Secrect Origins

Happy New Year! 'Tis the season to regroup, rethink and forge ahead. So, in honour of the coming new year I thought I'd take a look back at how I got into comics. It all started way back when I was a lad... Well actually it wasn't until I was in high school that I really became aware of comics. Oh, I knew the iconic characters like Batman and Superman and Spiderman but only through their spin-offs into TV and movies. I had a friend in high school who decided to start collecting comics. I flipped through a few of his books but wasn't really impressed. It was all superhero stuff and full of characters I'd never heard of with names like Dare Devil and Wolverine. I was more interested in playing AD&D and watching Robotech (I think I just dated myself there.) so that was as far as that went.

Stephen introduced me to the New Mutants some time after that. I remember thinking that Illyana Rasputin (Colosuss' little sister, for those who care) was kind cute and I was intrigued by a six armed samurai woman who's name escapes me now. (Spiral?) That was enough to get me to read the section of Dragon magazine dedicated to the Marvel role-playing game. So even though I didn't read any of the comics I was becoming fairly well versed on the backgrounds of some fairly obscure characters. Surprisingly, this all became useful a decade later when I was living Japan.

I was working as an animator in Tokyo and the friend of an acquainence who helped me get into the industry there asked me for help translating some storyboards for the Spiderman cartoon that was being animated there. It wasn't actually translating words that was the problem. The translator simply couldn't follow the story; it was too convoluted to make sense.
(This was the cartoon version that included half the Marvel universe and had Peter Parker sprout a set of ten-foot hairy spider legs out of his rib cage.) My job was to explain things like who the Kingpin is and why Kraven the Hunter want to kill Spiderman...

But I didn't really get interested in collecting or reading comics until after I finished high school and started seriously pursuing animation as a career. I met an new friend (this is getting confusing so I am going to start naming names. I may or may not change names to protect the innocent.) His name was Dave. Dave lived for comics. So I would accompany him to the comics shop and there I discovered... MANGA.

I was already an anime fan and manga had the same look and feel so, while Dave bought his superheroes,I would browse. A lot. But I was very particular about what I would buy. I recall liking the artwork in Akira when it came out but I didn't want to collect it because it didn't have any giant robots. (So my exposure to anime at that point was very limited.) There were, however, two comics that did catch my fancy: Nausicaa and Appleseed. So I decided to get my feet wet. I told myself I would collect anything that caught my eye until I had all of these two series and then I would quit. And thus began a long and intense love affair with Japanese comics.

Next time: why I fell for manga and how it all ended.

A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge, Part 2

So Patrick and I had agreed that we should work together on a comic without actually knowing what the project was going to be.

Now, I had a bunch of ideas that I thought were pretty solid. Some of them, I'd been waiting to use for years.

None of them was Cold Iron Badge.

They were good ideas. They would have made good comics. I suspect that some of them would have lent themselves better than Cold Iron Badge to monetizing and merchandising.

But they weren't ideas that worked for both of us. No matter how good they were, I couldn't be married to them. We found -- had to find, through a lot of discussion and a lot of give-and-take -- a story that we could both get excited about.

There are a few reasons for this; one is philosophical. I'm not a proponent of applying auteur theory to comics -- even though it's actually possible in comics to be an auteur (unlike, say, film).

But just because something is possible doesn't mean that it's always a good idea. Collaboration is an incredibly powerful creative tool, and a lot of my own best writing has been collaborative. Comics is a medium that lends itself to collaboration. Particularly in my case, since I can't draw, and I am pretty much utterly dependent on having a creative partner in the form of an artist if I want to make comics.

(And even in comics, there are few genuine auteurs. My friend Mark Oakley is one. But even Dave Sim had Gerhard.)

Another reason is practical. In any comics project, the artist is going to be spending a lot more time drawing it than the writer spent writing it, so if there's no money on the table, it damn well better be something they actually want to draw.

(I believe it was Warren Ellis who said that he begins every new collaboration asking the artist he's working with questions like, "What do you love to draw? What do you hate to draw? What have you always wanted to draw and never gotten the chance?" That thought was never far from my mind while Cold Iron Badge was coming together.)

And besides: Patrick is talented. He has good ideas. Why wouldn't I want him involved in creating the story?

This isn't unprecedented for me -- Xeno's Arrow was developed in very much the same way, with Greg Beettam and me discussing the kind of story we wanted to tell, building our characters and world outwards from the initial desire to collaborate. It wasn't the first idea we kicked around, either -- just the best. It beat out, by the way, an idea that we did give a lot of thought too, that even got to the scripting and plotting stage before we decided that we weren't really into it, and which -- conceived, keep in mind, in early 1993 -- was eerily similar in many ways to Harry Potter.

That's a whole 'nother story, but I will say that it's enough to make me wonder if Alan Moore is right about IdeaSpace.

So: Patrick and I were kicking ideas around, mostly by email. And the germ of what became Cold Iron Badge was contained in a phrase he wrote, about being in a "super" mood -- wanting to tell a story that was superheroic, or supernatural. I immediately gravitated to the latter.

More on how that evolved into Cold Iron Badge next time.

Perfectionism

I have a friend that is still working on his student film. We graduated fifteen years ago.

My friend (and you know who you are) continued to work on his film after graduation. Then he looked at the stuff he did in school and decided to improved it, since his skills had improved. By the time the old stuff was redone it was better looking than the new stuff. So he deicided to redo the "new" stuff, which was better looking than the other stuff... for fifteen years.

My approach to my student film was more pragmatic. I knew that after graduating I would never touch it again, even if I didn't finish it (which I didn't.) I did the best I could, used it to get a job and moved on. A few years later I made another film, and finished it. And then made another; and then a couple more (which are almost done). I like to finish what I start.

