Tagged: wrong

Grand Theft Auto IV: Less NYC, More Chicago’s South Side?

Grand Theft Auto IV: Less NYC, More Chicago’s South Side?

The hub-bub over the recent release of Grand Theft Auto IV is finally starting to die down, but of all the stories popping up around the InterWebs about the controversial videogame, one really caught my eye.

Slate recently posted an analysis of the real-world dynamics of life on the wrong side of the law – and those who are forced to live and work with that dynamic every day – as echoed in GTA IV. While the landscape of the videogame is based on the New York City Metro area, the author contends that the true real-world equivalent of life in the GTA IV universe can be found in Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods.

The last time I visited Chicago, I stopped by 59th Street, near Washington Park (and only a few short blocks from the picturesque University of Chicago). Two of the local gangs were fighting each other in full view for control of a prime sales spot, a hotel. For a monthly fee, the proprietor had promised to allow one gang to turn the place into a bordello—drugs, prostitution, stolen merchandise. For the gangs, winning meant more than simply getting rid of their enemy. Neither controlled the area surrounding the hotel. Anyone bringing drugs (or women, or guns, etc.) to the hotel would have to run the gantlet formed by other enemy gangs, who would be at the ready to shoot down the transporter.

Author Sudhir Venkatesh goes on to compare the decisions GTA IV’s protagonist must make over the course of the game, and compares those choices to many of those made by residents of South Side streets where the criminal element provides the only semblance of structure.

Read the full article on Slate.com.

Review: Terry Brooks’ ‘Dark Wraith of Shannara’

Review: Terry Brooks’ ‘Dark Wraith of Shannara’

Dark Wraith of Shannara
By Terry Brooks, Illustrated by Edwin David, Adapted by Robert Place Napton
Del Rey, 2008, $13.95

I am morally sure that the following conversation took place somewhere, among some people, before this book came into existence:

“It’s not fair! All of those other fantasy writers are getting comics based on their books!”

“Yeah! Why Salvatore and Hamilton but not Brooks?”

“What do they have that he hasn’t got? He’s at least as popular as Feist!”

I have no idea who said it, or who they said it to, but, somehow, the influence of the Dabel Brothers has led to ever more epic fantasy writers getting the urge (or maybe just the contract) to create graphic novels based on their work.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that; American comics have been a closed guys-in-tights shop for a generation now, and anything that opens that up is nice. But it is a bit weird, personally, when the two sides of my world collide quite so violently.

Dark Wraith of Shannara, unlike most of the recent epic fantasy comics out there, doesn’t adapt anything; it’s a brand-new story set in Terry Brooks’s very famous (and very bestselling) world of Shannara. For continuity geeks – and aren’t we all that, about something? – this takes place soon after the end of the novel The Wishsong of Shannara, and involves much of the cast of that book. Wishsong is the third of the original Shannara “trilogy:” they’re nothing like a trilogy, despite being three books about members of the same family published relatively quickly and all having the word “Shannara” in the title, but fantasy fans will call any conglomeration of three books a trilogy if you don’t stop them with heavy armament.

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Little Ditty About Danny and Fred, by Dennis O’Neil

Little Ditty About Danny and Fred, by Dennis O’Neil

Danny and Fred were the last two kids in their grade to still believe in Santa Claus. 

 
Danny had first believed in Daddy, but he stopped when Daddy began to yell a lot, and drink whiskey, and throw things. So Danny could believe he had a father, because he could see a man coming and going, but he stopped believing in Daddy. 
 
But he still believed in Santa Claus. Santa Claus would never yell or throw things or drink whiskey, and besides, he brought presents and all Danny had to do was be good, which he was anyway. Fred, who lived next door, also believed in Santa, though he and Danny never discussed the etiology of it, so Danny didn’t know why Fred believed. He didn’t care, either.
 
Then, when Danny was fourteen, Father, who was once Daddy, came into Danny’s room on Christmas Eve and pulled Danny from bed and hustled him into the front room, where the Christmas tree was. Father sat Danny down on the sofa and got a big cardboard box from a closet.
 

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DENNIS O’NEIL: The Missouri Mafia

DENNIS O’NEIL: The Missouri Mafia

 

There we were, in Cape Girardeau, Mo. at a convention chatting with fans and signing autographs – yes, the Missouri Mafia together again.

There is an element in the preceding sentence that’s wrong. It’s the word “again.”

Before I explain, a warning: the subject of this week’s blather is so trivial, so insignificant that it does not merit a footnote in the most comprehensive of comics histories, even if that footnote is in a type font so tiny one could use it to put the whole of next year’s New York Times on the head of a pin, presumably near the dancing angels.

Where was I? Oh yeah, in southeast Missouri with Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich, being very well treated by the convention sponsor, Ken Murphy. The occasion was a reunion of the aforementioned Missouri Mafia – i.e., the three of us. I don’t know who first used the term Missouri Mafia, which Roy, in a recent email called “a dumb phrase,” or why. It was probably because we three, in the late 60s and early 70s, were working as writers at Marvel Comics (and Gary and I also wrote for Charlton) and we were not only from Missouri, we all had a connection to a particular parcel of the state. I was working as a reporter for the Cape Girardeau newspaper; Gary and Roy were childhood friends who lived in Jackson, about eight miles from Cape.

