNE RIGGS: The PFVM Principle

  • News
  • September 5, 2007

There’s been a flurry of posts lately in the comics blogosphere, including Glenn Hauman’s last column here, about perceived value for money (let’s just call it PVFM) when it comes to comics. The consensus seems to be, American comics periodicals from the Big Two are usually about 22 pages long and take mere minutes to read through, which is Not Good. Added to that the current buzzword in vogue for what used to be called "padding," now rechristened "decompression," and the PVFM aggravation level shoots way up as the time actually spent reading the thing goes way down. And the conclusion is, there just ought to be more words per page, and possibly more pages per pamphlet, so the reading time (and thus the presumed enjoyment time) increases and fans don’t feel like they’re being ripped off and more readers will return to comics and all will be well with the world. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve actually seen online comics pages where a writer/artist will put up a page of wordless story and apologize for the lack of dialogue on it!

Allow me to ask: When did PVFM become a condition upon which entertainment should be created? Do all stories have to be dense, or should all stories strive instead to be good?

Look, I understand PVFM. I frequent an all-you-can-eat sushi place, for cripe’s sake. The sushi’s very good there, or I wouldn’t frequent it. But I’ve been to lots of AYCE places that made me wish I paid more for less-but-better stuff. As anyone who’s visited a 99-cent store would agree, quantity isn’t always synonymous with quality.

Particularly where such a subjective experience as entertainment is involved. Perhaps I’m the wrong person to ask this, what with my swiss-cheese retention abilities, but were all the stories you really remember fondly real long ones? I’ve been to some long, dense movies that were full of sound and fury and signified less than nothing; the concession candy had more fulfillment. And I’ve spent two minutes reading various pithy blog posts that stick with me far longer than the screens and screens of blather that, frankly, I usually can’t even make it all the way through. But okay, let’s be fair — comics aren’t blog posts, where brevity and getting to the point is often prized. And they’re not movies, where unspoken movement can convey so much that a constant stream of words isn’t necessary.

So tell me, without looking: what’s your favorite comic book story, and how many words does it contain?

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ELAYNE RIGGS: The Stupid — It Burns!

ELAYNE RIGGS: The Stupid — It Burns!

  • News
  • August 29, 2007

I’m sure most readers will agree that we all bring our own unique views to our entertainment experiences, our own desires and prejudices and lifetimes of baggage. And many of us try to partake of those experiences bearing that baggage in mind, allowing for it or disclaiming it or even using it to enhance our POVs.

For the average consumer, baggage is something you try not to let get in the way. But a certain subset clings to it like a badge of honor. That’s the portion of the crowd that brags of specialized knowledge, and will accept nothing less than that same level of specialization in their entertainment. Which is silly, in my opinion. You may be a rocket scientist, or a medical intern, or a lawyer, or even a secretary, but the people who write movies and comics and whatnot, well, they’re just storytellers.

This is not to say that a certain verisimilitude isn’t welcome. A story needs to be internally consistent, after all, to keep you involved in its world. But if you’re from Cleveland and the movie you’re watching is supposed to be set in that city and it’s pretty darn clear that it was shot in Vancouver, it can take a bit more effort to stay with that story when you keep going "But that’s not the street I used to walk to school on!" If you’ve just come home from a day in the newsroom, opened up the latest Superman comic and noted that the Daily Planet scenes don’t resemble your job in the least, I can understand the irritation. Many’s the time I’ve watched actors pretend to type or play a musical instrument as just something to do with their hands, not as though they were actually performing the task at hand. (By the way, how things have changed on the typing front since the advent of PCs and laptops; one of the things I love about the TV show The Office is how the actors actually type IMs to each other during filming; they look like they’re at their desks doing actual office work, just like me!)

But obsessing on these comparatively minor things to the point where they ruin your enjoyment of the story is, to my mind, just silly. It’s not seeing the forest for the trees. Even if they’re palm trees and the story’s set in a northern climate.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Would I lie to you?

ELAYNE RIGGS: Would I lie to you?

  • News
  • August 22, 2007

Galaxy Quest is one of my favorite movies. I mean, go wrong with Alan Rickman and Tony Shalhoub, you know? And even the nominal stars of the ensemble, Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver, go down pretty easily in this brilliant vehicle. But there’s one scene that makes me cringe every time I see it.

