Many reviews of The Matrix Reloaded asked what was the point of giving Agent Smith the ability to replicate himself over and over since his enemy, the film’s hero Neo, can and does just fly out of his multiple selves’ grasp. Well, certainly, but Agent Smith and X-Men‘s Madrox the Multiple Man would both be able to use their self-multiplication ability to attend every event at Comic-Con International.
I, on the other hand, could not, and Saturday was the day most heavily packed with stellar events. This, in fact, was the principal day for presentations on movies and television series. Those of you who are hoping for reports on Halle Berry’s appearance to promote her movie Gothika, or Anjelina Jolie’s to publicize the new Lara Croft flick, or Hugh Jackman’s to launch the buzz for the forthcoming Van Helsing film, or New Line’s preview of footage from the next Lord of the Rings movie, or even Sony’s premiere of film of actor Alfred Molina (there in person) as Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2, will not find them here. My interests led me to give other panels higher priority. (Moreover, according to one Con report I read, these panels were so crowded that unless I had arrived early, I would not have been able to get into them anyway.)
Then again, there were reports on various movie preview panels in the mainstream media; even Entertainment Tonight, I’ve been informed by a friend, ran a segment on this year’s Comic-Con. I suspect that major media news organizations that did not run reports on Comic-Con took notice of those that did, and that there may be considerably more mainstream coverage of next year’s Con.
As you may recall, I was traveling from far-off Alpine, California to San Diego each morning with my filmmaking companions in their rented car. And as the con progressed, they were growing more tired (whereas I, the oldest, who stayed up 43 hours only a few days before, was demonstrating surprising stamina) and wanted to sleep later.
So, I got to the Convention Center closer to noon than I would have liked. This left me too little time to try to locate some people who I knew were at the Con and wanted to locate. There were some people I never found, not even at the booths they were supposed to be sitting at. Hmm. Maybe they were hanging out at the even more unfindable Marvel booth.
You know, that’s not a bad idea. It reminds me of that Twilight Zone episode in which actor Billy Mumy (future co-writer of Marvel’s Comet Man – you see, it’s all linked!) makes people disappear by sending them to the “cornfield.” Perhaps people at Comic-Con similarly vanish by being sent to the Marvel booth. Yes, it makes a certain kind of sense.
NEILCON DAY 3
“Saturday afternoon at Comic-Con, and I’m already brain dead,” announced Neil Gaiman at the start of his 12 PM panel in Room 6A. The Comic-Con was certainly getting its money’s worth out of booking Gaiman as a special guest. Unlike the umpteen other panels he did, this one was not about an individual project, like MirrorMask, or an organization like Vertigo or the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. This was the “Spotlight on Neil Gaiman,” all about himself.
Gaiman apologetically explained that one might think that he would have prepared material in advance for an hour-long solo panel, but instead he had to write his keynote speech for last night’s Eisner Awards. “So,” he said, “I’ll leave it to you lot” for questions and answers.
The first was nearly a conversation-stopper: what does “your writing process” “look like”?
Gaiman hesitated an instant, apparently taken aback by the questioner’s seeming assumption there was some great mystery to plumb here, and fell back on a tried and true technique of humor, the overly literal interpretation. (See Anya in Buffy.) “My writing process looks like me sitting,” Gaiman began, either before a computer screen or a piece of paper, “looking rather like my head is going to explode.” Slowly warming to the topic, he continued, “unless I’m doing dialogue,” in which case he is “making facial expressions,” like the particularly grotesque one he made for our benefit, “which is why I prefer to write alone.” A sudden thought occurred. “I hope no one got a photo of that.” But no one, it seemed, did, either out of courtesy, or, more likely, an inability to aim the camera in time.
For films Gaiman said he likes FinalDraft, which he dubbed “a clever screenwriting program” that does the formatting for him. But for novels and short stories, he prefers writing in a notebook, and then will “feel virtuous doing a second draft, typing it all in” on the computer. As for comics, it’s “me and a piece of scrap paper, drawing pages.”
Next came the topic of Gaiman’s new series for Marvel, 1602. Although he had been working on it for eighteen months, neither Marvel nor Gaiman had said much about the project until recently. “The veil of secrecy is now lifted,” Gaiman ironically proclaimed, although his reasons for not saying much about it in the past were fairly mundane and practical.
For one thing, Gaiman did not want the concepts for the series discussed to death on the Internet far in advance. “The Internet exists in mayfly time, anyway,” Gaiman said. “You know, a half an hour on the Internet is like several years in the real world.” Gaiman decided that if he said much about the series in advance, “people will get tired of it” before the first issue even comes out.
Moreover, Gaiman said he disliked the fate of so many comics limited series, in which issue 1 and 2 come out “on time,” issue 3 is “six weeks late,” and issue 6 finally “comes out on the day everyone has given up on” the series ever being finished. So, Gaiman decided, “let’s get as much done so we are not late at the end.” Hence he spent “eighteen months just quietly working on things.”
