YMB Presents... Rescued By Nerds: May 2008 Archives

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May 28, 2008

I Gots Me Some Enthusiasm

Larry Young, the Chief Visionary, Creative Engine, and Marketing Guru for AiT/Planet Lar has got himself some enthusiasm, and isn't exactly shy about sharing it.

This week Larry's talking patches.

So, I gots me some enthusiasm.

My family moved around a lot when I was a kid, and I started at a pretty young age getting into logos and design and insignia and patches. At first, it was because I'd just throw on a t-shirt with the mascot and colors of the new school I was attending so I'd visually fit in right away, but it quickly developed into some enthusiasm for collecting embroidered patches when I noticed that all the guys being shot up into space, there, in the late Sixties, all had different mission patches on their sleeves. Since we lived just up the road from Mission Control, back then, when you could look up in the sky and know that guys named John and Al and Gene and Neil and Pete and all were walking around on the actual green cheese, well, it sure seemed a fun way to be part of the trip by collecting all the different mission insignias.

I have quite a lot of them now, forty years later.

Anyway, when we started up our publishing house, I figured a neat little commemoration for folks on our side, people going above and beyond, guys helping us to tote that barge and lift that bale... might be our own little mission patch:

...sort of our version of a No-Prize. if you've got one of these, it's because I gave it to you.

But in looking up the history of these sorts of things, I uncovered a little-known section of the Pentagon called the Institute of Heraldry, responsible for all the logos and design and insignia and patches of the Army and other government sections that I had such enthusiasm for as a kid. And, sure, who hasn't seen sergeant rank patches on the sleeves of "Don't salute me, boy; I work fer a livin'!" actors in WWII movies? Who hasn't seen the Seal of the President of the United States on rugs and flags and press conference podiums? Podia? Whatever. We're not Latin scholars over here. So these things all come from the same place.

But there are patches and insignia that are disavowed, like Casey Randall in Mission: Impossible. In fact, according to Trevor Paglen, who has written a book for which I gots much enthusiasm called I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me, there are a whole suite of used-but-unapproved, or completely made-up, or party favor patches (according to Freedom of Information requests he's filed) that still appear on Secret and Black Ops uniforms. Here are a couple of my faves; if you see a guy in fatigues sporting one of these and he's got a light steam coming off him and he's asking you the date ("No... THE YEAR!"), maybe it'd be best to steer clear:

This one's a little on the controversial side. It's apparently a patch commissioned for the 509th Bomb Wing; the guys who dropped Fat Man and Little Boy that ended World War II. The other thing is... well, they were stationed in Roswell in 1947. Roswell, as you know, isn't just famous for being the birthplace of Demi Moore; there was that whole alien crash thing, too. Which explains the alien eating the B-2 and the dog Latin that roughly translates to "Tastes Like Chicken" at the bottom of the crest.

I haven't figured out what this one is yet, but I love it because it seems to speak to me about a secret moon mission, and anyone who's read my Astronauts in Trouble books know I love me my secret moon missions. "Don't Ask!" with a crescent moon and a question mark and "None of Your Fucking Business" across the bottom. Ah, this one's awesome.

I like this one because it's a secret patch for the support service guys who tend the secret missions. Even planes and craft that officially don't exist need to be topped off every once in a while, and this is a patch reminding the Black Ops flyboys that they can't do their jobs without the clandestine maintenance and refueling men. "Nobody Kicks Ass Without Tanker Gas... Nobody." Maverick and Goose don't get the girls and down the bad guys unless there's windshield wiper fluid in the reservoir.

Anyway; people are proud of what they do, and want to show the world who they're working for and what they're a part of...

...even if they... and their jobs... don't officially exist.

09:36 PM | Comments (2)

May 27, 2008

Weekly Picks

Another week, another batch of solid recommendations from the RBN staff.

Mike's Pick of the Week

Severance Package by Duane Swierczynski. Take Battle Royal cross it with Office Space and add in a little Die Hard with splash of Alias and you've got some idea what to expect in Swierczynski's fourth book. On an August Saturday morning the managers for a company are all called in for a mandatory meeting with their boss who informs them that they are in fact working for an intelligence agency front and they are all going to die. What follows is a gleefully violent game of cat and mouse with a jaw dropping ending. Swierczynski has gotten better with each book and he is in full stride with Severance Package.

Larry's Pick of the Week

Crater on the Moon

A ball's-out fumetti re-telling of Jason and the Argonauts as a 1950's sci-fi movie done by Seattle's premier publisher/creator/writer/actor/muscian/photoshp wiz, Keith Curtis. Keith does quadruple-duty as the photo double Jason Crater, who then recruited his pals and actual bandmates to play supporting roles, just as the original Argonauts were assembled. The lush attention to detail and the obvious love and enthusiasm that wafts off every page makes me enjoy the hell out of every package I get in the mail from the only guy I know with the stones enough to do his own take on the Argonautica by Apollonius Rhodius.