The bad guy, Sarris, has coerced Jason Nesmith to confess to Mathesar, who idolizes "Captain Taggart" and the Galaxy Quest crew, that he and his fellow Terrans are ordinary actors, something Jason has been trying to figure out how to do without success for much of the movie as Mathesar’s people have no concept of, I guess, showbiz. But it’s the way Sarris forces his hand that makes me squirm:

Jason: Mathesar, there’s no such person as Captain Taggart. My name is Jason Nesmith. I’m an actor. We’re all actors.

Sarris: He doesn’t understand. Explain as you would a child.

Jason: We, uh, we pretended. [On Malthesar’s blank look.] We lied. I’m not a commander. There’s no National Space Exploration Administration. We don’t have a ship… It’s all fake. Just like me.

Mathesar: But why…?

Jason: It’s difficult to explain. On our planet, we, uh… we pretend to… to entertain.

 

I was reminded of this scene again just recently when blogger Skot Kirruk at Izzle pfaff! said much the same thing:

[begin quote] I try not to lie. And when I do lie, I try to lie in such a hyperbolic, overblown fashion that I hope that it is patently obvious that I’m just making shit up. I probably fail at this, though. It’s just too easy to lie. Writers lie all the time, because most of the time, life is just fucking dull. So we pull out our little tricks, and we lie. We insert or import in false details to serve an anecdote… Writers are liars. Don’t trust them.

And especially don’t trust me, assuming that you even consider me a writer, as opposed to some twitchy dilettante. I’m also an actor, so I’m also trained in lying. I think I’m pretty good at it… It’s no good protesting that when people go to the theater (and nobody does any more, but never mind), that the audience is damn well expecting that I lie to them: it’s my job. It’s no good because we are delighted to take those very same skills and exploit them for our own base wants and needs.

I have been taught to lie, we realize at some point. This could be awesome.

And so we do. But it’s more sinister than even that. It’s more sinister because actors aren’t just trained to lie, they are trained to lie with the unshakable conviction that they are not lying at all… Don’t ever listen to actors or writers, or worse, some unholy combination of both. They are liars and aren’t to be trusted. [end quote]

 

Naturally, I believe everything I’ve just quoted to be absolute hogwash. In other words, a lie.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Wanderlust

ELAYNE RIGGS: Wanderlust

  • News
  • August 15, 2007

One of the side effects of "the internets" making the world a more accessible place for many of us is how it’s fueled my desire for travel.  But in truth, that was probably kindled when I was but a wee babe and my parents decided to drive across the country and back — pretty ambitious considering my mom was pregnant at the time.  I’m told my 1-year-old self experienced all sorts of national historic sites and sights, none of which I remember of course, but enough of it probably seeped into my subconscious and stuck that the idea of Going Places has appealed to me ever since.

I was pretty fortunate when I was a teenager, in that my family had both means and relatives overseas.  We made a pilgrimage in 1973 to Israel and then Romania.  I was so proud of going to a country with a foreign language that I was studying at the time!  I’ve never liked the stereotype of the Ugly American, and so I remain determined never to travel to a country where I can’t speak the dominant language.  Which lets out most of them, I fear, but to me it’s just plain common courtesy.  And common sense; I have no right to complain about people living (and especially running businesses) in the US who don’t converse at all in English if I refuse or am unable to converse in the prevailing tongue of my destination of choice.  Israel was to be my Big Test to see how well I did in Hebrew.  Imagine my frustration when, to a person, everyone I encountered heard my American accent and immediately switched to speaking English.

My mom went me one better — she spoke Yiddish both in Israel and Romania, and everyone with whom we had lengthy conversations could communicate with her in the "Jewish Esperanto," including my dad’s Romanian relatives.  I still haven’t quite gotten the hang of Yiddish, which I really thought I’d catch onto when we were kids as it was what Mom and Dad spoke when they didn’t want us kids to know what they were saying; but even being in the German Honor Society in college (Yiddish has more German words in it than just about anything else) didn’t really help.  And my Romanian was pretty bad too, sad considering it’s a Romance language and has a lot of the same words and grammatical rules as Spanish and French, with which I had a passing acquaintance in high school and college.  I miss those days when I was around 20 or so and majoring in linguistics and could passably get by in about five languages; nowadays I’d need massive Berlitz-type refresher courses to retrieve even a tenth of the knowledge I used to possess.