And the plans for deep secrecy did not entirely work. Gaiman said that he would “get into taxis in foreign countries,” and the drivers would ask (Gaiman slipping into a generic foreign accent), “‘What is this 1602 about?'”
And, Gaiman went on, going back to the aforementioned humorous device, he replied, “It’ll be about 200 pages long.”
But actually, Gaiman explained, the story has its roots in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster.
Gaiman had agreed “to do a book for Marvel to fund Marvels and Miracles, to try to settle the Miracleman mess”: this is a fund which finances Gaiman’s legal battle with Todd McFarlane over the rights to the Miracleman series. A week after September 11, 2001, Gaiman took “one of the few planes that flew out of Minneapolis” on his journey to attend a fantasy festival in Trieste. Gaiman recalled a woman on the plane who looked nervously around at the other passengers, as if wondering “would they kill her?” and then threw up.
In the course of this trip, Gaiman found himself spending a day in Venice. (Taking cabs around the world and a stayover in Venice. You, gentle readers, like myself, may now be contemplating the disparity between our business trips and those taken by acclaimed fantasy authors.)
And there he thought about what he could write for Marvel in the wake of 9/11.
“There’s something about Marvel that automatically makes me think: New York and skyscrapers and people with guns and things that explode,” Gaiman explained. “I wanted to do something that had all of the fun of the Marvel Universe, but had no skyscrapers, no planes, nothing exploding and no guns.” And then came the big idea: “I thought, ‘Oh, I know what my story is,’ and 1602 was there in my head.”
“The premise of 1602 is as follows,” Gaiman stated; “It’s 400 years ago, and the Marvel Universe, for reasons that we do not know when we begin, has started occurring 400 years early.” He cautioned, “It’s not an Elseworlds.’ It’s not a What If,” referring to DC and Marvel series that present counterparts of familiar characters in alternate realities. “It’s actually happening and it will have some spillover into the real Marvel Universe.” By this I would guess that Gaiman means that the course of time has been altered in the Marvel Universe, with a large number of familiar present-day characters being somehow transposed to Elizabethan England, but we shall see as the series proceeds. Gaiman also noted that “some things are put back the way they were at the end” of the series, but “some things aren’t.”
So, as a result (and as the first issue reveals), “Sir Nicholas Fury was the head of Queen Elizabeth’s intelligence service. The court physician was a magician named Stephen Strange. Fury’s assistant is a young man named Peter Parquer sic, who has an obsession with spiders. His top agent is a man named Matthew Murdock, who is a blind Irish ballad singer who turns out to be this very mysterious figure of the night.” The latter is Daredevil, and next Gaiman describes 1602‘s version of the X-Men. “We have the Witchbreed, who are these persecuted kids with peculiar powers.” And operating behind the scenes, “There’s the mysterious hand of Count Otto von Doom, known as ‘the Handsome”; this would be 1602‘s version of Marvel’s preeminent villain, Doctor Victor von Doom, known for his scarred and ravaged face.
All of this, Gaiman summed up, “came from the initial decision not to be topical.” And yet, as Gaiman continued writing the series, 1602 nonetheless showed the influence of current events. “The initial vision was not to be topical, but by the time I’m writing issue number five, and have a number of people heading into a small European country to try and rescue potential weapons of mass destruction,” it was “getting topical” despite what he’s intended.
There is also a mysterious object in 1602 that “may be a treasure” or “may be a weapon” but “everyone wants it.” (My initial guess: the Cosmic Cube, which converts thought into reality.)
1602 was drawn by Andy Kubert, and Gaiman called it “enormous fun to write.” Indeed, working on 1602, Gaiman said, he “felt what it must have been like for Stan [Lee], Jack [Kirby], and Steve [Ditko]… at the beginning,” when they were creating the Marvel Universe.
As to how long 1602 will last, Gaiman asserted, “It’s definitely going to be eight issues, unless it’s nine.” The deciding factor turned out to be a surprise. Gaiman said that on the previous Wednesday he had met with Avi Arad, head of Marvel Studios, and Marvel editor in chief Joe Quesada, and they had discussed “the mysterious second project I agreed to do.” Gaiman recalled, “I could do something like this,” describing his idea to them but not to us, “and they went, ‘Ooh’.” Joe Quesada said it could come right out of 1602” and Gaiman replied, “Yes, you’re right.”
So there might be a ninth issue in order to set up the Mysterious Second Project, and, if so, the last issue may miss coming out on schedule after all. But Gaiman seemed resigned, saying that a late last issue is, after all, “a comics tradition.”
(As I write this week’s column, the first issue of 1602 has just come out, and be assured that I am planning to review the first issue or two in an upcoming column, after getting through the long slog of San Diego reports.)
The next question: did Gaiman plan to enter his A Short Film about John Bolton (described in one of my earlier Comic-Con reports) in film festivals?
