The Expanded Ultimate Story Checklist: Is the One-Sentence Description Uniquely Appealing?

Okay, folks, here’s the deal.  I’m sick of BCI, you’re sick of BCI.  We’ll do some new ones to celebrate when the book comes out, but that’s many months away (Official announcement soon!)  So what shall we do with those months, other than Friday podcasts?  Here’s my big idea.  I cobbled the checklist together out of blog posts, rewrote every one, and published those rewritten essays as my first book.  But if you click on “The Ultimate Story Checklist” in the sidebar, each question still links to the original blog post, not the nicely rewritten and expanded version in the book.  

I thought it would be nice if each of those linked to the version from the book, expanded to add any Checklist Roadtests or Straying from the Party Lines I’ve done about it, and then showing the answer to that question from every checklist.  It’s the deluxe version of my first book, and it’ll play out over the next 122 non-podcast posts of this blog!

So let’s start off with question #1: Is the one-sentence description uniquely appealing?

Right here at the beginning, I want to emphasize that great stories need not answer yes to every question, and this first one is a great example. As you’ll see below, it’s great to answer yes to this question but by no means essential.

So how do you boil your big, beautiful story down to just one line? It sounds impossible. In fact, it sounds insulting! Your story is large. It contains multitudes! But let’s say that you have twenty seconds to pitch it to someone. Can you do it? Of course you can. Because every great story grows from one simple idea.

This is the usual layout for a one-sentence summary, which is also called a “logline”:

A [adjective indicating longstanding social problem] [profession or social role] must [goal, sometimes including the ticking clock and stakes].

This can work for many different types of stories:

• The movie Casablanca: An amoral American nightclub owner must decide between joining the fight against the Nazis or pursuing his true love.
• The novel and movie Beloved: A guilt-wracked ex-slave must confront the vengeful ghost of the daughter she killed.
• The novel and movie Silence of the Lambs: Am underestimated FBI rookie must work with a devious imprisoned serial killer to rescue a senator’s daughter.
• The movie Groundhog Day: A selfish weatherman must repeat the same day over and over until he achieves personal growth.
• The novel and movie Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: A mistreated boy gets a chance to go to wizard school, where he must defeat the evil wizard who killed his parents.
• The comic series and movie Iron Man: An arrogant arms dealer must build a suit of armor to free himself from a warlord and then perfect his suit to deal with related menaces at home.
• But wait, there are two more examples we’ll keep returning to that don’t exactly fit this model:
• The memoir and movie An Education: A clever-but-bored schoolgirl in pre-Beatles London puts her Oxford dreams on hold when she meets a devilishly charming older man.
• The novel and movie Sideways: Two miserable middle-aged men romantically pursue two divorcées during a weeklong trip to wine country.

Crucially, there’s no “must” in the last two examples, which inherently makes them a harder sell. As it turns out, both movies are wonderfully entertaining, but it’s hard to know that from reading the logline. Because there’s no “must,” we fear that the stories will lack stakes and motivation. Because the hero is not being literally compelled to enter the world of the story, we fear that we will not be compelled to, either.

The first six are stories you might try out simply based on this intriguing line. Of the eight, these last two are the ones you’re more likely to try only if you’ve read good reviews or you’ve heard good things about the author of the novel or the director of the movie. As it happened, both movies got great reviews, and so people checked them out and discovered they were compelling.

So every great story doesn’t need a uniquely appealing logline, but it definitely helps, both in selling your work to a buyer and eventually to an audience. As mentioned in chapter two, publishers and producers hate to say to the public, “I know it doesn’t sound interesting, but trust us—it’s really well written.” In order for them to market your work, they prefer to have a unique, appealing concept.

A sharp logline also focuses your mind as a writer: You’re not feeling your way through the shapeless blob of a half-formed idea, you’re starting with a unique and clever concept that automatically excites both your readers and yourself. That’s a great way to start.

As you pitch concepts you’ll hear the term high concept a lot, without explanation. It’s worth noting that the term high concept has changed in meaning over the years. It used to refer to big, complicated, highly conceptual ideas like 2001, but now it refers to the opposite: a concept that is uniquely simple.

• Limitless (and the novel it’s based on, The Dark Fields) is high concept because you instantly understand the appeal of the premise: What if a pill could make you rich and powerful?
• But it can also apply to movies without any science fiction elements. The Hangover was also high concept: Three groomsmen can’t remember their wild bachelor party or find the missing groom.
• For that matter, Wedding Crashers is the ultimate high-concept story because you got the unique appeal of it as soon as you heard the title, no poster or tagline necessary.

High concept now refers to a simple one-sentence premise that makes everybody say, “Oooh, that sounds fun!” High-concept ideas are easy to market. If the concept is instantly and uniquely appealing, it’s an easy sell.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that every story has to be high concept to work. Let's look at a movie that has an unappealing, low-concept logline (even though it does have a "must" in it). Here's a one-line summary of The King’s Speech: “A nervous figurehead must work with a radical speech therapist to overcome his stutter in order to give an inspiring speech as World War II begins.”

The financiers of that movie took a huge risk: Instead of starting with an asset (an appealing logline), they started with a huge liability (an unappealing logline). Every step of the way, they had to explain to potential directors, actors, and distributors, “We know it doesn’t sound very interesting, but if we do a good job we can make it interesting.” That took a lot of persuasion on the part of the producers.

