Aaaaaaaaaand I'm back.
Upon reflection, I think we've moved to a slightly different phase of the story of Cold Iron Badge; less how it came to be, and more how it actually got made.
So: How did we go from some characters and a concept to having an actual comic?
There needed, of course to be a genuine plot of some sort. As I've mentioned in previous posts, by this time, the character dynamics were starting to, if not take on a life of their own, then certainly continue to gestate, and those dynamics implied certain things that needed to happen in the story to introduce, build and service them.
Similarly, as a genre mashup, there were certain tropes that needed to be addressed, whether by serving them up straight or by subverting them.
And there were things that it was simply important for me, or important for Patrick, to have happen in the story.
So I took all those things, and I made a list of them.
I wouldn't call what I came up with an outline. My first list was sufficiently vague and disorganized that calling it an outline would have been an insult to tracery. But it certainly aspired to be an outline, and hammering it into an outline is what I set about doing, with rather a lot of feedback and input from Patrick.
By this point, we were both pretty clear that Cold Iron Badge would be a finite story in three installments. Three substantial but not Cerebus-long graphic novels is what I was thinking (since, as good geeks, we are both of course drawn towards trilogies).
This was helpful, because it took off the pressure to pack everything into the story willy-nilly. Something that didn't fit could be shunted aside, saved for Volume 2 or Volume 3. Whether those things actually get used in subsequent stories remains to be seen. Whether they do or not, the value was in having the psychological release of not having to use all our ideas at once.
Then I got a little more organized. I took all the character notes from the emails we'd been sending back and forth and put dropped them into the same document as the Not-An-Outline-Yet. I added other notes, from our conversations and from my head. Then I took the plot and scene suggestions that had inevitably crept into those notes and moved them down to the list.
Using the organizing principles of three-act structure that I picked up from my years in the screenplay trenches -- which is a long story for another time -- I separated the events of the story into four chapters
Four chapters from three act structure? Yeah. That's because in standard Hollywood screenplay structure, Act 1 is the beginning, Act 2 is the middle, Act 3 is the end, and the middle is about as long as the beginning and the end put together. This has the advantage of lining up well with, for instance, the story structure needs of a four-issue comic book mini-series... or a four-chapter graphic novel.
At some point along the way, with the ideas for the characters, events and cool-stuff-we-wanted-to-happen getting laid out before me in the structure of an actual story, my Not-Outline began to look more like an Outline.
In case you're curious -- because we didn't make a big deal of it, even to the point of noting the chapter breaks in the comic -- as of today's date, we're something like half-way through Chapter 2 from a structural standpoint.
Although not necessarily in number of pages. Scenes, especially action scenes, can take up a lot more pages of comics than they do points in an outline. And, as I've mentioned before, Patrick can take a description like "Christine fights the goblins. At first it looks bad, but then she kicks their butts" and turn it into an epic sequence that would make a wuxia choreographer weep with envy.
In case you're really curious, here's the first draft of what it would be fair to call an Outline. It only covers the story so far, to avoid spoilering.
--
Cold Iron Badge
Act 1
Introduce CHRISTINE MCCALL, a tough, smart lieutenant with the Borderland Guard – the cops who patrol the border between Earth and Fairyland. With her are her partner (and lover), ART JOHNSON and two rookies, KAY and DE LINT.
The Iron Badges are acting on a anonymous tip, tracking down what may be a network of smugglers between the two worlds.
Arriving at the (??? warehouse ???) they find nothing. "Another wild elf chase," snorts Christine. Suddenly, elf-shots rain down on them – it’s a trap!
Christine sees the rookies go down. But where’s Art? She fights an attack by creepy gobliny kind of things, and just barely takes them down. She’s on her hands and knees, gasping for breath when somebody – actually, Nobody – hits her over the head, very hard.
Christine wakes up on a stretcher. She jumps to her feet, almost falls down, but heads towards the (??? warehouse ???).
The Guard, under the command of CAPTAIN DAVID REDMAN, investigates the scene.
Despite her injuries, Christine insists on joining them – and sees her dead partner, strung up like the Hanged Man in the Tarot.
To everyone’s horror, Christine starts to LAUGH HYSTERICALLY. Through laughter that turns to sobs, she manages to gasp out: "Hanging Art. Freakin’ Sidhe and their jokes."
Christine wakes up, hung over. Bottles are strewn everywhere. Head still aching, she heads into the office.
Christine debates with Redman whether she’s ready to return to duty.