“There is this huge problem I have,” Gaiman stated, “which is the limited number of bodies I have. . . I have only one and he’s busy.” I know how he feels. Gaiman said that his CAA agent (note: take it from me, Neil is not leading the life of a typical comics pro) had sent him a book listing the small film festivals in North America, but still, he never finds time to get around to submitting the film. “I never quite get to step zero.”
Next came Gaiman’s progress report on his legal war with Todd McFarlane over the Miracleman rights. Miracleman was originally Marvelman, a British superhero character of the 1950s evidently inspired by the original Captain Marvel. In the 1980s the great comics writer Alan Moore reworked the concept into a brilliant and darkly revisionist take on the super hero myth that explored what might happen to a man and his world if he gained godlike abilities. Marvel Comics’ lawyers claimed that Marvelman’s name violated their trademark, and so the character’s name was altered to “Miracleman” (and Marvel’s lawyers apparently remained unaware that Marvel has a copyrighted character by that name). Eclipse Comics published Moore’s Miracleman stories in the United States. Eventually Moore turned his part ownership of the character over to his successor on the series, Gaiman. Eclipse went bankrupt, and Todd McFarlane asserts that he bought the rights to “Miracleman.”
Subsequently, there has been legal turmoil between Gaiman and McFarlane that also involves the ownership of the character Angela in the Spawn comics series. According to Gaiman, his side has won on every count, but McFarlane is now appealing the decision. “Todd’s appeal goes like this,” Gaiman said. “Yes, I said to Neil that he was not signing away his copyright. No, there was no indication he was signing away his copyrights. He didn’t sign his copyrights away in 1993. Yes, in 1996 I falsely filed copyright papers claiming that I had written the Angela book and Spawn #9. But in the subsequent three years, the statute of limitations on copyrights, Neil didn’t find out that I had done this and so his winning the case should be thrown out.”
Gaiman observed that “I’m not a betting man but I would not put a lot of money on Todd’s appeal as he’s going with the ‘Aha! Tricked you!’ defense.” Moreover, Gaiman contends that with Eclipse’s bankruptcy, its rights to Miracleman actually reverted to British comics pros Gary Leach and Dez Skinn.
Gaiman said that he intends to get his Miracleman stories back into print. He called the Miracleman legal situation “perhaps the single most confused can of worms in comics” and said that Moore told him “If I’d known it was such a poisoned goblet, I wouldn’t have given it to you in the first place.” (I wish I could come up with dialogue like that!)
Next: does Gaiman intend to move into directing movies?
“If I don’t have the organizational skills to send film to film festivals,” Gaiman pointed out, he was not about to become “a producer or director.” He continued, “So instead I have Dave McKean direct something I write” (as with MirrorMask). Gaiman does intend to direct the long-gestating movie of his Vertigo miniseries Death: The High Cost of Living. But, he said, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life directing movies.” And this was perhaps a surprise, inasmuch as one might expect a writer to take the opportunity to make a transition to a better-paid, more prestigious art form if he could. Instead, Gaiman said, he wanted to continue working in a variety of forms: movies, novels, comics, radio plays. “As long as I keep moving,” he said.
Now there was a question on an appropriate subject, the nature of the gathering at which we found ourselves. The questioner wanted to know if it was a comics convention that had inspired the serial killers’ convention that Gaiman memorably created for an issue of Sandman.
No, Gaiman replied, actually the inspiration was a World Science Fiction Convention. Gaiman said he thought, “We’ve all gone away for a weekend to be special together. I wonder if serial killers do that.” But, Gaiman said, in fact serial killers are not special: “And really they’re very normal and very boring and what they do is dull. . .dull, stupid and sad; it’s not clever.” Gaiman said that the “romance of the serial killer” in fiction “hadn’t happened yet, but you could see it coming,” and this story was his response to it.
Another questioner: Why do women like Sandman so much?
Whereupon a woman in audience, somewhere behind me, shouted: “Because Neil’s cute!” The audience laughed appreciatively, and Gaiman looked flustered, embarrassed and rather pleased.
Well, I’m of the wrong gender for judging this matter. But considering that Gaiman’s books don’t all contain photos of him (that audience member would have to find her own to use as bookmarks), there must be more too it than that.
Noting that it has been fifteen years since he began Sandman, Gaiman pointed out that “it isn’t a preadolescent male fantasy,” whereupon the audience burst into applause. He contended that “the great body of comics in 1997-1998” were exactly that. Gaiman said that in Sandman “the female characters were very odd characters, kind of like people,” whereas “other female characters in comics were men with big breasts and guns.”
So how did Gaiman manage to write women differently? He first commented that he had “this woman at home. Her in the attic,” an interesting reference to another Sandman story that the audience, laughing, appeared to get. Gaiman then simply said, “I have a trick to it. I write people. It seems to work.”
