We Are Letting it Get Away (Or How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb)

Have a head full of Nine Inch Nails right now; something that used to concern me.

Like, is there an extent to which listening to too much aggro solipsistically-inclined ego-driven techno-percussion might not actually be say useful to someone who is working out their own anger issues?  Well Fuck it. It works for me. Not all the time. But it’s the background I need to get what I do done.

Now I’m moving on to some new projects, I’m hoping to channel some of those themes in new directions. Keep it “Posi”. You know? That’s positive. Sort of channel the non-stop explosive chain-reaction into a containable streamable turbine driving energy. And then the light-bulb turns on. That’s all I’m saying. And I think… It’s working. I’ll keep you posted.

* * *

Of books, things I have been thinking most about these days; still, constantly thinking about Essential Spider-Man Vol1, the Ditko/Stan Lee stuff. There’s nothing in there that isn’t well, the very template of modern super-hero comics. Madcap hyperbole tormented teenagers kinetic visuals= compelling comics. I’m convinced that Dr. Octopus might be one of the greatest villains ever created simply for the way that his arms sprawl across a page, forcing our agile arachnid into ever contorted positions. His arms are just so simple and so good and so plainly visual in a way that so few antagonists are, and so perfectly suited as the antithesis of the hero; you can tell just almost by action alone how they made the second Spider-Man movie so exhilarating to watch. Anyway, I think about it a lot. I’ve been thinking about reading Reading Comics one of these days too just to catch up with well, everything else comic related. Apparently Doug’s chapter on Ditko is killer.

Also just starting to dig into Carter Beats the Devil; which has a thrilling stage magic set-piece opening, and then proceeds to dip into well, frankly uninteresting backstory as we learn of said magician’s priveleged up-bringings.  Now there’s a story of triumphing over odds, “ooh, Daddy, I don’t want your fancy millions, I’m gonna fight it out on the carnival circuit.” “that’s ok son, we support you and they’ll always be here waiting for you if you need them.” Uh, yeah, cue violins. Anyhow, I’m gonna stick it out for the sake of the beginning, and the plot does seem to chug along like a locomotion; like an honest to god story; which is all I’m after from a book anyway. But geez. Hang up the sob-story already.  And… is it just me… or didn’t Robertson Davies already write this like thirty years ago?

More on the go…

Still Shocking

Finally finished reading Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, one of the obvious inspirations for my Zuda comic Shock Effect. I picked it up in August when I was at Powell’s book store in Portland. I’d absorbed the ideas of her thesis through the excerpts online, but was still expecting something similar to No Logo. That is, a contemporary history examining current trends in this case in places like Iraq and New Orleans, how disasters are exploited to create wealth for super-rich companies awarded government contracts. And that was part of it, but not everything.

Instead it was a counter-history,  in an almost super-hero movie paranoia kind of way (“everything you know is wrong!”) rewriting the last forty years through the lens of ‘free-market’ economic ideology. The book shows countries around the world, from across South and Central America, Asia and Russia and Eastern Europe each had their economies shattered, held for ransom by ideological driven institutions bent on eradicating all traces of any public sphere, leaving them open to pillage from foreign mega-corporations.  Klein also uses the dominant metaphor of torture, specifically techiques of radical shock treatments that were developed to treat mental illness, as a parallel growth that has accompanied these new economies. In enforced ‘free-market’ economies, one cannot exist without the threat of violence and torture, kidnapping and terror.

So it’s a bit much to take in really, but to Klein’s credit for the most part she pulls it off. No Logo, beloved as  a movement bible, I always found largely unreadable. A textbook of statistics and anecdotes strung together with little sense of  a definining narrative. Few traces of actual on-the ground investigative journalism that held together. And what makes the Shock Doctrine different is that  it has progressed to the point of being a genuine book, if you will, rather than just a textbook. Klein weaves in stories of her actual encounters talking with those in the affected areas, in New Orleans, in Iraq in South Africa, capturing their voices, really conveying their thoughts and concerns.

Now in some sections it does trail off into catalogues of details and figures, it is largely an economic story after-all, but by balancing this with sense of a larger ‘narrative’ Klein has crafted a book that has more staying power. I’d like to liken it to a documentary film but that seems largely redundent considering the medium, but that’s the sense I had–in that for sections she allowed her subjects to tell the story rather than bombarding us with numbers. I’d say more that Klein is moving towards creating powerful, lasting books which most importantly can still be read by most people, by engaging with her subjects in a new journalist kind of way. There are still moments where the prose is heavy handed, returning to the metaphorical ‘economics as torture’ big picture, where I think it would have been better served by more moving examples of actual people.

But that is part of the point of this book. It’s an argument. It’s impassioned. It has a point of view, one that is counter to the dominant ideologies of the world. And like those on the ground it has to shout a bit louder to be heard.

