Storytelling Engines: Bat Lash

(or "Right Story, Wrong Reality")

Looking back over "Bat Lash", as it's presented in the latest "Showcase Presents" volume, one has to wonder exactly what went wrong. It's clear something must not have worked in setting up the elements that go into a long-running series, because "Showcase Presents: Bat Lash" is only 240 pages long, less than half the length of a usual volume. What was it that made "Bat Lash" so short-lived? Was it a lack of a good protagonist? A poor setting? Weak supporting characters? Uninteresting antagonists?

Clearly, it wasn't a bad creative team. Sergio Aragones and Denny O'Neil are two legendary writers, and Nick Cardy's art is genuinely spectacular. This really is a book with some of the best in the business in it, doing stellar work. But maybe if we look a little closer at Bat Lash's storytelling engine, we'll get more of a hint.

Bat Lash, star of the series, is a comedy Western character (no big surprise, coming from the pen of comic genius Aragones.) He's presented as a sensitive dandy, a poetic rogue with an eye for beauty who's entirely out of place in the Wild West...except that honestly, he's deceiving everyone with that act, himself included. Bat's actually a thief, a scoundrel, a con artist, and a deadly fighter to boot. (The opening story, where he tries to get a beautiful lady to cook him dinner in a town being taken over by bandits, is a comedy masterpiece.)

This is, fundamentally, a satire of Westerns...and given that Aragones and Mark Evanier managed to make a satire of sword-and-sorcery epics last over a hundred issues of continuous publication, it's no stretch to think that Aragones and O'Neil could think up enough Bat Lash stories to last a similar length of time. After all, there are just as many Western tropes to satirize as there are barbarian hero tropes to mock.

But unfortunately, the types of Westerns that were popular in the late 60s, when Bat Lash was created, were not the light-hearted Westerns of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. By this era, the only Westerns that managed to retain an audience in a distinctly sci-fi age were the grimmer, darker spaghetti Westerns that Clint Eastwood made famous, leaving very little place for a Western hero who plucks flowers for his hat and has a taste for pheasant in aspic. The last two issues of the series emphasized his tragic past, perhaps in an effort to reposition the character for that audience, but it was too little, too late.

Which is, sometimes, the unfortunate truth about creating a storytelling engine. Sometimes, even when you've created a good, solid, well-crafted status quo that can generate hundreds of stories...the audience just isn't there for them. Tastes can change, and sometimes you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thankfully, we live in an age where it seems like just about everything's being archived...giving a series like "Bat Lash", which never got the chance it deserved, a little time to shine.

5 Comments

• At July 21, 2009, Gavin wrote:

  Sergio's best work to this date has still got to be his margin work in Mad Magazine. I love ...

• At July 21, 2009, Jeff Ryan wrote:

  No one is better at drawing a vacant face than Sergio.

• At July 21, 2009, Bernard the Poet wrote:

  John, it's good to have you back, I've missed you.

  Saying that, I'm not sure that I'd agree with you central ...

• At July 21, 2009, Patrick Joseph wrote:

  With Maverick, Support Your Local Sheriff, and Support Your Local Gunfighter it seems to me that the satirical cowboy was ...

• At July 21, 2009, Robert R. wrote:

  I tend to think that Bat Lash was just too smart for his own good. It's a great book, but ...

Storytelling Engines: Darkman

(or "The Kitchen-Sink Superhero")

Sam Raimi's been pretty open about two things when it comes to the creation of Darkman; one, that he wanted to create a superhero who could sustain an open-ended series of films, and two, that he drew on a lot of other superheroes for influence. The character winds up being an interesting mix of Wolverine, Swamp Thing, Batman, the Unknown Soldier and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (although it's worth mentioning that Raimi was thinking more "Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Phantom of the Opera" than Swamp Thing and the TMNT. But the conversation on the line of descent of those characters can wait until another day.)

So what you wind up with is a scientist who gets disfigured by crime bosses and left for dead. (Like Alec Holland.) He survives, though, and sets up a laboratory in a disused warehouse (an abandoned train station in the sequels), scavenging and stealing old technology and kitbashing it into new equipment. (Like the Turtles...although admittedly more the cartoon versions than the comics.) This technology allows him to recreate his brilliant discovery, a synthetic skin that allows him to assume the identity of anyone for 99 minutes at a time, covering his burns with a seemingly normal face for a while. (A la the Unknown Soldier--he even wears bandages when not using a mask.) But the formula isn't stable, so a normal life is forever denied him. (And we're right back to Swamp Thing again, along with the Thing, the Hulk, Robotman, and literally hundreds of other heroes and villains.)

Except that there's another angle to the character. This one is a scientist who gets disfigured by crime bosses and left for dead. (Like Alec Holland.) Surgeons save his life with an operation that nullfifies the pain of his horrific burning, but at a price--he no longer has any feeling in his body at all. He's impervious to pain, but the feelings of disconnection and alienation leave him with wild surges of uncontrolled anger and berserker rage, complete with spikes of adrenalin that give him superhuman strength. He fights crime as a shadowy creature of the night, barely able to keep his fury in check. (See, that's where the Wolverine comes in.)

And there, in a nutshell, is the problem with the Darkman series (as opposed to the Darkman movie, which makes this dichotomy its central conflict.) On the one hand, you have a superhero whose powers lend themselves to plots involving intrigue and subterfuge, as his ability to impersonate anyone leads him to set criminals against each other while he steals their assets to further his research while posing as them. It requires a hero who's patient and clever, calm under pressure and able to outfox anyone at their own game. (And who just happens to be a gifted mimic, because the masks don't change your voice, but Peyton Westlake seems to be in luck there. Amazing how that happens soemtimes.)

On the other hand, you have a superhero who's filled with barely constrained fury, who could snap at any second and frequently does. He defeats enemies by overwhelming them with sheer brutal power, savaging them with his relentless, single-minded anger and devotion to punishing them for their crimes. (One of the best moments in the movies is when Darkman is dangling from a helicopter piloted by the villains, furiously waving away a police chopper and shouting, "He's mine!")

These two aspects of the character don't always mesh well, forcing writers to make the character behave inconsistently as the plot demands. He winds up having a sort of convenient "pocket berserker fury", only to be brought out when it's time for a big action sequence and the writer has run out of other ideas. The Darkman sequels demonstrate this problem--both of them turn from complex caper films into action mayhem, sacrificing the payoffs of a well-timed twist for a big set piece where Darkman beats a bunch of guys up with his super-strength.

Which isn't the only problem with them--it's a struggle, having gone to all the work the original did to try to set him up as a plausible superhero in a realistic world, to find antagonists outlandish enough to fight a man with super-strength and plastic faces that last 99 minutes (more in the dark, but that's an angle that always seems to get forgotten--mainly because a 99 minute timer makes for more drama.) The sequels introduce super-strength drugs and laser cannons, elements that jar with the atmosphere established in the first film. This might eventually be overcome simply through acclimatization; as you become more accustomed to a weird world, it becomes easier to accept that drug kingpins routinely employ insane scientists that design exotic particle beam weapons with nuclear batteries. But unfortunately, Darkman never got the time to make that kind of transition in the movies or on TV. Hopefully, returning to his spiritual home in the comics will give the character a bit more space to resolve these contradictions and come out of them as a more unified hero.

And with that, I close what will be my last Storytelling Engines column for a while--I'm putting the series on hiatus for a bit, hopefully not indefinitely. It's not a lack of time or energy, it's a lack of material--having covered just about every significant Marvel and DC character, and big swathes of movies and TV, I have gone through just about every open-ended series that I have books/DVDs of. Naturally, if anyone wants to buy me some DVDs or trade paperbacks so that I can watch/read them and do a column on them, they can feel free to leave a comment to that effect and we can talk, but for now, I think the series will go on hiatus while I "reload". There will still be a Monday(-ish) column on my blog every week, rest assured, and the entire series of Storytelling Engines columns is re-running from the beginning on Xenagia.com for those of you who missed the early installments (shameless plug alert!), but for right now, I'm putting it to bed after 114 columsn for a nice, long, well-deserved nap. Thanks to everyone who read it, and thanks even more to the people who told me so!

Thanks for the columns, John! - Brian

6 Comments

• At April 22, 2009, googum wrote:

  John,

  You've done a great job on these, and fingers crossed that one will ...

• At April 22, 2009, joshschr wrote:

  John, I've enjoyed your series as well. I learned a lot about characters I've never read before and ...

• At April 22, 2009, Joe Rice wrote:

  Ha, I was just about to post "Darkman? Really?!? I think you've run out of possibilities."

• At April 22, 2009, Stephen wrote:

  Going to miss these - they're good pieces.

  And Darkman will always be, for me, one of those great underdeveloped franchises. ...

• At April 23, 2009, chroom wrote:

  Thanks for a very enjoyable couple of years doing these, John. I really appreciate the time and thought you've ...

• At April 23, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  Cheers for the columns John - they were good fun!

Storytelling Engines: Doom Patrol

(or "Synergy And Synchronicity")

Among comic book historians, there's a lot of discussion over the origins of the Doom Patrol. Not the actual origins, of course; we all know that the brilliant, irascible scientist known as "The Chief" found three people who had been transformed by unusual accidents into unwilling super-heroes, and brought them together to fight such unusual menaces as the Brotherhood of Evil, the Animal-Vegetable-Mineral Man, and General Immortus (the same villain who had crippled the Chief.) But there are enough similarities between the Doom Patrol and the X-Men, and the Doom Patrol and the Fantastic Four, for people to wonder...did series writer Arnold Drake inspire Stan Lee and Jack Kirby? Or was he inspired by them?

The truth is probably that both of them were inspired by events around them. Just like animals will evolve similar features in similar environments, comics creators wind up with their own examples of convergent evolution. Both Drake and Lee/Kirby were trying to create a storytelling engine that would work in a very particular marketplace, and both were writing at the same time. It's actually not too surprising that both of them would have hit upon some very similar ways of generating story ideas.

For starters, they were both operating in an era where the installation of the Comics Code was a recent event. The Code had the effect of killing off the horror comic, but not the demand for one. At the same time, the post-World War II era caused a massive boom in science fiction, as the world that sci-fi promised seemed to be coming ever closer to reality. Atomic rockets, space travel, and seemingly even aliens (this was the golden age of "saucer sightings", too) made science fiction seem tantalizingly close to science fact. And of course, Julius Schwartz had just made super-heroes popular again by rebooting all of DC's classic heroes with a sci-fi twist.

So when tinkering with ideas for a popular series, it was pretty natural to think about doing a book that was a) super-heroic, because super-heroes were popular, b) science fiction themed, because science fiction was even more popular than super-heroes, and c) bordering on horror, because while they couldn't actually have horror comics, the audience's tastes for the bizarre and grotesque had never really abated.

And so Drake, in much the same way and at much the same time as his Marvel counterparts, hit upon the idea of an unwilling hero. Not "unwilling" in the sense of "reluctant", but in the sense of being forced into the role by powers that he or she couldn't get rid of. Each of the Doom Patrol's core members explores a different sub-theme of this idea. Robotman is literally trapped in a body that is freakish in appearance, and can no longer live a normal life; becoming a super-hero gives his life meaning again, even though it can never be enough to make up for what he's lost. Negative Man has powers, but they're not the sort of thing you'd dream of being able to do yourself; when he unleashes the N-Man, he's reduced to a helpless spectator instead of getting to save the day himself. And Elasti-Girl? Even though she looks normal, she's nonetheless the victim of prejudice because of what people know she's capable of. The Chief is the only one without super-powers, but he's an outcast from society because of his temperament and his intellect even before he loses the use of his legs.

Each of these angles provides inspiration for a different kind of story. Robotman's stories constantly focus on how his body is fundamentally different from a human's; he can be mangled, ripped to shreds, blown up, and still survive. (In one memorable story, he winds up sacrificing his limbs, one by one, to fight a criminal.) Negative Man is constantly pushing against the limits his power imposes on him, trying to find ways to be a hero even though all he ever does is keel over and try not to die before his other self can return to him. Elasti-Girl is always tempted by the thought that she could return to regular society any time she wants; she, of all the team, is there at least somewhat by choice. And the Chief is constantly probing the boundaries of science, while running the Doom Patrol as only an irascible, anti-social misfit can (Grant Morrison's run exacerbates his personality problems, but it's amazing how well the supposedly revisionist take fits in with what Drake originally wrote) and trying to contribute despite being powerless in many ways.

You also see convergent evolution in the "design theme" of the villains of the different series. As mentioned above, "bizarre and grotesque" was in vogue at the time, and that starting point inspired villains like the Brain, Monsieur Mallah and Madame Rouge (the Brotherhood of Evil) just as easily as it did the Vulture, the Leader and the Mole Man. The Doom Patrol winds up with a smaller rogue's gallery than the FF or Spider-Man (perhaps because Lee had the benefit of working with Kirby and Ditko, both legendary writers and creators as well as artists--not a slight against Doom Patrol artist Bruno Premiani, of course, whose design work on the Doom Patrol's heroes and villains was elegant and timeless.) But Drake makes sure that the villains he does have are good story generators; General Immortus alone could fuel a series for years.