Looking back, Gaiman stated that in 1987-1988, every fan at his signings was male. By 1990, he estimated, thirty percent were women. Gaiman said “unwashed gentlemen in large T-shirts” would be “pumping my hand,” saying (as Gaiman slipped into yet another of his multiple voices), “Man, I gotta thank you; you brought women into my store.” By 1992, Gaiman asserted, the signing lines were divided 50-50 between male and female, and that ratio has stood ever since.
It’s interesting to hear the audience applaud Gaiman’s remark about “preadolescent male fantasy”: this was another audience with a knee-jerk negative reaction to superhero books. And, it would appear from Gaiman’s enthusiasm about 1602 and writing the classic Marvel superheroes, it is not a reaction that their hero, Gaiman himself, shares. To paraphrase John Byrne on another subject, one of the fun things about reading 1602 will be watching the heads of many of Gaiman’s fans explode.
Gaiman promoted various new projects: his new Vertigo collection of comics stories, Endless Nights: a new spoken-word CD Telling Tales; and a new children’s book from Harper Collins, illustrated by Dave McKean, The Wolves in the Walls.
“We’ve got another children’s book coming out in about a year, in theory, called Crazy Hair.” The “in theory” was there because “Dave thinks he can oversee all postproduction for MirrorMask and the costumes and production design for The Vampire Lestat musical” and illustrate this book, all at the same time. “I’d like to see him do it,” Gaiman observed, disbelievingly.
Since Gaiman had mentioned filmmaker and Monty Python co-founder Terry Gilliam at the previous day’s MirrorMask panel, a questioner now asked Gaiman more about their friendship. Gaiman replied that he had been friends with Gilliam since 1989. (Note how fast Neil’s career has moved: this was only two years after I first met him, which was before his Sandman #1 had come out!) This was the year that Gilliam had first attempted to acquire the movie rights to Good Omens, a farcical fantasy novel about the end of the world written by Gaiman and another celebrated author, Terry Pratchett. Gaiman said that Gilliam went through “hell” trying to get the film made, and co-wrote a great script, but that American studio executives had said, in Gaiman’s words, “We are scared of Terry Gilliam.” Moreover, Gaiman said, they did not understand how a film about the end of the world could be funny. (Gaiman did not mention this, but I will: Doctor Strangelove.)
Famously plagued by troubles trying to launch movie projects, Gilliam recently said, according to Gaiman, “If I don’t direct a film soon, I’m going to kill somebody.” Luckily, Gilliam is now directing The Brothers Grimm for Miramax, so we need not keep glancing over our shoulders, worrying whether he is looming behind us with a meat cleaver.
Next question (and notice how many of these deal with movies, not comics): what have been Gaiman’s best and worst experiences working with movie studios?
The best, Gaiman replied, was working with the Hensons on MirrorMask since they promised, in his words, “We won’t mess with you.” Somewhat wistfully, Gaiman said, “It’s hard to explain how unlikely that is,” and “how odd it is never to have sat in a room with people in suits.”
As for the worst experience, that was an attempt to make a movie of the aforementioned Good Omens. In 1989 or 1990 Gaiman and Pratchett flew to Los Angeles to meet with studio executives. Pratchett, Gaiman recalled, suggested they have a “code word”: if either one of them uttered it during the meeting, they would walk out and fly back to England. It had to be a word neither of them would use in ordinary conversation, so they chose the name “Biggles,” a flying ace in British children’s books.
In walked the most important executive, a woman, Gaiman recounted, and he began imitating her voice, again proving himself to be Vertigo’s own version of Mel Blanc. The woman suggested Julia Roberts for a major role, and Tom Cruise to play the Witchfinder, and Gaiman said, Pratchett held out his arms and began imitating the motion of a plane. “That was probably the worst,” Gaiman concluded.
The next questioner from the audience returned to the subject of conventions. Gaiman said he “tried to do one or two small conventions a year” but he did “few conventions now.” I presume that his workload and travels (“I went around the world signing copies of Coraline,” he soon told us) are factors. But it appears the main reason is that the convention experience has grown less enjoyable as it has grown more crowded. Gaiman noted, not in a boastful tone but a somewhat saddened one, that “so many more people come” just to get his signature. But for him, a “Convention experience is where you can go to the bar and talk to people.”
As I have noted before, even finding people one knows is a major difficulty in today’s megacons. (They’re at the Marvel booth, I tell you.)
Next came an inquiry about Gaiman’s children’s books, like the recent Coraline. Gaiman said his next children’s book will be The Graveyard Book, which he compared to The Jungle Book, except in this case the boy is raised by dead people. “Probably like Coraline, it will be too scary for adults but children won’t mind it at all.”
The next questioner from the audience effusively praised Neil’s performances on panels and asked if he would consider doing “standup comedy.” “No!” Gaiman forcefully exclaimed, albeit with perfect timing and delivery, neither of which undercut the questioner’s premise. More calmly, Gaiman explained that, “I’m much less interesting than the work,” whereas standup comedy is about the comedian himself.