To make a story I’ve told probably hundreds of times as short as possible: Roy was editor of what was unquestionably the best comics fanzine, Alter Ego, and had just accepted a comic book job in New York. I did a story on him for the paper, a month later he sent me Stan Lee’s writer’s test, I did it and then Roy and Stan offered me a job, which I accepted. A year or two later, Roy recruited Gary and…voila! The Missouri Mafia.

The Mafia’s ranks were augmented by the eventual arrival on the scene of Steve Gerber, who, coincidentally, graduated from my alma mater.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Notes for a War Story

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Notes for a War Story

In its original Italian form, Notes for a War Story won the 2005 Goscinny Prize for Best Script and was the Best Book of the Year for 2006 at the Angouleme comics festival, so I have to assume that it’s one of the very best European works of recent years. Which is unfortunate, since I found it only moderately successful.

It’s set in an unnamed European country, during an unnamed conflict among unspecified groups, in the vaguely recent past. All the non-specificity is meant to give it an aura of timelessness, or of dislocation, or something like that, but it left this reader feeling as if I were wandering about in a fog. Compared to the specificity and closely-observed detail of a book like Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, Notes from a [[[War Story]]] is thin and ineffectual, unwilling to commit to being for anything, or against anything other than the very abstract idea of war.

The plot follows three young men – Giuliano, Christian, and Little Killer – who are scavenging in a region of small villages being bombed by enemy forces. They’re not in the armed forces, and they never encounter anything like regular armed forces, not even as much as seeing a bomber in the sky. They’re supposedly in the middle of a war, but they are actually seen in a mostly-depopulated landscape, drifting into gangsterhood.

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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: A Pair of Minxes

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: A Pair of Minxes

DC Comics caused a bit of a ruckus late last year when they announced their new Minx line of comics. Minx was avowedly an attempt to drag the large audience – mostly young, mostly female – for translated Japanese [[[manga]]] back to American creators by giving them books in formats and styles similar to manga. Some feminists took an instant loathing to the name, and to the fact that most of the announced creators were male, but everyone seemed to think that the idea was a good one. (Though I’m still surprised that no one has done the obvious thing: spend the money to start up an American equivalent of Shojo Beat. The manga system works so well partly because the periodicals act as try-out books and party because popular series can be sold twice, as periodicals and books. Trying to create a manga-like market with only collections is like trying to ride a bicycle on one wheel – you can do it, if you’re Curious George, but it’s difficult and slow.)

I’ve recently read two of the four Minx launch titles, and thought it would be interesting to look at them together. (The other two, which I haven’t seen, were Good as Lily by Derek Kirk Kim and Jesse Hamm and [[[The P.L.A.I.N. Janes]]] by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg. And more books have already been announced to follow.) I’ll admit that I’m not the target audience for Minx’s books – I’m about twenty years too old, and sport the wrong variety of wedding tackle – but I am definitely the audience for a new book by the creative team behind My Faith in Frankie, and for a new book written by Andi Watson. And I’m certainly part of the audience for interesting, new American comics done well, no matter who they’re supposedly aimed at.

Let’s start with Re-Gifters, which is both more essentially conventional in its story and more successful in the end. It is a reunion of the crew behind [[[My Faith in Frankie]]], down to the publisher and editor – and the story has certain parallels to Frankie, as well. Our main character is a dark-haired young woman (Jen Dik Seong, aka Dixie), with a blonde best friend (Avril, who starts to narrate the story but is stopped quickly). Dixie thinks she’s crazy about a blonde boy (Adam), who turns out to be not quite as all that as our heroine at first thought. The narration, in Dixie’s voice, is also a bit reminiscent of Frankie’s. But that’s about the end of the parallels: Dixie’s story is completely down-to-earth, without any gods or other supernatural elements. (It’s also aimed at a younger audience than Frankie’s, so there’s no sex, either, and Dixie is a couple of years younger than Frankie was.)

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DENNIS O’NEIL: (Hey, Dude, ain’t he ever gonna git done yakkin’ about) Continued Stories

DENNIS O’NEIL: (Hey, Dude, ain’t he ever gonna git done yakkin’ about) Continued Stories

Last week, we were discussing the cons of continued stories, specifically what’s wrong with them, and we posited that they have a major problem in the difficulty new readers (or audiences) have in understanding the plot and characters. I said that there were remedies for this problem and now I’ll suggest, a bit timidly, that though remedies exist, nothing is foolproof.

Which brings us to the second difficulty with this kind of narrative, one closely related to the first. A potential reader who knows that the entertainment in front of him is a serial and that he’s missed earlier installments might think he’s come to the party too late, and so he won’t be tempted to enter it. Admittedly, this has more to do with marketing than stortytelling, but anyone who thinks that sales departments and creative departments aren’t entwined tighter than the snakes on a ceduceus isn’t paying attention.

There are probably more cons, but let’s let the subject rest with those two – we don’t want to beat anything to death, do we? – and proceed on to the pros.