The Doom Patrol have always been something of a "cult" series, which seems slightly unfair given that just down the road, Marvel was making a comics empire based on very similar concepts. Perhaps they just never fit into the DC universe (which may be why they packed up and went off to Vertigo for a while.) But despite their cult status, they've endured--a strong storytelling engine tends to do that, you see. Because every writer starts as a reader, and when you pick up a series with a good storytelling engine, you can't help but get ideas on what stories you would tell with those characters...sort of like how Paul Kupperberg and Grant Morrison did, years later, when they respectively revived and revitalized the Doom Patrol. Their unwilling heroes might have changed a bit as the culture changed, but the storytelling engine remained sound.

11 Comments

• At April 16, 2009, Bill Reed wrote:

  I am very excited to finally get to read the Drake stories in the new Showcase volume.

• At April 16, 2009, Sijo wrote:

  When you stop and think about it, the standard superhero setting -where only a small segment of the population gets ...

• At April 16, 2009, myra wrote:

  A long time ago, Humanity sold planet Earth to a group called the Evers in order to gain peace and ...

• At April 16, 2009, Nitz the Bloody wrote:

  " Morrison basically used it as an excuse to pour out all his weird ideas, which, while interesting, felt really ...

• At April 16, 2009, Gavin wrote:

  Morrison's run on Doom Patrol is one of my favorite runs on any comic series, ever. He recognized the ...

• At April 16, 2009, Jack Norris wrote:

  Seconded. If I were trying to get someone into reading Morrison, "Crawling From The Wreckage" is where I'd start every ...

• At April 16, 2009, Anthony Strand wrote:

  I gotta go buy that new Showcase Presents DP. I've only most of those comics once, and I could definitely ...

• At April 16, 2009, Luis Dantas wrote:

  From what little I have read of Byrne's Doom Patrol, it seemed to have little interest in being about the ...

• At April 16, 2009, Dean wrote:

  I loved the Morrison "Doom Patrol". That title, Gaiman's "Sandman" and James Robinson's "Starman" were the only comics that ...

• At April 16, 2009, Dean wrote:

  Sijo said:

  Now we’re having Keith Giffen handle them. That means it’ll either be 4th-wall breakingly funny, or depressingly tragic, or ...

• At April 17, 2009, Jeff Ryan wrote:

  RE: "just down the road..."

  A missed opportunity for a Danny the Street reference.

Storytelling Engines: Battletech

(or "Subverting History")

I'm not saying anything particularly new when I say that science fiction is rarely about the actual future. It's really more about the present, translated into an allegorical form, and the venerable "Battletech" franchise is no exception. It doesn't even really disguise it, with the various Great Houses of the Inner Sphere being clear analogies of various Earth nations--it doesn't really make much sense when you sit down and analyze it that these lines of sheer demarcation between a Japanese monoculture, a Chinese monoculture, et cetera would actually translate across hundreds of light years and centuries into the future, but it makes emotional sense to us because it's a recognizable allegory for our world. It feels right that in the fall of the Star League (Rome), the Inner Sphere (Europe) would splinter into bickering, warring nation-states constantly jockeying for political advantage, with ComStar (the Catholic Church) as the primary mediator of disputes. (You could probably write a paper on the symbolism of ComStar, guardians of faster-than-light communications, acting in the role of priests, but not today.)

But having built a universe that makes emotional sense to us, complete with a sympathetic British/American heroic House as the hero (the Federated Suns sort of blend that line as necessary, much like House Marik straddles a line between American and Prussian--again, you could probably do a paper on the way that two of the major strains of American ancestry are divided up in the Battletech universe)...having set up the universe to feel comfortable to us armchair historians, Battletech deliberately subverts the audience's expectations of how this "future history" will flow. So we see the allegorical China joining with Japan and Germany to repel an invasion by Britain and Norway, then a shift as the alliance between the latter two falters and the Japanese analog winds up allied with the pseudo-Britain, while the futuristic church of ComStar splinters along ideological lines--OK, so that bit's fairly historically accurate, but you get my point. Having established factions that we recognize, the Battletech writers then have them behave in ways that are very different from their historical analogs, which serves to heighten the sense of surprise at every plot twist.

The ultimate example of this is, of course, the Clans. The first era of Battletech books established the legend of "the Star League", the united and glorious nation that splintered into the various Great Houses. It felt comfortable, understandable, the kind of legend that you see a lot in fantasy and science fiction. The Star League drew upon historical Rome (which wasn't nearly as benevolent or enlightened as its legends would indicate, but that's what happens when you write all the history books) to create a backstory that made emotional sense to the readers. Nobody saw it coming when the lost legions of the Star League came back as ticked-off, bloody-minded Spartan-style conquerors sweeping waves of devastation through the Inner Sphere and forcing them into a tenuous alliance, any more than you'd expect to hear about the Roman legions coming back in World War II armed with machine guns. It was a complete paradigm shift in the whole concept of the Battletech universe, and yet one that was foreshadowed expertly in hindsight.

Once the Clans opened up the second era of the Battletech universe, it was even easier to generate real suspense. If something so major could change so rapidly, then surely just about anything could happen? And in some ways, it did. Several major plot twists marked the later Battletech novels of this era, as the political maneuvering reached a fever pitch. Unfortunately, many of the storylines were left unfinished as the property changed hands and jumped ahead about sixty years (to the "Dark Ages" era.) Still, that decision is in some ways typical of the Battletech line. It remains strong and vital in some ways because of the writers' willingness to take risks. There are no sacred cows in the Battletech universe, not even history itself.

4 Comments

• At April 11, 2009, Andrew wrote:

  "(You could probably write a paper on the symbolism of ComStar, guardians of faster-than-light communications, acting in the role of ...

• At April 11, 2009, mightygodking wrote:

  Steiner was German. Marik was a sort of pan-Slavic mix.

• At April 12, 2009, Pedro Bouça wrote:

  The ComStar high-tech as religion thing comes from Isaac Asimov's Foundation novels.

  I really like the BTech universe. Read pretty much ...

• At April 21, 2009, Rich wrote:

  Spoiler warnings, in case they're needed.

  I'd like to point out, the American/Canadian analogue was defined last year as the Terran ...

Storytelling Engines: Ambush Bug

(or "They Thought Him Up!")

The sub-title, for those of you not familiar with Keith Giffen's nigh-legendary humor creation, refers to Giffen's "secret origin" for the character. It's at once completely accurate and utterly defiant to the fans who worry deeply about the continuity of DC's fictional universe...but it's incomplete. So here, with apologies to Giffen, is the expanded and revised Secret Origin of Ambush Bug!

Ambush Bug began his career when a meteoric rush of inspiration landed him as a potential antagonist for Superman--not so much a character designed to carry his own series as a potential story-generator for an established hero. He was intended to be a madman in the "Joker" mold of things, a crazed killer with a teleporter that let him always stay one step ahead of the Man of Steel.

But after just one story, it became clear that a Joker-type killer didn't fit into the Superman "daylight hero" mythos. Ambush Bug's homicidal tendencies receded, and he reappeared as a wacky prankster whose antics frustrated and annoyed Superman. In addition to teleportation, he gained the power of superhuman satirism, a sort of denser pocket reality he carried within himself that overrode the reality of others. His new powers allowed him to escape from Arkham by being so crazy that they declared him sane just to get him out of their hair, allowed him multiple origins, and even got his own arch-nemesis in the form of an evil sock. This new version of the character suited Giffen's anarchic sense of humor much better--so well, in fact, that over his next few appearances, he became a hero instead of a villain (all the better to carry his own title with.)

But his new role created a potential instability in the very fabric of the DC universe--the heroes depended on verisimilitude and the suspension of disbelief to maintain their existence in the reader's imagination, but the sheer mass of Ambush Bug's dense satire was too heavy to suspend any disbelief. Already he'd deduced Superman's secret identity by noticing that his "disguise" was just a pair of glasses, and reduced reliable villain Kobra to a laughing stock. Things were getting dangerous. Ambush Bug had broken the Fourth Wall.

Eventually, by the time of his mini-series, Ambush Bug's humor had become so dense that he'd plummeted out of the DC universe completely. Finding himself outside the universe allowed him a perspective few other fictional characters possessed; he was able to spot inconsistencies, continuity errors, retcons, and make fun of them all. Giffen even created an antagonist for him in the form of "Jonni DC", a self-proclaimed hero whose job was to keep all the continuity clean and tidy (and get rid of anomalies/inconsistencies/wiseasses like Ambush Bug.) But with his power to exist outside of continuity, Ambush Bug had become effectively unkillable--how do you kill someone who just ignores his death and pops up five pages later?

But even though he couldn't be killed, Ambush Bug's powers had nonetheless gone completely out of control. By the end of his second mini-series and his later specials, Ambush Bug was so far outside the DC Universe that he was no longer capable of relating to it. His satirical weight was now so dense that plot logic simply collapsed into a singularity in his stories--the head of Julius Schwartz killing off Spike of "Sugar and Spike" was now just one more plot element, no more or less logical than anything else that happened in an Ambush Bug story. By the end of his Showcase Presents volume, Ambush Bug had become too bizarre to even be written, a catastrophic collapse of his storytelling engine into chaos that led to a long period of obscurity. It's only now that enough inspiration has accumulated to fuel a new mini-series. Can it sustain a character who is almost too anarchic to have a storytelling engine? In a series where you actually can do anything, does that help or hinder a writer? Only time will tell. Time, and DC Comics.

9 Comments

• At April 2, 2009, Gavin wrote:

  Ambush Bug didn't just break down the fourth wall, he annihilated it. Irwin Schwab is truly one of the ...

• At April 2, 2009, rwe1138 wrote:

  I'm curious as to what's the hold-up on the sixth issue of the mini.

• At April 2, 2009, The Mutt wrote:

  "I’m curious as to what’s the hold-up on the sixth issue of the mini."

  Giffen was about to start drawing it ...

• At April 2, 2009, Thok wrote:

  What better parody of event delays than an Ambush Bug mini delay?

• At April 2, 2009, HammerHeart wrote:

  AMBUSH BUG IS.

  And that's the basic premise behind DC's upcoming miniseries Final Crisis 2: Tawky Tawny's Revenge: Ambush Bug gets ...

• At April 2, 2009, Ricardo wrote:

  The delay is weird, considering Keith is never late in his books. Somehow, I think this is probably due to ...

• At April 2, 2009, Jeff Ryan wrote:

  Anyone else feel just wonderful for the episode of 52 where Ambush Bug shows up?

• At April 2, 2009, danjack wrote:

  AMBUSH BUG IS.

  this comment hurts my head.

• At April 2, 2009, Doug Atkinson wrote:

  My guess on the Ambush Bug #6 delay is that it was supposed to parody Final Crisis (since they'd been ...

Storytelling Engines: Sherlock Holmes

(or "The Ultimate Success")

I'm currently in the midst of reading Kelly Hale's fascinating (and undeservedly obscure) novel, "Erasing Sherlock", and it occurs to me that a large part of the reason it works so well is that the phenomenon it describes feels so real. The book, for those who haven't read it, is about a time-traveling historian who insinuates herself into the life of Holmes as a maid, in order to observe the Great Detective first-hand and discover details of his life, methods and motivations that Watson never wrote down. (Naturally, from there things Go Horribly Wrong, but I'll leave it to you to find out how. Amazon's still got it for sale...) The reason this feels so real is that large numbers of people do involve themselves in "The Great Game" of treating Watson's writings as actual accounts of a real person, analyzing and studying them with an almost obsessive fervor to learn everything they can about Sherlock Holmes...despite the fact that not only was Holmes not real, neither was Watson.

So what exactly is it that makes the Holmes canon such a magnificent storytelling engine that not only could it generate four novels and fifty-six short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, not only could it generate hosts of additional novels, short stories, TV shows and movies by authors like Kelly Hale, not only could it inspire fictional detectives like "Monk" and "House", but it could actually inspire people to treat it as though it was a genuinely non-fictional story about real people?

For starters, there's the character of Holmes himself. Doyle imbued the man with a brilliant complexity that lends astonishing verisimilitude to the stories. Holmes doesn't feel like a fictional character (and according to Doyle, was based on an actual person to some degree); he's mercurial, contradictory, displaying a full range of the moods and feelings that real human beings display (for better or worse, sometimes.) He's not exactly charming; in fact, you could make a good case that you wouldn't want to get stuck on a long train ride with the man. But he is fascinating, which is absolutely key for any character that the audience is going to be following for any length of time.

But don't underestimate the importance of Watson. For all that Holmes is the central character, Watson is as key to the series as the companion is to 'Doctor Who'. (Which reminds me, as long as I'm plugging non-canonical Holmes, if you can track down the sadly out-of-print 'All-Consuming Fire', by Andy Lane, you'll get an excellent Holmes/Doctor team-up.) Watson fulfills Holmes' emotional need to explain his brilliant deductions, but more than that, he provides a mechanism to get those deductions from Holmes' mind to the audience in a naturalistic way. A Holmes story without Watson would consist of Holmes grabbing a random man and saying, "He did it!" And where would be the fun in that?