But somehow, in the end, they did it. They convinced enough people at every step to take a chance on it, and shepherded it all the way to box office success and a Best Picture win. And guess what? The final product was a much better movie than any of the three I just listed. It can be done, if you’re willing to run uphill.

But if you want to give yourself a big boost, both in terms of selling it and in terms of writing it, a uniquely appealing logline works wonders.

Okay, for each of these, I’ll then show various Rulebook Casefiles or Straying from the Party Lines I’ve done in regards to this question.  In this case, there aren’t any, that I can remember.  But of course, I have asked this question in every checklist I’ve done, and here are the answers:

The 40 Year Old Virgin	YES. A 40 year old virgin makes new friends who try to finally get him laid.
Alien	YES. The crewmembers of a space freighter are hunted down and gutted one by one by an alien bio-engineered to be the ultimate killing machine.
An Education	YES. A clever-but-bored schoolgirl in pre-Beatles London puts her Oxford dreams on hold when she meets a devilishly charming older man.
The Babadook	YES. A mother and son are stalked by a creature that emerges from a creepy picture book.
Blazing Saddles	YES. A sarcastic black track layer in 1874 is set up to fail as the new sheriff of a white western town, but rises to the task.
Blue Velvet	YES. A voyeuristic college student finds a severed ear in a field, leading him to discover the dark side of his small town and himself.
The Bourne Identity	YES. A spy with no memories must determine who he was and who he wants to be now, while his ex-bosses try to kill him.
Bridesmaids	YES. A broke and broken-down bridesmaid gets into an epic feud with a wealthy rival who wants to steal the position of maid of honor.
Casablanca	YES. In an exotic city filled with intrigue, an amoral American nightclub owner must decide between joining the fight against the Nazis or pursuing his true love.
Chinatown	YES. A 1930s private detective discovers a massive conspiracy to control Los Angeles
Donnie Brasco	YES.  a married FBI agent goes so deep undercover in the mob that he almost becomes a made man.
Do the Right Thing	NO. Not especially : “A conflicted black pizza delivery man working for the only white business on his block must decide what to do when a race riot breaks out.” This movie was sold on the success of the writer /director /star’s previous two movies, which were more broadly comedic.  He cashed in that goodwill here with a more ambitious movie.
The Farewell	YES. A young Chinese-American woman returns to China to see her dying grandma one last time, but nobody will let her tell her grandma the truth.
The Fighter	YES. The inspiring true story of a boxer who breaks free of his explotative family to become a champion.
Frozen	YES. A princess must save the world from her sister’s out-of-control ice powers.
The Fugitive	YES. A falsely-convicted fugitive hunts for his wife’s killer.
Get Out	YES. A young black man becomes increasingly aware that his white girlfriend and her family may have sinister designs on him.
Groundhog Day	YES. A selfish weather man is mysteriously cursed to relive the same Groundhog Day over and over until he achieves personal grow.
How to Train Your Dragon	YES. An underestimated Viking prince captures and bonds with a dragon, so they try to bring peace to their two tribes.
In a Lonely Place	YES. An angry screenwriter is accused of murder, then falls in love with the beautiful woman who provided his alibi, but she’s not sure he’s really innocent.
Iron Man	YES. A humbled arms dealer becomes a high-tech armored superhero to confront the enemies foreign and domestic that he himself has armed.
Lady Bird	NO. There’s no hook.  It had to depend entirely on reviews and a funny trailer.
Raising Arizona	YES. A desperate childless couple steal a baby from a family with quintuplets, but two escaped convicts and a ruthless bounty hunter complicate things.
Rushmore	Somewhat: A precocious high schooler falls in love with a teacher, then loses her to his own best friend, a rich school funder.
Selma	YES. An activist army and its weary general have to convince the president to commit to civil rights.
The Shining	YES. A family agrees to take care of a snowbound hotel, but when the father is driven mad by spirits and tries to kill his family, his psychically-gifted son must stop him.
Sideways	NO. The logline sounds very unappealing. (Two miserable middle-aged men romantically pursue two divorcees during a week-long trip to wine country.)  This was sold largely on the writer-director’s reputation. We knew we could trust Payne, and he knew we trusted him and would let him make a low-concept movie.
The Silence of the Lambs	YES. An ambitious FBI rookie must work with a devious imprisoned serial killer to rescue a Senator’s daughter.
Star Wars	YES. A farmboy on a distant planet becomes the hero of a galactic rebellion.
Sunset Boulevard	YES. A dead screenwriter tells us how he  became the kept boy of a psychotic ex-silent-screen-goddess and tried to get away.

Episode 30: Genre, Burgers, and Alien with Jonathan Auxier

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 30: Genre, Burgers, and Alien

Just two weeks later, here’s another episode of “The Secrets of Story Podcast”! We’ll try to stick to a biweekly strategy for a while, alternating with “Marvel Reread Club” on the alternate Fridays.

And hey starting on Monday, I’ll embark on a major new project on Mondays through Thursdays, so you’ll have five days a week of posts for a while!