With each project I set out to acheive certain goals. The first film was to be finised first, quality was secondary. The next films were to experiment with different techniques and to push my self as to do the best work I can. My goals with Cold Iron Badge, were to make a comic and to tell a long format story. What I didn't take into consideration at the time was that a long format story take a long time to tell. And in that time, I am improving. It has gotten to the point where the earlier pages of CIB are full of things that are painful to look at. Some of it is in the pacing. Some of it is in the layouts and some of it is in the drawings themselves. It is to the point where portions of the comic are no longer representative of what I am capable of doing. So what do I do? Move on or revisit?

As much as I like to move forward, sometimes going back is inevitable. Experience is a good teacher and hindsight is always 20/20. So I will be going back and "fixing" some of the artwork. When eventually (knock wood) we make a print version some of the things I am talkng about will be much more obvious than when veiwed a week at at time so I owe it to Christine and Delric to show them in the best light I can. I will be leaving the archives alone for now but at some point I will post the new and improved versions somewhere. And I promise that won't take fifteen years to finish.

A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge, Part 1

I'm going to leave my impressions of the rest of the first edition of The Hobbit -- from Chapter Six on -- for another time, for a couple of reasons.

I haven't actually finished it yet, for one thing -- I've been reading other things, books that I can actually read while on public transit without fear of damaging an heirloom. A lot of science fiction (one of my other loves, and which I also write) by John Scalzi and Charles Stross, both terrific writers.

The other thing is that first edition of The Hobbit, after the radically-different Chapter Five, the variation between versions in the chapters that follow is pretty minor. Barely noticeable, and not the sort of thing that makes for very interesting analysis.

So, if I'm not going to bore you with that, what do I intend to bore you with?

Well, Patrick has been wowing everyone with his posts about process, so you've learned quite a bit about the whys and hows of his creative choices. But you haven't heard much about the writing side of that particular coin.

So: How was Cold Iron Badge conceived? How did that translate into the story you've been following and, I hope, enjoying the hell out of?

It emerged, first and foremost, from a desire to work together.

Patrick and I have been friends for a long time, and at various times in the past we had talked about doing a comic of some sort. Nothing that had gotten beyond an interesting conversation or two and some character designs.

About a year and a half ago, I was frustrated. My attempts at breaking into screenwriting had long since fallen by the wayside (the details are a long story for another time). I had also recently had reason to remind myself why I've always avoided writing short stories or a novel: I'm just not very good at prose. What I'm good at is scripting.

Especially in the wake of attending the 2007 Toronto Comics Art Festival, I missed comics. But it was clear to me that, in terms of creative outlets that were fun, didn't have many related expenses, gatekeepers or bars to entry, but still held out the possibility of being of high quality and maybe even profitable someday, webcomics were where the action was.

The problem was, I can't do a webcomic by myself. Because I can't draw. It pisses me off. It's the one talent I don't have that I really, really wish I did. But I can't draw for beans.

At that point, I didn't have many contacts in comics anymore. My "career" (and I use the self-deprecating quotes advisedly) was about as cold as my "career" in film. The artists I was still in touch with were all busy with their own lives and projects.

So, Patrick and I were talking, and I was bemoaning my situation. "The problem is," I whinged, "That I don't know any artists who want to work with me!"

"Ahem," he replied.

"Oh! I thought you were busy!" I said.

So, that was where it all began.

That left wide open the question of what we were actually going to work on. More on that next time.

Things I have learned

After laying out fifty-odd pages of story I think I am finally getting a handle on pacing the story. As I mentioned last time, I try to end a page on a scene cut or a dramatic moment. Sometimes that leaves me with a lot of business to cover in that page and sometimes it leaves not very much. When that happens I have to look at whether to stretch or condense the action. Do I squeeze it into one page or stretch it out over two, and if so how much goes on page one and how much goes on page two?

I don't think I can explain how I make these decisions right now. All I know is, it is getting easier to make them. But here are a few things I have learned in the process:

1) More panels on a page means more work for me. This may seem fairly obvious but it wasn't to me. For example, Christine's fight with the goblins at Puck I used a couple of sixteen panel pages. I asumed that more smaller drawing would be take the same amount of time as fewer larger ones because the pencil mileage is the same. I was wrong. Perhaps the drawing time is the same but I didn't account for how long it takes to work out the composition. (Significantly longer that it takes to do the drawing.) So extra panels ends up being a lot of extra time per page.

2) Size matters. The size of a panel does influence the seeming passage of time. In Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner states that a longer panel will seem to occupy more time than a shorter one. Even though I had read that, I thought that the number of panels is more important than the size. Now I have to conede that Eisner knew best. (I quess that is why he has an award named after him.)

3) Blow by blow action is really boring. In a movie it is great to see a fight in intricate detail. Fast cutting can make any number of shots feel as fast or slow as you want. But in a comic, too many drawings slows things down. Even though I know this, I still imagine that action as a movie, which I then have to distill down for the comic.

4) Planning is essential. Not just thumbnailing out pages and panels, but taking the time to really think about what the story needs. I tend to thumbnail out twenty or so pages at a time, then draw them, then thumbnail out another twenty, and so on. By the time I get to the twentieth page of any given set, I have been thinking about it for weeks more that the earlier pages, and they (not surprise here) turn out better. The pacing is better and the story works better. So, as in all things, measure twice, draw once.

The Riddle of Riddles in the Dark

On to Chapter Five: 'Riddles in the Dark'. Bilbo, lost and alone in forgotten caves beneath the Misty Mountains, finds a Ring, finds Gollum and finds his way out. And some riddles are exchanged.

That much is the same.

There's so much that fascinates me about the changes between Chapter Five of the first edition of The Hobbit and the revised version, released after the success of The Lord of the Rings, that most of us are more familiar with.

(I'm going to stop at this point to somewhat belatedly acknowledge that what follows is going to contain rather a lot of spoilers. Although if you don't already know what happens in The Hobbit, why the heck are you here? Go read it. Now. Come back later.)

