Armchair Story Editing: MOON

While spitballing story ideas with my creative partner Fred via e-mail I brought up the film Moon as an example of a story that I felt missed it's own point. This particular exchange felt interesting enough to share with others, so here we are.

We were discussing how sometimes neat concepts are ignored or merely used to service plot, whether mediocre or great, and how I dislike that and often wonder what could have been. Prometheus was an obvious example but also an easy target. So I used Moon because it's actually fairly beloved by film buffs and sci-fi lovers alike.

I love science fiction and I enjoyed Moon, especially Sam Rockwell's performance. I didn't analyze it because I feel it's a bad movie, but because even good material can go astray.

Spoilers, obviously...

[On stories that bury the lead...] I didn't totally love Moon for similar reasons. You have a guy working in isolation on a lunar base who believes he's soon going home to earth but doesn't know he's in fact a disposable life form owned and manufactured by a corporation. There's an elaborate charade to keep him unaware of his fate that includes an AI nanny that runs everything anyway.

By having the AI there, you've made the need for a human superintendent unnecessary, and there goes your story.*

*My point being that if the whole facility is automated and looked after by AI, it seems redundant to have a single human watching over things. It's been a few years since seeing the film, and I guess it can be argued that Rockwell's character served as a maintenance worker since the plot kicks into gear when he ventures out to fix a malfunction of some kind. But since those difficulties appeared few and far between, I maintain it would be more efficient to send a repair crew when problems arise as opposed having someone up there at all times. I would even argue that simple robots navigated by workers from Earth or a space station could also serve to that end. But okay, I'm nitpicking...

I realized the only reason the story was structured the way it was was to have this twist--OH! He's a clone!* It was a decent movie, but even the conclusion felt too neat; he goes back to Earth to blow the lid off this corporation that's manufacturing human life for the express purpose of slave labor and we don't get to fucking see that? The movie buried the real lead to service a plot twist that was only kind of neat.

*The reveal actually comes midway in the film. It's somewhat obvious but doesn't feel cheap, neither does it rely on the twist-factor to sell the premise like an M. Night Shyamalan movie. In fact the second act proved most interesting because it focused on the two Sam Rockwells interacting with each other. However this relationship is cut short in the third act when a crew from HQ back on Earth arrives to eliminate both Sams (probably). The consequences of Sam's return to Earth are relayed in news headlines delivered in monotonous voiceovers by news anchors.

If I was tasked with reworking that movie, I'd ask myself what was trying to be said. Make it a statement about North America's outsourcing to China, and how Chinese laborers practically live and die in their work environments. These people aren't in the dark [about their situation]. Their eyes are wide open to that fact. So I'd make Sam Rockwell either perfectly aware of his circumstance, or have no AI for him to interact with. Have someone on a screen ordering him to do this and that, see him running this rat race to meet deadlines and be super productive. Have the situation be so absurd that audiences will go "WHY would anyone put themselves through that willingly? How horrible!" Then have him die, get replaced, and maybe the new clone is defective and doesn't adhere the order of things. Life finds a way, so to speak. He finds a way to get back to earth and tells the world what's going on. "This corporation has an army of clones--human lives with no rights working until they die!"

Then nobody cares because they'd rather listen to their iPods or read BuzzFeed on their iPads and the escaped clone DIES alone and worthless.

If you haven't seen Moon and still wish to after reading this, you totally should. It's good, original sci-fi and that should always be supported.

 

 

The God Emperor of Dune

Caesar was cool and all, but on this Ides of March I decided to celebrate an emperor who is a personal favourite of mine: Leto Atreides II, God Emperor of Dune!

You guys, Leto II is seriously epic. Sure he's fictional--science fictional no less, but that doesn't stop me from tipping my hat to one serious baller.

First off, he gets serious points for being from outer space. Who do you know has ruled anything from outer space? No one. Don't even lie! Newt Gingrich may blab about potential U.S. moon colonies in 2020, but that's peanuts compared to Leto II who ruled the entire known galaxy for over five thousand years!

Secondly, he's a horrific hybrid of a man and sandworm! His grotesque form has given him immense strength and has made him seemingly immortal, hence his god-like status.

Thirdly, his sandworm form means he's constantly ingesting the Spice, giving him oracular precognition that allows him to see thousands of years into the future!

With all these awesome attributes combined, Leto II put all of humankind onto his "Golden Path", a strategy that involved monopolizing the all-important Spice and ruling with an iron fist for thousands of years. Everyone thought he was a huge dick. In fact, he even looked like a huge, Lovecraftian, monster penis from hell. But he was totally doing humanity a big favour, you guys!

In his wisdom, Leto II knew humanity's total dependance of one single resource meant our inevitable extinction. So he made civilization go cold turkey, forcing humanity to adapt and sustain itself in new ways despite his tyrannical reign. Epic!