I understand Gaiman’s position. In the four panels in which he appeared at Comic-Con and which I attended, he never spoke about his family, and only once, I think, told an anecdote about his childhood. He was indeed talking about his work. But he was also telling anecdotes about his work – whether about himself and Dave McKean trying to get along writing in that chilly house, or about himself and Terry Pratchett facing the Hollywood philistines, or about how he came up with the idea for 1602 in Venice – and all of them are also about himself in his role as author.
I can see that a writer of stories might deep down want to be a performer, to act out the parts he writes, the characters who embody parts of himself, and to communicate in person with his audience. Writing is usually a solitary profession, requiring individuals to spend their working hours alone in a room in front of a computer, and one might expect that the field therefore attracts people with reclusive temperaments.
But not entirely. There are areas of writing that involve collaboration, including comics, wherein writers collaborate with artists. I have borne witness to the growth of a large community of comics professionals in the New York area, before much of it fell apart due to people moving away, getting fired, or just growing older and less social. Reading about the writers at Joss Whedon’s Mutant Enemy Productions, I get the same sense of a collection of like-minded creative spirits working together that I used to see in comics.
Before the 1970s, there was virtually no contact between comics creators and their audience. In fact, most comic book writers and artists were not even credited in the books until Stan Lee began regularly listing credits in Marvel books in the 1960s. As the field has evolved in subsequent decades, comics brings the creators face to face with the public: there are book signings, appearances at direct sales comics stores, and, of course, conventions. Since Comic-Con dates back to 1969, it is a pioneer in this transformation. Moreover, comics writers and artists give interviews to fanzines, both amateur and professional ones, and nowadays interact with their readers over the Internet.
So it is that comics creators get plenty of practice in expounding on their work, speaking in public, polishing anecdotes, and learning how to command the attention of an audience. I have been struck by how articulate most of the comics pros whom I’ve interviewed over the years have been. Rarely is there the hemming and hawing, or the reflexive reliance on “You know” to fill space (If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking) that one encounters so often when people talk. Most comics pros whom I interview even talk in complete sentences, and, if you study transcripts of most conversations, you will see how unusual that is.
In working on my documentary, I was very aware that I was “casting” interviewees, selecting people who I knew would be articulate and speak intelligently, people who were good storytellers in person as well as on the printed page, and Neil was one of them.
Certain guests at comics conventions are particularly good at commanding the audience’s interest. There’s Stan Lee, who makes his “surprise” cameos and steals the show. Joss Whedon, with his inexhaustible wit, more effusively American than Gaiman’s understated British style, is another crowd-pleaser. And Gaiman is clearly a master at talking with and entertaining convention audiences, and I hope that I am conveying some of this in my reports on his panels. That one woman in the audience said Gaiman is popular because he is cute; more to the point is that he has a charismatic presence as a public speaker, and I expect that audiences at conventions go to see him as much to be entertained by his anecdotes and witticisms as to learn what his next project is.
Panels at Comic-Con, at their best, are theater, and the most effective guests at Comic-Con are, in their own way, showmen.
And Gaiman, unexpectedly, got to make a rather theatrical exit. It was during Gaiman’s exchange with the man who wanted him to turn standup comic that I noticed that Klingons – aliens from Star Trek – were lined up against the wall behind the dais. But no, it was no hallucination. Gaiman saw them, too, did not ascribe them to being brain dead from exhaustion, but instead was delighted. “This is so cool. Haven’t you always wanted to leave behind a line of Klingons?”
And with that the panel was at its end, and Gaiman and the Klingons all left. And what the heck were the Klingons doing there? For the answer we would have to wait another day.
SPENDING ETERNITY IN SPRINGFIELD
The summer following The Simpsons‘ initial season, the San Diego Con held its first Simpsons panel, which I intended. The show’s creator, Matt Groening, who had been doing his underground-style comic strip Life in Hell, and was a longtime San Diego Con attendee, was enthusiastically welcomed by the audience: the comics pro who had made just good in the big time. The panel had a screening of one of the earliest episodes, “Bart the General,” about Bart’s war with the now familiar bully Nelson.
This year, at 1 PM in the now familiar Room 6CDEF, was another Simpsons panel, once again with Groening, joined by the show’s longtime writer and current show runner Al Jean, writers Tim Long, Don Payne, Kevin Curran, and early Simpsons director David Silverman. Another past episode was screened, this time the episode, written by Curran, in which Lisa enters the “Spellympics,” in a longer cut than the one shown on the air. (This episode takes on new relevance now that there is a successful indie documentary, Spellbound, about a national spelling bee.) But now (and here I am feeling old again) the show was going into its fifteenth season this fall, which, I believe, makes it the longest running situation comedy in American television history. The “Spellympics” show from last season was the 301st episode, and we were informed that they had just finished the 330th.