Suddenly, Christine spots DELRIC. "Sword! Sword!" She tackles him – and learns that he’s the new Sidhe liaison to the Guard.
Possibly as a punishment, Redman assigns Christine and Delric together. Their task, he tells them, is to find out why the Unseelie have suddenly become so murderous, and bring the Fae
responsible for killing the three Guard to justice.
Act 2, Part 1 – up to the mid-point
Christine, out for a morning jog, is attacked by a kelpie.
Christine tells Redman that she thinks Delric is behind the wave of attacks. She wants him questioned. Redman explains they can’t – it was a political minefield just getting both sides to agree to a Sidhe liaison. Accusing Delric without a lot more evidence could blow up in their faces. Angry, Christine tells Redman that in that case, she doesn’t CARE how short-staffed they are, he damn well better assign two more people to the case. Seeing his smirk, she realizes that she’s walked right into something. But what?
Intro RAY DONOVAN and BUNNY MAYHEM.
Bunny Mayhem, the new recruit. Christine asks if she brought a loaf of bread, as advised. "I did better than that! I brought PIE!" Teeth gritting, Christine reminds Bunny that some faeries are repelled by bread. Not by pie. "Whoops."
Ray has been kicked around the Guard for years, never lasting in any one position for very long. Christine wonders if he’s a putz, or maybe even dirty – but his record is no worse than hers. Better. Reading between the lines, she realizes that he must be a Jonah.
--
So, yes, obviously, there was some improvement -- and more than a few changes -- between what you just read and Cold Iron Badge as you know it. More on that process next time.
Showing posts with label Cold Iron Badge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cold Iron Badge. Show all posts
Monday, February 9, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
I Have Not Forgotten You...
Assuming, of course, that anyone besides Patrick and me is reading these!
The rest of my life intruded over the weekend, via an annoyingly bad cold. So I lacked the time and energy necessary to craft the next installment in the Brief History. Or indeed, the mental faculties to recall the Brief History.
Unless you wanted to see an installment that read, "And then I said some stuff and Patrick said some stuff and some stuff happened and we made a comic."
Wait, let me guess -- you wouldn't have noticed a difference?
Actually, I'm going to take this opportunity to ask for a shout out from those of you who are reading -- could you drop by and say hello in the comments section?
And I'll be back with a real post in a day or so. Thanks for your understanding!
The rest of my life intruded over the weekend, via an annoyingly bad cold. So I lacked the time and energy necessary to craft the next installment in the Brief History. Or indeed, the mental faculties to recall the Brief History.
Unless you wanted to see an installment that read, "And then I said some stuff and Patrick said some stuff and some stuff happened and we made a comic."
Wait, let me guess -- you wouldn't have noticed a difference?
Actually, I'm going to take this opportunity to ask for a shout out from those of you who are reading -- could you drop by and say hello in the comments section?
And I'll be back with a real post in a day or so. Thanks for your understanding!
Sunday, January 18, 2009
A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge, Part 4
Once upon a time, before Professor Stephen Hawking wrote his book, it was possible to write a brief history of something and call is something other than 'A Brief History of Something'.
Not afterwards.
At first it was a joke, an increasingly obvious and un-clever go-to reference. But then it stopped being a reference and, because of its ubiquity, simply became the natural way to refer to a not-very-long written narrative detailing the origin and development of something.
(There were other Brief Histories before Hawking's, of course. But he put the phrase on the popular cultural map in a way that it hadn't been before -- or, to use a more elegant and apt turn of phrase, he put it into IdeaSpace.)
Not to expend too much effort justifying my own lack of creativity in blog post titles, but it never occurred to me to call this series anything other than 'A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge'. And I'd be willing to wager that none of you saw that title and thought that I was referencing Hawking particularly, whether cleverly or (more likely) not.
A Brief History of Blah-de-blah has become a trope.
This is not the only evolutionary path that a trope can follow, but it's an important one for storytelling -- for fiction. Because, occupying a level of universality that lies beyond references, homages, rip-offs and cliches, tropes are fundamental concepts that don't need to be explained for the audience.
Whether something is really a trope, or merely a reference/cliche/et cetera of course depends on who the audience is. There are tropes that are common to every culture, every demographic, every sub-culture, even every clique, that someone from outside those particular groups wouldn't get on the same subconscious level... and there are tropes that are common to all of humanity.
Cold Iron Badge was deliberately designed to be very, very tropey.