But the final element, and the one that works the hardest to make the Holmes canon seem not just believable but actually real, is the world he operates in. Doyle set the series in what was, for him, the modern day, and grounded it in the familiar world around him. But Doyle's great gift was in bringing those details to life in ways that made them accessible even to someone who didn't live in Victorian London. To a reader picking up the Holmes series a hundred years later, Doyle paints a vivid picture of a time and place that we know to have been real, then inserts his fictional creations into them so seamlessly that it's almost impossible to find the gap. We can believe in a police plodder like Inspector Lestrade, or a matronly boarding-house owner like Mrs. Hudson, or the thousands of tiny details on everything from slum life to hansom cabs to politics that form the world Holmes operates in.

Because of that, it's small wonder that Holmes seems to have taken on a life of his own. Even when his own creator decided to kill him off once and for all, Holmes managed to survive because the audience wouldn't let him be dead. How real is he? He's got a survival instinct, that's how real he is.

7 Comments

• At March 10, 2009, Tiffany Korta wrote:

  Wow, I thought I was the only person who ever read any of the Faction Paradox series (which Erasing Sherlock ...

• At March 10, 2009, Chris McAree wrote:

  The Holmes canon was my favourite reading material as a child, and I still dip my toe from time to ...

• At March 10, 2009, Wings wrote:

  Love both characters and the stories are awesome. Always a good read.

  In fact, I just signed up for dailylit.com - ...

• At March 11, 2009, Paul wrote:

  My introduction to Holmes were the 1939-1946 films starring Basil Rathbone, which I would watch as part of the Friday ...

• At March 11, 2009, Stephen wrote:

  "(Which reminds me, as long as I’m plugging non-canonical Holmes, if you can track down the sadly out-of-print ‘All-Consuming Fire’, ...

• At March 11, 2009, Stu Shiffman wrote:

  Nice to see "Erasing Sherlock" cited here. It was an interesting take. As a Sherlockian, I see an awful ...

• At March 16, 2009, Eric Michael wrote:

  My first introduction to Sherlock Holmes was through the TV series with Jeremy Brett, that was being aired weekly on ...

Storytelling Engines: Marvel Horror, Part Two

(or "At Long Last, Failure!")

"Wait a second!" I hear you asking. "The only long-running series you've done two columns on are the X-Men and Spider-Man! Even the Fantastic Four didn't get a two-parter, and they're your 'favorite' comic! Why does 'Marvel Horror' get a second column?"

The answer is, "Because the first volume of 'Marvel Horror' and the second volume of 'Marvel Horror' are two completely different storytelling engines." The first volume was all about the Son of Satan and his sister, Satana, while the second volume collects together several failed attempts at ongoing horror series from Marvel's Bronze Age, when the restriction on horror comics was first lifted by the Comics Code. Marvel did an immensely successful Dracula series, a successful werewolf comic, a brief Frankenstein comic...but what else did they try?

The answers reveal a lot of interesting things about storytelling engines. Up to now, pretty much everything we've discussed has been popular and long-lived, to some degree or another, so the discussion has more or less centered on "What They Did Right". Now, as we look at some series that never made it past ten issues (and significantly less, in some cases) we can look at "What They Did Wrong".

First, we get the adventures of N'Kantu, "The Living Mummy". It's a pretty logical progression for horror--vampire, werewolf, Frankenstein monster, and then mummy. N'Kantu is a former slave who was punished for leading a revolt by being condemned to eternal life (spent buried alive, natch. Not much of a punishment if he just gets to live forever.) Modern-day archaeologists dig him up, he frees himself, and...

Yeah. That's the problem. He doesn't actually have a whole lot he wants to do, he's not particularly sociable--he's sort of altruistic, as far as it goes, but not in a way that would get him involved in any stories. His quest to restore his lost appearance (the immortality serum made him nigh-indestructible, but ravaged his features underneath the bandages) is vaguely interesting, but fairly selfish and ultimately a false status quo. We all know he's not going to get a cure, because the adventures of "The Living Guy" isn't going to sell any comics. With nowhere for the series to go, it ends after its first epic adventure.

Then we get "Brother Voodoo". Thanks to Fred Hembeck, Brother Voodoo is pretty much the poster child for lame characters everywhere, but it's pretty easy to see why Hembeck picked him as a target. Sorcerers and spell-casters are kind of tough sells in comics, because it's hard to get a handle on exactly what they can and can't do. When the writer can just invent new abilities whenever their backs are against the wall, it wrecks the drama. Add to that the fact that co-creator Len Wein didn't have a real interest in voodoo and didn't think that the real religion lent itself to a comic-book hero, the fact that he was an African-American character being written by a couple of forty-something white guys, the fact that he gets knocked out in just about every story he appears in and generally saves the day by being tied up and letting the bad guy defeat himself through sheer stupidity, and the fact that his arch-nemesis is a guy dressed up like a rooster, and it's not too hard to see the problems that led to a short stint as a headliner here.

After that, it's "Gabriel, the Devil Hunter", a character that I'd never heard of before now (and I have five volumes of handbooks to the Marvel Universe.) This one actually has a pretty compelling core concept and central character--Gabriel was a priest who was possessed by a demon that forced him to rip his own eye out, and managed to drive it away by branding himself with a crucifix. Now aware of the material dangers of Satan and his minions, he works as a sort of "renegade priest" with the help of a mysterious psychic.

Sounds like good stuff, and at first it is. But the "exorcism fad" that prompted the creation of the comic leads it down a fairly repetitive path; every issue, Gabriel goes to a new home where someone's been possessed by demons, and drives them out. Combine that with the fairly fast-and-loose rules the series has for demonic possession (pretty much anyone, at any time, for no apparent reason can be possessed by demons and made to do horrible things) and you get a series that needed a few more drafts to work. This one could be ripe for a reboot somewhere down the line, though.

Then there's "The Golem", which is pretty much the myth you've all probably heard, but with most of the Jewish stuff taken out. (Which really renders his meeting with the Thing kind of flat, but this was years before Marvel was willing to acknowledge Ben Grimm's religion.) So instead of protecting the Jewish people, this Golem protects the three people who found it from the demon Kaballa (a gesture of sensitivity right up there with Wonder Woman's mentor, "I Ching".) Even if none of that were a problem, though, the Golem just isn't interesting. He doesn't talk, he doesn't think, he's just a walking wall between danger and three fairly uninteresting people. Heroes with no personality are tough sells.

Then we get "Modred the Mystic", another sorcerer (remember how they're hard for readers to get behind because it's hard to tell what they can and can't do from moment to moment? It's true in spades with Modred, who seems to be pretty much all-powerful in his few appearances.) He's got a bigger problem beyond just being too powerful for anything to threaten him--and that's saying something. But Modred also happens to be an unlikeable, arrogant jerk who got into his original predicament through being a hot-headed idiot, and is now wandering around causing mayhem and destruction. But it's alright, because...um, because...well, because his name is on the cover, right? That means you have to root for him. (Or hand the series over to Tigra for the next five issues, then cancel it. Either way works.)

And finally we get "The Scarecrow". No, no, not that Scarecrow. No, not that Scarecrow either. This is an entirely different Scarecrow, who is...um...he lives in a painting, and there's this cult that hates him, or maybe he hates them, and he's getting revenge on them for, um...something, but they want the painting, and there's a demon, and this guy keeps vanishing, and he's got the power to...do stuff, I guess, and...it's all actually more than a little confusing. A little mystery is a great way to hook readers into a series, but "The Scarecrow" reveals so little over its first couple of issues that the reader has no way of figuring out any of what the writer has in mind for the series. By extending "mysterious" into "confusing", creator Scott Edelman sabotages any chance he has at getting the reader to stick around. Even a postscript story in "Marvel Two-In-One" doesn't clear up much.

And so we look at the lessons. These series failed because the characters weren't likeable, because they weren't competent (or in one case because they were too competent), or simply because the writers couldn't come up with anything for them to do. Some needed better villains, some needed better backstories, but all of them ended up on the ash-heap of comics history. At least, so far they have. Given the industry's tendency to dig up and polish off old ideas, we could wind up seeing a new "Brother Voodoo" series any day now.

But probably not.

21 Comments

• At March 6, 2009, jazzbo wrote:

  So are these all from the second volume of Essential Marvel Horror? Is it worth picking up, despite being filled ...

• At March 6, 2009, Christine Valada wrote:

  I'd like to know where the writer has gotten his information about Len Wein and Brother Voodoo. In the ...

• At March 6, 2009, E. Martin wrote:

  Gabriel makes a brief appearance on one of the first issues of the 90's Hellstrom series.

• At March 6, 2009, joshschr wrote:

  Falsifying facts to support your position was easier to get away with in the days before the Internet and Google ...

• At March 6, 2009, danjack wrote:

  i remember that Marvel-Two-in-One with the Scarecrow, as well as at least one of his stand alone issues. They are ...

• At March 6, 2009, Scavenger wrote:

  FTR: Brother Voodoo is one of the candidates as a potential new Sorcerer Supreme in New Avengers.

• At March 6, 2009, T. wrote:

  Then we get “Brother Voodoo”. Thanks to Fred Hembeck, Brother Voodoo is pretty much the poster child for lame characters ...

• At March 6, 2009, SanctumSanctorumComix wrote:

  Scarecrow also appeared in several issues of DOCTOR STRANGE : SORCERER SUPREME.

  Brother Voodoo has been seen quite a lot over ...

• At March 6, 2009, Greg Hatcher wrote:

  Assigning negative motives to people you don’t know is a lot easier to get away with thanks to the internet ...

• At March 6, 2009, joshschr wrote:

  I knew I was going to regret not checking her background first.

  I'm not saying anyone is wrong to ...

• At March 6, 2009, T. wrote:

  I think her complaints were reasonable, even if she wasn't Len Wein's wife. If someone got their facts wrong, ...

• At March 6, 2009, John Seavey wrote:

  It's OK, folks, I'm sure that Ms. Valada just wanted to know where I got my information from. It's a ...

• At March 6, 2009, Ted wrote:

  John has kind of ninjaed me, but I'll put what I was going to say anyway.

  T: "Falsifying facts to support ...

• At March 6, 2009, T. wrote:

  I said the US declared war on Germany? I'm pretty sure I've always known they actually declared war on ...

• At March 6, 2009, Ted wrote:

  Well, what I was referring to was your comment on Cronin's last story on Miller's 'Holy Terror Batman': http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/12/28/batman-holy-terror-still-on-track/#comment-698944

  Looking at ...

• At March 7, 2009, Anonymous wrote:

  I am the same T as that thread. No, I'm not planning to get into that debate again, don't ...

• At March 7, 2009, Ted wrote:

  "I am the same T as that thread."

  Oh good, I had this terrible feeling that I was carrying out the ...

• At March 7, 2009, T. wrote:

  lol, I could have sworn I typed my info in before submitting! hilarious. this comment thread is on the ...

• At March 7, 2009, Ted wrote:

  I did the same thing myself but the website seems to have eaten that comment.

• At March 8, 2009, Mick wrote:

  Is there a link to MARVEL HORROR Part 1? Is there a part one?

• At March 9, 2009, John Seavey wrote:

  Check the sidebar, there should be a link to all previous "Storytelling Engines" columns.

Storytelling Engines: Strange Adventures

(or "Storytelling Paleontology")

When we look at 'Strange Adventures', the 50s science-fiction anthology comic published by DC, it's worth asking the question, "Is this actually a storytelling engine at all?" Because not everything is. The storytelling engine is composed, after all, of those things that help the writer generate ideas for stories. If the writer is just coming up with ideas for stories, then writing them, the resultant stories aren't part of an engine of any sort. They're just stories. Nobody ever said a writer had to have help coming up with ideas.

Although in this case, "a writer" does have help, in the form of several other writers. 'Strange Adventures' has eleven writers credited for the five hundred pages of stories within its pages, a fairly high number for a comic-book series over that length. It's almost no coincidence that the stories are also mostly unrelated; without recurring characters, the series churns through ideas at a fast pace. New writers with new ideas are constantly needed to feed the beast. (It probably doesn't help that each issue contains four six-page stories. "Decompression", the modern technique of spreading a story out over several issues, has a crucial advantage in that coming up with one new idea for a story every six issues is a lot easier than coming up with one every six pages.)

So all right, 'Strange Adventures' has no storytelling engine. With no central narrator and framing sequence, even the fact that all of the stories contain the same theme ("science fiction") doesn't really count as an "element that assists the writer in generating story ideas". After all, pretty much every anthology has a theme of some sort. It's an organizing principle, not a storytelling aid. Case closed, 'Strange Adventures' doesn't really belong here...right?

Well, not exactly. You can see, as you read through the eighty-one stories (one issue has five stories, not four) that comprise Volume One of 'Strange Adventures', how the elements of a storytelling engine are present in a sort of protoplasmic form. Certain recurring ideas take shape--the human who gains temporary, but extraordinary powers that help him handle a crisis; the scientist called in to deal with an unusual situation, perhaps involving aliens that have contacted Earth; the friendly alien, arriving on Earth to aid us in some way (perhaps with hostile aliens.) These sub-themes are proto-storytelling engines, there to aid a writer stuck for ideas by giving them a place to start. ("Okay, so it's a guy who invents a serum that lets him...grow wings! We haven't done that one yet!")

The next step in the process, one which you begin to see as the stories progress, is taking these recurring themes and turning them into recurring characters. For example, Darwin Jones, of the Department of Scientific Investigation, makes a couple of appearances in the series. You can almost see the writers slowly coming to realize the advantages of not having to make up a new scientist every time they need to investigate an alien menace. Of course, since it is the 50s, all comic book characters wind up seeming pretty interchangeable anyway.