But I digress.  The thing I remember most about Romania — still under the yoke of Ceausescu at the time — was that I almost got arrested at the airport.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: World Enough and Time

ELAYNE RIGGS: World Enough and Time

  • News
  • August 8, 2007

Everyone around my age seems to have a Twilight Zone episode that sticks with them the most.  For me, it’s the Burgess Meredith-starring "Time Enough At Last," which title I always misremember as World Enough and Time.  (Just my luck I’m about to become even more confused as that’s also the title of the new George Takei-starring Star Trek: New Frontiers episode debuting in two weeks.)  It’s about an obsessive reader who’s delighted he finally has time to pursue his favorite hobby after improbably escaping a bomb that wipes out the rest of the populace, only to have his glasses fall off his face and break, fade to black.

It was one of those episodes for which I refused to suspend disbelief because I kept thinking of all the ways Meredith’s character could remedy his fate.  What was preventing him from looking for new glasses?  If the NYPL building was still standing I’ll bet some optometry places were still around.  And after all, he had to go food-gathering to stay alive, he’d undoubtedly (and likely literally) bump into something.  And bombs tend to fuse things into lenses anyway.  All that aside, I refused to believe he totally couldn’t read without his glasses; my prescription is pretty strong and I’m to the point in life where, if I didn’t have bifocals, I’d have to remove my glasses to read.  And eyesight has been known to improve without the use of glasses, by means of various exercises and–

Well anyway, my point is, I went over all these machinations in my head for years because I could see a lot of myself in that character.  I love to read, always have.  Got it from my mom (hi Mom!); Dad wasn’t big on reading, but she’s always taken to it, as have her sister and brother, from whom I learned to like all sorts of genre stuff from the Happy Hollisters mystery series to fantasy and science fiction to fairy tales to the very occasional non-fiction foray.  Reading actively engages my mind like little else.  Reading has always been the way I found out about life, about myself.  Reading is dreaming using words (and pictures, if you’re talking about comics).

I’m never as happy as when I have time to catch up on my reading.  This week, for instance, I’m on "enforced" vacation — meaning that, because I don’t get to use up my allotted vacation time when I want to (due to my boss requiring me to be at my post whenever he’s in the country), I wind up accumulating too many days to carry over into my next service year and must "use or lose" them before my anniversary (next Monday).  As of the time I wrote this column I had no idea what I was going to do during this week other than read, read, and read some more.

And even then, there’s never time enough.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: The Prodigal Child

ELAYNE RIGGS: The Prodigal Child

  • News
  • August 1, 2007

White Rabbits!  (Sorry, that supersition is how I start every month.)

So Robin and I were watching Godspell on TV the other day.  Yeah, every now and then I like to revel in the best of ’70s kitsch.  Godspell reminds me a lot of Finian’s Rainbow.  They’re both earnest, so very very earnest, in their attempted appeal to perceived hippie consciousness, and there are sections of each that I love to bits… but my gosh, they’re so charmingly dated, bless their hearts.

And I was remembering how cool I thought the songs were when I was a kid, and how silly all the wide shots panning out over NYC look — and gasping when I suddenly realized the ending of one number was shot on top of the then-newly-built World Trade Center, and the title of the number was "All For The Best" — and Robin was comparing it to the version he’d seen on stage in England, and they came to the bit where that cast member who looks disturbingly like Ron Jeremy and a few other cast members were acting out the story of The Prodigal Son.

And I’m kinda caught up in the film despite myself, because I’ve always been fascinated by allegorical fiction, which is what most New Testament stories are, and all at once something just didn’t seem correct to me.  It’s the same kind of "wait a second…" I did when I first realized the second most common interpretation of the moral of the Garden of Eden story was "always submit to authority rather than seeking to understand things for yourself" (the most common being "all dames are trash").  It made absolutely no sense to me that the prodigal son, who had sinned mightily and returned to his father’s fold, deserved the fatted calf more than the son who had dutifully loved his father and seen to his work and was a genuinely good person the entire time and who needed no prodding to be good.  It didn’t work for me as fiction, it just wasn’t a satisfying resolution, because it rested on the assertion that it’s okay, even preferable, to cheat.  And because so many people need an excuse to justify actions that in their gut they must know they shouldn’t do, that message is incredibly appealing to a wide segment of people.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Left Behind