I touched on this in my last post, but it bears repeating and exploring in more detail: There are a number of points where Cold Iron Badge pretty blatantly uses tropes -- touchstones, storytelling conventions -- from either fantasy literature, cop shows, or both. And this was entirely intentional on my part.
A story that is fundamentally -- as I also noted last time out -- a genre mashup absolutely depends on honouring the key tropes of the genres that it's drawing from (and sometimes on subverting them). It's important on many levels, but one of the most important is the most basic. Because tropes, especially genre tropes, tell the audience what sort of expectations to have of the story. And when those expectations are either entertainingly fulfilled, or entertainingly subverted, the audience is generally happy. Which makes the writer happy.
This is true of all genres, but genre mashups are particularly fun for this, because an audience familiar with the tropes of all the genres involved will understand when there's conflict between the tropes of the underlying genres. Which creates dramatic tension, interest, and lots of opportunity for expectations to be fulfilled or subverted in a most entertaining manner.
And this, more than anything else, is what pushed the evolution of the collection of characters and other loose concepts that I've been talking about to become Cold Iron Badge.
What, for instance, would cause an interesting dynamic between Christine and Delric, while also forcing them to work together? Why would people like Ray and Bunny -- with their, to be tactful, questionable degree of competence -- be front-line law-enforcement personnel? What would cops as we understand them have to do with Fairyland at all?
The answer came to me, as many do, on the subway. I couldn't tell you what inspired it -- well, the whole process I've been discussing in these posts inspired it, but I don't remember what specifically led to the, "Eureka!" moment.
But there it was: After a mysterious event opens the doors between Earth and Fairyland, people who are themselves strange and marginal enough to be able to cope with all the weirdness are tasked to watch the new border between the two worlds. To enforce the laws, prevent incursions and excursions in either direction, and to keep a fragile peace.
I liked it. It made sense to me, it made sense for the characters. It gave both fantasy and cop show tropes free rein and it provided a roomy stage that would fit all kinds of stories and ideas.
It worked for me, and a couple of emails later, I knew that it worked for Patrick too. We didn't have a plot yet, but the core of what was now definitely called Cold Iron Badge was all there.
Next step: Go from characters and concept to an actual story. More on that next time...
Not afterwards.
At first it was a joke, an increasingly obvious and un-clever go-to reference. But then it stopped being a reference and, because of its ubiquity, simply became the natural way to refer to a not-very-long written narrative detailing the origin and development of something.
(There were other Brief Histories before Hawking's, of course. But he put the phrase on the popular cultural map in a way that it hadn't been before -- or, to use a more elegant and apt turn of phrase, he put it into IdeaSpace.)
Not to expend too much effort justifying my own lack of creativity in blog post titles, but it never occurred to me to call this series anything other than 'A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge'. And I'd be willing to wager that none of you saw that title and thought that I was referencing Hawking particularly, whether cleverly or (more likely) not.
A Brief History of Blah-de-blah has become a trope.
This is not the only evolutionary path that a trope can follow, but it's an important one for storytelling -- for fiction. Because, occupying a level of universality that lies beyond references, homages, rip-offs and cliches, tropes are fundamental concepts that don't need to be explained for the audience.
Whether something is really a trope, or merely a reference/cliche/et cetera of course depends on who the audience is. There are tropes that are common to every culture, every demographic, every sub-culture, even every clique, that someone from outside those particular groups wouldn't get on the same subconscious level... and there are tropes that are common to all of humanity.
Cold Iron Badge was deliberately designed to be very, very tropey.
I touched on this in my last post, but it bears repeating and exploring in more detail: There are a number of points where Cold Iron Badge pretty blatantly uses tropes -- touchstones, storytelling conventions -- from either fantasy literature, cop shows, or both. And this was entirely intentional on my part.
A story that is fundamentally -- as I also noted last time out -- a genre mashup absolutely depends on honouring the key tropes of the genres that it's drawing from (and sometimes on subverting them). It's important on many levels, but one of the most important is the most basic. Because tropes, especially genre tropes, tell the audience what sort of expectations to have of the story. And when those expectations are either entertainingly fulfilled, or entertainingly subverted, the audience is generally happy. Which makes the writer happy.
This is true of all genres, but genre mashups are particularly fun for this, because an audience familiar with the tropes of all the genres involved will understand when there's conflict between the tropes of the underlying genres. Which creates dramatic tension, interest, and lots of opportunity for expectations to be fulfilled or subverted in a most entertaining manner.
And this, more than anything else, is what pushed the evolution of the collection of characters and other loose concepts that I've been talking about to become Cold Iron Badge.
