Tagged: Star Wars

JOHN OSTRANDER: Apres Harry

News
July 26, 2007

Well, wasn’t that an exciting conclusion to the Harry Potter saga?! And who could have seen that twist coming? You know, the one . . . the one where he . . . I mean, she . . . I mean they . . .

Okay, at the time I’m writing this I haven’t yet read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It hasn’t been released yet. I won’t go near the sites that purport to have the text and published it online. Through the miracle of weekly deadlines that have been shuffled about because of the impending San Diego Comic Con (or Spam Diego, as I like to call it because that’s usually how I feel after the end of it if I go to one – a can of Spam), I get to pretend that the last Harry Potter has been read and probably consumed and can ask the burning question on everyone’s lips:

Now what?

The Harry Potter books took us to an alien world – England, to begin with, which is alien enough for most of us on this side of the Pond. (I once demanded of my good friend and excellent artist Steve Pugh why did the English persisted in driving on the wrong side of the road in their country. Steve smiled kindly and gently told me it was to confuse the French and we poor Americans simply got caught in the middle. “Well,” I said, “ so long as there’s a good reason . . .” Where was I? Oh yes – alien worlds.)

It took us into the world of magic and English academia; it’s hard to say which is stranger to Americans. It gave us a new experience vicariously, through the joy of reading. I once heard film critic Roger Ebert remark that one of the things he looked for in films – and one of the things he really liked about the original Star Wars – was when it took him to a new world, gave him a new experience. Or, I would add, make what we know seem new or give us a different perspective so it feels like a new experience. The Potter books, in my opinion, succeeded on both levels.

So, the Potter story is now complete. It’s a closed world. The remaining movies will translate that experience to the medium of film but it won’t be altogether new. Assuming, gentle reader, you want something more in that line, where can you go? I, like many others, have a few suggestions drawn from my own reading experience. Assuming that we take it as a given that they are not Harry Potter nor are they trying to be Harry Potter, they may be books that you’d enjoy.

They are also not intended as children’s literature, so don’t think of it as a sharing experience with the kids.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: Potter’s End

News
July 19, 2007

We’re at something of a cultural crossroads.

On July 21, Saturday, the last new Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows, will be published. With this, J.K. Rowling completes her story and a literary phenomenon is completed. Yes, I know there are two more movies and scads of related tie-ins still to come but the story itself will be complete. We’ll know how it ends.

I have a mistrust of anything that labels itself an “instant classic.” It suggests adding water to a half-baked idea, mix, and you have something for the ages. For something to be classic, time must pass. The work must speak to more than one generation. In the 1920 and the 1930s, the detective Philo Vance was all the rage; today, virtually nobody has heard of him, let alone read him.

All that said, I do think the Harry Potter books have the potential to become classics, to be read and loved by future generations. There is a timeless quality to them; they create their own separate but accessible world; and – as with all truly great children’s literature – they are accessible to adults as well as children. I’m 58 years old; I write GrimJack and have written things like Wasteland. I’m a fan of hard-boiled noir detective fiction and, yes, I’m a Potter-head as well.

What is going to decide whether or not the Potter books become classics or not, I think, is going to depend on how author J.K. Rowling winds up the series. I have nothing but respect for Ms. Rowling; she went from being a single mother on welfare when she wrote the first Potter book to being worth more than the Queen of England as she winds up the series. By the end of the summer, they’ll have to start inviting her to G8 meetings. On a simple commercial level, the writer in me is in awe.

The writer in me also admires her clear-headed vision of herself and of her work. I’ve dealt with fans, my own and Star Wars fans, and while I love them I know how fanatical some can get. There can be this sense of identification with a work to where they can feel entitlement or ownership even above the creator his or herself. On a video, I heard Ms. Rowling address this and say, pretty close to verbatim, “Is it important to me what the fans think? Absolutely. Should it change one word of what I’m doing? Absolutely not.” For the record, I think Ms. Rowling is spot on.

As I was saying, however, whether or not the Harry Potter books go on to become a classic or a flash in the pan will depend on this final book – on how she winds up the series. That ending must satisfy everyone, young readers and older ones alike, who have made an emotional investment that spans years. That doesn’t necessarily imply a happy ending; the movie Casablanca doesn’t have a “happy” ending in that the two lovers, Rick and Ilsa, are together. But, boy, does the ending satisfy the viewer.

