In honor of tonight’s US debut of the latest reincarnation of “Doctor Who”, I thought I’d showcase a comic that was way too good to be a TV-tie-in. In the late ’70s, before he gained everlasting fame and fortune co-creating “Watchmen”, Dave Gibbons put an amazing amount of care into his weekly serial about the adventures of the fourth Doctor, then being played by Tom Baker.
Many younger fans of the current show have shied away from the doctor’s first 42 years of adventuring because the production values on the original show were so insanely bad, and I can’t blame them.But the wonderful thing about these comics is that the budgetary problems disappear, so this was really the only time, before the current higher-budget re-launch, that the Doctor was truly allowed to go anywhere in time and space.Gibbons and the various writers who worked with him on this strip (Here it’s Pat Mills and John Wagner) really make the most of that freedom.They also do a great job capturing the timeless appeal of the character in just a few pages, including both his sense of mischief and his righteous fury.These strips are currently back in print from IDW and well worth getting, especially since what I’m giving you ends on a cliffhanger:
Okay, part one didn't really make my point about the bigger canvas, so here’s part two. (Still a cliffhanger, though...)
Far and away my favorite comic of last year was The Book of Genesis Illustrated by Robert Crumb.Anyone who has seen the great documentary Crumb knows the nightmarish power of Crumb’s cartooning.Now, after a lifetime as an angry, obscene iconoclast, Crumb has turned all his powers towards a faithful rendering of the ultimate “establishment” document.It turns out to be his masterpiece.Only someone with Crumb’s irreverance could interpret the founding document of his own religion with such clear-eyed and open-hearted vigor.
I gave up on picking a favorite moment, so let me show four.When I heard that Crumb was doing the full text, my first question was “But will he really do all the begats?”Yup, he does, albeit clumped together. How he chooses to illustrate it is a good example of the sociological eye he brings to the project:
A witness in a modern police line-up would describe every man in this book the same way: “It was a hairy hasidic guy in a robe, officer.”This is the ultimate artist challenge.How do you differentiate between dozens of characters who all look superficially the same?This is where Crumb’s ability to draw every line of character on a person’s face comes in handy:
Of course, because it’s Crumb, he doesn’t shy away from the more disturbing aspects of the text, which he doesn’t have to dig hard to find.You expect him to editorialize about these things, and he does, but in surprisingly compassionate ways.I love the single tear that Crumb grants Sarah in this supremely creepy moment:
But he finds ways to enrich Abraham’s inner life as well.This is probably my favorite drawing in the book:
And the whole book would be worth buying for Crumb’s endnotes alone! I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
Years: 1994-1996, 3 seasons, 36 half-hour episodes Creator: Ben Edlund Stars: Townsend Coleman, Mickey Dolenz (yes, the Monkee, later replaced by Rob Paulson)
The Concept: In a town with too many superheroes, a maniacal idiot with the invulnerability of a tick takes on a new sidekick: an accountant in a flying moth costume. The result is the most deranged and clever thing that ever aired on Saturday morning.
Recommended If You’re a Fan Of: “Rocky and Bullwinkle”, “The Simpsons”
How it Came to be Underrated: This show was wildly popular with college students and hipsters, who dragged themselves out of bed to watch it, but that demographic wasn’t who the advertisers wanted to speak to at that time of day, so the show struggled to stay on the air.Afterwards, strange legal issues kept it off DVD for a long time.
Sample Episode: 1.2, The Tick Vs. Chairface Chippendale Writers: Ben Edlund and Richard Liebmann-Smith The Story: The Tick and Arthur team up with the American Maid to take down Chairface, who wants to write his name on the face of the moon.
Why It’s Great:
Along with “Ren and Stimpy”, this represents a transitional period in which very smart people were trying to do bold work within a very hidebound old form.Eventually, with the rise of Adult Swim and other new venues, bizarro animation would find a more stable home, but at this point they just had to keep freaking out little kids (except for the weird kids, who were delighted that someone was finally speaking their language)
So many lines from this series still spring unbidden into my head, all these years later.From this episode, it’s the moment when a alligator bites off Arthur’s bowtie and he shouts in triumphant mockery: “Ha!Didn’t expect a clip-on, did ya??”
It’s easy to write bad superhero satire.Just have someone shout out: “hey, you’re all wearing tights!”To do it well, you have to accept the conventions of the genre and then slowly, like a frog in boiling water, increase the absurdity.Anyone can make fun of superheroes, but it’s a lot funnier when you explore how crazy the world would have to be in which such people could take themselves seriously.