ELAYNE RIGGS: Left Behind

  • News
  • July 25, 2007

It’s the day before the biggest convention in an American comic fan’s year — the San Diego Comic-Con International.  Just about every one of my ComicMix colleagues is heading out there.  (Don’t ask me how they got hotel rooms, it’s still a mystery to me.)  I’m not.  My boss told me a long time ago that I can’t go on vacation when he’s in the country (yes I know, but it’s still better than being unemployed and sans health insurance), and even if I could I just don’t think I could work up the enthusiasm any more for something so expensive and exhausting.  The closer I get to pushing 50, the more 50 pushes back harder.

I vaguely remember when I used to have the energy for Events.  When I was in college I enthusiastically queued up for a couple hours to see The Empire Strikes Back and was severely disappointed because I was expecting a movie, complete with a resolution, not a chapter.  (When Robin expressed much the same sentiment years later on Usenet, I responded with "Marry me," and the rest is history, sort of.)  I get the idea of wanting to be a part of a phenomenon bigger that one’s self, wanting "bragging rights" to fill your anecdotage.  (I wish I could say I coined that word, but I didn’t, I got it from a Fred Astaire movie and goodness knows where the movie’s writer picked it up.)  When it’s organic and unexpected, the Event phenomenon can be quite fun.  But what’s really organic today?

San Diego grew out of comic fans’ love for their medium and the people who toiled therein.  And then it just grew, and grew, and grew.  It’s nigh unto unwieldy now.  Before Wizard took over the Chicago Comicon, it too was centered around the comics artform; now it’s just another notch on the WizardWorld bedpost.  The more cons grow, the more the fans can convince themselves of the comic industry’s health — but the growth ain’t about comics, it’s about product.

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Nothing common about it

ELAYNE RIGGS: Nothing common about it

  • News
  • July 18, 2007

The older I get, the more Einsteinian I become in my concept of time. It’s like I’m watching a vehicle moving at light-speed, Dopplering like crazy, when it’s all I can do sometimes to make it from point A to point B. I’m just a 20th century gal in a 21st century world.

Which isn’t always a bad thing. I retain a viewpoint that I honestly think is foreign to many around me, one that relies greatly on the ideas of common sense and common courtesy. Don’t spend more on your credit card than you have money to pay it off. When you’re out to dinner, stack your plates in a way that makes them easier for the server to handle. If you’re responsible for someone who can’t care for themselves, their needs supercede yours. Behind the wheel, do everything you can to facilitate traffic flow, don’t do anything that distracts you from driving, and always let aggressive drivers pass you so you’re well rid of them. Don’t do anything in public that will cause discomfort to others around you, unless they’re more politically powerful and intending you physical harm. Listening is more important than talking. (Okay, I don’t have that last one down quite yet, but I’m working on it!)

Two of my conclusions after almost fifty years on this planet come down to "sex is private" and "violence is abhorrent." I don’t know why people who wish to regulate media keep pairing the two, as the former affirms life while the latter negates it. And to tell you the truth, while I’m not that big on regulation myself, sometimes I think it may just be needed in certain circumstances. Because, once again, I see so few people around me any more exercising common sense and common courtesy.

While it’s true that societal mores, like language, are an ever-evolving phenomenon, it’s not that difficult to suss out what might discomfit the majority those around them — if they cared to. But selfishness often wins out over courtesy. So while a kiss on the lips may be quite continental, no matter who’s kissing whom, when that public kiss turns into major gropage or heavy petting it’s time for the participants to think about getting a room. As my mom is fond if saying regarding the romance novels she reads, "I prefer the ones that stop at the bedroom door."

Or the bathroom door, for that matter. Bodily functions are nothing of which to be ashamed; neither are they anything to show off. If you’re planning to go beyond a simple exchange of saliva, do consider a more intimate and less public venue, one with doors between you and the general public. That goes for feeding your baby straight from the source as well. But hey, maybe that’s just me. I see enough fluids around me as it is, I don’t really want to deal with other people’s. It’s beautiful, it’s natural… it’s private, mmmkay?