There’s been a lot of speculation about how the series will end. Word has it that two of the series’ characters will die and that one of them could be Harry Potter himself. Since this is my last shot at it before the book comes out, I’m going to chime in with my own opinions/speculations. WARNING: SAID SPECULATIONS WILL NECESSITATE REVEALING EVENTS THAT HAVE HAPPENED IN PREVIOUS BOOKS. IF YOU’RE NOT CAUGHT UP AND HAVE SOMEHOW AVOIDED LEARNING WHAT’S HAPPENED AND WANT TO LEAVE IT THAT WAY, GO READ SOMETHING ELSE. NOT THIS.

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F&SF News & Links

News
July 9, 2007

The Slush God quotes from a bunch of writers who have seen the Transformers movie, most notably Cherie Priest, who made me laugh out loud with things like “I think that now I can DIE OF AWESOME POISONING because that was more awesome than a whole SWIMMING POOL THAT HAS BEEN FILLED WITH AWESOME, and then someone shoves A PAIR OF GIANT DUELING ALIEN ROBOTS INTO THE SWIMMING POOL, and there’s a UNICORN STANDING IN THE BACKGROUND, GRANTING WISHES and SHITTING DIAMONDS.”

Maureen McHugh explains the attitude of a writer towards a work in progress, via this handy chart.

Jacob Weisman, publisher of Tachyon Publications, recently got married, and both Frank Wu and Susan Palwick were there. The best part: they recited the Green Lantern oath (the one written by Alfred Bester) to each other as part of the ceremony.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: Fireworks

News
July 5, 2007

It’s America’s birthday and what better way to celebrate than with fireworks? Yeah, I know – the Fourth of July was yesterday but if your neighborhood is anything like mine, people have been setting things off since last weekend and will probably continue through this weekend. So let’s see if we can set off a few here.

I hold these truths to be self-evident.

Item: Democracy is a radical experiment and one that could still fail. The notion that all men – and, as we have come to understand it, all women – are created equal and are endowed with certain inalienable rights was certainly a radical notion in a world where the right to rule came by birth or by force of arms. Instead, we maintained that People could, should, and had the right to govern themselves and the right of any government to rule rested within the consent of the People. That’s just crazy talk – or so much of the world in the late 1700s thought. That was chaos – anarchy. Heck, it scares a lot of people today and that includes our own citizens, a lot of whom would be more than willing to trade freedoms (well, certainly OTHER peoples’ freedoms) for a little more security for themselves and their own. In the overall scheme of things, folks, two hundred twenty five years is nothing. We blow it and it’ll just be noted as an interesting aberration.

And we’re really close to blowing it. Voting is a pain and we can’t be bothered to turn out in real numbers even for the Presidential elections; we abide rigged elections and voting machines; we let ourselves be led like lemmings by polls and attack ads.

I’m not a political innocent; I was raised in Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago. I know the difference between political theory and political reality. We, the People, increasingly vote for appearances rather than bother to look at issues. We assume that, because America has been around for two hundred years, it will be forever. History says the odds are way against that. We are an experiment and the results are not yet in, folks.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy News & Links

News
July 4, 2007

Mark Evanier shows off the cover to his upcoming book Kirby: King of Comics, and explains what this book is (a big, heavily-illustrated look at Jack Kirby’s comics work) and what his next book will be (a much longer, text-heavy biography of Kirby).

Columnist Alex Stein, in the Guardian, likes to argue with a friend about the use and importance of science fiction. (He’s on the side of the angels) Sadly, Stein seems to be content to argue that there’s some good stuff out there amid the dreck, rather than calling the friend on his category error – the unnamed friend stacks the deck by using the new Transformers movie as the SF exemplar and “some new French slow-burner about adultery” as his example of “real life.” The equivalents of a good serious “real life” movie are movies like Gattaca, or 2001, or Blade Runner; if you want a “mainstream” comparison movie on the same level as Transformers, you’ll have to dig up something like Monster-In-Law. Defenders of SF need to point out that there’s just as much “real life” dreck as fantastic dreck – and our dreck at least has cool pictures to go with the lousy plots.

The Baltimore Sun reports on an exhibition of Star Wars paraphernalia at Geppi’s Entertainment Museum in Baltimore. The materials are all from the collection of Thomas Atkinson, who runs the Star Toys Museum.

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Science Fiction/Fantasy News & Links, June 28th

News
June 28, 2007

Mad Magazine goes for the easy jokes with their “Rejected Star Wars Stamps.”

The UK’s own Guardian newspaper wonders why science fiction is more popular now on TV than it used to be, and blames 9/11. Others have already pointed out that the Guardian seems to have forgotten the mid-90s surge of SF and Fantasy TV (Buffy, anyone? Babylon 5, perhaps?), but at least they’re saying nice things…

Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist is running a contest to give away a few copies of Jay Lake’s new novel, Mainspring, set in a clockwork solar system. (That bizarre mental image you just got? Yes – it’s exactly like that.)