Today’s episode was extricated from the previous episode. This is the discussion Jonathan Auxier wanted to have, but we ended up having a different discussion about the Sayers triangle that broke off and became its own episode.  Now we can present Jonathan’s original idea about genre, how it is like burgers, and what this all has to do with the movie Alien. James then high-roads us with some classical music cues.

Marvel Reread Club Episode 7: October 1962

Steve and Matt Bird · 007 Marvel Reread Club October 1962

Welcome back to the Marvel Reread Club! From now on we’ll be coming to you every other Friday, starting today. This week, we’ll tackling five big issues: Fantastic Four #7, Journey Into Mystery featuring Thor #85, Strange Tales featuring the Human Torch #101, and Tales to Astonish featuring Ant-Man #36. Hostility Rays! Anti-Matter Particle Fans! Asbestos Bedspreads! Angry Portraits of Khrushchev!

I usually decline to post interior panels we discussed, in the interest of making less work for myself, but I could resist posting this gorgeous page from Fantastic Four:

Believe Care Invest: Aladdin

Hey, where’s Marvel Reread Club?? Well, after overwhelming you guys with podcast content last week, I’ve decided to do one podcast a week. MRC will appear this Friday morning and will now be bi-weekly every other Friday from this point on. The next Friday, we will have a new Secrets of Story Podcast, then a new MRC, etc. Hopefully we can maintain both podcasts on a bi-weekly schedule, alternating with each other. In the meantime, let’s do Aladdin!

• A merchant trying to sell us a lamp tells a story: First we see Jafar try to get something from a magical cave, then he says he must find the “diamond in the rough.” Cut to Aladdin who has stolen a piece of bread and leads the guards on a merry chase around the city, singing a song. He gets away with the bread, but decides to give it to some starving kids. He then protects the kids from the whip of a prince going to the palace.

Why Aladdin might be hard to identify with: No real reason, he’s tremendously lovable.

Believe:

• We begin with a song about his culture and the setting.
• He has a distinctive outfit.
• He has a gap between his exterior and interior: When he’s alone, he sings to himself, “Riff-raff, street rat, I don’t buy that, if only they’d look closer, would they see a poor boy? Nosiree. They’d find out there’s so much more to me.”

Care:

• He’s an orphan: The people in the streets say, “I’d blame parents but he hasn’t got ‘em”
• He’s poor: “I steal only what I can’t afford – That’s everything!”
• He’s envious of the prince.
• Needlessly insulted: “You are a worthless street rat. You were born a street rat, you’ll die a street rat, and only your fleas will mourn you.”
• He falls in unrequited love at first sight.

Invest:

• He’s great at running away. After he dives off a building and swings down a series of clotheslines, the guards say, “You won’t get away so easy!” and he says, “You think that was easy??”
• He has a reputation. Women think he’s adorable. “He’s rather tasty!”
• He has a resourceful monkey assistant.
• He’s kind: he gives bread he’s stolen away to poor kids.
• He’s badass: He protects kids from being whipped by grabbing the whip away from the prince.
• He’s good at improv with the princess when he has to save her from having her hand cut off. They “yes and” each other.

Believe Care Invest: The House on Mango Street

• Pre-teen Esperanza moves with her family to a modest house on Mango Street and looks for friends.

Why Esperanza might be hard to identify with: It’s an unusual format. The short book essentially consists of 150 one-page short stories, with only a small amount of interconnectivity. Obviously, scenes don’t go very far in depth and not a lot of momentum builds. There’s very little dialogue.

Believe:

• She talks about, “windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath.” Always good to personify things
• We always like vivid but unexpected smells: “Mama’s hair that smells like bread.”
• We have all, in our odder moments, experienced bits of synesthesia. I remember as a child thinking “red and green make brown because red is 5 and green is 3 and brown is 8”, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world. Giving your hero a bit of synesthesia makes them feel oddly real: “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.”
• Odd sensory information: “At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth.”
• Let your characters relabel themselves: “I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.”
• Unlike some Hispanic authors, Cisneros doesn’t sprinkle in much Spanish, but she does have culturally unique syntax: “Two girls raggedy as rats live across the street.” Different characters have different culturally unique syntax. One says, “but me I’m Texas.
• Not a lot of dialogue in the book, but what we do get has lots of personality: “People on the bus wave. A very fat lady crossing the street says, You sure got quite a load there. Rachel shouts, You got quite a load there too. She is very sassy.”
• Vivid sound description: “Our laughter for example. Not the shy ice cream bells’ giggle of Rachel and Lucy’s family, but all of a sudden and surprised like a pile of dishes breaking.”
• Unique similes: “It’s like all of a sudden he let go a million moths all over the dusty furniture and swan-neck shadows and in our bones.”
• There are lots of chances to tie the book in to specific cultures, but there are also details like this not specific to their culture, implying that there are some aspects of culture that cross over, just because they’re great songs. “She can’t come out—gotta baby-sit with Louie’s sisters—but she stands in the doorway a lot, all the time singing, clicking her fingers, the same song: And we always love song lyrics. Apples, peaches, pumpkin pah-ay. You’re in love and so am ah-ay”

Care:

• They had to move hastily because the pipes burst in their old home and their landlord refused to fix them. Decisions made under pressure are always good ways to launch stories.
• The opening humiliation of the story is often the moment when a hero first realizes how others see them: “You live there? There. I had to look to where she pointed—the third floor, the paint peeling, wooden bars Papa had nailed on the windows so we wouldn’t fall out. You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there. I nodded.”
• She arrives in her new neighborhood and has to go through the humiliating ritual of asking kids to be her friend. One replies, “You want a friend, she says. Okay, I’ll be your friend. But only till next Tuesday. That’s when we move away. Got to. Then as if she forgot I just moved in, she says the neighborhood is getting bad.”