Which is a key point in looking at this series--it's from a relatively early point in the history of the medium, when storytelling techniques were still being developed and the comic book was still seen as essentially disposable entertainment. If you were to tell John Broome or Otto Binder that their six-page science-fiction stories would be collected in book form and read by grown-ups as classic examples of an era's literature, they'd probably laugh. (Heck, they'd probably make it into a story in the comic. "A scientist travels through time and finds that the students of the future are studying...get this...science fiction comics! In their History class!") This book is almost like seeing a fossil of an early life-form as it develops into something we recognize. We can see the limb buds here, the first signs of gills there, but it's a far cry from our modern life.

The idea of a science-fiction series that centers around unusual science isn't necessarily one that has a storytelling engine, and 'Strange Adventures' only has the beginnings of one. But as writers work with the idea, turn the vast array of interchangeable scientists into a few distinctive and recognizeable ones, toss out some of the stories that don't quite fit and find ways to help come up with ones that do, and use more modern storytelling ideas like decompression and metastory arcs, well...let's just say that modern TV shows like 'Fringe', 'Primeval', 'Torchwood' and 'Eureka' can look on 'Strange Adventures' as a sort of distant ancestor.

1 Comments

• At January 20, 2009, davidwynne wrote:

  ...I need to get that collection now.

Storytelling Engines: The Muppet Show

(or "Failure Is Funny")

I don't think it'd be controversial to say that Jim Henson was something of a genius when it came to comedy (then again, judging by some of my previous posts, I also don't think it'd be controversial to say that I'm not good at guessing what's going to be controversial and what isn't.) He certainly spent time thinking about settings and character dynamics that would help him come up with skits for a half-hour variety show; he's famously quoted for his axiom on how to end a comedy sketch ("blow something up, have one character eat another, or start tossing animals in the air"), but he also spent a lot of time working on ways to begin one. 'The Muppet Show', his best-known series, is filled with recurring gags and repeated characters that somehow never get old, and it all comes from one of the simplest rules of comedy. Failure is funny.

Well, let's clarify that a bit. Other people's failure is funny, so long as you don't focus too sharply on the consequences of that failure. 'Requiem for a Dream', for example, is never going to be regarded as a comedy classic. But looking at the Muppets, you see a group of people united by a) their passion for entertainment and their dream of making people happy through art, and b) their lack of talent at their chosen field. The gap between their desires and their actual abilities provides fertile ground for chaos, confusion, and comic misunderstandings as events slowly (and sometimes quickly) spin out of their control.

It starts with Kermit, who's the emcee and showrunner, but who has problems controlling his temper and asserting his authority. Not only can he not keep his cool when problems hit, but when he does fly into a rage, it's endearingly cute instead of intimidating. Then we have Fozzie, who's almost the perfect emblem of the show; he's a comedian who's so unfunny it's funny. Miss Piggy is a diva who doesn't conform to the traditional feminine standards of beauty, but who acts like she does. Gonzo is an avant-garde performance artist trapped in a run-down vaudeville theater, Bunsen Honeydew's inventions don't work, Sam the Eagle continually fails at injecting moral uplift into the show, Wayne and Wanda can't ever finish a single song, Statler and Waldorf are continually disappointed in their hopes of seeing quality entertainment--really, the only characters who seem fulfilled are Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, and you still get the feeling they'd rather be doing arena rock for a bunch of counter-culture types.

This "comic disaster" mentality permeates every aspect of the show, helping to create not just sketches but entire episodes that are structured around a slowly building crisis--Carol Burnett, for example, comes on the show to do her "classic" comedy bit, the "lonely asparagus" sketch. But due to a scheduling conflict (Gonzo's running a dance marathon in the theater that week), all her efforts to get some stage time are continually frustrated until at the end, she only manages to get off one joke before time runs out and the show's over. Quite clearly, they only had one joke they could come up with in the "lonely asparagus" sketch (it's too terrible to repeat, even by my pun-happy standards), but by turning the story into the failure of the sketch, they made that one terrible joke into an entire hilarious episode.

This structure also allows Henson to come up with recurring characters and sketches that nonetheless manage to be funny every time, despite only slight variations; somehow, seeing incompetence never manages to become too formulaic, no matter how many times we see it repeated. The basic gag for the Swedish Chef is the same every time, but it's always funny to see an incomprehensible guy fail spectacularly at a simple task. In fact, the Swedish Chef is probably the perfect distillation of the entire concept of the Muppet Show (and 'The Jim Henson Hour', and 'Muppets Tonight', and all of the various movies and specials and, well, everything else Muppety.) Watch the Swedish Chef, and you'll understand Jim Henson's genius in less than two minutes. He wants to teach people how to cook, but he can neither cook nor teach. That's just always going to be a good start to a comedy bit.

26 Comments

• At January 14, 2009, tk. wrote:

  Great piece! I just watched a handful of episodes for the first time since I was a wee lad, ...

• At January 14, 2009, Joe wrote:

  Only time I ever saw 'The Muppet Show' was when it was on Nick Jr. (with Face!) I loved that ...

• At January 14, 2009, Anthony Strand wrote:

  Excellent work, John. The bit at the end about Swedish Chef summing up the Muppet Show is perfect. It would ...

• At January 14, 2009, Thok wrote:

  Rolf should also be mentioned as a Muppet who isn't a failure. On the flip side, he's not particularly ...

• At January 14, 2009, joshschr wrote:

  Ha! Now I can tell my friends I really do appreciate Muppets on a deeper level than they do.

  I've ...

• At January 14, 2009, Stephen wrote:

  The DVD releases are tremendous for seeing how the show developed... but I always felt the movies lacked something, because ...

• At January 14, 2009, Scavenger wrote:

  Good column. When I saw "Muppet Show" in the title, I was like "It's a variety show..what engine?"

  And yet ...

• At January 14, 2009, manglr wrote:

  My wife and I have been working through the series DVDs in order...and for her its more or less the ...

• At January 14, 2009, suedenim wrote:

  Crazy Harry strikes me as another exception - he's quite good at what he does (i.e., blowing stuff up), and ...

• At January 14, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  A personal fave of mine - Animal, Beaker and The Chef sing Danny Boy: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=OCbuRA_D3KU

  but you also get comedians who ...

• At January 14, 2009, danjack wrote:

  To show how powerful the concept that Jim Henson came up with really is, i was laughing through the WHOLE ...

• At January 14, 2009, M Bloom wrote:

  One of my favorite Muppet Show bits, and one which perfectly sums up this storytelling engine, is the Rhyming Song. ...

• At January 14, 2009, dantecat wrote:

  Buddy Rich vs. Animal in a drum-off.

  Christopher Reeve - "Super-Rat, you're in charge."

  Zero Mostel singing "what do the Simple Folk ...

• At January 15, 2009, stephen cade wrote:

  I've been watching this on DVD--all over again--and cracking up on a regular basis.

  Great show!

  One thing I read in an ...

• At January 15, 2009, Blackjak wrote:

  Even though Muppets Tonight wasn't as successful, I still loved the episode when the Lobsters try to hijack the show ...

• At January 15, 2009, John Seavey wrote:

  For those who call Crazy Harry successful, I have but one question...isn't he supposed to be their electrician? :)

  And yes, ...

• At January 15, 2009, Doug Atkinson wrote:

  "I really hope they do the other Muppet series on DVD at some point when the original is collected."

  Rumor has ...

• At January 15, 2009, Scavenger wrote:

  A favorite memory is Roger Moore wanting to sing Talk to the Animals as a nice pleasant song constantly beset ...

• At January 15, 2009, Jeff R wrote:

  I've been loving the Muppet DVDs, too. Although I have to say that when you start running tallies on ...

• At January 15, 2009, David wrote:

  I chucked through your article but just got done choking with laughter over everyone's comments and remembering how much I ...

• At January 15, 2009, John Seavey wrote:

  Ooh, I loved the Roger Moore episode, Scavenger! That song was one of the iconic pop culture moments of my ...

• At January 15, 2009, Stephen wrote:

  They almost repeated the Moore plotline a few times - Gene Kelly comes to mind, as he comes to the ...

• At January 15, 2009, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  It's not really muppets, but if you search for woody allen and muppets in you tube, someone's taken the cafe ...

• At January 16, 2009, Steve S. wrote:

  Wonderful piece, Brian! Very insightful observations of the characters and how the Muppets comedy works. It should also ...

• At January 17, 2009, Evan Waters wrote:

  Too terrible to repeat? I think you're forgetting one of the central rules of THE MUPPET SHOW: A joke that's ...

• At January 19, 2009, The MuppetCast » Blog Archive » Show #93 - January 18, 2008 wrote:

  [...] Brian Cronin posted an opinion article from “John Seavey’s Storytelling Engines” on GoodComics.com talking about what made the Muppets ...

Storytelling Engines: Sgt. Rock

(or "A Rock-Solid Character Study")

For all that I frequently talk in these columns about the need to consider the entire set-up of a series in order to really get a feel for its storytelling engine--setting, supporting cast, core concept, recurring antagonists--every once in a while a series reminds me that the whole thing really does live and die on its main character. Sure, there are a few ensemble series where no one character is the protagonist, and everyone plays a role in the development of the story...but "Sergeant Rock" is most definitely not one of those series. While it does have a recurring cast, the lead character, narrator, viewpoint character and most compelling and interesting person in the series is Frank Rock, top-kick of Easy Company, and the series outlived most other war comics to become the gold standard for the genre based on him. (Not that Joe Kubert's brilliant art didn't help, of course. But Kubert also illustrated "Enemy Ace", which did not run for hundreds of issues.)

Rock isn't just a sergeant, he's the sergeant; his character is both drawn from and informs the archetype of the combat-savvy veteran enlisted man who keeps his unit together in a way that officers can't. He does so with a mix of compassion, courage, toughness, heroism, and a down-to-earth understanding both of the psychology of the fighting man under his command and of the realities of the battlefield. To the men who serve under him, the Rock of Easy Company can handle anything, knows everything, and is an authority figure just one step above a general and one step below God. It seems like he's been a sergeant forever and like he will be a sergeant forever. (In fact, creator Bob Kanigher claimed at one point that Rock was killed by the last bullet fired in World War II.)

Every issue provides some additional shading and definition to Rock's character, of course; as the character moves from North Africa to Italy to France in his service, you also get a deeper understanding of his background and psychology. But the basic elements of Sergeant Rock are so definitive as to be instantly and intuitively grasped by any reader after only a single issue. You feel like you know who Rock is right away, to the point where you feel like you know what he'd do in any given situation. He's a character that almost writes himself, his personality is so clear. When you have a character like that, it makes the writer's job much easier. (You could argue that Spider-Man shares that same clarity of personality; you can drop Spidey into the middle of World War II, an alien dimension, or prehistoric times, and he'll still be Spider-Man. The same holds true of Frank Rock--no matter what he's fighting, he's still the Sarge.)

Of course, any World War II comic has a lot of advantages when it comes to storytelling engines; the war spanned almost a decade, sprawled over half the world, and had antagonists that have come to symbolize clear, unambiguous evil. That's a lot of stories to be told--and indeed, non-fiction books about the war are their own cottage industry. You can tell World War II stories for a long time before you run out of ideas. But stories about the war are, inevitably, stories about the soldiers who fought it, and a compelling war story starts with a compelling soldier. And when it comes to compelling soldiers, Frank Rock gives ground to nobody.

18 Comments

• At January 6, 2009, Blackjak wrote:

  In fact, creator Bob Kanigher claimed at one point that Rock was killed by the last bullet fired in World ...

• At January 6, 2009, googum wrote:

  See, I still don't buy that "last bullet fired in World War II" death for Rock. If the last ...

• At January 6, 2009, Paul wrote:

  Who was better, Rock or Fury? I enjoyed both very much in the 60's. Rock (and Easy Co.) ...

• At January 6, 2009, Blackjak wrote:

  See, I still don’t buy that “last bullet fired in World War II” death for Rock. If the last bullet ...

• At January 6, 2009, Jeff R wrote:

  They could always do some cheat around it, with the last bullet of WWII being in some museum somewhere and ...

• At January 6, 2009, John Seavey wrote:

  My picture of it, mentally, was that Rock was involved in mop-up operations, and his squad accepted the surrender of ...

• At January 6, 2009, Anonymous wrote:

  ...or if he DID survive, he was out of the service and sitting around a VFW hall, drinking Pabst and ...

• At January 6, 2009, sgt rawk wrote:

  Say it with me : Sgt Rock was cooler than Fury. Better art, better writing, better characters, better everything. Now, ...

• At January 6, 2009, Deco wrote:

  Actually Fury's cooler than Rock, but Rock was a better book. But nuthin' beats the "voice" Stan managed for Fury ...

• At January 6, 2009, Anonymous wrote:

  What about the Sgt. Rock and Dozer that showed up in Keith Giffen's Suicide Squad? Are they the same people?

• At January 7, 2009, John Seavey wrote:

  Depends on who you ask. Kanigher said no, any "Sergeant Rocks" that appeared post-WWII were just someone else with the ...

• At January 7, 2009, suedenim wrote:

  IIRC, near the end of the Giffen Suicide Squad series, there might have been a hint that Rock and Bulldozer ...