The heroes stop Chairface from writing his name on the moon—in that he only gets as far as “CHA”.Astoundingly, the CHA stays on the moon in the background throughout the rest of the series, which gives you an idea of the attention to detail.(Two seasons later, the Tick did manage to remove the “C”, which didn’t improve things much)
How Available Is It?: It’s on barely-adequate DVDs, but some episodes are inexplicably missing.
But Don’t Take My Word For It: Click through for parts 2 and 3.
[UPDATE: This post was written while the show was still on the air. We later discovered that the writers were lying to us, and they had no idea what the villains’ plan was. It was very disappointing. Nevertheless, the point stands.]
Before it fell apart towards the end, the recent reboot of “Battlestar Galactica” was one of the most compelling shows on TV.Like “Lost” it was a great example of epic storytelling, keeping people on the hook for years as it parceled out tiny bits of the larger picture every week.How did it get people to keep coming back?By managing expectations very carefully.The creators knew that they had to make certain promises to their audience and those promises were spelled out every week in the show’s intro.
The standardized intro of “Battlestar Galactica” was always broken into two chunks.The first half ran before the teaser, and the second half ran after the teaser.The first half talked about the villains, and the second half talked about the heroes.This was no accident, and it nicely encapsulate a fundamental rule of storytelling.
Every episode, before that week’s story began, before they even did the episode teaser, the first half of the intro re-established who the bad guys were.It ended with big words printed right on the screen:“AND THEY HAVE A PLAN”.Note that they didn’t say what that plan was (and for most of the series, we didn’t know), but the writers were explicitly saying, “yes, trust us, the bad guys do have a plan and all will eventually be revealed.”
Then each episode would have the teaser, where they begin that episode’s story.Once the teaser builds to an exciting point, the music swells and we suddenly cut to the second half of the intro.This part summarizes who the heroes are and what they’ve gone through, then ends with their goal in big letters on the screen: “IN SEARCH OF A HOME... CALLED EARTH”.
The implicit point is that the villains, not the heroes, drive the action.The quickest way to get us to care about the story is to establish that the villains have a goal.After that, they then give us some actual story to get us sucked in before they reveal that, oh yeah, the heroes also have a goal, but it’s less important. On any given week, if the villains attack, the heroes will forget about their own goal and just defend themselves.They only actually search for Earth on those weeks in which they think they’ve shaken the villains off their tail for a while.
This rule applies to movies as well.The villain motivates the action.John McClaine wants to reconcile with his wife, but Hans Gruber wants to rob a bank, so Hans gets to control the story.If John still wants to win his wife back, he has to do it on Hans’s time.I had been taught this rule before, but watching the opening of BSG really drove it home for me every week.
Series: Naked City Years: 1958-1963, 39 half-hour episodes, 99 hour-long episodes Creator: Sterling Silliphant Stars: Paul Burke, Horace McMahon
The Concept: Each week, they shot a gritty little noir on the streets of New York City.Each episode feels like its own mini-movie because the focus is on the psychology of the guest-star criminals, not the workaday cops, who often just lurk in the background ...until they pounce at the end.
Recommended If You’re a Fan Of: the novels of Jim Thompson or Ed McBain.
How it Came to be Underrated: Everybody remembers the tagline “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this was one of them” but few people today have actually seen the show.
Sample Episode: 3.06, The Tragic Success of Alfred Tilloff Writers: Howard Rodman and Leonard Bishop The Story: Alfred is a two-time ex-con who just wants to stay out of trouble, but his wife dreams up a cynical kidnap plan—take a poor woman’s daughter and then demand that a benevolent rich person pay the ransom.There’s just one problem: Alfred’s disguise reminds him too much of his own dad, giving him a pang of conscience…
Why It’s Great:
This show was first and foremost an actor’s showcase, and it eventually featured all of the great NY actors of its day. This time it’s Jack Klugman’s turn to sweat it out as Alfred, and he breaks your heart as the kidnapper who just wants a kid of his own…
This show was the opposite of the other great 50s TV noir, Dragnet.While that show lent a sympathetic ear to the frustrations of the detectives, this show plunged viewers every week in the moral quagmire of the criminal’s mind, which is pretty astounding to see on TV.This was the heyday of the Warren court, when America was toying with the idea that criminals might be human beings, too.It didn’t stick.
The detectives played by Burke and McMahon are decent men, but the format of show does them no favors, as they rarely get to understand the depth or complexity of the criminal’s story.Frequently, they exchange a satisfied look after a sympathetic crook meets his fate, and we’re horrified. It’s a credit to the stars that they were willing to take on these thankless roles.