What else did we find out? That an upcoming episode will introduce the father of Professor Frink, who is voiced by Hank Azaria as an imitation of Jerry Lewis, and that the elder Frink was actually played by Jerry Lewis, thrilling Azaria. That another episode will cast the Simpsons as historical figures, such as Homer as Henry VIII. A musical episode will parody Evita with Lisa running for class president. In yet another episode, the Simpsons travel to London. (I already knew about this: this is the episode with Ian McKellen and J. K. Rowling playing themselves.) I also knew another thing that Groening told us: that Bullwinkle, which worked on different levels for children and adults, was a major influence on the Simpsons writers.
Groening said he would like to do a movie version of his other animated TV series, Futurama (which had its own panel earlier today), but so far, he said, that is only a “dream”; he said it is more possible they will get to do new TV episodes. Eventually there will be a Simpsons movie, but they are too busy doing the TV Simpsons for the foreseeable future. “We hope to have a Simpsons movie for your children,” a panelist said.
It was asked, “How do you continue to come up with new and fresh ideas?” A panelist pointed out that the show has fifty regular characters that stories can be done about. But there must be more to it than that. Whereas so many series seem to run out of steam as the years pass, The Simpsons has somehow managed to retain its high level of energy and creativity. Perhaps the show is unusually good at finding a steady supply of writers with fresh ideas.
Groening spoke not only of how The Simpsons proved that animation could be successful on prime time television, but also how it enabled people to become more accepting of different graphic styles in animated series. “The Simpsons kicked off the prime time animation explosion of the early ’90s,” he said, “And now cartoons all over TV look like nothing else,” singling out “unique visions” including Spongebob Squarepants, Samurai Jack, King of the Hill, and Family Guy.
I think one of The Simpsons‘ greatest achievements is that it has won a great battle for the cause of cartoon art. I never read or hear any condescending references to The Simpsons: because it is a cartoon show. Indeed, it seems universally acknowledged to be one of the best and most intelligently written shows for adults on television. Before The Simpsons went on the air, this was unheard of. The conventional wisdom was that any animated TV series was entirely or primarily for kids. Now it is not a surprise when, say, King of the Hill or South Park are reviewed as shows of interest for discerning adults, though the American adult audience still seems more willing to accept comedy in the cartoon medium than other genres.
I’m a little puzzled, though glad, that The Simpsons has run for so long. The usual rule is that a series needs to run five seasons to be successful in syndication. I recall that during recent rounds of negotiations on renewing Friends for yet another season, some articles pointed out that television stations carrying the show in syndication were not obliged to buy another season. Hence there was a question as to whether it would be financially viable to produce another season. The Simpsons has been running years longer and has nearly three times the usual number of episodes needed for syndication. But the show keeps going. If Fox is willing to spend the money, I’m not complaining.
During the panel Groening was asked about a report that he had written the final episode of The Simpsons. “No,” he said, “I had an idea for the last episode of The Simpsons. But there will be no final episode of The Simpsons.”
And, you know, he might be right. At this point it seems hard to believe that The Simpsons will ever be cancelled, although I know that at some point, inevitably, it must stop. But even if The Simpsons comes to a stop as a weekly series, I wonder if the characters have by now become perennials, like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, and if they will therefore continue to appear in new material in one format or another for the rest of our lives and even beyond.
And finally, how did Groening feel about his two shows, Futurama and The Simpsons, competing with each other for the Emmy as best animated series? “No matter what wins,” he said with a strangely cynical satisfaction, “you still get to be bitter.”
DUCK, TITANS, DUCK!
In Buster Keaton’s silent comedy Seven Chances, two scene transitions are achieved thus: Buster sits in his car, and instead of the car moving from one place to another, the background fades from one setting into the next.
This is like my afternoon at Comic-Con. I simply remained seated in Room 6CDEF after the Simpsons panel ends, and at 2 PM another animation panel began: “Cartoon Network: Duck Dodgers and Teen Titans.”
This was the animation network’s presentation on two of its newest series, both of which have premiered by the time this column appears.
In fact, this was two panels in one. First up was the group that discussed the Duck Dodgers series. Among its participants were Sam Register, Cartoon Network’s senior vice president of original animation; Tony Cervone and Spike Brandt, the supervising producers for Duck Dodgers; writer/producers Paul Dini and Tom Minton; and voice actors Joe Alaskey and Bob Bergen.
How times change. Two decades ago, Paul Dini and I were working on the fanzine Comics Feature: I was associate editor, writing a column “The Enchanted Drawing” that is the forebear of this one, and Paul was assistant editor, low man on the totem pole. And now I’m an underemployed comics historian looking in vain for a day job, while Paul became not only an Emmy-winning writer/producer, but is now (imagine Daffy pointing to the heavens while glowing with energy) PAUL DINI IN THE TWENTY-FOURTH AND A HALF CEN–TURY!!
This show was inspired by Chuck Jones’s space opera parody Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century, which stars Daffy Duck in the role of space adventurer Duck Dodgers, accompanied by Porky Pig as his “eager young space cadet,” doing battle against Jones’s milquetoast-voiced alien marauder Marvin the Martian. One of his greatest cartoons, it has become an obligatory component of any Chuck Jones retrospective.