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ELAYNE RIGGS: Baseball, comics and all that jazz

ELAYNE RIGGS: Baseball, comics and all that jazz

  • News
  • July 11, 2007

It’s said that there are only a few established art and entertainment forms that America can truly call its own — baseball, jazz music and comic books.  It’s a bit of a hubristic statement, not surprising coming from a country as relatively young yet as vast as our own.  It almost sounds as if we’re trying to convince ourselves of our own cultural relevance — even more so because we realize that each of these things has its roots elsewhere.  But hey, so do most of us.  And just as this "nation of immigrants" has brought disparate peoples into a "melting pot" atmosphere wherein their contributions have mixed to form a melange all its own, so have jazz, comics and baseball taken previously existing elements and turned them into something new and unique.

Now, I don’t know much about jazz, so I leave that topic for someone more savvy than me to tackle. But speaking of tackling, George Carlin has a famous monologue where he contrasts the essential natures of baseball and (American) football, so I thought it would be interesting to compare baseball to "mainstream" (i.e., primarily "Big Two") comics. I believe the two have more things in common than many people may realize. Both are team efforts in which individuals can excel and stand out, but which have the best outcome when everyone involved is working toward the same goal (in baseball, winning the game; in comics, telling the story). Both have bullpens and wacky nicknames (as Stan Lee well knew), and both have equally enthusiastic fan bases. And while the split between baseball fans and comics fans has always been presented as a "jocks versus nerds" scenario, both of those stereotypes have been pretty well dismantled in recent years. Despite American baseball still not being gender integrated (but hey, it only took a century from its inception to integrate the game racially) it boasts male and female aficionados of a wide age range. Despite American mainstream comics being largely created by and targeted to straight white post-adolescent males, they too have drawn in male and female readers and admirers of all ages.

There’s something quintessentially welcoming about the game, and the literature, of amazing visual possibilities and poetry – something that can’t be squelched by all the talk about contracts and exclusives and all the business stuff that’s extraneous to spectators, that’s beside the point of what happens between the white lines or the black borders. We all know it’s there, and admit it has its place, but that it’s more the realm of the voracious media who need their daily dose of sensationalist copy and crave the breaking story even when it’s a non-story. Mountains are made from minutiae – is this pitcher healthy? What about that book’s lateness? Did he really sign a 2-year contract for that much money, and will it include his creator-owned work? Was he on steroids when he drew that or what?

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ELAYNE RIGGS: I want to believe

ELAYNE RIGGS: I want to believe

"We’re never gonna beat this if belief is what we’re fighting for." – John Mayer

As Americans gather today to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence 231 years ago, many of us find ourselves in quite a different place than we believe our founders envisioned for this country.  Each day brings more tragic results of the radicals currently in power thumbing their nose continually at Benjamin Franklin’s observation that "Those that would give up essential liberty in pursuit of a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security" and frightening the populace into constant submission so they can retain this ill-gotten power.  (Hang on — creating a climate of fear, isn’t that what terrorists try to do?  Guess that means They’re Winning.)  And without the assurance that our government will (or even can) do its job of seeing to the well-being of its citizens, many Americans do what people in their situation have done for centuries — they turn to institutions they believe will care for them, mostly institutions that "answer to a higher authority" in which they believe.

We’ve been talking a lot about perception and belief on ComicMix this past week.  First Mike Gold tackled how people misperceive personal threats to their way of life when no such threats exist.  For the life of me, I cannot imagine how these ideas get into their heads, and neither can anyone in the all-pervasive corporate-sponsored conservative-pandering media.  Then I talked more about subjectivity and how some folks amazingly find the exact "evidence" to support their pet beliefs, rather than the other way around (using actual scientific procedure to observe first and then create a theory based on those observations).  And the capper was John Ostrander’s column about dogma, rigid belief systems (whether religious or no) whose adherents will brook no dissenting opinions.  The danger of dogma is the same as that of any fanaticism — that subjective perceptions are suddenly presented as objective ones, and individual beliefs replace reason and compromise with authoritarian systems such as theocracies.

And it ought to be obvious that theocracies are not Good Things in pluralistic societies because they leave no room for diversity of opinion.

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