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.