Obviously, Tolkien's big ret-con* is the centrepiece. Over the course of writing The Lord of the Rings, his conception of what the seemingly innocuous ring of invisibility that Bilbo found deep under the Misty Mountains actually was changed so dramatically, that Chapter Five of the original version of The Hobbit simply made no sense at all anymore. So Tolkien came up with the brilliant idea that the story as originally written was a lie that Bilbo told, and wrote in his memoirs, because he wanted his claim to the Ring to be indisputable, and was ashamed at the thought that he'd stolen it.

Tolkien had a little bit of fun at his own expense, as well, when Frodo and Gandalf discuss Bilbo in The Fellowship of the Ring and Frodo describes the "true" version of the story as "much more likely."

And then, of course, Tolkien rewrote The Hobbit, emending many minor details (as discussed in one of my previous posts) and altering Chapter Five extensively, making it reflect the "truth" as described in The Lord of the Rings.

But that vital change was made up of countless other changes, major and minor. One of them in particular is surprising to me: Gollum barely matters to the story at all.

The Hobbit was written by a man who had studied, and who understood, myths, folklore and fairy-tales right down to the core of his being, so it's no surprise that The Hobbit shares at least some of the classic characteristics of the Hero's Journey as articulated by Joseph Campbell. Campbell suggests that the Hero's Journey consists of a call to adventure, a journey out, a series of tests, some sort of ultimate trial (usually a confrontation with death) and if the hero succeeds, a journey back, with a reward.

Of course these criteria are sufficiently general that they can be applied to a very broad range of stories. But I don't think that it's entirely a coincidence that the subtitle of The Hobbit is There And Back Again.

The point of this digression is that The Hobbit is a story about a journey, a going and a returning. It's also an episodic story, well-suited to being read aloud a chapter a night at bedtime. Bilbo goes from one point to another in his travels, meeting new characters and having fairly discrete adventures along the way.

But the interesting thing is that virtually every character that Bilbo encounters returns at some point. Every character becomes important again later on, either at the climactic Battle of Five Armies or during Bilbo's return home at the very end of the story. Elrond, the Goblins and Wargs, Beorn, the Elven-King. Even the trolls, indirectly, when Bilbo and Gandalf pick up their treasure on the way back.

Except Gollum. Gollum, after Bilbo leaves the Misty Mountains, never matters again in the story. He was a mechanism for getting Bilbo the Ring and getting him out of the caves.
Gollum, who is arguably the pivotal character of The Lord of the Rings -- key to the theme, the unfolding action and the resolution, the tragically fallen counterpart to Frodo -- doesn't matter.

He's also a rather more pathetic figure, who apologizes to Bilbo for losing the Ring that he apparently genuinely intended to give him for winning the riddle contest, and tries to make up for it by leading him to safety. He's clearly not a very nice person (the reference to him eating Goblins, when he can, is present in both versions) but he's not the treacherous, debased, tragic, obsessive figure we know from The Lord of the Rings. His last words to Bilbo are directions: "It musst squeeze in and sneak down. We dursn't go with it, my preciouss, no we dursn't, gollum!"

Compare that to the blood-curdling accusation and threat, "Thief, thief, thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever!" that echoes in Bilbo's ears, and across the pages of The Lord of the Rings right through to the conclusion.

Gollum was a minor, almost a throwaway character.

That Tolkien had the chutzpah to change things so dramatically is frankly astounding.

It's also inspiring, and illustrative.

It's a reminder that tales can, and sometimes should, grow in the telling. That I -- that we -- can grow creatively, and that the process of creative growth never really ends. That earlier works can be reinterpreted in the light of later ones. That characters too, can grow and become more than they were.

That these changes, sometimes even retroactive ones, are not something to be feared, but opportunities to be explored.

Tolkien was good enough, and wise enough, to grow with his work as his work grew with him, and he was smart enough to use that growth as a solution to the story problem it created.

None of which means that I'm about to rewrite the past to support the revelation that Christine is actually a spider elemental, or that Delric is really a giant who only looks like an elf because he's been merged with a magic sword.

But the reason not to do those things isn't because they'd be ret-cons, but because they'd be stupid. I think that's my take-away from all this, and a new mantra: Embrace change, but avoid stupidity.

After all, Tolkien managed it.

Next: 'Out of the Frying-Pan Into the Fire'. Yes, that's what Tolkien actually called Chapter Six of The Hobbit.
__

* That's geek-speak that means a retroactive change to continuity.

From script to page

There are a few consideration when sitting down to draw Cold Iron Badge. First is the amount of story to put on each page. Then there is the number of panels to use to tell the story, and the layout of the panels on the page. Then there is the content of the panels. I go through these steps first as a set of thumbnail drawings, often right on the script pages. I will go through twenty or so pages at a time like that. Then I go to artboards and rough out a scene at a time before going back to ink the pages.

When Stephen gives my a script, the first thing I do is the happy dance (because I even though I helped write the story, I don't know exactly how things will go until it is written, and sometimes Stephen adds a twist of his own.) Then I get to work. I will read through the story again and mark off the page breaks. I try to find a good dramatic spot to end a page. The end of scene is good, especially if it has a twist or cliffhanger element to it (think "You want to arrest you partner?)". This presents a mystery or a question to the readers (that you) that will make you want to see what happens next. I avoid having a scene end in the middle of a page. It just seems a really unnatural page to do it. Not to mention that the page itself will end at an awkward moment.

Once I have the pages broken down, I read through the script again and decide how many panels it will take to tell that bit of story. This is on of the hardest parts of the process for me. As I read the script I can visualize the story as a movie. And if I had to storyboard it, there would be no problem. But this is a comic, not a movie. So what I have to do is translate the movie in my head into a limited number of images. This is most difficult for the action scenes. I love action, especiall kung fu movies. And I really want the action in the comic to shine. That means balancing the drama of the story with my desire to show detailed coreography. (More on this later.)