Did you know that ABEbooks.com (the noted conglomerator of used book retailers) has been running a contest for Harry Potter-related poetry? And that the entries, so far, are not nearly as horribly soul-destroying as you might expect?

James Maxey, author of the new novel Bitterwood, ruminates on how to create dragons.

Jonathan McCalmont has been to see “The Ugly Side of Fandom,” and reports back about what he has seen.

Hey, didja notice that the cover from last week’s New Yorker was by Pixar artist Lou Romano? Romano explains how he got the job, and what went into it, on his blog this week.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: My Karma Ran Over My Dogma

News
June 28, 2007

In my 25 odd (sometimes very odd) years in comics, I’ve had a chance to be associated with certain books/characters/concepts and produced work of which I’m very proud such as GrimJack, Suicide Squad, The Kents, Wasteland, and others. With some – such as GrimJack and Suicide Squad – I’ve had a chance to go back again recently and re-explore them which offers different challenges, new perspectives, but also familiar pleasures.

One series that I’m not certain I could revisit is The Spectre. At the time, the book was an examination of theological issues, questions of redemption and of punishment, and the concept of God. All along with some truly exemplary and horrific art courtesy of Tom Mandrake. It had a great run and is one of the highest points of my career, in my own opinion, but at the time I wrote it I was still something of a believer. I was a lapsed Catholic (for me, RC meant Recovering Catholic). I didn’t hold with the hierarchy or the theology of the Church but I guess I believed in the general outline – Jesus the Son of God, died for our sins, came back from the dead, and so on. Certainly I believed that sin existed and that redemption was something that was possible. It was from all this that my questioning in Spectre emerged.

These days – well, I’m more of an agnostic. I got my doubts. It began when I asked myself a basic writer’s question – who were the gospels and epistles written for at the time they were written? Who was the anticipated audience? Not us – they were very much written for their age. The Second Coming was expected within the audience’s lifetime.

From there I learned to see the texts in the social and political contexts of their time; these helped shape the writings as much or more than theology. Finally, I came to see that we project on God and or the Devil many of the things that are within us. Above all, I came to understand that the things in which I thought I believed were things that I inherited or that had been drummed into me (sometimes literally) when I was a boy.

Even in grade school, there were some questions. Sister Mary Tabernacle Door Half Open taught us that the Holy Trinity consisted of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit – a bird. A dove, to be exact. As an image that made no sense to me. Shouldn’t it be Father, Son – and Mother? Didn’t that make more sense? S’ter (all the nuns had their names shortened down to an abbreviation of their rank – S’ter) was not amused and informed me that if I kept up that kind of thinking I was bound for Hell. Worse, I’d get sent home with a note to my mother which was a far more immediate peril and one that I understood on a deeper, primal level. Hell was a concept; my Mother was real. I stifled my heretical ways for a long time.

As a result, I’ve come to be very leery these days of dogma – stated beliefs of an organization or individual, religious or not, that are uttered with an authority that does not invite question or contradiction. It’s where thought processes stop. It is where truth is assumed to be obvious or ordained. I’m right because I say I am. I have either God or logic or something to back it up but there it is. These days, I’m seeing dogma all over the place including some I didn’t expect.

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Conan: Red Nails Voice Cast Set

News
June 25, 2007

The upcoming R-rated animated feature film Red Nails, based upon Robert E. Howard’s famous Conan story of the same name, has its voice cast in place.

Co-writer and producer Steve Gold notes in his blog Ron Perlman (Hellboy) has been cast as Conan the Cimmerian, Cree Summer (Ben 10, The Boondocks) as Valeria, Marg Helgenberger (Mr. Brooks, CSI) as Tascela, James Marsden (X-Men, Smallville, Buffy, Torchwood) as Techotl, Clancy Brlown (Lex Luthor in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited) as Olmec, and Mark Hamill (Star Wars, and virtually every decent U.S. animated show in the past decade) as Tolkemec.

Vic Dal Chele is directing Red Nails. There are tons of development sketches and storyboard art on their website; Mike Kaluta handled much of the development artwork, including the piece above.

JOHN OSTRANDER: Backing Into The Future

News
June 21, 2007

The new Suicide Squad miniseries got announced this last weekend and noted by many, including here on ComicMix. The series was always a cross between Mission: Impossible and The Dirty Dozen and will be again. I’ve always tried to give it a “real world” feel, even going back to its origin. And sometimes the “real world” pulls a fast one.