Invest:

• This book is about Esperanza getting wised up to the true nature of the world: “I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn’t it. The house on Mango Street isn’t it. For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know how those things go.”
• As with all semi-autobiographical novels, we invest primarily because of the fact of this book, which, because we’re reading it, proves that the hero broke free and made her place in the world (though the author and heroine have different names). All of the Believe examples above show both Sandra and Esperanza’s exquisitely perceptive eyes, and we like good eyes.

The Annotation Project: The House on Mango Street

Non-podcast content! I was trying to get some Latina content in my book and discovered this wonderful novel.  BCI tomorrow. 

 

Episode 29: Author Draft, Artifact Draft, Audience Draft with Jonathan Auxier

The Secrets of Story Podcast · Episode 29: Author Draft, Artifact Draft, Audience Draft

The Secrets of Story Podcast is back! Sorry for the long delay-- I promise it’s not because I’ve been distracted by my shiny new podcast (Marvel Reread Club), this episode just took a lot of effort to make happen. In the end, just like the last two episodes of MRC, we had enough material from this SOS recording session to make two episodes. In this case, it was trickier, because our conversation with Jonathan Auxier jumped back and forth between two topics, each of which deserved their own episode, so I had to carefully disentangle them to become episodes 29 and 30.

Here is the first of those episodes, and it’s a doozie! Jonathan introduces the idea of the “Sayers Triangle”, which basically boils down to this: Everything you write needs an Author Draft, an Artifact Draft, and an Audience Draft. James and I are blown away by this, and we spend 40 minutes grappling with it.  Eventually, we end up discussing how it applies to Jonathan’s new book series “The Fabled Stables” and it all becomes clear...  

Marvel Reread Club Episode 6: September 1962 (Part 2)

Steve and Matt Bird · 006 Marvel Reread Club September 1962 (part 2)

Hi again, everybody! It’s time for the second half of September, 1962, featuring Incredible Hulk #3, Journey Into Mystery #84 (featuring Thor), and Tales to Astonish #35 (introducing Ant-Man!) Elephant punching! Volcano-triggering! Plugging guns with ant-honey! Check it out!

Guest Appearance on "Pod Dylan" discussing "Restless Farewell"!

Hi, everybody! So I sure hope you like the sound of my voice (which I myself am not crazy about) because if you check out all my podcast appearances you’re going to be hearing a lot of me in the coming weeks. I continue to put out “Marvel Reread Club” every week, we have not one but two episodes of “The Secrets of Story Podcast” all edited and ready to go once they gain James’s approval, and now we have my appearance on a third, totally different podcast!

One of my personal favorite podcasts is “Pod Dylan” where host Rob Kelly and a guest examine a different Dylan song in depth every week. I’ve been invited to be on many podcasts over the years, but this is the first time that I’ve initiated it. I’m such a fan that I just wrote Rob out of the blue and asked if I could come on his show as a guest. I proposed a few songs and this was the one he picked. We discuss 1964’s “Restless Farewell”, one of my favorites.

Here's the podcast, and here’s video of Bob performing the song for Frank Sinatra:

Marvel Reread Club Episode 5: September 1962 (Part 1)

Steve and Matt Bird · 005 Marvel Reread Club September 1962 (part 1)

Hello everyone and welcome back! I promise that I will have non-MRC content on this blog soon. I am currently editing not one but two episodes of the “Secrets of Story Podcast”, and there’s more goodies to come!

But for now, let’s dive into September, 1962. There were five issues that month and we recorded 100 minutes talking about them, but we decided to split that into two episodes, so this week, for part one, we’ll just be discussing Amazing Fantasy #15 (introducing Spider-Man) and Fantastic Four #6. Spider-pupils! Unstable molecules!

And come back next week for Part 2!

Marvel Reread Club, Episode 4: June to August 1962

Steve and Matt Bird · 004 Marvel Reread Club July & August 1962

Here we are back again! This is a big month, folks: Fantastic Four #5, introducing Dr. Doom! Journey into Mystery #83, introducing Thor! Incredible Hulk #2, introducing, uh, the Toad Men! A convenient cache of fake beards! Easter Island men from Saturn! Magnetism doing what magnetism can’t really do! Check it out, true believers!

Marvel Reread Club Episode 3: February to May 1962

Steve and Matt Bird · 003 Marvel Reread Club March & May 1962

Welcome back everybody! It’s time for the third episode of the Marvel Reread Club podcast! This issue, we’re reading all the superhero comics from February to May of 1962, which means Fantastic Four #3 and #4 and Hulk #1! Mass hypnosis! Walking whales! Passenger Missiles! Lots of fun to be had!

(And if you miss the Secrets of Story Podcast, I do remain dedicated to it, I promise, but we’ve once again pushed back our latest episode because of an issue with the guest. We’ll try and record one this week!)