Once I know the number of panels, I arrange them on the page. This step and the previous are somewhat fluid. There are times I need to add or subtract a panel to get the page to end on the right note, sometimes my idea for the action evolves, requiring a new number of panels. Some times the whole page comes to me at once. These are the easiest to do, because I can just jump in a draw them. Usually they are simple layouts or splash pages. Sometimes I get an idea for a panel or a short sequence of panels. These are not bad to work with either. I just place the sequence on the page and fill in the gaps around it. Sometimes I get nothing. A blank. Like right now. I know what I want to put on the page but I am not sure where to start. When that happens I default to a nine panel grid. I originally thought I would do the whole comic in a grid, like Watchmen. I give a great deal of control over pacing to the writer and, most importantly for me, it removes on level of decision making. All the panels are exactly the same. But when I started to draw, the first shot of Puck just screamed out to be bigger. So I decided to follow my gut on that one and I am happy with the results. But when I get stuck, I do fall back on the tried and true.

Once the page is laid out, I compose the images with the panels. I used to hate the rule of thirds, because it struck me as being formulaic. But I have to admit that it does work. Check out the Watchmen, if you don't believe me. The focus of nearly every panel is on a third. So I have been using that a lot. I probably should spend more time thumbnailing the actual compositions but I will admit to taking short cuts here. I follow my instincts at to where to place everything in the frame. This often lead to a lot of erasing and redrawing. But as long as the paper can take the abuse I will continue on.

From An Unexpected Party to Riddles In The Dark

So, we were speaking of The Hobbit.

As I mentioned, I decided to finally -- I've had the book for about three and a half years -- read the first-edition copy of The Hobbit that my wife gave me.

So far, in the limited amount of time I have to read for pleasure (other than on the subway, which is not something I'm going to subject a seventy-year-old rare book to) I've covered just over a hundred pages -- from the start of the story to just past the ending of Chapter Five.

Chapter Five, 'Riddles In The Dark', is of course the chapter that's radically different from the version of The Hobbit that most of us are familiar with, the chapter that Tolkien felt he had to ret-con in order for Lord Of The Rings to work. More on that another time. The four chapters that precede it, in comparison, are not altered as dramatically. Minor changes at most -- a word here or a sentence or two there, that's about it.

And the overall difference is almost shocking.

It's not that the book isn't outstanding. It's just strikingly different. And, to anyone familiar with Lord Of The Rings, sometimes bizarrely so. The idea that one of Bilbo's Tookish ancestors had married a fairy is followed by a paranthesis noting that less friendly people suggested it had been a goblin. And Elrond refers to his High Elven kindred as "gnomes".

But it goes deeper than that.

The Hobbit, in the version that most of us are familiar with, is full of anachronisms and things that strike a tone that's not entirely consistent with Lord Of The Rings. But anachronisms and inconsistencies of tone are a huge part of what Tolkien cut -- so those elements are even more pronounced in the original.

The overall effect, for me, was that the story reached, and then crossed, some sort of tipping point. That tipping point was in Chapter 2, 'Roast Mutton', on page 43 in this edition.
The Dwarves are discussing the dubious character of the region they and Bilbo are crossing (as they do in both versions). The italics are mine, for emphasis: "These parts are none too well known, and are too near the mountains. Policemen never come so far, and the map-makers have not reached this country yet."

Policemen? In Middle-Earth?

In the long-abandoned wild lands between Bree and Rivendell? What policemen? Whose? How?

Policemen?

And with that, the balance of the familiar and the fantastic, that Tolkien was such a master of, was thrown irrecoverably off.

Again, none of this makes the first edition of The Hobbit a bad book, or a poorly-crafted one. It's a great book, wonderfully written. But it clearly doesn't take place in Middle-Earth, not really. It takes place in a world much more like our own, that uses the languages, and history, and some of the characters of Middle-Earth to enrich a fine and very engaging story.

Fantasy fiction depends on striking that balance -- what and where it lies depends on the story -- between the familiar and the fantastical. And what I've realized, in reading The Hobbit as it was originally written, is how small and subtle the choices that balance rests on can be. A single word, a single idea that doesn't quite fit, can make all the difference.

Fantasists, it is sometimes said, are playing God, freely creating entire worlds to tell their stories in. Well, this is a reminder of the tremendous responsiblity that accompanies that freedom. The existence of an imaginary world is always provisional; it depends on the reader continuing to believe in it. And the smallest inconsistency or wrong note -- a single word! -- can tip the balance from belief to unbelief. And then poof. A whole world gone, like that.

As a writer of fantasy, I haven't decided yet whether the fact that even Tolkien struggled to find and maintain that balance takes the pressure off me... or just makes me feel doomed.

Next time: Riddles In The Dark.

In A Hole In The Ground There Lived A Hobbit...

For me, it all begins with Tolkien. And that means that it begins with The Hobbit.

The Hobbit, besides being a genuinely great book, is a very interesting one from a writer's standpoint. It's the reason that The Lord of the Rings exists -- no Hobbit, no call for a sequel, and yet it was never intended to introduce people to Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Tolkien originally wrote The Hobbit for his children -- he wrote a great deal for his children, including annual letters from Santa that were eventually collected as The Father Christmas Letters -- and as such it was mainly intended to be an exciting, entertaining adventure. But it's also, and this was quite unusual in fantasy for children at the time, clearly set not in a generic fairy-tale setting, but in a very concrete world different from our own -- a world with a deep and meaningful and mysterious history that was only really hinted at.

Of course, Tolkien wrote The Hobbit while he was also involved in his life-long project of creating the languages and mythology of Middle Earth -- the stories that became The Silmarillion. So he went to those tales when he needed names and events from the distant past of Bilbo Baggins's world. Elrond, the legendary blades of Gondolin and the ancient battles between Elves and Goblins (they weren't called Orcs yet), these are all Tolkien bringing his secret obsession to life by putting elements of it into a story that other people would actually see.