When I proposed the Squad, there was some concern that the premise – that the U.S. government would hire bad guys to undertake missions considered to be “in the national interest” but needed deniability – seemed a little “out there.” In between the time that the proposal was accepted and we got our first issue out, Irangate broke – where the government was using bad guys etc etc – and made us look like pikers. It looked like we were cashing in on the story rather than inventing an edgy and daring scenario.

That continued through the Squad’s run. I would read the papers and try to extrapolate events from them, concoct possible and likely scenarios and try to fit the Squad around them, and the real world would get there around the same time the issue came out. I was successful enough at one point that a friend contacted me one January wanting to know where I was setting the Squad that summer. She was preparing her summer vacation plans and wherever I was sending the Squad she wanted to avoid.

In truth, I’m not much of a seer. I simply apply what I know from writing plots – formulating a sequence of events that would lead to a given event/moment and then extrapolating the most feasible series of events that might follow from said event. I apply this method to what I see in the world. Very useful in plotting or dealing with characters; a little scarier when dealing with real-life situations.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I did it in a column concerning the sudden death of bees. Others, such as Al Gore, are doing an admirably scary job looking at climate change (a.k.a. global warming). I remember once when I was teaching a writing class at the Joe Kubert School – yes, I was teaching writing to artists – I gave an assignment on scanning the future. We started from a given factoid: oil is not a renewable resource. At some point we will cross the line where we will have taken more oil out of the ground than there is left in it. Some speculate we either already have or will within the next ten years. At that point, oil has to start becoming a scarcer commodity. Given our current rate of consumption, there are some who think the oil will give out around 2030.

We started to explore what that would mean. Not just higher costs for driving your car or heating your home but what the impact would be in other areas. For example, as the cost of transporting goods goes up so does the cost of bringing in food outside the local area. Everything then costs more from the clothes you wear to the food you eat.

Plastics are made from petroleum and as petroleum becomes scarcer, the cost of plastics goes up. Think of everything – EVERYTHING – you use that depends on plastic use – on CHEAP plastic use. The cost, of course, gets passed on to the consumer. That’s a given.

With all this, I asked them to contemplate what happens geopolitically. As oil becomes scarcer and control of it literally dictates what happens to a country’s economy, who will do what in order to control access to the oil? I don’t mean just this country; there are up and coming players as well. Hungry players.

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REVIEW: Star Wars: Robot Chicken

Reviews
June 18, 2007

Last night Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim premiered Star Wars: Robot Chicken. The half-hour edition of the popular stop motion cartoon show was entirely devoted to Star Wars gags. What separates this from countless issues of Mad Magazine was the involvement of George Lucas himself. Lucas provides a sense of legitimacy and an acknowledgement that he is finally ready to laugh at his own creation.

Unfortunately, much like the prequel trilogy, maybe more could have been done if Lucas was less involved. The sketch featuring Lucas being saved from a mob of fans by a guy dressed as a tauntaun was by far the weakest in the entire show. I don’t know if this was a problem with the writers or with Lucas, but the sketch felt particularly flat.

The rest of the show was more successful. The highlight was a sketch in which Darth Vader explains a number of the more contrived coincidences in the series to a Mark-Hamil-voiced-Luke Skywalker. Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy) was excellent as the voice of Emperor Palpatine in a number of bits, including one featuring a mama-joke contest between the Emperor and Luke.

Overall, the show worked the best when it was contained within the universe, albeit one with a lot more jokes, the Late Night with Zuckuss sketch (featuring the voice of Conan O’Brien) scored, as did the Ponda Baba segment.

The more it felt like they were winking at the audience the less it worked for me; another lowlight was the sketch featuring a Jedi President Bush fighting Sith Abraham Lincoln.

The best possible outcome of this would be increased exposure for Robot Chicken, Adult Swim’s gem, with its third season set to begin in under two months. With the Family Guy season premiere bringing another high profile Star Wars parody our way I’m interested to see if they can match this effort by Seth Green and the staff at Robot Chicken, the way Family Guy has been going it won’t be easy.

Star Wars: Robot Chicken can be watched for free (for at least the time being) at adultswim.com

Tagged: Star Wars

JOHN OSTRANDER: Apres Harry

JOHN OSTRANDER: Potter’s End

F&SF News & Links

JOHN OSTRANDER: Fireworks

Science Fiction/Fantasy News & Links

Science Fiction/Fantasy News & Links, June 28th

JOHN OSTRANDER: My Karma Ran Over My Dogma

Conan: Red Nails Voice Cast Set

JOHN OSTRANDER: Backing Into The Future

REVIEW: Star Wars: Robot Chicken

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