Believe Care Invest, Comics Memoir Week: Persepolis

• Marjane Satrapi recalls being 9 years old in 1979 when the Islamic Revolution takes over Iran. The next year, the girls at school are all forced to wear veils. The girls play with their veils at school. She recalls wanting to be a prophet as a child, even before the revolution.

I’ll break my rule and do just one book in translation. The author is an English speaker who supervised the translation, so I’m going to let myself get away with it, and I just love it too much not to use it.

There’s no reason not to love Marjane, she’s intensely sympathetic. Let’s look at some of the reasons we Believe in her:

• She acts recognizably ten when she takes off and plays with her veil at school, despite her religious bent.
• She’s got beliefs and she’s written them down: “I wanted to be a prophet because our maid did not eat with us, because my father had a cadillac, and above all, because my grandmother’s knees always ached.” Her grandmother says to her, “Come here, Marji, Help me to stand up.” Marjane helps her and says, “Don’t worry, soon you won’t have any more pain, you’ll see,” then reads to her from the Holy Book she’s written: “Rule number six: Everybody should have a car. Rule number seven: All maids should eat at the table with the others. Rule number eight: No old person should have to suffer.”
• The book captures how children process things: Marjane is told that her communist grandfather was put in a cell filled with water for hours. That night she insists on taking a long bath. “I wanted to know what it felt like to be in a cell filled with water. My hands were wrinkled when I came out, like Grandpa’s.”
• She’s stubborn: When she tells her teacher she wants to be a prophet the other kids laugh at her and her teacher says to her parents, “Doesn’t this worry you?” They tell the teacher it’s fine, but she still decides to lie about it, even to them. Her father says, “So tell me, my child, what do you want to be when you grow up?” She thinks, “A prophet,” but says “I want to be a doctor.”
• She’s imaginative: she has an amusing relationship with God, who talks with her long into the night.

As with most of our other examples, Marjane is caught up in a historical tragedy, so she’s easy to Care for:

• She is forced to wear a veil she doesn’t want to wear. Her co-ed French school is shut down and she is sent to an all-girls religious school.
• She is caught between the shah and the revolutionaries, both of whom are horrible. Her parents are political, so she has even more reason to worry about them. A picture of her mom taken at an anti-veil protest goes global, putting her life in danger. “She dyed her hair, and wore dark glasses for a long time.”
• When she chooses Marxist revolution, she finds that her friend God no longer visits her at night.

There are lots of reasons to Invest in Marjane:

• She’s got a pretty badass attitude for a ten year old: “I wanted to be justice, love and the wrath of God all in one.”
• She’s precocious: “To enlighten me, they bought books. I knew everything about the children of Palestine, about Fidel Castro, about the young Vietnamese killed by the Americans, about the revolutionaries of my own country… But my favorite was a comic book called ‘Dialectic Materialism’”
• She dresses up with a (presumably toy) machine gun and bullet sash, then marches around in her garden: “Today, my name is Che Guevara! Down with the king! Down with the king!”

In the end, Marjane will not lead the revolution, but we trust in the opening pages that she could.

Strength / Flaw: Fiery / Heedless

Believe Care Invest, Comics Memoir Week: Maus

• This book has a very similar structure to “March”: Begin with an emblematic incident from the hero’s youth (In Rego Park, New York, in 1958, young Art Speigelman skins his knee and goes to his holocaust survivor dad Vladek for sympathy but gets none) then we jump forward to a modern day framing sequence (In the late 70s, Art visits his dad for the first time in years to get out of him details of his life for a holocaust comic about mice) then jump further back into a harrowing past (Vladek tells of dating a poor girl in the 30s, then leaving her for a rich girl)

Neither Art nor his father are very easy to identify with. Art is an unsuccessful underground comic book creator, which isn’t any reader’s favorite profession. He hasn’t visited his father in two years, until he decides to come pump him for comic book material. He smokes constantly and gets annoyed when they get annoyed that he’s ashing on their stuff. Vladek is not a great dad in the 1958 sequence, unkind to his new wife in the modern day framing sequence, and a bit caddish and mercenary is his flashbacks. So the book has some hurdles to overcome with BCI.

Let’s do Art and Vladek separately. Here are some reasons we believe in Art:

• In 1958, Art has an object unique to the time: Skates that attached to your shoes.
• We get just a brief mention of Art’s French-American wife Francoise, but we can tell that such a wife makes him unique in Rego Park.
• He has a signature piece of clothing: The vest he always wears.

There are lots of reasons to care about Art.

• In 1958, he’s abandoned by his friends: “I-I fell, and my friends skated away w-without me.” His father responds, “Friends? You’re friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week…then you could see what it is, friends!” We instantly get that it would suck to have to beg sympathy from someone who compares your suffering relative to the holocaust.
• In the present, Art’s mother has committed suicide.
• His father doesn’t respect his job: “Better you should spend your time to make drawings what will bring you some money”
• His father is exasperating, telling him great stories and then insisting they not be in the book. We’re glad Art breaks his promise to leave them out.

As for Investing in Art, the quality of the comic itself is the ultimate testament to his skills. His goal of commemorating the holocaust is noble, and he does push to get it against resistance. Neither Art nor Vladek can suspect that this comic will make Art one of the first comics artists ever to become rich and famous. His stepmother correctly points out, “It’s an important book. People who don’t usually read such stories will be interested.”