But in doing so, and by being so unbelievably good at it, he set in motion a chain of events that would lead to him writing The Lord of the Rings, and eventually (after his death) to the publication of The Silmarillion, in a version compliled by his son Christopher Tolkien with the help of Canadian and later fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay.

What that means, is that what was intended to be a one-off story for children that had a few minor references to Middle Earth became most people's actual introduction to the actual Middle Earth.

So there were a number of discrepancies, in both tone and detail, between The Hobbit as originally written and Tolkien's vision of the "actual" Middle Earth. And since Tolkien was before all else an inveterate world-builder, this bothered him.

What did Tolkien do about it?

As a writer, I find what he did very interesting.

First of all, when The Hobbit was re-released in the wake of the success of Lord of the Rings, Tolkien went back and changed things, mostly minor details. Terms that that had fallen out of his evolving "translation" of the languages of Middle Earth, and words that didn't quite convey the right tone were most of it.

But there was a much bigger change along with the minor ones, and it's something Tolkien included in Lord of the Rings.

The Lord of the Rings contains an early example* of what we Big-Time Geeks call a ret-con -- a retroactive change to a story's continuity. Without giving too much away, it has to do with how Bilbo Baggins gets the Ring from Gollum. Tolkien's changing notion of what the Ring was by meant that the story as originally written didn't make sense anymore.

So Tolkien, through Gandalf and Frodo, explained that the version of the story that appeared in The Hobbit had been a lie, made up by Bilbo to justify keeping the Ring.

But the new, "true" version of the story was also incorporated into the revised edition of The Hobbit -- Tolkien rewrote that whole chapter. So the ret-con in Lord of the Rings read a bit strangely to anyone, like me, who first read the revised Hobbit. Because it was a fix for something that wasn't broken anymore.

I love that story. It's a wonderful illustration of Tolkien's brilliant, meandering and incremental creative process. But I've always wanted to read the original version, to see for myself how it differs, and to find out just what Bilbo said when he lied to the dwarves.

Yes, I'm a huge Tolkien geek.

I am also, now, the proud owner of a first edition of The Hobbit. It was an engagement present from my wife, which is a whole other story that deserves its own post.

But the funny thing is, I still haven't actually read it. There's always so little time -- and with work and family obligations, I've never had the time to read it in a place and situation where the book would be safe. A first edition of The Hobbit is genuinely rare, and when a book is genuinely rare and also one that you personally revere and that was an engagement present from your wife... well, you don't just take that book on the subway for the morning commute, you know?

But I think it's time, now, to read it. To see what Tolkien changed, and what he didn't. To read 'Riddles in the Dark' as it was originally written. And to share my impressions.

I'm looking forward to reading The Hobbit for the first time. See you in a couple of weeks with some thoughts on the subject.

--

*"Early" is a relative term, of course. A genuinely early example of a ret-con would be the idea, which seems to have been popularized in the Athenian tragedies of the Fifth Century BCE, that Helen had not actually gone to Troy, but had sat out the Trojan War in Egypt while a doppelganger was in Troy in her place. So, you know, she hadn't actually done anything wrong, and it was okay that she and her husband got back together after the war because she wasn't really responsible for the death of thousands. But I was speaking mainly about Western popular fiction.

Trekking Along the Paper Trail

Inking is still weighing heavily on me this week. I still love my brush pen. I am having lots of fun experimenting with it and if my only problem was the steadiness of my hand I would be fine, because that will improve with practice. The problem is the $%(*&%/?&!!ing paper.

As with everything else in this comic, I am experimenting freely to see what kind of results I can get and what will eventually become “my” style and that includes the paper I am drawing on. I did the first twenty four pages on three ply, 11x17 Blueline Pro Art Boards. I thought that since they are “pro” art boards they must be what the pros use. (Apparently a lot do but there are many who don’t. For an interesting read about some successful comics artists, I recommend the book Artists on Comic Art. It’s full of interviews and examples of work in progress and finished product. Very inspirational.) I didn’t like them for a couple of reasons. First is the texture. I was drawing all my roughs with a Colerase coloured pencil and I ended up carving trenches into the board as I drew. I have a heavy hand and the paper bears the brunt of it. Erasing was also a pain because I could never get all the colour off the page, which is why the early pages are so sketchy looking. I ended up using Photoshop to clean up the faces and the hairiest of the lines but it was so time consuming that I decided to chalk it up to experience and move on.

Another problem I had with the 11x17 boards was they were to slightly larger than my backpack. So anytime I took them with me (which is nearly always cause you never know when you will have a minute or two to draw in) they got bents, bruised and ended up looking pretty ratty. All the scuff and creases were easy to clean up once the pages scanned, though. (Photoshop saves the day again!) But why make more work for yourself, I thought.

When it was time to buy new stock I looked around and settled on a pad of vellum finish Bristol board. The vellum finish has more tooth to it which means I can save myself some elbow grease with the roughs. I was able to draw with a lighter hand now but on the few panels where I did go heavy, the erasure was really bad. (More Photoshop!) Another draw back was that the new pads didn’t come in the same sizes as the art boards. Since I would have to cut the pages anyway, I decided to go a little smaller and save them from some of the wear and tear in my backpack.

It was here that I discovered how convenient the Blueline pages were. They come pre-printed with margins and guides for splitting the page in halves and thirds, to make drawing the panels easier. With the generic Bristol board I had to do a lot of measuring and ruling before getting down to drawing. After a very short time this became very tedious.

I am now on my third type of drawing surface. I decided that the pre-printed margins were too good to give up and went back to the Blueline boards. This time I am using only 2 ply pages and I do find them to be a little less durable. I solved the backpack problem by carrying the whole pack of twenty four together in the plastic wrap they came in. The bulk of the stack makes they solid enough to survive. I also switched from the Colerase to an ordinary HB pencil. The real reason for the coloured pencil was just force of habit and after the first page, drawing with graphite feels normal. And the lack of tooth is as much of an issue.