• At January 7, 2009, googum wrote:

  Deco's right about right: Fury's a cooler character, and transplants to other settings (spy stuff, superhero stuff, etc.) but ...

• At January 7, 2009, suedenim wrote:

  I'm pretty sure Blackhawk and Sgt. Rock never met, unless it was some incidental thing (like in a George Perez ...

• At January 7, 2009, Paul wrote:

  suedenim: Nice take on Fury being a "fighter". That's so true on many fronts. If he wasn't ...

• At January 7, 2009, Anonymous wrote:

  I'm not so sure I agree about dropping Spider-Man into prehistoric times. I think a more grounded (well, as ...

• At January 7, 2009, suedenim wrote:

  I don't think it's a question of prehistoric times being a particularly good setting for a Spider-Man story so much ...

• At January 7, 2009, jccalhoun wrote:

  The thing that I always forget about the Sgt. Rock stories is that they are almost always relentlessly grim. ...

Storytelling Engines: George Romero's "Dead" Films

Normally, when I talk about a series' storytelling engine, what I'm really doing is trying to take a look at a long-running (or occasionally short-running) series from a different perspective. Instead of just seeing the elements of the series as part of the story the writer is telling, I'm looking at them as story-generating components--the supporting cast fulfills this function, the setting adds this potential, the protagonist moves the plot this way, and so on. But it's very rare that I think that writers consciously consider their status quo as a machine that generates plots.

In the case of George Romero's seminal zombie movie series ("Night of the Living Dead", "Dawn of the Dead", "Day of the Dead", "Land of the Dead", "Diary of the Dead"), though, that's pretty much exactly what they are. Romero starts with a set of postulates that function as his "engine", and then takes other stories and runs them through the engine to see what the result will be. It's a storytelling engine that takes the world as it is, applies a major change, and observes the logical result.

The change is, of course, the dead coming back to life. Romero postulates an event (never explicated, but hinted as some sort of radiation wave released by a returning satellite) that causes every recently-deceased corpse in the world to re-animate and seek out living humans with an instinct to consume their flesh. (Their bite is invariably lethal, although Romero never makes it clear whether this is an effect of their status as zombies, or just due to the normal infections that would result from being bitten by a septic, rotting corpse.) They retain traces of their former personality, but generally have limited intelligence and diminished physical capacity (they're slower, but stronger.) Being dead, they're pretty much immune to pain, and the only way of permanently killing them is with damage to the head. But more importantly, the event affected living humans as well, even if it doesn't show. Anyone who dies in the series re-animates within minutes of their death as a zombie, unless that death is due to head trauma.

Romero's movies (and the various comic and novel spin-offs) focus on the consequences of this event for different groups. He never returns to the same set of protagonists (which allows him a lot of freedom when it comes to killing off characters), but the world is always the same. Humans find ways to survive the zombie apocalypse, some of which are co-operative (as in the small community of survivors in "Land") and some of which are competitive and counter-productive (as with the nihilistic end to "Dawn".) Different people cope with the psychological stress of the event in different ways (most of which aren't good--if Romero's movies have a common theme, it's that people tend to come unglued in crisis situations.) And the zombie horde always gets larger--in fact, with the span of time separating the movies, the size of the zombie horde provides the only definitive timeline for the series. "Diary" might look like 2005 and "Night" might look like 1968, but the two both occur early on in the zombie plague.

Romero's "zombie rules" provide a very interesting storytelling engine, precisely because they're the only real element of an engine with very loose continuity from installment to installment. This faithfulness to the rules has meant that the entire zombie sub-genre of horror has found itself defined by Romero's rules and the ground-breaking films that provided them, to the point where many zombie movies are essentially Romero movies in all but name. Some of them are loving homages, like "Shaun of the Dead", others are rip-offs, like "The Dead Next Door", and still others are deliberate reactions against or alterations of the Romero rules, like "Return of the Living Dead" or "28 Days Later" (or, for that matter, the James Gunn/Zack Snyder remake of "Dawn of the Dead".) But the Romero rules now provide a practically inescapable framework for everyone following in Romero's footsteps, a storytelling engine that has escaped its creator and run wild throughout the genre. Its simplicity is also its strength, something that is constantly proved with each new zombie movie, comic, or book that comes out.

2 Comments

• At December 3, 2008, Jeff Ryan wrote:

  John, I'd love to get your take on Prison Break.

  Or Heroes: Tim Kring said his original idea was to burn ...

• At December 3, 2008, Tom Fitzpatrick wrote:

  "Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnsssssssssssssssss"

Storytelling Engines: James Bond

(or "The Dreaded Reboot")

Even its detractors would have to admit that the James Bond film series is a genuinely astonishing achievement. Even the most popular movies die off after five or six sequels (horror icons like Freddy and Jason managed eight to ten), but James Bond's 22nd "official" film is in theaters now, and they're already getting started on Number 23. The series really does seem to be an "evergreen" franchise, having outlasted five of the actors who played the part (not counting the Niven Bond, the Sellers Bond, the Woody Allen Bond...) and the author who wrote the series of books it was based on.

Of course, those same detractors might also argue that the Bond movies are more of a formula than a storytelling engine; after an exciting opening set-piece, Bond meets with M and learns of some threat to the free world, then goes and gets interesting gadgets from Q (an element played down in recent movies, as the real-world spy technology has essentially caught up with Bond's MI6 boffins). He goes off and investigates, meeting beautiful women, getting into an exciting chase and evading at least one elaborate death-trap, before fighting the villain in an action-packed climax. That sums up the plot of most Bond movies and books (although it should be noted that Ian Fleming's novels were far less gadget-heavy and more cerebral, playing to the strengths of the printed page instead of the big screen.)

But the Bond formula offers plenty of flexibility; as a jet-setting spy, he has his choice of world locations from Jamaica to Russia to New Orleans, and "chase scenes" and "death-traps" and "gadgets" can mean anything from le parkour foot-races to elaborate space battles, depending on the particular era of the series. Bond films don't so much follow a formula as create one; our whole popular perception of the "spy movie" is moulded by the Bond films, whether imitating them, spoofing them (yes, hello, there, Austin, in the back) or reacting against them, as with John le Carre's spy novels (which have themselves been adapted for the screen.)

The flexibility of the Bond formula for the writer, though, is different from the flexibility of the Bond formula in the eyes of the audience. Writers might insist that there's always something new to be done with a glamorous super-spy who needs to save the world from a crazed madman's evil scheme, but when the audience stops being able to tell one Bond film apart from another, it's time to employ a strategy loved by some and hated by others: The "reboot".

Reboots are generally employed very late in the life of a storytelling engine, usually after the engine has been partially or totally ruined by bad writing decisions that have crippled its ability to function. Either so many elements have been added that only fanatical followers of the series can understand all the layers of complications obscuring the original, entertaining core concept (the Superman Emergency Squad, the bottle city of Kandor, New Krypton, super-pets, and a dozen types of Kryptonite) or else too many important elements have been destroyed/permanently altered due to a lack of foresight on the part of the writers and editors (the deaths of the Joker, the Green Goblin, Harry Osborn, and the lead character and entire supporting cast of 'Aquaman'.) Usually, the blame for this lies with the editors; writers tend to have their hands full thinking of story ideas (that is, after all, the point of a storytelling engine, to help the writers think of ideas) and it's the editor's job to evaluate their impact on the series.

The point is, when the series gets so completely written into a corner that you can't tell any more stories, you "reboot", starting over at the beginning, clearing the decks of all the baggage that's accumulated over the years, and going back to the core concept. Long-term fans tend to dislike it, because the root word of "fan" is "fanatic", and fanatical followers of a long-running series tend to enjoy all the baggage as much as they do the core concept, but a well-executed reboot can win over skeptical fans. It also tends to bring in new fans, who relish the chance to get in on the ground floor of the next generation of the series. (Of course, that next generation will usually have baggage of its own, not to mention the problem of new writers who try to bring back that old baggage because they're fans themselves--Ultimate Stryfe and Ultimate Onslaught, anyone?--but a reboot at least offers a chance at some fresh stories.)

But how does that relate to James Bond? After all, there's no complex continuity in the Bond films--they've changed lead actors five times, and nobody except George Lazenby noticed. There aren't any damaging decisions to undo; every Bond film is pretty self-contained, sharing very few recurring characters...unless you argue that the introduction of John Cleese as "R", or Felix Leiter losing a leg are "damaging decisions", really, any Bond film can serve as an introduction to the series. Even the chronology is loose, vague and unimportant to the films; Bond has moved from Cold War politics to a post 9/11 world, and all that's changed is what country the villain is working for.

A soft continuity demands a soft reboot, and that's exactly what "Casino Royale" is; it doesn't so much erase the previous movies as gently ignore them. It could be a flashback--after all, Bond movies seem to take place in a sort of ever-present "now", so a flashback film that seems to post-date the movies it's set before seems kind of appropos. It could be a reboot--sure, M is the same character as in 'Goldeneye', but Bond films have pretty short memories, so why not? It could just be another stylistic shift, the same as occurred from 'Moonraker' to 'For Your Eyes Only', or from 'A View To A Kill' to 'The Living Daylights'. Since the Bond films are fairly chameleonic in tone (as all long-running series tend to be), it's not too surprising to see shifts like that.

Ultimately, the much-debated Bond reboot is really just another way for the series to adapt in order to stay relevant, something all truly effective storytelling engines do. Times change, and a timeless series isn't so much one that fits the changing times as one that changes with the times. Daniel Craig is the Bond that fits this era; he's a rebooted Bond, yes, but in a sense, they all are.

21 Comments

• At November 26, 2008, wil wrote:

  very true. shame quantum of solace was balls though.

• At November 26, 2008, Jeff Holland wrote:

  I've been impressed by the way the new films utilize the tropes of previous installments in more in-film ways. Gone ...

• At November 26, 2008, Stephen wrote:

  Since you mentioned The Living Daylights... that entire movie is practically a prototype for the Craig movies now (License to ...

• At November 26, 2008, Chris McAree wrote:

  Hey John.

  LTRFTW. I pretty much agree with everything you've just said about the Bond films. Albeit, I'd argue that each ...

• At November 26, 2008, JimZipCode wrote:

  I'd agree with the premise that each of the last few new actors have "gently rebooted" the series: Living Dalights, ...

• At November 26, 2008, Stephen Frug wrote:

  I wonder if this sort of "soft continuity" might be a valuable model for big-company superhero franchises to follow? ...

• At November 26, 2008, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  The only thing that caught me off guard with the reboot is it came at such an odd time - ...

• At November 26, 2008, John Seavey wrote:

  My problems with 'Casino Royale' were twofold; one, the card tournament felt strangely uninteresting. The change from baccarat to poker ...

• At November 26, 2008, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  And second, once Le Chiffre dies, there’s a long stretch of the movie that just seems to sort of meander ...

• At November 26, 2008, Geoff wrote:

  Have you thought about doing any Story Telling Engines about series like: The Executioner, The Destroyer (of Remo Williams ...

• At November 26, 2008, stephen cade wrote:

  Bond movies aren't really all sequels--although there have been sequel elements every now & then--they are movies you can strictly ...

• At November 26, 2008, Jeff Holland wrote:

  Oh, wow, I just realized: the New Gods/Fourth World series has never been talked about in this column. Seems like ...

• At November 26, 2008, Scavenger wrote:

  FGJ: "Die Another Day was easily the best of the Brosnan films,"

  Seriously?

  It hit such ridiculous points, with the ice castle ...

• At November 27, 2008, Bernard the Poet wrote:

  John, I totally agree with your central premise that the key to James Bond's longevity is that by regularly changing ...

• At November 27, 2008, John Seavey wrote:

  I think it'd be a lot harder to replace Ford as Indy than people think; they've tried, with a variety ...

• At November 27, 2008, Bernard the Poet wrote:

  "Jones is more Ford than Bond is Connery."

  I wasn't alive at the time, but from what I've read, Sean Connery's ...

• At November 27, 2008, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  It hit such ridiculous points, with the ice castle and the invisible car that it just became way too silly.

  None ...

• At November 28, 2008, Basara wrote:

  And, of course, as Lazenby's Bond seemed to hint, and perversely, the comedic Casino Royale had at its warped premise, ...

• At December 2, 2008, IA wrote:

  * On CR: I didn't feel at all that the "second half of the film follows the book very closely, ...

• At December 2, 2008, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  Of course, we do see some continuity between movies, mostly tying into the person that impacted Bond’s personal life the ...

• At December 23, 2008, Trinten wrote:

  IA - you are correct. The director for CR wanted to push the idea that 007 and the name Bond ...

Storytelling Engines: Firefly

(or "The Real World Tells Stories Too")

(And a hearty "welcome back!" to all the Joss Whedon fans who visited my blog!)

Whenever people try to describe Joss Whedon's 'Firefly' to someone who hasn't seen the series yet, the inevitable term they use is, "It's a Western in space." Which is true enough as far as it goes; any series that has an episode with the heroes smuggling cattle to another planet definitely earns the title "Western in space" pretty definitively. But when he came up with the idea for 'Firefly' and its storytelling engine (TV series are always very concerned with storytelling engines, because TV series look at 100 episodes as a minimum benchmark for success), Whedon didn't just decide to combine the tropes of the Western genre with the tropes of the science-fiction genre. He used the reality of the American frontier, rather than the fiction of the Old West, as his model to create a storytelling engine.