Okay, let’s look at why we Believe in Vladek:

• He has very distinctive syntax: “It’s a shame Francoise also didn’t come.” “I don’t want you should write this in your book.”
• In the flashbacks, he’s got a nicely mundane job buying and selling textiles.
• He knew his current wife back in Poland before he met his first wife, which is a nicely complicated situation.

And of course, there are many reasons to care, even before we get to his time in the concentration camps:

• His wife has committed suicide, an ironic death for a holocaust survivor.
• He doesn’t get along with his new wife.
• He has a unique complaint “A WIRE hanger you give him! I haven’t seen Artie in almost two years—We have plenty WOODEN hangers.” Shades of Joan Crawford!
• In the flashback, he finds his girlfriend more attractive than the richer girl he actually wants to marry, which is a caddish problem, but we still sympathize.

So why do we Invest in Vladek?

• Crucially, he rides an exercise bike while he tells his son of his past. We love exercise and bikes!
• When we get the flashback, he’s a great lover, “I had a lot of girls what I didn’t even know that would run after me. People always told me I looked just like Rudolph Valentino.”
• Always a good superpower: When the hero understands a second language and then others use it around them, not knowing they understand it: “The next morning we all met together. My cousin and Anja spoke sometimes in English.” The cousin asks, “How you like him?” Anya replies, “He’s a handsome boy and seems very nice.” Vladek explains to Art: “They couldn’t know I understood.”

Speigelman is acutely aware of the ironies of this story. He overcomes the urge to present his late, longsuffering father as saintly, and instead presents him flaws and all. He worries aloud to his stepmother that unflattering aspects of his portrait will seem to some to confirm some of the racist caricatures that triggered the holocaust in the first place. But ultimately, he has to trust himself. The more three-dimensional the story is, the more powerful it will be, and the more it will impact every reader.

Believe Care Invest, Comics Memoir Week: March

• We begin on the Edmund Pettus bridge in 1965. John Lewis and Hosea Williams lead a group of marchers across the bridge and get attacked by the local police. We then jump to the morning of Obama’s inauguration as a much older John wakes up and prepares for his day. He goes to his office, where a family peeks in and he offers to show them around. He tells them about speaking at the March on Washington. One of the boys asks why he has so many chickens. He describes growing up in Alabama as the son of a sharecropper who eventually bought his own farm.

Obviously John Lewis is one of the great American heroes of the 20th century, so we certainly admire him right away. You might think that his monumental edifice might make him hard to identify with (as MLK is in stories about him), but Lewis is delightfully humble and human here, allowing us to Believe, Care and Invest right away.

Here are some reasons we believe:

• First and foremost, his iconic, odd outfit on that bridge: He was wearing the standard suit and tie of the movement, but over it he had a trenchcoat and a backpack, which emphasized his young age and his preparation for going to prison.
• We always love song lyrics. As he gets ready for his day on the morning of the inauguration, he sings in the shower: “You can take my freedom, oh yes, you can take my freedom, oh, yes, but you cannot take my dignity.”
• Distinctive syntax: He says of his family’s cabin, “My father bought it in the Spring of 1940 for $300. Cash.”
• He’s got odd kid logic: “When the hens began laying their eggs, I’d mark each one with a lightly penciled number to help keep track of its progress during the three weeks it took to hatch. The numbers were always odd. Never even. I had been told never to put an even number under a sitting hen. It was bad luck.”
• His dreams are represented by an object: “I always hoped to save enough money for an actual incubator, like the $18.95 model advertised in the Sears-Roebuck catalog. We called that our wish book.” 

 As far as getting us to Care, this book does the classic trick of beginning with the most brutal moment in Lewis’s life, getting beaten on the bridge in 1965, then we jump forward to the framing sequence where he’s a comfortable congressman on a happy day for the country, then we jump back further to his hardscrabble childhood, having established both the highs and lows he’s heading toward. We fully care at this point. Let’s look at other reasons we care:

• In the opening vignette on the bridge, he could not be more trapped, the bridge behind him is filled with marchers pushing him forward, and they discover a club-wielding mob waiting for them at the far side of the bridge. Williams nervously asks him, “Can you swim” He says “No.” Williams responds, “Well, neither can I, but we might have to.”
• He’s viciously beaten.
• In the past, he was very poor, going to substandard “separate but equal” schools using the broken down, discarded bus of the white kids, and their discarded old school books as well.
• He’s forced by his parents to eat chickens he loves.

Obviously, Lewis is easy to Invest in. He’s tremendously badass.

• When they realize militarized cops are waiting to beat them and he just says to Williams, “We should kneel and pray, Hosea.” This infuriates the cops who swarm and attack them.
• In the present, he certainly has decision making authority as a congressman (in a party that now controls all three branches of the government, starting on this day.)
• He’s a precociously smart and determined child. He can read the bible on his own at age five. On the days when his father tells him he must stay home from school to help on the farm, he hides until the bus comes by and then bolts for it just as it’s leaving, getting away to school before his father can stop him. “When I got home, my father would be furious. I was certain he would tan my hide. But he never did whip me—not over that.”
• He’s a uniquely sensitive child: “No one else could tell those chickens apart, and no one cared to. I knew every one of them by appearance and personality. There were individuals to me. Some I even named.”