Register declared that at Cartoon Network “we are purists. Doing anything with Looney Tunes characters scares us. They were originally done so well by geniuses, why go there?” Register had just rejected a proposal for another show based on Looney Tunes, which, perhaps mercifully, was not described, and asked for what was termed “non-crap ideas.”
A new Duck Dodgers project had been pitched several times before. Tony Cervone and Spike Brandt had done an “animatic” trailer for a nonexistent Duck Dodgers feature film, and this eventually got the new series greenlighted. Some of this trailer turns up in the new show’s opening credit sequence, which was screened for us.The opening credit sequence is also the only part of the show that acknowledges the framing device. The credits bill Daffy as playing Duck Dodgers and Porky as the Eager Young Space Cadet, but the episodes themselves never acknowledge that the characters are actors playing roles.
Joe Alaskey and Bob Bergen performed a brief Duck Dodgers: script clearly done as a piece d’occasion for the con, with Alaskey doing the voices of Daffy and Marvin and Bergen doing Porky. It was actually a lame script, though helped by the actors’ ad-libs, but I was entranced. Listening to voice actors – these living humans speaking in the voices of familiar animated characters – is like watching magic being performed. It’s as if Alaskey and Bergen were channeling the spirits of Daffy and Porky, as if, when he was alive, Mel Blanc was the medium through which they spoke, and now these guys are. (It is an old piece of animation lore that Blanc’s voice was speeded up electronically to make Daffy and Porky’s voices sound so high, and that in fact Daffy’s voice, unenhanced, was the same as Sylvester’s. But Alaskey and Bergen duplicated the familiar sounds right before our ears. Years ago, at one of Mark Evanier’s voice actor panels, I heard Alaskey dispute the story about Blanc and explain that in fact, Daffy was a “head voice” and Sylvester was a “chest voice,” whereupon he demonstrated both.)
Other voice actors on the show include Star Trek‘s Michael Dorn as the voice of all the many robots who will be wrecked in battle, and Tia Carrere as the Martian Queen. (Wait, can’t she be shown in live action instead?)
The panel pointed out that Chuck Jones had based the original Duck Dodgers cartoons on the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials; the new show will likewise reference them, but also draw on the “last fifty years in science fiction,” and parody Star Trek, Star Wars, and many others.
This was clear in the Duck Dodgers footage that was screened for us. Some of it was an excerpt from an episode called “The Green Loon-tern,” in which Daffy/Dodgers becomes a member of DC Comics’ Green Lantern Corps. Then there was a complete episode, “The Fowl Friend,” which spoofed the animated film The Iron Giant: Daffy/Dodgers gets a robot friend, gets jealous of him, and tries to get rid of him.
We were also told during the panel that Cartoon Network did not want to make a Looney Tunes-derived show that would be compared to the classic Warners cartoons, so the Duck Dodgers show was to be “very different from classic Looney Tunes.” But look, everyone who loved the original Duck Dodgers cartoon is going to want the TV series to capture the same look and feel, justifiably so, and there is no getting around it.
I’ll be reviewing Duck Dodgers in a later column, but for now I’ll say that “The Fowl Friend” was surprisingly uneven. Here was an audience ready to laugh at a Daffy Duck cartoon, but which remained silent for the whole first half. This is not good, but an inventive slapstick sequence halfway through (with Dodgers trying in vain to dispose of a bomb) started the laughs coming, and the parody of Iron Giant‘s climax was likewise well received.
What strikes me most about this episode is that it’s very different from the usual run of American comedy, in which the lead characters must be basically positive, moral, likable figures. In contrast, British comedy often spotlights flawed lead characters, ranging from the drunken, self-deluded leads of Absolutely Fabulous to Basil Fawlty, with his rage management issues, to the Blackadder family, who will even engage in murder. Daffy Duck has traditionally been, as he openly acknowledges, a greedy, conniving little coward. And seeing Duck Dodgers plot and plan against the robotic rival who considers him a friend, get rid of him, and get away with it, was like a breath of comedic fresh air. There seems to be a little of one of Seinfeld‘s comic axioms here: No hugging allowed.
The Duck Dodgers crew stepped down from the dais (while Register remained) and the team behind the new Teen Titans animated series took their places. Among the latter were producer Glen Murakami; story editor David Slack; Khary Payton, the actor who voices Cyborg; and Yumi, the Japanese woman who composed the series’ catchy theme song, who spoke through a translator.
Register, the executive producer of Teen Titans, opened by saying that “Cartoon Network needed a superhero show for young kids,” that they wanted to get kids “to watch superheroes again.”
Now there’s an eye-opener. Has it really come to this: that the superhero genre over the years has evolved almost entirely into material for teenagers and adults? That there are no superhero shows for pre-teens anymore?