Noticing how involves a quick history lesson. What we think of as "the Old West", with gunslingers and bank robbers and grizzled settlers and sheriffs who were the only law in their town and madams with a heart of gold, et cetera, was a product primarily of the Civil War. There was settlement of the West prior to the Civil War, of course, but when the Confederacy collapsed, many of the former Confederate soldiers who didn't want to live under a government they'd just spent four years fighting drifted westward, where the United States' authority was minimal and they could use their military experience to make a living in a lot of not-particularly-legitimate ways. This meant living a lot rougher, but again, four years of being in a war had left them with different standards as to "civilized life" than the average person.

These semi-lawless veterans flooded into an already not particularly lawful part of the country that was still awash with gold prospectors and settlers who were also leaving the civilized parts of America for their own reasons (the Mormons also moved west into Utah during this period.) This created an unusually anti-authoritarian, sometimes violent society...one which was within the borders of the United States, and which the federal government had to tame if they wanted to truly become a continental government. (And one which, arguably, they never managed to completely conquer--many states in the western part of the US remain firmly libertarian and anti-authority, although the streak seems to have been put to positive uses for the most part.)

So this was the model that Whedon used for 'Firefly'. The conflict between the Sino-American Alliance and the "Browncoats" (and note that Whedon has always been vague about the exact causes and ideals of the Browncoats--Mal, of course, simply says they were for "freedom", but just about everyone thinks they're fighting on the right side) is an analogy for the Civil War, and Mal is one of the many disaffected veterans of that war who moves out to the frontier. The societal model for 'Firefly' feels real because it is real. It's got the kind of logic that's been tested by history. Writers should never feel afraid to borrow from history, because it's the only kind of plagarism that audiences admire. *rimshot*

Other elements of the Western in 'Firefly' are born out of economic logic. Sure, you could probably use a futuristic hover-buggy to ride around in, but if fuel is short, a horse is cheaper to feed. Laser pistols? A fancy toy for the rich, and a bullet kills just as sure as amplified and focused light. Why build tables out of wood instead of synthetics? Because it's cheap and plentiful and we've been working with it for the entire length of human history, and we know how to do it. The tropes of the Western aren't just there because Whedon thought they would look cool, they're there because they make sense within the story. (The only real "Western trope" is the idea of the Reavers as frontier savages, and Whedon deliberately subverts the idea in order to avoid the uncomfortable subtext of racism that's frequently present in Westerns.)

I've talked a lot about storytelling engines in this column (mainly because that's what it's about), but 'Firefly' does remind us that one of the quickest, easiest, most reliable storytelling engines comes from the world around us. Because the world is always full of stories, more than can ever possibly be told.

16 Comments

• At November 18, 2008, Myke G wrote:

  I miss firefly

• At November 18, 2008, Tyler wrote:

  me too... damn fox

• At November 18, 2008, Dalarsco wrote:

  And that is why I want to see Nathan Fillion as Jonah Hex.

• At November 18, 2008, ticknart wrote:

  Excellent analysis of this show.

• At November 18, 2008, Scavenger wrote:

  Did I miss the Storytelling Engine?

  I see a very good description of setting and background.

  But I don't see the engine, ...

• At November 18, 2008, Evan Waters wrote:

  True. I think the engine, as such, is one familiar to anyone who's played the TRAVELLER RPG- a crew on ...

• At November 18, 2008, KMFPL wrote:

  I'm with Scavenger. Good article, nice history lesson, no engine.

• At November 18, 2008, Ted wrote:

  "TV series look at 100 episodes as a minimum benchmark for success." No, American TV series look at 100 episodes ...

• At November 18, 2008, KMFPL wrote:

  Ted, I think it's "American TV Executives look at 100 episodes as a benchmark for success." IIRC, 100 episodes ...

• At November 18, 2008, Ted wrote:

  @KMFPL

  Yeah you're right, but to me that shows that it is a bad measure of success. Executives like a good ...

• At November 19, 2008, Bernard the Poet wrote:

  "Fawlty Towers only had 12 episodes and and the UK Office only had 14, and they’re both seen as widely ...

• At November 19, 2008, John Seavey wrote:

  The difference in styles between British and American production is so vast that I really didn't think it needed explicating, ...

• At November 19, 2008, Blackjak wrote:

  "(something possible when you have one large government-funded production company.)"

  John, that only applies to BBC-produced stuff... We do get ...

• At November 19, 2008, Andy wrote:

  Some interesting points being made here.

  Bernard: Your examples seem like they would deprive us of the best ...

• At November 19, 2008, Evan Waters wrote:

  I think a 12-episode FRASIER wouldn't have been nearly as satisfying. As planned it was mostly just about Frasier not ...

• At November 21, 2008, Graeme Burk wrote:

  John, I think you're off base even with American TV. Cable TV makes television in 13 episode seasons for the ...

Storytelling Engines: Indiana Jones

(or "Know Thyself")

Indiana Jones' storytelling engine was worked out by two absolute masters of their form while both of them were (arguably) at their creative peak, and it shows. (Yes, let's just get the gushing out of the way now.) It's a brilliant idea, one that's so great that it was either ahead of its time or else just copied a lot--take a particular era (such as the 1930s), and then take the tropes of its fiction and apply them as though the era really was like that. So just as Doctor Who pastiched the fictional image of Victorian London in "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" instead of using the much duller actual London (hey, Doctor Who has always been ahead of its time, even for a time-travel show), George Lucas and Steven Spielberg decided to create a two-fisted pulp image of the times leading into World War II and make it seem real.

Part and parcel of this was their brilliant (again, gushing) decision to treat myths and legends as real (within the context of the entirely unreal 1930s they'd created for the series.) In the world of Indiana Jones, all the ancient relics and mysterious MacGuffins of all those pulps really did what they said they did, and a daring treasure hunter (let's face it, the "archaeology" thing is just a dodge) has to clash just as much with the supernatural as he does with fiendish death traps, cold-hearted Nazi seductresses, and decidedly unfriendly natives. (Which remains a problematic element for any story that pastiches the fictional tropes of another time--do you use story elements that have not aged well in terms of their racism and sexism, and hope that your audience is well-educated enough to understand the context of their usage, or do you eliminate them, cutting out a lot of the authenticity of your pastiche?)

So what we have in your basic Indiana Jones story, as generated by the engine, is a story set in the era of the pulps, using tropes and stock characters/settings generated by them, with supernatural elements usually added in (but not necessarily required)...and then overlaying that with a veneer of authenticity by a) researching the historical myths that are the basis for the supernatural elements (you'd be amazed at just how much work went into getting the bits about the Ark of the Covenant as close to "right" as they could), and b) having a lead character who's flawed and human in a way that pulp heroes tended not to be. (Anyone see Doc Savage whimpering in pain and saying, "It's not the years, it's the mileage?") And yet, it's important to note that for all of Indy's flaws, he's flawed in a human, likeable way. His original motivation for treasure hunting (he's a playboy professor who lives beyond his means and sells his finds to finance his lifestyle) is almost totally muted in the series as we see it on screen...and in books, comics, video games, et cetera.

Just a quick sampling of the books, comics, video games, et cetera bears this out. We see Indy searching for the fourth nail of Christ's cross, fighting zombi armies in Haiti, searching for Atlantis and the supposed lands inside a hollow Earth, fighting dragons, and duking it out with Tibetan telekinetics. He even met Dracula. This seems like a very sustainable engine.

So why is it that audiences seem so reluctant to embrace Indy's sequels? (For a given value of "reluctant"--it's not like the Indy movies don't make money.) Setting aside the books and comics and video games for the moment--those tend to be produced for the "fan", not the casual enthusiast--only two of the four movies have gotten a good critical response, and the "Young Indiana Jones" television series crashed and burned after just two seasons, a genuine shocker considering the high-profile talent working on it. The fourth movie, in particular, was thoroughly panned (despite, again, not having any problems making money.)

Looking at the movies that were loved and the ones that were merely tolerated, it's easy to spot why--just look for the ones that didn't use the storytelling engine. 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom' skimped on its research, making up its MacGuffin (and not incidentally, falling on the wrong side of the "problematic" question mentioned above...all too often, it seems to use its pulp tropes as an excuse for racism, rather than attempting to examine the attitudes of the era it pastiches.) "Young Indiana Jones" skimps on the adventure--apart from one episode where Indy meets Dracula, most of the stories revolved around boringly educational meetings with historical figures and tame escapades in historical settings. There's no zip to them.

And 'Kingdom of the Crystal Skull'...the fourth Indiana Jones movie essentially tries to invent a brand-new storytelling engine built on the principles of the original, but using the tropes of 50s science-fiction films instead of 30s pulp films. Which is an interesting idea, and one that almost becomes necessary in order to continue using Harrison Ford as Indy (and let's face it, Ford's performance is 90% of what makes the character who he is; none of the other actors have ever managed to make the character work quite so well.)

But back when they were first considering the idea, Lucas and Spielberg had the option to use any era they wanted, and they chose the pulps of the 30s over the sci-fi 50s. Perhaps it was that Nazis made better bad guys than commies, perhaps it was because ancient relics were more exciting than flying saucers, perhaps it was just because Crash Corrigan was more fun than Flash Gordon, but for whatever reason, they saw that one era had more potential than the other for stories. Setting aside any question of whether Lucas and Spielberg have "lost it" over the decades, the storytelling engine they made the first time just worked in a way that the new one doesn't, which doesn't exactly bode well for attempts to make a fifth Indiana Jones movie. But the fundamental soundess of the original storytelling engine means that Indy books and comics, at least, can keep going strong for ages to come.

15 Comments

• At November 11, 2008, jj wrote:

  they should have had Nazis in the 4th movie. South America in the 1950s, and they couldn't find any Nazis?

  because ...

• At November 11, 2008, The Fiendish Dr. Samsara wrote:

  "...perhaps it was just because Crash Corrigan was more fun than Flash Gordon..."

  I know this is nit-picky, but Flash Gordon ...

• At November 11, 2008, Justin wrote:

  I am of the mind that they should have just made "Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars" (as ...

• At November 11, 2008, Jono11 wrote:

  They should have just made another 30s-style adventure movie, set in the 50s. Is it really THAT wild-wacky-crazy of ...

• At November 12, 2008, Dunc wrote:

  Great article.

  But the problem with Crystal Skull wasn't the implementation of a new engine, it was the attempts to combine ...

• At November 12, 2008, E. Martín wrote:

  I don't think the problems of Indy 2 and Indy 4 come mainly from a bad storytelling engine but simply ...

• At November 12, 2008, Carl wrote:

  While I haven't seen Crystal Skull (mainly due to lack of time from being a parent), I can only compare ...

• At November 12, 2008, Carl wrote:

  By the way does anyone refer to Raiders, by the DVD title?

• At November 12, 2008, Stephen wrote:

  "By the way does anyone refer to Raiders, by the DVD title?"

  No, but I suspect that's out of expediency's sake ...

• At November 12, 2008, Scavenger wrote:

  "the fourth Indiana Jones movie essentially tries to invent a brand-new storytelling engine built on the principles of the original, ...

• At November 13, 2008, SKFK wrote:

  "they should have had Nazis in the 4th movie. South America in the 1950s, and they couldn’t find any Nazis?"

  My ...

• At November 13, 2008, John Seavey wrote:

  The short answer: No, it's "Raiders of the Lost Ark", just like it's "Star Wars". :)

• At November 14, 2008, Rob Schmidt wrote:

  Spielberg and Lucas should've abandoned the "unfriendly natives" trope in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and the sequels. It ...

• At November 15, 2008, John Seavey wrote:

  I don't disagree, exactly, but I do think that it was better-used in "Raiders" than in the sequels. In the ...

• At November 15, 2008, T. wrote:

  Great piece.

Storytelling Engines: City of Heroes

(or "Echo Chambers Need To Be Empty")

Occasionally, I feel the need to open these columns up by reminding people of what a storytelling engine is, and the reasoning behind it. Not because I think that my readers have poor memories or don't know how to go through my archived columns, but just because there are times when I want to look at a very specific angle regarding storytelling engines, and it's useful to have the definition fresh. So I'll say it again, really quick: A "storytelling engine" is the set of those elements in an open-ended series (including but not limited to protagonists, antagonists, supporting characters, setting, and central concept) that help the writer(s) generate stories.

That last part is very important to a massively-multiplayer online video game like "City of Heroes", because there's a pretty strong demand for stories. Players of MMOs put years of their time into playing the game, and they're always looking for "content", storylines for their characters to follow that makes progression through the game more than simply "defeat the next bad guy and move on." (In City of Heroes, you don't "kill" bad guys, you "defeat" them. With your battle-axe, flame sword, katana, venomous spines...)

As a result, the developers of the game have designed a world that is filled with storytelling engine elements. There's an open-ended history to the game with loads of heroes and villains, from the mad scientists of the Vahzilok to the tyrants of Praetorian Earth, tons of evil schemes and mayhem always in progress for you to stop, and generally loads of things to see and do at any given moment. Why, there's a virtually endless amount of storytelling elements for writers!