Pro number one: Serialized stories build audience/reader loyalty. If you like the story you’ll want to learn what happens next and how the problems are solved and you’ll keep returning to satisfy your curiosity.

Pro number two (and this, to me, is the biggie): Serials present storytelling opportunities rare in other forms, if they exist at all. Continued narratives allow the storyteller to present a complex plot and a lot of subplots, as well as stuff that might not directly relate to the plot(s) but is, well, amusing.

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DENNIS O’NEIL: A Superman For Our Time

DENNIS O’NEIL: A Superman For Our Time

When we’re in a somber mood, which is an easy kind of mood to be in these days, we hope that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were not prophets. Joe and Jerry were, of course, the creators of Superman, and way back in 1938 they told what’s become known as Superman’s origin story.

Surely you’re familiar with it; it’s been retold and edited and redacted and emended and amended and recast in comics, in movies and books and on television, and probably video games, for these past 68 years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some earnest young writer is, at this moment, reworking it yet again. But in the event your long-term memory is gebollixed for some reason, I’ll give you the trading card version.

Jor-El, a scientist, tells the poobahs of his civilization on the planet Krypton that their entire world is soon to disintegrate. The poobahs refuse to believe him and – oops – the darn world does blow itself to bits. Jor-El does manage to get his son away in a spacecraft before the final blooey. The kid lands on Earth and becomes a mighty champion of justice, etc. etc.

If I were to rewrite this familiar story, I might consider making Jor-El an environmentalist who’s worried about, let’s say, global warming. And maybe, in this version, the poobahs are politicians who take Jor-El’s carefully reasoned and scientifically unimpeachable work, which Mr. El has presented in the form of a document, and had someone with negligible scientific credentials edit Mr. El’s writing so heavily that it’s meaning is altered.

I mean, my suggested revamp isn’t really too far from the original, is it? What’s scary is that it isn’t far at all from some recent real-life history. And that’s why, despite my great respect for Messrs. Siegel and Shuster, I hope they’re lousy prophets. Remember how their story ended? The poobahs insisted they were right and Jor-El was wrong, despite plenty of contrary evidence, and – Blooey!

If we were to redo, once again, what Joe and Jerry began with, we might consider expanding it to allow a look at the poobahs. The trick in doing this kind of thing is to ask, if these fictional characters were real, what kind of people would they be? Not conventionally “evil;” at least, they wouldn’t think of themselves as “evil;” no one does.

But arrogant, certainly: so sure of their own unchallenged superiority that they feel they don’t have to listen to, much less heed, anyone else. And prisoners of their own egos, which would not allow them to admit ever, being wrong. And not only greedy, but able to rationalize their greed, if there were a profit to be made from their acts.

All that would congeal into deep, impenetrable ignorance. Not lack of education, nor stupidity, but ignorance, which, in this context, we might define as a refusal to acknowledge the truth that’s available to them.

I’d like to read that story. In a comic book, not in a newspaper.

RECOMMENDED READING: The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins.

Dennis O’Neil is an award-winning editor and writer of comic books like Batman, The Question, Iron Man, Green Lantern and/or Green Arrow, and The Shadow, as well as all kinds of novels, stories and articles.

Artwork TM and © DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

Dune redubbed, 2001 sped-up

Dune redubbed, 2001 sped-up

Courtesy of the folks at Sequential Pictures, this re-imagining of Dune is just so very wrong.

I’m the only one who actually liked the original Dune flick, aren’t I? sigh  Also, via Fanboy.com, it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 5 Seconds:

That length seems about right to me…

GLENN HAUMAN: Literature of ethics, revisited

I’ve been kicking around these ideas around for a while but never codified them until Jim Henley wrote his famous blogposts and essay on the Literature of Ideas. Henley’s thesis boils down to “If science fiction is the literature of ideas, the superhero story is the literature of ethics. Or say, rather, it should be.”

Now for the backstory. This isn’t verbatim, but as I know and at least briefly worked with all the people here, I suspect it’s pretty close.

In the early 1970’s, the late great Julius Schwartz took over editorial duties on the Superman comics line from Mort Weisinger. Julie hired Dennis O’Neil to write the series, and O’Neil knocked Superman’s power levels down to about the level of his earliest appearances — no heat vision, no x-ray vision, no super-breath, no flying through space unaided, and so on. O’Neil was quoted saying that the reason for the change was that he found it difficult and/or uninteresting “to write about a character who could destroy distant galaxies by listening hard.”

O’Neil’s tenure on Superman lasted for about a year, and then the reins were handed over to Elliot S. Maggin. Elliot bumped Superman’s power levels back up to where they were, and approached writing Superman this way: if you have a character who can do anything, the only story avenues left to you are ethical ones. But in this area, there’s a lot of ground: “What was Superman’s relationship to his charges, the people of the Earth? To the authoritative functionaries of the rest of the Universe like the Guardians and, by extension, those who might be considered deities? What were the limits of Superman’s responsibilities? Were there differences between the real limits of his responsibilities and his perception of those responsibilities? What role did his heritage, both on Earth and among the stars, play in the determination of his actions? What long-term effects were coming about as a result of his intercession?”

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