Ash's Pick of the Week

Crawlspace: XXXombies (Image): Rick Remender and Kieron Dwyer are like a match made in Heaven. Er, maybe not most people's concept of Heaven, but definitely my concept of "awesome comic book Heaven," and Crawlspace is their new venture. XXXombies is the story of a zombie breakout on a '70s porn set.

Ok, that sentence should pretty much be all you need to decide whether this book is for you or not.

I loved this book in singles, and at $13, it's the right price for my bookshelf. Not for the faint of heart, but totally for those with a vicious sense of humor.

Erin's Pick of the Week

Sleeping In: Oh, it is rad. There's nothing better than the feeling of rolling over and noticing that the first number on the clock has two digits in it. If you're really, really good, sometimes you can manage to sleep so long that the first number is back to one digit. For bonus points, try sleeping in while in a room with open windows and cats on your feet.

Rich's Pick of the Week
Final Crisis #1: If you're like me and you took the past year off from DC Comics because of the weekly Countdown series, then this week is when DC opens the bathroom door and tells us it's now safe to come inside and have a seat. Grant Morrison and J.G. Jones begin their highly anticipated epic crossover event that promises not only big changes in the DCU but it promises (at least in title) to be the last of these damn Crises.

Julian's Pick of the Week

Lost Lost season finale
"I don't even own a TV!" Yes, I'm that guy. Nevertheless, Lost is the one series that keeps me on the edge of my seat while I'm watching it and then on the edge of my seat again as I wait for the next episode. Every aspect of these show, from the casting to the main plot to the subplots and theories hits exactly the rigth chord with me and can't get enough of it. After two excellent and one mind-blowing season finales, I can't wait to see what they've got prepared for us this week. Hopefully it will be good enough to survive the 8-month wait until season 5 (the show's second to last) comes along

08:33 PM | Comments (0)

Duane Swierczynski interview

Take Battle Royal cross it with Office Space and add in a little Die Hard with splash of Alias and you've got some idea what to expect in Duane Swierczynski's Severance Package. The always entertaining Duane dropped by RBN for a quick chat about what went into writing his latest.

MC: How bad was your former job at the Philadelphia City Paper that you came up with the plot for Severance Package?

DS: It was a living hell, Mike. I can’t believe I made it out alive.

Actually, the people at City Paper are great. I wrote the book when I was still working at the paper, and I was worried that my employees would… you know, read into it. When in truth, there were only two or three people I wanted to kill.

MC: The book is really violent but it’s also really funny. How important do you think that balancing act needs to be?

DS: Ultra-important. To me, Evil Dead 2 is the perfect balance of both; it goes teetering wildly from demonic possession to a Three Stooges routine… is there anything more thrilling?

MC: One of the two main characters, Jamie DeBroux is largely oblivious to what is transpiring around him. Why did you go that route?

DS: Mostly because I tend to be oblivious to what’s transpiring around me. Especially in an office environment.

MC: Severance Package ties into your last novel The Blonde. Do all of your books take place in the same “universe”?

DS: Yep. You don’t know how tempted I’ve been to write the crime novel equivalent of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, where I tie in all of these separate stories into one novel. But I do like the idea that people who slog through all of my books will be able to see the little connections here and there. I’ve been planting seeds since The Wheelman—some of which may take root. Some of which may be gobbled up by crows.

MC: The plot of the book is like a nesting doll. First we get the boss who may or may not be a little nuts telling his staff that they are all secretly working for an intelligence agency and that they are all about to die. Then little by little you reveal just how deep all the connections are. How much fun was the plot for this one to figure out?

DS: I honestly figured it out as I was writing it. I had the basic set-up in my head, and a hazy idea of what might happen at the end (though that changed); the rest was kind of me winging it. Same thing happened with The Wheelman. The only book I’ve only kinda sorta plotted was The Blonde, and that was because I was afraid I’d screw it up.

MC: One of the things that I really enjoyed in Severance Package is that all of the action scenes feature women except for one near the end of the book. What was the reasoning there?

DS: That was me having fun with action movie clichés—it’s almost always the guys who take charge, kick ass, etc. I also wanted to do a reverse of The Wheelman, which is pretty much a sausage party.

MC: You’ve created a singularly badass character in Molly Lewis. Where did she come from?

DS: Partially from my wife, who is also a singularly badass character. Molly was also inspired by a lot of 1980s slasher flick heroines—the mousy types who are usually the only ones left standing at the end, nearly naked, bleeding, trying to swing a hatchet into a hockey mask.

MC: 9/11 is a running subtext in the novel. Why is that, and was their any concern on your part in using it?