Is this really true? Cartoon Network does have The Powerpuff Girls, who are superhero tots, but I can see that little boys might think the show is only for girls. But Cartoon Network has Justice League and reruns of the 1990s Batman and Superman series. These shows are intelligent and visually inventive enough for discerning adult audiences. But aren’t they appealing and accessible to kids, too? They were originally run on Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons!
Murakami said that for Teen Titans they wanted a “different story structure” and “different look than Superman and Batman.” Register said that “Bruce” – Bruce Timm, character designer for Superman and Batman – “is the man!” but that it was time to “move in a different direction” and “try something completely different.”
Murakami said that many of the people working on the Teen Titans show were “into old school anime,” Japanese animated film. Register said that “Everyone grew up on Battle of the Planets.” (I didn’t. Feeling old again.) Register dubbed the look of Teen Titans “Americanime”; it is not true Japanese anime, but a style in which what Register said they “make anime our own.”
I did not stay much longer, but I did get to see a screening of Teen Titans‘ opening title sequence, and the Japanese-style theme song is indeed fun. Since the Con, I’ve watched several Teen Titans episodes, which I’ll review in a future column, but for now I’ll just say that I’ve grown fonder of the “Americanime” style of the series with each episode. But if they do a Batman series in this style, I will not be happy.
And I’ll also say this. The Teen Titans show is clearly based on The New Teen Titans, created by Marv Wolfman and George Perez: it’s got Titans Tower, as well as three members they created – Cyborg, Raven and Starfire – and, when you watch the show, plenty of villains they created, too. Voice actor Payton even recalled on the panel how he read The New Teen Titans as a kid. (I’m feeling old yet again; this has become an occupational hazard of attending Comic-Con.) And I spotted Marv Wolfman sitting in the panel’s audience. Shouldn’t he have been up on stage?
THREE TRUE LIFE TITANS
Just before 3 PM, as the Titans panel continued, I asked the family seated near me to hold my seat, and I would be back in fifteen minutes. They agreed, and I headed out the door and down the corridor to Room 6A, for the start (somewhat delayed) of “Forry, Julie and Ray,” a joint appearance by three nearly lifelong friends who are also giant and venerable figures of the world of science fiction.
There was Forrest J. Ackerman, longtime editor of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, and renowned expert on science fiction and horror.
There was Julius Schwartz, co-founder of the first science fiction fanzine, The Time Traveler, who subsequently became the first literary agent specializing in science fiction, and in these capacities worked with many of the great names of the genre in the 1930s and early 1940s. But he had an even longer career from the 1940s into the 1980s as an editor at DC Comics, where he led the great Silver Age revival of the super hero genre in the 1950s, and revitalized both Batman and Superman in the next two decades. It was in reaction to Schwartz’s success that Stan Lee co-created “The Fantastic Four,” launching the modern Marvel line. Hence, one might well wonder if there would be a comics industry in America today if not for Schwartz.
And there was Ray Bradbury, whom Schwartz discovered and represented in the former’s early career, who is surely America’s greatest living author of science fiction.
The moderator was once again Mark Evanier, who appeared to be more awed by the trio gathered here than by the guests at any of the numerable other panels he hosted at this Con. Bradbury was confined to a wheelchair, as a result of suffering strokes some years back. There was supposed to be a ramp so that he could get up to the dais, but in a rare screwup at this professionally run convention, the ramp had been sent to the wrong room. So Bradbury remained in his wheelchair in front of the dais, and Evanier sat with him, holding a microphone. Bradbury worried that the large audience would be unable to see him. But we could all hear him, and were glad we did.
After Schwartz told an introductory story about how he first met Ackerman and Bradbury, Evanier turned to Bradbury, who told us why coming to the Comic-Con was important to him. As a child he too was a comics collector, but what he collected was the “Buck Rogers” strip. As a result, Bradbury said, other kids made fun of him, even made him cry, and he threw his collection away. But afterwards, he changed his mind and started collecting “Buck Rogers” once more. He decided to “travel to the future,” Bradbury said, and he “never came back.” It was a simple story, movingly told, with a profound moral, to follow one’s own interests regardless of the ridicule and incomprehension of others. And the audience warmly applauded this tale of a man who had begun like all of them, had followed his passion for the fantastic, and had risen to become a major literary figure.
Yet as soon as Bradbury had finished his tale, I had to leave to get a seat for the start of another panel. This was the toughest choice I made between competing panels at this Comic-Con. According to Mark Evanier’s later account on his website, Bradbury continued to amaze the audience, at one point urging each writer among them not to let anyone tell him or her how to write, but to follow his or her own vision. (As a beleaguered comics critic/historian, that’s advice I wish I had heard in person. And you should all check it out in the July entries for Evanier’s blog at http://www.newsfromme.com.) Yet there was another major figure in fantasy and science fiction whom I had come to Comic-Con to hear, and whose panel was about to begin. And you’ll find out who that was in my next column.
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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