His enemies were powerless to defeat him. Oh how they tried! Of course, Leto II foresaw his undoing, and could perhaps have stopped it. However, once Leto II felt certain the course of humanity's progress was safely on his Golden Path, he accepted his fate and went willingly into a body of water--water, the sandworm's Achille's heel!

Still, a pearl of Leto II's being lived on in each and every sandworm created from his demise; an infinite Fuck you! to the whole species.

Comics That Were, Are, and Will Be...

Last night I attended the launch party for Infinite Kung Fu, created entirely by Toronto artist Kagan McLeod. It is an amazing work roughly ten years in the making. Top Shelf's production on the book itself is slick and stylish, yet the texture is still indicative of printed pulps and manga that no doubt inspired this work, but which it easily manages to transcend. The end result is a beautiful marriage of two cinematic genres (martial arts and exploitation films,) that looks and feels like nothing else on book shelves to date.

The art is energetic and tremendously fun. Despite the fact that for years Kagan's work has been seen in countless magazines and websites, my first exposure to his stuff was on the covers of Kill Shakespeare, another Canadian created comic that delivers a refreshing twist on the familiar. I'm thrilled that I can now dive into Kagan's finished product like the gluttonous art and comic lover I am.

The event was fine enough. A nice venue filled with interesting people that I could hardly hear or understand on account of the great music laid down by live DJ's. I had a chance to speak with the man of the hour as he signed and doodled in my copy. Perhaps it was the alcohol in our veins or the energy in the air, but I dare say he was pleased to see me. I killed a completely different conversation by talking about beards. It was awesome. After lamenting the loss of my beard to a pretty neat comic creator, he, who shall go nameless, nodded and said "O-K guys! I'll see ya..." and promptly lost himself in a sea of people. What can I say? I have the gift of the anti-gab.



I thought to myself on the drive home, "ten years? whoa." Perhaps not ten solid years, but years of work into a creator-owned labor of love. Impressive... inspiring. Although it's startling how time flies. I've worked on Teuton now for two years, and it's funny to count that time in pages produced (not that many: 112). Yet that's nothing compared to a story of my own that I've been harboring since my early teens. It's existed mainly as doodles on scraps of paper, in the margins of homework assignments, and every so often as sequential pages that are soon abandoned and re-tooled.

It began by taking a summer workshop at Sheridan college on the construction of the comic page. I think the year was 2000, and it felt like a big deal. I remember reading comics on the Oakville bus--Matt Murdock was exposed as Daredevil, and he was lying his way to (relative) safety--and watching Making Comics The Marvel Way on VHS.

In the end I had made my very first finished page of sequential story-telling. There it is on the left. I remember thinking, "I could do this every day!"

In fact, I spent the rest of that summer fully-charged and ready to make the comics world mine--by force, if necessary. Luckily it never came to that. I simply put pen to paper and got making what I then imagined was my magnum opus. I called it Century, and it was going to be awesome you guys!

The overall story followed a private organization called Century and its agents who were sent about the business of unlocking the crucial mysteries of the universe. Easy! I drew most of it in sharpie and sent photocopies to every publisher I could think of. I received a very tender rejection letter from Heavy Metal, which I thought was too bad at the time, as I believed it was the very thing they were looking for.

A few years after that, I decided to give Century another go, perfectly certain that "this" time everything would come together, and they should already begin engraving my name on the coveted crown to the comic kingdom. This just goes to show how much you actually know when you're 15. Anything is possible and attainable--which I suppose remains true, but I'm 26 now and am just getting ankle deep in the world of creating comics professionally.

Here are pages from the very first comic book I ever made, and the second comic I ever made:



I scrapped what I had done and shelved it away in my brain, all the while spawning little stories in the back of my head, imagining scenes and depictions of things I found thrilling. Essentially, I've been subconsciously writing a love letter to my very favourite genre: science fiction.

This story usually includes a gruff, animal-humanoid from race of interstellar barbarians; an outlaw space bandit in the form of a mischievous female; and a androgynous amnesiac who just might be the creator of the universe... if only they could remember. I've taken them to places filled with horror and wonderment, have pitted them against fearsome creatures and tossed them in explosive laser shoot-outs. And it almost always begins with imminent doom on a frozen landscape. It's all been terrific fun! Now, if only I could just put it all on paper.



My last attempt (but for from final) was nearly four years ago, when my good buddy John Lewis and I swapped ideas for a line of comics that would collectively be told under one banner: The Crown: A Princely Dreadful.

So What happened? Well John got married, bought a house, and became a responsible citizen with a real job at Pearson Publishing. I worked a handful of dispiriting jobs until I found work on The Vampire Conspiracy. That imaginary playground still exists, and perhaps some day I will get around to finishing what I started three times already. Seeing guys like Kagan celebrate the fruition of a decades work is certainly inspiring, and I get to wondering what my trio of space-trippers are up to.