In seminary, Lewis tells of coming across the story of MLK told in comic book format, and what a powerful tool that was. He published his memoirs in prose form (as “Walking With the Wind”, which is also well worth reading), but then he chose to reach out to another audience with this comics version, and the result is a stunning success.

Believe Care Invest, Comics Memoir Week: Fun Home

• Alison Bechdel tells us of her memories of her life before and after her father’s death by suicide in 1980. Her father spends all his time renovating their house, and also runs a funeral home (The central irony: They shorten “Funeral Home” to “Fun Home”)

Bechdel is a passive hero. Her central action in the story is getting a phone call telling her that her father has died. She will find out some of her dad’s secrets before his death, and some after, but she mostly learns them because her mom drops them unexpectedly, not because she’s actively pursuing the mystery. This book’s primary value is that it’s thoughtful. She has, in retrospect, given a lot of thought to her relationship with her dad and now she’s got 242 pages of fascinating insights. That’s not an easy sell, but the book turns out to be easy to love simply because it’s so well written (and drawn, but the art’s not the main focus).

She could have structured the book by building up to the shocking reveal of his death, or the shocking reveal that the seemingly-accidental death was probably suicide, or the shocking reveal that her father was pursuing affairs with adolescent boys, but all three of those facts are mentioned very early on. We sort of move outward in concentric circles from these central facts, adding a series of layers to the narrative.

So Bechdel had a lot of work to do with BCI. She had to get us to connect with a passive heroine on an inner quest that doesn’t build to any catharsis in real time. How did she do it?

There is no shortage of reasons to believe in this character and this world. Bechdel has the ideal material of every memoirist: She kept extensive diaries as a girl and still has them. That means she has hundreds of details ready at hand. The diaries themselves are fascinating: She became increasingly unsure of herself and started to add a qualifying “I think” in tiny letters after every sentence. Eventually she just creates a shorthand symbol to express this, and soon she’s just scrawling the symbol on top of every word.

Some other ways she gets us to believe:

• Characters usually reveal themselves in what they compliment in others, but her backhanded compliments towards her father show what she doesn’t value: “He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor.”
• In response to her unloving father’s obsession with interior design, she develops a motto: “When I grow up, my house is going to be all metal, like a submarine.”
• Sense memory always makes a character come alive. She remembers one of the few times she felt close to him: “My mother must have bathed me hundreds of times. But it’s my father rinsing me off with the purple metal cup that I remember most clearly. The suffusion of warmth as the hot water sluiced over me… …the sudden, unbearable cold of its absence.” Later, she has to remind herself, “He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials, smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne.”
• We see the books he’s reading and often they’re red flags to his secrets.
• Her grandmother has unique syntax: “Why he was all over mud, dears.”

Obviously, the main reason to jump ahead and reveal her father’s death early on is that it makes it easier to care about her right away. If she had waited to wallop us with it later, we might not have gotten as involved with the narrative. Other ways she gets us to care:

• Foreshadowing through the use of parallel characters: In a moment that is fairly typical of the book’s philosophical bent, she remembers her father lifting her up on his feet, and tell us that she now knows that it’s called “Icarian Games” in acrobatics. She then talks about how Icarus and Daedalus became parallel characters for her and her father. (And then this leads to a discussion of Joyce’s character Stephen Daedalus)
• Her father cares more about restoring the house than playing games with her.
• Her father calls a room he’s decorated “slightly perfect.” Nothing is ever good enough for him.
• Her father insists on pink and flowers for her room though she hates both. She hasn’t figured out yet that they’re both gay.
• Her father hits both her and her mother, and at one point she flees the house in fear of violence.
• “I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children and his children like furniture.”
• Everything is a risk, “If we couldn’t criticize my father, showing affection for him was an even dicier venture.”

We never fully Invest in Bechdel to solve the book’s mysteries. In the end, she gives it all a lot of thought, and reaches some fascinating conclusions, but she has no big breakthroughs or catharsis. It’s a gentle, melancholy book. Nevertheless, here are some reasons we invest:

• She’s defiant: “I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his Nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete.”
• Rides a bike: “I bicycled back to my apartment, marveling at the dissonance between this apparently carefree activity and my newly tragic circumstances.”
• She’s brave. She comes out to her parents as soon as she figures it out, though she has reason to suspect they won’t approve.
• She’s a classic book-taught amateur: She decides she’s gay totally hypothetically, comes out to her parents, then reads every book ever written on lesbianism (braving potentially-disapproving librarians), then launches into her first relationship fully informed.

Ultimately, Bechdel forges a universal story out of observations that are very specific to her odd circumstances. It’s the ultimate testament to this story’s fundamentals that it was able to be translated into a hit Broadway musical, despite having none of the elements one generally associates with musicals.

Believe Care Invest, Comics Memoir Week: El Deafo

Hey guys, we’ve been talking about comics on the new podcast, but we’ve never really done any story analysis on comics on this blog! So let’s go ahead and do Comics Memoir Week! Let’s start with one of the best, El Deafo.

• In the mid-70s, four year old Cece Bell gets meningitis and loses the ability to hear. She soon gets a powerful hearing aid and decides that she is now a superhero called “El Deafo”.