So why have the tie-ins been such miserable failures commercially, despite the presence of talented writers like Mark Waid and Robin D Laws? (I should not have to explain to anyone why I idolize Robin D Laws. The man is a genius.)

The answer comes from the difference between video games and conventional narratives, and also serves to explain why video game movies, as a rule, suck rocks. The storytelling engine of a video game series always has one crucial and key difference from the storytelling engine of a book, movie, TV show, ballet, et cetera ad nauseum, and that comes from the protagonist. The protagonist of a conventional story drives that story with their decisions, their personality, their virtues and flaws and singular character. A good protagonist in a conventional narrative is always unique, doing things nobody else would do in that situation whether for good or ill.

Whereas in a video game, the protagonist is you. No other medium has this advantage, and no other medium can use it to make a story so totally immersive. In City of Heroes, you are the main character. You make those decisions, and you create the narrative around you. Simple things like getting into a fight with a couple of thugs with guns become thrilling, because you identify completely with your character to the point of feeling real fear when your health bar is in the red. A protagonist that's too defined and rigid actually works against the video game's strengths (who doesn't get tired of too many cut scenes in a video game? Those are the scenes that ostensibly tell the story, but we'd rather be the character than watch them.)

So when City of Heroes tries to translate itself into a conventional narrative, it runs headlong into this problem. The novels and the second series of comics tries to turn the Freedom Phalanx (the CoH equivalent of the Avengers or the Justice League) into a well-defined team of super-heroes, complete with personality conflicts and interpersonal struggles, but the audience that comes from the video game wants those people to be ciphers that they can project their own ideas and personalities into. Not to mention, in City of Heroes, those characters are supporting characters, not protagonists. They're mentors to the real heroes--the players. This is the ultimate difficulty for a City of Heroes comic/novel/TV show/ballet...for it to be really true to the video game, it'd need to be about you. And that's kind of tricky to pull off. (The first City of Heroes comic tried, by showing the adventures of a trio of street-level heroes. While it wasn't without its charms, it still couldn't manage to be "about you", by definition.)

Interestingly enough, it looks like we're soon to see the reverse problem: DC Comics will be launching an online game soon, where you can create your own hero and have them team up with Batman, Superman, et al, to fight the Joker, Lex Luthor, and the endless hordes of DC villains. Which sounds good as far as it goes, but it might find a translation problem the other direction: Who would want to just hang out with Batman, when they could immerse themselves in the world even more fully by being Batman?

10 Comments

• At November 4, 2008, Thenodrin wrote:

  Interesting take. I would disagree with the idea that, "No other medium has this advantage, and no other medium can ...

• At November 4, 2008, Thenodrin wrote:

  Sorry for the double post, hit Publish too soon.

  To address your final question, I've found that the least successful RPGs ...

• At November 4, 2008, Eric P. wrote:

  I am the one person who actually liked the first series of CoH comics (produced by Blue King Studios), which ...

• At November 4, 2008, FunkyGreenJerusalem wrote:

  Everyone won’t want to play Batman because everyone’s Batman is a little different, and so the game quickly turns into ...

• At November 4, 2008, The Mad Monkey wrote:

  Honestly, I wouldn't want to play a pre-established character (e.g. Batman). It's much more personal and intimate to create ...

• At November 5, 2008, John Seavey wrote:

  I liked the first series of 'City of Heroes' as well, so there's at least two. :) It couldn't precisely ...

• At November 5, 2008, Marc Kandel wrote:

  Mad Monkey makes a valid point- In my younger days, the Transformers and GI Joes I collected quickly lost their ...

• At November 6, 2008, Ted wrote:

  I think that we have to remember that the main reason why most game movies suck is because they're terribly ...

• At November 6, 2008, Marc Kandel wrote:

  "I think that we have to remember that the main reason why most game movies suck is because they’re terribly ...

• At November 7, 2008, Thenodrin wrote:

  "I think that we have to remember that the main reason why most game movies suck is because they’re terribly ...

Storytelling Engines: Blackhawks

(or "The Theme Team")

In a way, it's a little surprising that we've gotten this far into this series of columns and never once touched on super-hero teams designed around an organizing theme; then again, that's partly my fault. The Blackhawks' "international team" motif was re-used pretty much wholesale when Professor X organized the "all-new, all-different" X-Men, and I didn't think to mention it then because there were so many other things going on. But the Blackhawks pretty much were their international gimmick; it was the one constant in their transformation from World War II patriotic heroes to post-war "science heroes" to hideously embarrassing superheroes to obscurity. So let's take a moment and look at the gimmick in action, shall we?

First, we need to understand that "international" is just one of many organizing themes available to a writer when creating a themed super-team. Writers are just as likely to choose colors (Power Rangers, although most Power Rangers teams are likely to also be of different nationalities), elements (Captain Planet), or animals (Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew, a collection I'm still waiting for, DC trade paperback department!) The idea is the same in all cases, though; when coming up with a new superhero team from scratch, it helps writers if they can come up with just one idea, the organizing theme, and then develop that idea to its logical conclusion instead of having to come up with a whole new concept for every superhero on the team and then explain why they all came together.

So you can start with the idea of "fighter pilots from all nations", and then just slot in the French One (Andre), the Norwegian One (Olaf), the Eye-Blisteringly Racist Chinese One (Chop Chop), and so on until you've got a full team. Which brings up the reason why you don't see the "international" theme much anymore...during less progressive eras, simply the idea of people from different ethnic backgrounds working together as more or less equals (shamefully much less, in the case of Chop Chop) counted as being "ahead of the curve", but as time has passed, the very stereotyping that labels these characters as international has become less acceptable. (I'd be surprised, for example, if the upcoming Star Trek movie dwelled quite so much on Sulu's Japanese heritage, Chekhov's Russian pride, and Scotty's, well...Scottishness.)

This isn't to say it's totally gone--'Stormwatch', for example, is a UN-based team that has members of all different nationalities--but for the most part, you don't see many new superheroic teams based around the concept of "heroes from all nations". (Of course, the old ones are still around--the Global Guardians still pop up from time to time, and it's not like you don't still see just about every member of the Claremont/Wein/Cockrum X-Men still with the team.) But even if one option has been closed off, there are still a lot of themes out there to turn into superheroes (and supervillains--the Royal Flush Gang, anyone?) And since it remains an easy option for writers who need to come up with an idea quick, we'll probably see every single one of them.

But we might not see the Blackhawks themselves anytime soon. They really were a product of their time.

10 Comments

• At October 28, 2008, Blackjak wrote:

  Nice piece! Must admit that reading through it made me think of DC's other titular international team/organisation, Checkmate... I ...

• At October 28, 2008, Bryant wrote:

  I always enjoy your storytelling engines. Have you ever thought about comparing/contrasting the storytelling engines of legacy heroes (i.e. the ...

• At October 28, 2008, Stephane Savoie wrote:

  While Chaykin's sledgehammer-style social commentary hasn't aged very well, his reinterpretation of the Blachawks in to 80s was pretty entertaining, ...

• At October 28, 2008, Lucas wrote:

  Not that I'm complaining, because i find these articles to be pretty cool, but this one wasn't much of a ...

• At October 28, 2008, Doug Atkinson wrote:

  Looking at the historical context of when the Blackhawks were created does shed some light on the team makeup; it's ...

• At October 28, 2008, John Trumbull wrote:

  The Chaykin Blackhawk doesn't hold up nearly as well as the Mark Evanier-Dan Speigle version from the early 80s. ...

• At October 29, 2008, Paul wrote:

  There's a website out there which offers free copies of what they say are "public domain" Golden Age comics in ...

• At October 29, 2008, comixkid2099 wrote:

  "The idea is the same in all cases, though; when coming up with a new superhero team from scratch, it ...

• At October 29, 2008, Eric Tolle wrote:

  The inner cynic in my quietly points out that back in the day, it was probably easier to do an ...

• At October 30, 2008, StereotypeA wrote:

  Eye-blisteringly racist is my new favorite adjective.

Storytelling Engines: Shi

Hey, kids! Comics!

Billy Tucci's 'Shi' comes out of a very different era in comics than most of the ones I've discussed in this column before; the 1990s really saw the dawning of an era where comics were selling more to adults than kids, particularly independent comics. And one of the chief appeals to these adults buying comics was that they could get plenty of sex and violence in their stories; the "bad girl comic", traditionally featuring a scantily-clad butt-kicking female lead character, became a staple of 90s comics. Which isn't to say that 'Shi' is an attempt to exploit those trends, but it is worth remembering them (along with the obsession with Japanese martial arts that reached its heights in the late 80s, but that retained plenty of devotees years later. 'Shi' is as much a part of the "ninja craze" as Elektra, Ronin, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.)

Shi also follows a much grander and more ancient storytelling tradition, that of the "revenge story". Everyone from Shakespeare to Shane Black has tried their hand at telling the story of a person who's lost everything they have due to the actions of another--everything, that is, except their life and their desire to avenge their loss. This is part of why 'Shi' feels so cinematic; the modern action movie uses the revenge plot with an almost-obsessive frequency, and so 'Shi' feels like it could sit right next to 'Desperado' or 'Hard To Kill' on the video-store shelves.

Which is a problem, because while revenge stories frequently make good stories (witness 'Hamlet'), but they almost always make lousy storytelling engines. (Yes, I hadn't forgotten the subject of the column. I was getting to it.) The hero of a revenge story is always single-mindedly devoted to the elimination of the architect(s) of their tragedy. Once that architect is destroyed, they have nothing left to fight for. Sometimes, they're able to then go back and rebuild their lives (as in 'Desperado'), sometimes their need for revenge consumes them (as in 'Moby Dick'...or 'The Crow'.) But if you want a sequel, a "what comes next" after the event they've been devoted to their entire life happens...well, that gets tricky.

Sometimes, writers just pull out a "man behind the curtain." We've all seen this one. "Oh, the guy who killed your Uncle Ben was really working for the Kingpin, he's responsible for all the crime in the city." (That's the Ultimate Spider-Man version.) Sometimes, they pull a "bait and switch." "Oh, the guy you thought killed your Uncle Ben wasn't really the guy who did it, he was just the accomplice. The real killer is this guy!" (That's the movie version.) And sometimes, they just decide to portray the hero as learning that there's more than just revenge to fight for. "Because with great power must come...great responsibility." (That's the other, much better movie version. Yes, I went there.)

At first, 'Shi' looks like it's going to have a lot of trouble transforming itself from a story to a storytelling engine. The title character doesn't just have trouble figuring out what she's going to do after she kills Arashi, the murderer of her father and brother, she has trouble figuring out if she's going to be able to go through with it at all--she's a devout Christian as well as a sohei warrior-monk, and she feels kind of guilty about carving a bloody path through New York City's criminal underworld. (Wow, a hero who feels guilty about killing. If you ever wanted to know what set 'Shi' apart from other 90s comics, there it is.) If she can't be motivated to take down Arashi, how can she ever wind up sustaining a series?

Ultimately, it's at the end of the first volume of 'The Definitive Shi' that you start to get the answers. Not the end of the story; while I won't spoil things for anyone who decides to read it, I will say that it's hard to find a truly novel twist on the revenge story after all these years. (Well-executed, but not novel.) No, it's the text pieces that follow the story that give you a hint of how you can turn a revenge story into an open-ended storytelling engine.

Each text piece is a short vignette from Shi's teenage years, when she was training with her sohei grandfather, learning from her missionary mother, and generally growing up. They show a glimpse of a character who's not consumed by revenge, one who studies art and has crushes and gets into snowball fights. The Shi of 'Senryaku' (the comic that collected these text pieces) is shaped by tragedy, but not defined by it. She's someone you could picture doing other things besides getting revenge, and that's the key element you need to have before you can turn a single story into an open-ended series.

Unfortunately, there has been no second volume of 'The Definitive Shi', possibly due to poor reception of the black-and-white translation of its color art. (It does wind up looking more than a little murky in black and white.) That's a real shame, because it's not until the very end of the first book that the potential of the character really begins to open up.

Storytelling Engines: Highlander

(or "There Won't Be Only One")

'Highlander' is a relative rarity among storytelling engines, because it didn't start out as one. In fact, writer Gregory Widen turned in a script that seems to defy sequelization at all--it's the story of the final battle between a group of immortals that have lived in secret among the human race, summed up by the iconic line, "There can be only one!" (As an aside, it's important to note the difference between coming up with a sequel and coming up with a storytelling engine. Coming up with a sequel means finding the logical extension of a stand-alone story, while coming up with a storytelling engine involves setting up a premise that can generate multiple stories. It's the difference between 'Die Hard 2' and 'Dawn of the Dead'.)

But as the movie developed from a minor flop into a slow-burn cult hit, it became evident that "only one" wasn't enough. The movie developed a franchise that wanted more, and wouldn't take, "Everyone's dead except Connor!" for an answer. About the first attempts to develop the story into a storytelling engine, the film's theatrical sequels, well...the less said the better. They were slapdash, didn't fit the lyrical fantasy tone of the original, and they were stuck trying to tie into the ending of a film that was fairly definitive in establishing itself as the conclusion to the whole concept.

The TV series, though, took a different tack. TV writers are, by definition, good at creating storytelling engines, because they're all too aware of a) the challenges of writing twenty-two episodes of television on an enormously tight schedule, and b) the need to write five or six seasons in order to get the lucrative rewards of perpetual syndication (and DVD release, nowadays.) So they took the risky step of breaking down the 'Highlander' film to its component elements, finding those that would support a storytelling engine, and discarding the rest.