With almost no sets, this show was shot on-the-fly on the streets of NYC, and the portrait of the living city that forms the background of every episode is sumptuously detailed.This show was spun off a 1948 movie of the same name that was considered the first “semi-documentary” noir, and this show, too, is a document of a very real time and place.
How Available Is It?: Many but not all of the episodes are available on a series of “Best Of” DVDs.
But Don’t Take My Word For It: The show is nowhere to be found online, and the DVDs are going out of print.You can still get them off Netflix, or buy them here while they’re still in stock.
Years: 2006-present, 3 short seasons so far, 18 episodes total. Creators: David Mitchell, Robert Webb, Gareth Edwards Stars: Mitchell, Webb, Olivia Coleman, James Bachman, Mark Evans
Recommended If You’re a Fan Of: “Monty Python”, “Kids in the Hall”
The Concept: The stars of the britcom “Peep Show” let their minds wander thorough a series of bizarre filmed sketches.
How it Came to be Underrated: This deserves to have a huge cult in America, but outside of YouTube, it remains unknown over here, which is baffling. BBC America did run the first two seasons, but only once.They’ve just started running the third season, Wednesday nights at 9:30, so catch it now while you have the chance…
Sample Episode: Series One, Episode Four The Story: We zip through 15 filmed sketches in 25 minutes, some wholly original and some featuring recurring characters: A bored host chloroforms an overly chatty guest...An actor shooting a sex scene starts uncontrollably muttering “now we know…” Drunken snooker commentators amuse themselves… Each skit is smart, funny, short and absolutely deranged.
Why It’s Great:
I first discovered this show because several writing blogs all linked to this sketch, where Mitchell, as a writer, gets notes from a “suit”, played by Webb, who wants him to kill off his main character and add a shark: “Well, maybe it’s not a shark, but it’s a squid, or a pebble, or a policeman…” As always, the creators take a painfully real situation (receiving vague and unhelpful suggestions) and hurtle it into the realm of total absurdity.
Mitchell and Webb are truly co-equal.In that sketch, Webb is playing broad and Mitchell is the straight man, but just as often it’s the other way around.Or they have sketches like this one, in which both are totally deadpan.Here they’re a couple with very different levels of job stress, which makes it hard for them to properly commiserate about their day at work: “We’ve been through this, just because I’m a pediatrician dealing with severely ill children doesn’t mean that you can’t have a tough day... tasting ice cream at the ice cream factory…”
Occasionally, just to keep us on our toes, they go “behind the scenes” and show the cast sitting around between sketches candidly chatting… supposedly.In one, Mitchell has had a bad break up and the other actors all cheerfully remind him that he won’t be able to move on until he breaks into her apartment and plants some crack for the police to find…
But ultimately, the recurring sketch that makes or breaks people on the show is Numberwang, the arcane game show that descends into nightmarish confusion.(I have no ability to figure out the rules of anything.I can watch people play a card game for hours without guessing how it works, so I always relate…)
How Available Is It?: This is one of the few things that’s available on Watch Instantly even though it’s not on Region One DVD.Season Two is not available in America at all, other than as individual skits on YouTube. Season Three is airing now.
But Don’t Take My Word For It: Obviously, you can just watch the sketches individually, but it also gains momentum beautifully when watched as a whole.If you don’t have Netflix, here’s the whole episode on YouTube, broken into thirds.Click through to see the other two…
Yesterday, I featured a moment that was insulting towards its readers, which just made them love it more.Today I thought I’d feature one that was sort of the opposite...“The 7-Year Old Genius”, from EC’s Weird Fantasy #7, is a little too flattering to the average comics reader at the time.You would almost think that writer-artist Al Feldstein was poking fun…
Set in a dystopian future metropolis that covers all of North America, Judge Dredd has been a wildly popular British satire of American over-policing ever since its debut in 1977.But when the strip was first starting out, they had a little problem—they were playing it too straight.Dredd was coming off as more of a genuinely righteous Dirty Harry type than the satirical figure he was supposed to be.
It was only with the 20th issue of the anthology 2000 A.D. that John Wagner and artist Mike McMahon were finally able to make it clear that the fans were not supposed to be cheering Dredd on.Readers must have been shocked when Dredd chose to cleanse Mega-City One of the worst of all cultural plagues—comics...