More on this from Jimmy G. Next up for me. Well something cheerier I expect, although you couldn’t get much darker. Perhaps that book about The Green Zone in Iraq, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. I’m sure that will brighten my day…

Speakin’ Easy

I’ll be appearing with my Shock Effect co-creator John Lang at the SpeakEasy Comic Book Show. It’s one of my favourite comic-book events in the city– not just because of it’s size. The vibe is essentially more like an art opening or zine fair than something traditionally comic-book based. It’s a great place to talk fellow creators and people who just dig comics, it couldn’t be more casual. The beer, which I think is usually sponsored helps. It was at the first edition of the show I met Danesh who I worked on my first comic with, Ogre Hospital. So you know, it’s a place where good things happen. And since the Gladstone hotel went ultra-lux not a bad place to spend a Thursday night either. I’ll be there hawkin’ issues of Freelance Blues. Dig it.

On Apocalyptic Horror

I saw the Mist yesterday. And it was so predictable in spots. I mean, it was a tense location based, suspense horror, routed in the horror of people; a somewhat brutal allegory of contemporary America, and a trapped house terror plot, like the Birds. Which is completely fun, I’m all in favour of.

See, I just finished writing something like that myself, or at least the first chapter of a project on similar theme. Shock Effect. This was my first comic published by a major publisher, on DC’s Zuda competition. It was a competition, we came in 3rd, so right now our strip stands in limbo, perhaps to be finished, perhaps to be stasis forever. But all in all it was a good endeavour to be part of. But because of this limbo state, my mind has been spinning out on these themes, where these stories go, and what they mean, and most importantly how they end.

Which brings us back to The Mist. This was a film, a survival horror type story, that was almost, almost good.

But it was too predictable; the monster jumped out JUST when you thought it would. It came JUST when you needed it too. Like the tentacles from under the door. Like the large creature devouring the soldier after the church lady throws him out. Like the monster bug biting the girl after she refuses to have sex. It’s like, your worst fears, your worst nightmares were out in the mist. And then you thought them, and then they came true.

I kept trying to figure out the riddle of it, but it turned out to be monsters from another dimension brought in by soldiers and scientists, shades of Half-Life anyone? Which now that I’ve finished the game, should be subject for future post.

Then I thought wouldn’t it be so much worse if? If there were no grounding. If there were no explanation. If it just kept happening. A little bit worse each time. And perhaps happening, because we expected things to happen. What if it was their fault. The worse they imagined the boogie-man to be, the worse it got each time. And the fantasy-driven mind of a Hollywood horror film cover painter, where does that lead us? The apocalyptic fantasies of a deranged evangelical? Where does that leave us? Which one fears the most? What will come out of the mist? That’s what I thought. Because it came always when we needed it according to the plots and the characters worse fears. Which is why it might have made sense to have survivors make it out, because they believed they would.

It’s tricky to consider that then.

How do you end your apocalyptic locked door horror movie? There was a nod to The Thing in this movie, and in my mind that movie was a perfectly crafted work of storytelling. There was no way you knew what was going to happen, and it kept mutating further and further. And then the ending became, a bitter grudge; a sleeping stalemate. Not a damn bad way to end. A cold war standstill in the arctic between paranoid friends. Who do you trust? The end.

But The Birds, however, they just drive off. Where does that go? Is that narrative closure? Do we need it?

But then 28 Days Later; it ends in pastoralism. Escape from Zombies, and an eventual end to the grim tunnel that the protagonists had to navigate. It opens up to a scene of reward. Then rescue.

But then Children of Men. More political allegorical, I guess, but similar setting. Our protagonist dies. Our child lives. The hope for the future lives on. Moses does not see the promised land.

Which one works the best? Depends on your ends. And then, not only that, when you start to take a story apart like this, in this mechanistic way; how does that work? These are stories. Shouldn’t the end be just what the end is? You write your way to it, then you see. You have to see it through to find out what it is. Not just choose ahead of time.

But I’d say for horror, the most daring, are those that peel the layers of our world back, and then just leave us there. Cthulu style. No redemption. No remorse. Just the Mouth of Madness. Something that leaves you there, with the world continuing to peel back. It’s anti-narrative. It’s counter-intuitive. And I think that’s what’s going on in the work of Tony Burgess.

It’s making you feel uncomfortable. It’s not a genre adventure. it’s a takedown. it’s the end of all possible worlds. It’s their world invading and inhabiting our own and forever changing it, irrevocably. The doors of perception opened in your mind, and the fear now lurking there, of perceiving things in a different light. There’s no hope no redemption. There’s only dread. Because even when you close the book, even when you turn off the screen, and turn on the lights, your world your way of looking at things has been marred.

That’s true horror. And it takes a monster to do it.

*****

I realize this is the first time I’m writing about a movie here in this blog for the first time, and not books directly or radioactivity. I’m not sure what direction my writing is going here. I think Skeez Dreams is mutating here from a catalogue of my own reading habits into a greater examination of storytelling and elements within it that are influencing my own work. There so many books that I have read over the last five or six months that haven’t made it into this blog, so it’s orignal intention has been a bit blurred. Let’s just say that from here on in, it’s open to more discussion of all mediums that are influencing my writing. And we’ll go from there.

Speaking of, we’ll have more to say about the Half-Life series of video games too. You were warned.