Why Cece might be hard to identify with: It’s a little hard to identify with a four year old, since most of us have lost all of our memories of that age. It’s pretty odd that it seems to take her days or maybe even weeks to figure out she’s gone deaf—I believe it, because this is obviously a very honest memoir, but it just makes me think, “how could a four year old not notice that? They’re so weird!”

So I think that this book may have the best one two punch of believe and care that I’ve seen. Here’s the first page:

 
So right away we’ve got six reasons to believe:

• First and foremost, she always wears the same two-piece swimsuit, every day, even when other people are dressed in normal clothes. Distinctive wardrobe choices really help us believe, and, to the extent that we remember being four, that’s so perfectively indicative of that age’s peculiarities.
• Then we have five individual memories: In the first, she draws on her mom’s vanity mirror with lipstick, which is believable enough.
• Then she watches Batman on TV with her siblings, which establishes the setting and her family situation.
• Then she rides with joy on the back of her dad’s bicycle. We love to watch people enjoy things fully.
• Then she finds caterpillars with her friend. Always good to give them friends and give them an activity to do with that friend that we haven’t seen a million times or more.
• And finally, song lyrics! We love song lyrics, and singing into a cardboard tube makes it tactile and unique.

So boom: We totally believe in this four year old hero in one page. Then what happens on page 2?

 

She almost dies! This specific song we all love is interrupted and she’s rushed to the hospital. Because we totally believed on the first page, we now totally care on the second page! (And superimposing the car on top of her mother’s words makes effective use of the medium.)

At the hospital, she’s taken from her parents and has a needle put in her back. We hear (but she doesn’t) the doctor tell her parents: “The fluid from her spine tells us she has Meningitis. Her brain might swell--” Her mom replies, “But she’s only four!” Cece wakes up in pain. She notices that the other girl in her room got ice cream and she didn’t (and only much later figures out she didn’t hear when they offered it to her.) When she tries to get up, she can’t stand or walk.

Of course, she’s only four and quickly becomes very helpless, so we don’t invest right away, but we finally get the chance to invest starting on page 22, when she gets a hearing-aid and starts to realize that this makes her kind of a kick-ass bionic woman. Then she goes to school and gets a super-hearing-aid. At first, she feels self-conscious about it, and enters a “bubble of loneliness”, but then she realizes that she can hear so much more than the other kids. She can hear her teacher going to the bathroom, and gossiping about the kids in the teacher’s lounge (“That Jimmy Malone is making my life HELL!”) She thinks, “I have amazing abilities unknown to anyone! Just like Bruce Wayne uses all that crazy technology to turn himself into Batman on TV”. Once she lets her secret be known, she becomes a hero to the other kids. She now sees herself as a superheroine called “El Deafo”. The bubble pops (though it will return intermittently as we move through several years of story.)

Strength / Flaw: Resilient / Self-conscious

Marvel Reread Club Episode 2: January 1962

Steve and Matt Bird · 002 Marvel Reread Club Jan 1962

Hi, everybody, we’re back! We appreciate your response to our first episode, and we humbly submit our second. This week we cover January 1962, which means Fantastic Four #2, the first appearance of the Skrulls, and Tales to Astonish #27, the first appearance of Ant-Man (though he’s not Ant-Man yet).

Please let us know what you think in the comments below!

Believe Care Invest: A is for Alibi

In the present, private investigator Kinsey Milhone is trying to process that she’s just shot and killed someone, then jumps back to three weeks earlier, when she was hired by a woman who had just gotten out of jail to find out who had really killed the woman’s husband. Kinsey goes to the cops for information, but they inform her that not only is the woman guilty, but they suspect she also killed another victim and never got caught.

Why Kinsey might be hard to identify with: She’s hard to identify for the same big reason that we…

Believe

• Her work is fairly mundane and her attitude toward it is rather bland, even this more-interesting-than-usual murder case. This is all just a job for her, no different from her other small jobs: “I had to go take some photographs of a crack in a sidewalk for an insurance claim” She’s not engaged, so we also find it hard to engage.
• Her terse, hardboiled voice gives her individuality. And she’s got some fun observations: Of the head cop: “He looks like he would smell of Thunderbird and hang out under bridges throwing up on his own shoes.”
• The case has lots of unique details, such as poisoning using oleander.
• What we compliment in others shows our values: She says of the cop: “his powers of concentration are profound and his memory clear and pitiless.”
• After the cops sends her to a side room to read about the case, she returns to his office: “I leaned on the doorframe, waiting. He took his sweet time ambling over.” Good capturing of how people communicate and express conflict just with body language. She sends a message by leaning, he sends one by ambling.

Care

• She’s had to kill someone in the flashforward, and that’s roiled up her placid exterior. “The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind… Killing someone feels odd to me and I haven’t quite sorted it through.”
• She has a hardscrabble background: “I’ve lived in trailers most of my life, but lately they’ve been getting too elaborate for my taste, so now I live in one room, a ‘bachelorette.’” She drives a dent-covered ’68 VW.

Invest

• She’s just killed someone, and the cops don’t seem to mind very much, so she’s badass.
• She can traverse different worlds, and she’s satisfyingly rebellious: “That’s why you didn’t like being a cop yourself, Kinsey. Working with a leash around your neck.”

Strength/Flaw: Professional / Dispassionate