Title: The Fireman’s Ball Year: 1967 Director: Milos Forman Writers: Milos Forman, Jaroslav Papousek, Ivan Passer, Vaclav Sasek Stars: Jan Vostrcil, Josef Sebanek, Josef Valnoha, Josef Kolb, Jan Stokl, Stanislav Holubec
The Story: The petty and venal old men of a small-town fire department hold a retirement ball for a dying comrade, then use the opportunity to round up all the pretty girls in town for an impromptu beauty contest.A circus of bumbling, thievery and corruption turns the event into an ever-escalating farce.
How it Came to be Underrated: This movie is beloved by those who know it, but it’s too little seen today.
Why It’s Great:
You might think that nothing could be more unpleasant than a visit to an official gathering in a backward town in a bad time, but the movie is actually a lot of fun.Forman has that magical ability, shared with a few other great ’60s European directors, to invest unhappy situations with a sweetly buoyant charm.They remind us that such situations are rooted in all-too-human folly, and folly is always fun to watch.
Throughout their history, the Czech people had never been free for very long.How do you develop an artistic tradition when you’re not free to say what you feel?You stick your tongue firmly in your cheek.Satire and allegory have always been their stock in trade, even when flourishing under the relative freedom of the “Prague Spring”, as they were in 1967.It’s ironic that this bitterly funny protest was made during that brief window of happiness, but Forman knew enough not to get too happy too quickly.The tanks were already on their way…
Political protest allegories are very hard to write.We understand about five minutes in that everything is going to go very, very wrong, and we know that there’s no way to turn things around without undercutting the political statement.So why watch?Because Forman isn’t just looking to tell us that things are bad, he’s looking to show us how things go so wrong.Having grown up in a corrupt system, Forman has intimate knowledge of how an epic fiasco goes down, step by step, in all its gruesome glory.
There are no idealists who get disillusioned here.Rather, the implicit criticism comes from the fact that everybody, as pleasant as they try to be, is already laboring under the oppressive knowledge of how bad things really are.The mothers already know that they can’t leave their daughters alone with the town fathers.The raffle prize officials know that every prize will be stolen.The true cost of omnipresent corruption is shown in the faces of those who know the fix is in.
If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Forman’s first major Czech film was Loves of a Blonde.His best American film was One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest.
How Available Is It?: It’s on a very nice Criterion Collection DVD.
Today’s Post Was Brought To You By: Tired of Collecting Bottle Tops, Race Horses?
My first day in film school, a bitter little directing professor walked into class and announced: “I don’t know what the point of this is, no one can teach directing.Either you have talent or you don’t.”We were paying him tens of thousands of dollars to teach us directing.It was not money well spent.
Talent can be taught. Not easily, no, but nothing lucrative is easy, or else we’d all be rich.You can learn it from someone else (if they’re a lot more dedicated than my professor was) or you can teach yourself.How do I know this? Because otherwise nothing good would ever get written. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you have no natural talent for any aspect of the process, you’re in trouble.True, you can learn everything step by step, but you’re probably not to going to be able to get started writing until you’re 80.
Most people choose to write because they have a talent for one part of the process.They have a natural ear for dialogue, or they know how to make up thrilling plot-twists, or they effortlessly know how to convert their own life experience into metaphors.And so they think, “hey, why don’t I use this skill to go to Hollywood and get rich?”But they discover that screenwriting doesn’t rely on one skill.You have to be great at dialogue and plot-twists and thematic metaphors, all at the same time.Every single screenplay requires an almost ludicrous range of skills.And no matter how good you are at some of them, nobody is naturally good at all of them.So you have to learn that skill, sometimes from scratch.And since everybody has to learn different skills, then every skill has to be teachable. There are people who naturally write terrible dialogue but then teach themselves to write great dialogue. It happens all the time.
But what about those people who claim that they sold their first screenplay?Or even won an Oscar for their first screenplay?Well, they’re lying, but don’t blame them.The studios love to sell the idea of an “inspiring” overnight success, so they force the screenwriter to falsely claim that the first one they sold was also the first one they wrote.Then, when those writers go back and sell their older screenplays, those p.r. people don’t want to admit that they were raiding your file cabinet, so they insist you claim you just wrote it.But don’t believe it.No professional screenwriter who saw Juno believed that it was Diablo Cody’s first screenplay, because the structure on that movie is absolutely rock-solid.Jennifer’s Body, on the other hand, is painfully amateurish, filled with classic first-timer mistakes.Juno was the first one to sell, but it clearly wasn’t the first one written and somebody taught themselves structure in the meantime. Now that’s inspiring.