My only real complaint now is that with these new boards, the ink from all my pens bleeds a little. For close ups its barely noticeable because the lines are thick. But I just finished a page with a lot of small panels and most of the panels are long shots. With the pencils, I am able to get very fine details in the drawings only have the bloody bleeding ink wipe them out.

So the search for the perfect drawing surface continues. I think I will try a larger vellum board for the crispness of the ink lines. I will have to device some way to reduce the measuring and ruling. Since many of the pages are a grid, I can make a template by cutting holes in one page and… yes. I think that will work. Now I just have finish off the boards have now and then I can move on.

Does Fantasy Have To Be Anti-Democratic?

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about two subjects that don't always live in the same intellectual neighbourhood: Fantasy and democracy. Democracy, because the Canadian federal election is this Tuesday (if you're Canadian, please do vote). And I've been thinking for some time now about how to reconcile my love of fantasy with the values of democracy.

Fantasy is often viewed as being an essentially anti-democratic genre, and it's hard to argue with that in the post-Tolkien milieu that still dominates the field. Epic fantasy, especially, idealizes monarchy and the aristocracy; it romanticizes agrarian life and rural conservatism while condescending to the people who actual live on and work the land (there's usually, for instance, only one peasant or working-class character, and he or she is always humble, down-to-earth and played for laughs).

The problem with kings, in fantasy, is when you have a bad one, and when he's replaced with a good one, the problem is solved. Cities are viewed with suspicion, as dens of sin, disease and crushing poverty... And yes, medieval cities were all that, but so was the medieval countryside, and unlike life on the farm, the city offered freedom and opportunity. There was a saying in Germany in the Middle Ages: "City air is free air."

In reality, the solution to bad kings was no kings, or (as in the British and Canadian tradition) monarchs who are so powerless that it doesn't matter very much if they're good people or not. The greatest good has been accomplished by getting more people, and more different kinds of people, empowered and involved in the decision-making process. Too often, fantasy writers suggest, this was all a mistake, and what we really need is a king with a magic sword to stab evil and keep the lower orders in their place.

Tolkien gets blamed for a lot of this. But in fact, his idealized agrarian society of hobbits functionally has no government at all, either before or after the Return of the King, and both the hobbits and the king like it that way. It's a society that gets along because the hobbits want it to, which is a good functional description of anarchism in action. Of course, it's an insular, patriarchalist, classist, culturally conservative and anti-intellectual sort of anarchism, but the fact remains that Lord of the Rings isn't quite the "Hooray for aristocracy!" tract some critics suggest.

That being said, it was the idea of the returning king who would save us all, not an anarchistic agrarian society, that echoed through the legions of Tolkien imitators.

Of course, many fine writers have reacted against this trend, and its troubling ethical implications. Ursula Le Guin's early books were full of lost kings and mentoring wizards, but then she started thinking about what all of that would really mean. Terry Pratchett, in a more comedic vein, is another example. His Discworld city of Ankh-Morpork, ruled by a sort-of benevolent dictator, has the usual prophecy of a king who will return... but the king has decided not to. And the dictator, partly by accident, has over the course of several books installed all the institutions required for a functioning democracy except democracy itself, including social mobility, mass communications, a free press, the rule of law and equal opportunity for women and minorities.

The exceptions are bright lights, but they shine in a dark sea of secret heirs with magic swords and their wizard mentors who return to take the throne and defeat the Evil Overlord of Blahdeblah. They're exceptions.

The interesting thing is that this disdain for democracy often extends to fantasy set in a more contemporary milieu as well. Urban fantasy is full of wizards keeping magic alive in secret, of families with the magical door to another world kept safely locked away in the basement, or secret orders of monster hunters protecting us from threats they never bother telling us about.
Aristocracy is alive and well in fantasy novels set in modern-day Canada and the U.S.

And in the stories, this is always treated as good, or at the very least absolutely necessary. There's usually a hand-waved explanation that either us plebes would have our puny minds blown by the existence of magic and monsters, or we'd be jealous and try to destroy the people who can do magic.

In other words, some people -- special people -- are above accountability, and the more important their job, the more above accountability they need to be, to Do What Has To Be Done.

Again, much like the generally anti-democratic principles of epic fantasy, this view is entirely at odds with the values of a modern democratic society. We have learned, through painful experience, that the only thing that prevents power from being abused, that keeps the public good being advanced, is openness, transparency and accountability. People who believe they need to wield their power in secret, without scrutiny, tend to be at best tragically mistaken.

Christine McCall, and the other heroes of Cold Iron Badge, are police officers. They live in a world that's very like our own -- except, as Christine has pointed out, on a strange day not very many years before, the gates to Fairyland opened, and magic returned. But that event, although it shook the world, did not bring down civilization or destroy democratic institutions.

The Borderland Guard aren't conventional cops by a long shot, but they have many of the same responsibilities. There are crimes to investigate, a border to patrol, and people to protect -- or try to. And being a police officer, in contemporary Canada, means being a member of an organization that is (sometimes more in theory than in practice) accountable to democratic institutions. It means accountability.

This is not terribly innovative; it's not the first time it's been done in a story. It also isn't going to be immediately relevant to the plot... not for a while.

But it's important to me, and something I felt was worth exploring. Democracy gets short shrift too often in fantasy, but democracy is better than rule by monarchs or aristocrats, and in a democracy, power is supposed to be used for the public good by people who are accountable to the public.

Magic doesn't have to be a secret, and monster hunters don't have to be a shadowy conspiracy keeping us ignorant for our own good. In Cold Iron Badge, the monster hunters aren't just responsible for the people they protect; they're accountable to them as well.