What, for instance, would cause an interesting dynamic between Christine and Delric, while also forcing them to work together? Why would people like Ray and Bunny -- with their, to be tactful, questionable degree of competence -- be front-line law-enforcement personnel? What would cops as we understand them have to do with Fairyland at all?
The answer came to me, as many do, on the subway. I couldn't tell you what inspired it -- well, the whole process I've been discussing in these posts inspired it, but I don't remember what specifically led to the, "Eureka!" moment.
But there it was: After a mysterious event opens the doors between Earth and Fairyland, people who are themselves strange and marginal enough to be able to cope with all the weirdness are tasked to watch the new border between the two worlds. To enforce the laws, prevent incursions and excursions in either direction, and to keep a fragile peace.
I liked it. It made sense to me, it made sense for the characters. It gave both fantasy and cop show tropes free rein and it provided a roomy stage that would fit all kinds of stories and ideas.
It worked for me, and a couple of emails later, I knew that it worked for Patrick too. We didn't have a plot yet, but the core of what was now definitely called Cold Iron Badge was all there.
Next step: Go from characters and concept to an actual story. More on that next time...
Sunday, January 4, 2009
A Brief History of Cold Iron Badge, Part 3
So Patrick was in a "super" mood -- eager to work on a story with superheroic or supernatural elements.
I can get behind a good superhero story, but I wasn't in the mood to write one.
(An idea that Patrick and I had talked about working on a couple of years previously had been a superhero story -- it got as far as being outlined, having the script for the first issue written and all the key characters designed. Then, between our schedules at the time, and someone else independently coming up with another version of the same idea, it fell by the wayside. I may talk more about this project another time, as I still have a great deal of affection for it.)
That left the supernatural.
As you've probably already inferred from some of our previous posts, though -- as well as the comic that we eventually cooked up -- we were both of a mind to create an action-adventurey kind of supernatural tale, rather than one that focused on, say, horror.
(Actually, I pitched Patrick a teenagers-getting-disembowelled story that I had on the shelf, in the form of a mostly-finished screenplay. It wouldn't have been difficult to turn into a comics script, but it wasn't Patrick's cup of tea.)
So we were looking at at least some of our protagonists being tough and competent.
But despite that, "Bunny Mayhem" was the first character to be imported into Cold Iron Badge.
Imported?
Yes. A lot our our characters existed in some capacity previously to Cold Iron Badge. Not precisely, of course... not in the final forms they appear in now. But Patrick and I -- entirely separately -- had character concepts or sometimes just names, from years of ideas that were waiting for the right venue.
Patrick had been looking for a story to use Christine McCall in for years. Ray Donovan was a character name I'd made up as a teenager meshed with a character concept that was much more recent. And Delric... well, Delric's origins are dorkily embarrassing.
But Bunny was the first. Bunny was one of mine, but I think Patrick suggested using her. And because she was the first, Bunny ended up defining a great deal of what came afterwards.
Because of her name, you see.
Because in the time between me coming up with the name "Bunny Mayhem", there was another supernatural action-adventure story that achieved some degree of success, featuring a title character with an ever-so-slightly similar name.
Bunny.
Buffy.
Bunny. Buffy.
Buffy. Bunny.
You see the problem?
I felt, very strongly, that I needed to deal with this similarity -- which really was a coincidence -- by crafting a story that would not otherwise invite comparison with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But was still a supernatural action-adventure story.
Well, this happened to dovetail with some other things I'd been thinking about. I tend to enjoy genre mashups, and I like procedurals a lot -- they provide story hooks that are immediately understandable to the reader and don't require a lot of complicated backstory to understand: The heroes are involved in the story because it's their job. This balances nicely with the need for fantastical stories to establish and explore a world that is clearly different from our own. So fantasy and procedural seemed like a good fit.
But what sort of procedural?
As I suggested in an earlier post ('Does Fantasy Have To Be Anti-Democratic?'), inspired by both the fiction and the criticism of Ursula K. LeGuin, I think a lot about ethics and fantasy. Much fantasy seems to be seriously at odds with contemporary ethics, and one ethical issue that bothers me a lot in many supernatural action-adventure stories is secrecy, a distrust of the public, and a lack of accountability.
The illustrious Vampire Slayer, for instance, operates in secrecy, aided by a few friends. An attempt by the U. S. military to get involved in battling the supernatural was a major plot point in one season, and interestingly, was treated as being at best horribly misguided, at worst an immoral conspiracy that became a tool of the forces of evil.