The first big one they let go was the protagonist. Connor McLeod was a spiky, alienated immortal burned out on caring about the mortals who lived and died all around him. His story was all about finding his ability to love again...and that's a wonderful plot for a one-time movie, but as open-ended TV series go, it doesn't work. (Plus, actor Christopher Lambert probably wasn't willing to commit to a weekly series.) So Connor gained a "cousin", Duncan, who was a bit more genial, connected to the world, and generally audience-friendly. (It says a lot, by the way, that despite only appearing together twice in the franchise, Lambert and Adrian Paul have a chemistry that easily convinces you that they spent lots of time together off-screen.)

The second thing that had to go was the Gathering. Again, this was just necessary to the development of a storytelling engine as opposed to a one-time story. The Gathering, and the final battle of all the immortals, is by definition the end of the story. (Unless you suddenly decide they're all aliens from the planet Geist or something.) Setting it in an "alternate universe" (the official explanation, never actually referred to onscreen) where immortals are more prevalent, and new ones appear all the time, gives the writers the chance to tell more stories than Widen's conception allowed. (The movie occurred in the series continuity, by the way, but Kurgan was just another nasty immortal dispatched by Connor, not the second-to-last of his kind.)

Which brings up another point; the series' mythos had to be widened to accomodate more stories. Some recurring villains had to show up, simply because it's hard to create a new villain every week (as touched on in the column on the Punisher); the organization of the Watchers was created to help create supporting allies and enemies, and various recurring foes like the Four Horsemen, Kalas, Ahriman, and Xavier St. Cloud helped keep the pressure off the writers. And of course, supporting characters, both mortal and immortal, generated stories of their own--Richie, Amanda, Joe, Tessa, the list goes on and on. (Mainly because the series wasn't afraid to kill off supporting characters.) Indeed, by Season Six, Duncan was barely featured in the series at all. (Primarily because Adrian Paul was already thinking of moving on.)

The revamped Highlander concept ran six series and spawned a further two movies (and several books and comics), a respectable run for any series but all the more impressive for a series that started with the end of the story. It's surprising, really, that it took until 2006 for the comic book to arrive, since a comic can conquer the last hurdle that the series had to being a true open-ended storytelling engine...comic book characters, unlike actors, never age.

9 Comments

• At October 3, 2008, Jeff Ryan wrote:

  Not enough Highlader 2 bashing for me. Maybe that's why Lambert always looks like, three seconds before any given take, ...

• At October 3, 2008, Elijah wrote:

  Oh man, sometimes I think I'm the only fan of that show. Good to see someone else writing about it.

  I ...

• At October 3, 2008, William O'Brien wrote:

  The show, especially in seasons 2-5, was pretty good. Lots of great characters and ideas, some pretty compelling plot ...

• At October 3, 2008, Jack Norris wrote:

  God, I loathe and despise Highlander in all its incarnations. Of all geek-cult franchises, it's the one for which I ...

• At October 4, 2008, Bat2supe wrote:

  I loved the movie & the serie when I was younger & still have a soft spot for it watching ...

• At October 4, 2008, Nancy wrote:

  Come on Jack, tell us how you REALLY feel! LOL!

  I happen to have LOVED the Highlander movies and especially ...

• At October 4, 2008, Matt-L wrote:

  I really liked the first movie as well as a lot of things about the series. In some respects ...

• At October 5, 2008, Luis Dantas wrote:

  I always thought that it was a matter of not being able of avoiding the more aggressive immortals. From ...

• At October 8, 2008, Debbie wrote:

  I liked the first Highlander movie and loved the TV series.

  I am a history buff and always loved the ...

Storytelling Engines: The Simpsons

(or "Packing Up The Shop")

Futurama, Matt Groening's second television series, suffered from a single great problem that afflicts all too many science-fiction/fantasy shows. It was on the Fox Network. (Rimshot.) The series' creators, all of whom had gained a lot of experience while working on the Simpsons, designed their series almost as an exercise in creating a good storytelling engine; the futuristic setting allowed for any number of stories set on any number of distant, quirky planets, and the delivery-service that the show centered on gave them a good reason for going there. Fry, as an unfrozen 20th century guy, served as a viewpoint character and a handy source of exposition for the strange world of the future, and all of the characters had their own private frustrations and unfulfilled desires that expressed themselves in comic ways (Fry's unrequited love for Leela, Leela's need to find her true parents, Zoidberg's desire for wealth and legitimacy, et cetera.) Really, you can go back through just about every column I've done, looking at things other series did right, and you'll find them expressed in Futurama at some point or another.

But unfortunately, Fox has a love/hate relationship with sci-fi series. The executives never got behind Futurama, never understood its appeal, and seemed to go out of its way to scuttle the show. By the time the fourth season rolled around, the show's creators knew that they were going to be canceled. This actually afforded them some unique opportunities--not totally unique, of course, as there have been other series that have had the time to wrap up their dangling plot threads, but certainly Futurama was part of an exclusive group. Their final season, produced with the threat of cancellation looming over their heads, explained Leela's parentage, gave Amy and Kif a family (albeit one that could be conveniently ignored in all future episodes) and in the final episode, showed Fry and Leela finally finding each other.

All of which changed the group dynamic pretty radically, of course. That wouldn't be a problem for most canceled shows--apart from a comic-book spin-off series that seemed set in a perpetual continuity twilight of "sometime before all the big changes happened", nobody really expected the series to come back. But this is the 21st century, the new Golden Age of archival fiction, and DVD sales forced Fox to sit up and take notice of the fan following of their canceled show. (All except those execs who were beaten to death and ground into a fine powder with a million uses, of course.)

The series revived itself with straight-to-DVD movies, and one of the interesting things to notice is the way that they set about finding ways to rejigger the character dynamics to something with a bit more long-term comedic storytelling potential. So Fry and Leela took a step back from the couple they were implied to be at the end of the series, Amy and Kif took steps both forward and back, and the next release will feature a return of Mom (of the Friendly Robot Company.) The shifts aren't dramatic--but they didn't have to be, since the writers had taken a little care to hedge their bets at the end of the series. (Other series, such as the classic Britcom 'Only Fools and Horses', took less care with their "permanent" endings, and had to take more drastic measures when the show unexpectedly returned.)

So what does this say about the storytelling engine of the series? Only that in the current era, when a series can slowly build demand through DVD releases, Internet communities, and word-of-mouth, it's wise to anticipate a return for your storytelling engine. Because nowadays, the only way you'll go away for good is if you're really out of stories to tell. And that's exactly what a good storytelling engine is supposed to prevent.

3 Comments

• At September 30, 2008, JdRavnos wrote:

  Cool analysis. Except I'm pretty sure that's the Storytelling Engine of Futurama and not the Simpsons.

• At September 30, 2008, Jeff Ryan wrote:

  Floating heads in jars will always be funny.

• At September 30, 2008, Paul wrote:

  To this day, I don't get why Only Fools and Horses had to undo the previous ending (becoming millionaires). That ...

Storytelling Engines: The Simpsons

(or "And Then The Children Were Rescued By...Oh, Let's Say Moe.")

The storytelling engine of the Simpson family is a pretty familiar one to anyone who watches television. The average family with a not-so-average life is pretty familiar ground for television comedy, and has been ever since the days of 'I Love Lucy'. Matt Groening (who supposedly based the series on his own family) created a deceptively simple family structure that generates plenty of stories--the dumb-but-loveable dad, the mischievous-but-good-at-heart son, the intelligent-but-socially-awkward daughter, and the slightly-stir-crazy stay-at-home mom each have their own reasons to provide the writer with storylines (and hyphens, apparently.) Groening's main contribution to the genre was to open up the throttle slightly in a way that works well with the choice of cartoons as a way to deliver the series. Homer isn't just dumb, he's cartoonishly stupid. Bart isn't just mischievous, he's cartoonishly wicked, et cetera, et cetera.

The series developed the other elements of its storytelling engine over its first few seasons, bringing in supporting characters like Moe and Barney, settings like the nuclear power plant and the school, and gradually developing more ways to generate stories as it went on. This is pretty much par for the course with any sitcom (although as a cartoon, the Simpsons have the advantage of not having to worry about actor availability. You can develop a much larger supporting cast when they're all really Hank Azaria.) Again, this is nothing we haven't seen in any sitcom.

But all family sitcoms suffer from the same problem--there's only a limited number of stories you can tell that don't fundamentally break the status quo (and let's not forget, the "status quo" is simply the set of elements making up the current storytelling engine.) One of the key elements of a family sitcom is that in the end, despite the wacky adventures, the family finds a way to put things right at the end of every episode. The more wild the adventure, the harder it is to put things right, and so eventually sitcoms falter as they run out of new wacky adventures.

Which is where the Simpsons broke ranks, back in Season Five. Oh, sure, they'd had a few adventures that were a little outrageous, ones that maybe stretched the limits of the audience's belief that things would really be "back to normal", but the episode 'Homer Loves Flanders' marked a real departure in the series' whole direction. In it, Homer becomes best friends with annoying goody two-shoes Ned Flanders, and at the end of the episode, nothing occurs to break up their friendship. Indeed, they deepen their mutual respect for each other in the episode's climax, prompting Lisa to comment, "Is this the end to our wacky adventures?"

And then the episode ends with a coda, where "next week", Homer hates Flanders as if nothing had ever happened. From that point on, the Simpsons operates on the assumption that unless a future episode explicitly mentions a change to the status quo, it's assumed that everything simply resets back to the default state. So Apu and Manjoula really get married, because she shows up in later episodes, but Bart and Lisa don't wind up trapped on a desert island along with the whole class of Springfield Elementary.

This is a whole new kind of idea, a post-modern take on the storytelling engine that takes it for granted that the audience is not only familiar with the storytelling engine of the Simpsons, but the concept of a storytelling engine in general and the way that a sitcom works. It allows the writers much more creative freedom than the traditional sitcom--they don't have to come up with an ending that returns everything to normal, they just have to take their ideas as far as they can logically go, and let the audience's knowledge of the "sitcom rules" do the rest. Arguably, the series has overused the idea a bit, as it moves on into its twentieth season, but then again, the very fact that it even has a twentieth season, when such legendary sitcoms as 'The Cosby Show' and 'All In the Family' didn't even run for half that length, shows that the Simpsons' elasticity is one of the overlooked elements to their long-running sucess.

17 Comments

• At September 23, 2008, David wrote:

  It's funny you should mention 'The Cosby Show', since The Simpsons was in the same time slot (Thursdays, 8 PM) ...

• At September 23, 2008, Thok wrote:

  It’s funny you should mention ‘The Cosby Show’, since The Simpsons was in the same time slot (Thursdays, 8 PM) ...

• At September 23, 2008, crood wrote:

  There's one other advantage the Simpsons have over the typical family sitcom. Noone ages. They don't have to ...

• At September 23, 2008, Nick Marino wrote:

  this is a rather brilliant observation on the nature of the simpsons. i remember watching "homer loves flanders" the night ...

• At September 23, 2008, Bernard the Poet wrote:

  I have always been surprised that so few sitcoms do take their ideas as far as they can logically go, ...

• At September 23, 2008, Nitz the Bloody wrote:

  " There’s one other advantage the Simpsons have over the typical family sitcom. Noone ages. They don’t have to worry ...

• At September 23, 2008, Daniel O' Dreams wrote:

  Yeah the whole not aging thing has apparently led to a "sliding scale" timeline like Marvel & DC have. I ...

• At September 23, 2008, Tom Fitzpatrick wrote:

  "THEY KILLED KENNY!!!!!!!!!!!"

  Ooops, wrong sitcom.

  Excuse me.

  "DON'T HAVE A COW, DUDE!!!"

• At September 23, 2008, Thomas wrote:

  I also liked what Fry said in Futurama

  Clever things make people feel stupid, Unexpected things make people scared, at ...

• At September 24, 2008, John Seavey wrote:

  The "sliding timescale" thing is a running gag of the series, actually; they make a point of counting back in ...

• At September 24, 2008, onion3000 wrote:

  "...Clever things make people feel stupid..."

  For years, many women have complained (quite vociferously) that 'gorgeous' models in magazines are bad ...

• At September 24, 2008, Evan Greene-Terrence wrote:

  "...as a cartoon, the Simpsons have the advantage of not having to worry about actor availability."

  Tell that to Lionel Hutz, ...

• At September 24, 2008, crood wrote:

  I think you'll find that more family sitcoms are hurt by child actors aging than see benefits from young adult ...

• At September 24, 2008, Anonymous wrote:

  On the other hand, the fact that the characters can’t age limits the story possibilities. On the Simpsons, this is ...

• At September 24, 2008, Journalista - the news weblog of The Comics Journal » Blog Archive » Sept. 24, 2008: Sucked back from the grave! wrote:

  [...] John Seavey explains the “storytelling engine” behind The [...]

• At September 24, 2008, Mike Shields wrote:

  Perhaps the reason for no reset button, lies in the fact that the actors and characters do age, and the ...

• At September 24, 2008, Rob III wrote:

  Good stuff Brian, but to respectfully challenge the idea of a "whole new kind of idea" , Get A ...