The brush pen is mightier than the sword

I promised myself a little present once Cold Iron Badge was up and running. Something fun and somehow related to comics. It took about a month until I finally decided to get a new pen. A brush pen. And that has got me thinking a lot about inking lately.
I went back and forth quite a bit in deciding how I would ink CIB. I really like the smooth flowing lines of Jeff Smith. But I also really like the hatching and tonal work Masamune Shiro does in Appleseed. And REALLY like the inking by Haruhiku Mikimoto in Marionette Generation. But I, having never inked a comic before, don’t have a defined style. As a result, the inking is the thing that changes the most. On days when I am feeling meticulous (and have the time), the lines are more smooth. When I am feeling more pressed for time, the lines are more sketchy. As things progress, I expect “my style” to emerge.
So far I have been using various pens. I tried a bunch of brands and eventually settled on a very fine Sharpie, because I really wasn’t seeing a huge difference between them and because Sharpies are, well, cheap. Although on pages 30-32, I tried a disposable brush pen. I was really happy with the first few panels. The brush tip gives are nice organic line and it was easy to get a good variety of line weights… Until the tip started to wear out before the first page was finished. On the three pages I used a brush pen, I went through four pens and actually broke a sweat from concentrating on controlling the lines. Once the tip started to degrade, I couldn’t get really fine lines anymore. That was really frustrating. I spent so long on those pages that I went back to the Sharpie. And so I expected it would be for the rest of the story.
Then I found my new pen.
It’s a Pentel brush pen with an ink cartridge and an actual brush tip with bristles and I love it. I can get really good range of line weights and I can even us it to paint in big areas of black. I find especially useful for texturing hair. The only draw back to it is that it requires a really steady hand. I have had a few “what the hell was I thinking” moments, to be sure, but all-in-all, I like my brush pen.

Portrait of the Writer as a Young Nerd: Influences

In our interview (conducted by the inestimable Shaenon Garrity) just before Cold Iron Badge launched, I was asked for some of my influences as a fantasy writer. I mentioned Steven Brust, Charles De Lint, Guy Gavriel Kay, Tanya Huff, Neil Gaiman, and Joss Whedon.

Now, this was by no means an exhaustive list. As worthy as those creators are, I was focusing particularly focused on works in fantasy that were influences on Cold Iron Badge.

Brust, for instance, inspired me to explore low-fantasy, street-level characters dealing with high fantasy problems, while mixing in sensibilities from other genres (Brust adds mystery and noir; I threw police procedural into the genre blender).

De Lint was one of my keys to urban fantasy, and along with Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry also to unashamedly Canadian characters and settings. I, of course, repaid the favour by having characters named in their honour horribly murdered.

But, as I said, that's a "influenced Cold Iron Badge" list more than it's the "influenced Stephen" list. Here's how incomplete it is on the latter front:

It doesn't. Mention. Tolkien.

Tolkien was my gateway drug to fantasy. Tolkien was where it all started. He's the reason that the modern fantasy genre exists in anything close to its present form. He's the reason both that there is a Dungeons & Dragons (1) and that I cared enough about the content to want to play it. The thousand and one pale imitators who followed in his wake are evidence of the enduring power, influence and excellence of his work.

I'll probably have more to say about Tolkien in the future; pending that I will note that Lord of the Rings is a profoundly deep, powerful work. It's an essential piece not only of the canon of fantasy, but of English literature in general. I both envy and sympathize with those who haven't yet read it (they've missed out on the pleasure so far, but get to read it for the first time), and I can get pretty judgemental about people who didn't like it (2).

I also owe a rather strong debt to Roger Zelazny. A warm, funny, deeply intelligent and humanistic writer, he used a seemingly effortless light and fluid style to juxtapose the heroic and the human, the perfectly immortal and the tragically mortal. He's probably best remembered for his Amber series, and that's where I first encountered him, although Lord Of Light is often considered his finest novel. I learned a lot about writing from reading Zelazny. His few, too-brief essays on writing, and anecdotes passed along by other writers who knew him, amount to a crash course in creative writing.

And there's Douglas Adams, who didn't write fantasy, but whose wit and sense of the ridiculous influenced me deeply. He's another writer, to point out what's becoming a pretty clear theme, who put ordinary people in a world ruled by the rules and tropes of genre fiction, and made them try to cope with it and get out alive and sane.

Of course, especially as a young aspiring writer, everything I've read (3) influenced me one way or another. For good or for bad, pushing me towards or away from particular approaches and ideas, giving me examples I was inspired to emulate or motivated to avoid.

(There's lots to say, for instance, about the schlocky fantasy I read as a teenager that I would now place in my personal Hall of Shame. Or, more charitably, I could characterize those books as examples that I was inspired to avoid. But that's a long, embarrassing story for another time.)

The process never stops as long as we continue to live and to learn, although it does level off. I'm older now, I have a stronger grasp of craft and of my personal voice. It's less likely that the next novel I read will be such a strong influence that it'll be a game-changer in how I view fantasy, writing or life in general.

In contemporary fantasy, for instance, there are a lot of writers I admire, whose books I love, who I still wouldn't characterize as strong influences. George R. R. Martin is one; he revitalized the genre with A Song of Ice And Fire -- read the series, but only if you can stand the pain, because he's brilliant at putting his characters through the wringer.

There's J. K. Rowling, who with Harry Potter not only found great success, but basically made reading cool again (and note that she did it, again, by mixing and matching genres, in this case the fantasy epic with the classic British "kids gang solving mysteries" adventure, as if Lord of the Rings had been written by Enid Blyton).

And Terry Pratchett, as funny as Adams but deeper, putting genre-conscious characters in a world ruled by fantasy tropes, and then letting them change that world and the world change them.