The irony of this wasn't lost on me, and neither was the opportunity to resolve my own ethical issues with some of the elements of my chosen genre while also clearly differentating my story from Joss Whedon's.
My heroes wouldn't be secretive vigilantes, but cops, protecting a public that was fully aware of both their existence and that of the supernatural menace...
Um, which was going to be what, exactly?
More on how we solved that problem next time.
I can get behind a good superhero story, but I wasn't in the mood to write one.
(An idea that Patrick and I had talked about working on a couple of years previously had been a superhero story -- it got as far as being outlined, having the script for the first issue written and all the key characters designed. Then, between our schedules at the time, and someone else independently coming up with another version of the same idea, it fell by the wayside. I may talk more about this project another time, as I still have a great deal of affection for it.)
That left the supernatural.
As you've probably already inferred from some of our previous posts, though -- as well as the comic that we eventually cooked up -- we were both of a mind to create an action-adventurey kind of supernatural tale, rather than one that focused on, say, horror.
(Actually, I pitched Patrick a teenagers-getting-disembowelled story that I had on the shelf, in the form of a mostly-finished screenplay. It wouldn't have been difficult to turn into a comics script, but it wasn't Patrick's cup of tea.)
So we were looking at at least some of our protagonists being tough and competent.
But despite that, "Bunny Mayhem" was the first character to be imported into Cold Iron Badge.
Imported?
Yes. A lot our our characters existed in some capacity previously to Cold Iron Badge. Not precisely, of course... not in the final forms they appear in now. But Patrick and I -- entirely separately -- had character concepts or sometimes just names, from years of ideas that were waiting for the right venue.
Patrick had been looking for a story to use Christine McCall in for years. Ray Donovan was a character name I'd made up as a teenager meshed with a character concept that was much more recent. And Delric... well, Delric's origins are dorkily embarrassing.
But Bunny was the first. Bunny was one of mine, but I think Patrick suggested using her. And because she was the first, Bunny ended up defining a great deal of what came afterwards.
Because of her name, you see.
Because in the time between me coming up with the name "Bunny Mayhem", there was another supernatural action-adventure story that achieved some degree of success, featuring a title character with an ever-so-slightly similar name.
Bunny.
Buffy.
Bunny. Buffy.
Buffy. Bunny.
You see the problem?
I felt, very strongly, that I needed to deal with this similarity -- which really was a coincidence -- by crafting a story that would not otherwise invite comparison with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But was still a supernatural action-adventure story.
Well, this happened to dovetail with some other things I'd been thinking about. I tend to enjoy genre mashups, and I like procedurals a lot -- they provide story hooks that are immediately understandable to the reader and don't require a lot of complicated backstory to understand: The heroes are involved in the story because it's their job. This balances nicely with the need for fantastical stories to establish and explore a world that is clearly different from our own. So fantasy and procedural seemed like a good fit.
But what sort of procedural?
As I suggested in an earlier post ('Does Fantasy Have To Be Anti-Democratic?'), inspired by both the fiction and the criticism of Ursula K. LeGuin, I think a lot about ethics and fantasy. Much fantasy seems to be seriously at odds with contemporary ethics, and one ethical issue that bothers me a lot in many supernatural action-adventure stories is secrecy, a distrust of the public, and a lack of accountability.
The illustrious Vampire Slayer, for instance, operates in secrecy, aided by a few friends. An attempt by the U. S. military to get involved in battling the supernatural was a major plot point in one season, and interestingly, was treated as being at best horribly misguided, at worst an immoral conspiracy that became a tool of the forces of evil.
The irony of this wasn't lost on me, and neither was the opportunity to resolve my own ethical issues with some of the elements of my chosen genre while also clearly differentating my story from Joss Whedon's.
My heroes wouldn't be secretive vigilantes, but cops, protecting a public that was fully aware of both their existence and that of the supernatural menace...
Um, which was going to be what, exactly?
More on how we solved that problem next time.
Monday, December 22, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, December 15, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, December 7, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, October 13, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
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.
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.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
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!"
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!"
Friday, September 19, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, August 4, 2008
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...
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?
Saturday, July 26, 2008
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!
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!
Friday, April 11, 2008
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.
Monday, February 18, 2008
A Preview
Once upon a time...
(Click images to enlarge)
Cold Iron Badge
By Stephen Geigen-Miller and Pat Heinicke
Coming Soon
Cold Iron Badge
By Stephen Geigen-Miller and Pat Heinicke
Coming Soon
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