Of course, creative influences are funny -- trying to break them down into something as neat and tidy as clear genre categories is ultimately futile. Even in this short list, I've broken away from speaking exclusively of fantasy writers to include Douglas Adams. Everything I've read really has gone into who I am as a human being and as a creator, not just the books with dragons and swords. Maybe I'm ignoring the early impact of the Hardy Boys on my writerly development. Or the significance of the fact that I stand alone with Steve Bochcho in having thought that Cop Rock was a totally awesome show.

And yet.

There must be something inside me that drew me, not just to fantasy, but to the writers I've cited here. Some reaction, some spark that made me choose fantasy as a vehicle for my storytelling (4). The common threads, the seeds of inspiration, are so clear, the connection must be real. And I also think -- I believe -- that it's a connection that is important and meaningful.

In the end, of course, it's readers (and, in the case of the truly great, which I'm not, literary biographers and university professors and the like) who truly and most clearly see the connection between writers, following the thread of influences. And they in turn are influenced by me (5) and it all begins again.

Which is humbling, and a little daunting. I thought I was just writing a fun adventure story about a cop who teams up with an elf. Now I'm part of the endless cycle of influences that ripple through our culture, affecting people, changing the world.

No pressure, huh?

---

(1) Yes, I've read about the history of D&D, and I know that Gary Gygax always claimed not to have been particularly influenced by Tolkien; however, it's because of the appeal of Tolkien, and the Tolkien-related hooks in D&D, that it found an audience. D&D may have been rooted in wargamers developing rules for small-unit tactical skirmishing with fantasy elements derived from Moorcock, Lieber and Vance, but that's not what made D&D a phenomenon.

(2) In this viewpoint I may be unkind, but I'm at least in good company; see Ursula K. LeGuin's wonderful essay, 'Why Are Americans Afraid Of Dragons?' You can find it in The Language of the Night, a collection of her short non-fiction.

(3) And seen, and heard, and experienced, but this is supposed to be a blog post on fantasy, not my autobiography, and I'm trying to stay on point.

(4) This also, of course, completely ignores the fact that Cold Iron Badge is a work of collaboration; Patrick and I developed the story and characters together, and he has his own experiences and influences that he brought to the process.

(5) "This Geigen-Miller clown is a hack! I can do better than this!"

Is this thing on?

Testing, testing. Is this thing on. It is. >cough, cough<. When was the last time anyone dusted around here…

Oh, hi! Patrick here. It’s my turn to welcome you to Cold Iron Blog, where Stephen and I will talk about stuff related to the comic, Cold Iron Badge. You’ve been hearing from Stephen about CIB for a while now so I thought I’d horn in on the limelight. So… where to begin? A logical place would be the beginning: Page one, panel one. Puck. What the hell was I thinking with that building. I had originally decided to keep the backgrounds minimal because I was more interested in drawing the characters. They were what was really interesting to me, since they drive the story. But since Puck is a major set piece for the story ( there are several scene set there), I wanted it to be more than a big concrete box. However, I am not an architect, not by a long shot, and I was having a really hard time coming up with a design for it. Then I walked past this great building. It had a distinctive shape, and was surrounded by a heritage area; it even had a cobblestone street running along one side. AND, it had a club in the basement. Perfect! I thought. It was only slightly out of my way coming home from work, so I walked around it a bunch of times, and took some reference photos. Now, I am a pathetic photographer so my reference photos were all but useless. Fortunately, I found what I needed on the good old internet, and started to draw. And draw… And draw. What the hell was I thinking? It took me about three days to wrap my head around the perspective. Anyway, I finally got my act together, took a deep breath and got started. Once I got rolling it ended up being what you see. I was so frustrated by the amount of time it took to get that on panel down that when the club appeared again on page four, I reduced the first drawing and traced it. Although, from the new angle we can see more of the environment and a have to admit that I goofed up on that. I mixed up the angle of the intersecting street and some of the buildings. A colleague of mine said no one would notice, and since it isn’t critical to the story it wasn’t a big deal. Maybe he was right, but I still get grumpy when I see those half assed Bgs. If Cold Iron Badge ever comes out in print, there’s a gonna be some fixin’ a happenin’, let me tell you. So the question is, can you name the interection where Puck is? If you can, then I guess the drawings are good enough.

Welcome to the Cold Iron Blog!

Hello, and welcome to the Cold Iron Blog!

If you're here, you probably already know that Cold Iron Badge is a new urban fantasy webcomic, written by Stephen Geigen-Miller (that's me) and drawn by Patrick Heinicke. A new installment of Cold Iron Badge appears every Monday at Modern Tales.

Our second installment, 'Partners', posted today -- you can read the brand-new four-page scene here!

The Cold Iron Blog is going to be the primary web presence for Cold Iron Badge outside of Modern Tales. This is where you'll find news, information, and reminders of updates, as well as the occasional look behind the scenes or sneak peek of upcoming developments.

We've also talked about using this space to run DVD comment track-style reflections on previous installments, and to talk about our influences as creators, and about comics, webcomics and fantasy in general.

We'd also love to hear your thoughts on the comic, or field any questions -- fire away!

In the mean time, on the subject of those sneak peeks I mentioned...

Who are they? Well, all I can say is that they're coming soon. Anyone care to hazard a guess?

Launching Monday, July 28!

Yep. Cold Iron Badge will debut on Modern Tales this Monday, July 28. We plan to update weekly -- every Monday -- with a three to five page scene.

Until then, you can learn more about Patrick, me (Stephen) and Cold Iron Badge through a recent interview with us at Talkaboutcomics.com, conducted by Modern Tales editor and cartoonist extraordinaire, Shaenon Garrity.

Thanks to Shaenon for the great questions, and the opportunity to plug our big launch!

Cold Iron Badge Preview 2

Pages 4 - 7 of Cold Iron Badge used to be posted here as a preview; I deleted them to avoid spoilers. This scene will appear on Modern Tales on Monday, August 4th.

A Preview

Once upon a time...

(Click images to enlarge)

Cold Iron Badge
By Stephen Geigen-Miller and Pat Heinicke

Coming Soon