DS: A lot of that is based on what was going through my head on 9/11. I happened to be on the 36th floor of a Philadelphia skyscraper that morning, and a lot of the shock and confusion and wild speculation you see in Severance Package came from that experience. I was trying to recreate what the world felt like at very moment.

(That said, some part of me really wants to write the full version of Center Strike, the novel referred to in Severance. Though that would probably be wrong, on so many levels.)

MC: Severance Package ends on a pretty startling note. Do you expect to continue that story at some point?

DS: I do have a sequel in mind, but I’m not sure how soon I’ll get to it. This is a familiar pattern with me: I finish a book. Two or three sequel ideas pop into my head. But then I move on to the next shiny little toy.

MC: Aside from your Marvel Comics work, what else is coming up from you?

DS: I’m finishing up my fifth novel now. I’m in that all-too-familiar zone where one day I think it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done, and the next, a total flaming disaster. Ah, the writing life!

10:05 AM | Comments (0)

May 22, 2008

I Gots Me Some Enthusiasm

Larry Young, the Chief Visionary, Creative Engine, and Marketing Guru for AiT/Planet Lar has got himself some enthusiasm, and isn't exactly shy about sharing it.

This weeks topic? The greatness that is TiVo.

So, I gots me some enthusiasm.

Imagine, if you will, a time in which you had to sit down in front of yout TV at, say, Friday night at 8:30, to watch, say, the Planet of the Apes TV show. If your parents were talking and you missed what the astronauts said as they were making quinine out of tree bark to save the malaria-stricken ape village, you had to hope that one of your friends had caught it and would tell you on the playground on Monday.

So it's almost hard for me to articulate how much better my life is for having my TiVo hooked up to the television without sounding like some sort of cult member. We've just celebrated our eighth anniversary together, my TiVo and me, and I wanted to send it a little love letter.

I didn't want to get the TiVo, but Mimi really did, and so I said, "OK, but this is like a puppy. You have to take care of it, because I don't want to deal with this thing AT ALL." I'm not exactly a technophobe; I can hook up the gizmos and rip-and-burn CDs, and that sort of thing… but the gadgets need to have the bugs worked out before I want to get behind 'em. I wouldn't be nearly as an early-adopter of the new gee-whizzes as I am if it weren't for Mimi.

As long as they keep making what Garth Ennis calls the "wee notebook" and something to write in them with, I won't be getting a Crackberry, for example.

But the missus really wanted the TiVo, so there you go.

So, she brings it home, and spends an afternoon setting it up. "Hah," I think, "it takes three hours to set up? What a piece of crap." Until she explains it's getting info downloaded from the TiVo mothership, or something, and that the two or three hours set up only has to be done once, and it's basically a computer, and that's how long it took to get the office computers back together after we moved, so I should just shut up.

So I put on some tea, smugly, thinking that she was wasting her time with this thing that, even if I had heard some glazed-eyed techies talking about it in worshipful tones, could not possibly be as cool as they said it was. So we read the documentation on their website, and I had to admit that the set-up interface was very approachable, and I found myself going from "get that away from me" to "cautiously optimistic" about it.

I have never missed an episode of DIRTY JOBS.

Oh, I love my TiVo. Love it love it love it. I actually spend less time watching TV, instead of more, because it's only stuff I want to watch, ready for me whenever I damn well feel like watching it. It is a little black box of heaven made just for me.

TiVo; oh, I love you.

12:38 PM | Comments (0)

Anatomy of a Panel: The Damned

In Anatomy of a Panel, Rich Barrett picks a great scene from a comic and dissects and analyzes it with the help of the people that created it. In this installment, Rich talks with writer Cullen Bunn and artist Brian Hurtt about a scene from The Damned: Prodigal Sons #2 which hits the stands this week.

The Damned: Prodigal Sons is a three issue mini-series published by Oni Press that picks up after the original, critically acclaimed The Damned series from two years ago. Set during the Prohibition era in which organized crime families cross paths with soul-trafficking demon families, the series' protagonist, Eddie, is gifted with the curse of never being able to stay dead. Once his dead body is touched, he returns to life and the person that did the touching takes his place. As we pick up the action in issue #2, Eddie has committed suicide in order to find his dead mother in Purgatory. Meanwhile, Eddie's dead body has been stolen and his brother, Morgan, has to jump on the back of a truck full of demons to get it back.

RB: This issue is almost one long extended action sequence. How do you guys work together on plotting out an action scene like this?

BRIAN HURTT: I think this scene just began with Cullen and I agreeing that we wanted a car chase of sorts. We’d briefly done a car bit in our 6-page prequel to the first series and we wanted to take something like that and just amp it up a bit. We wanted to also get the action moving a bit, change the scenery, as this is really one long extended action scene that began in the last several pages of the previous issue.

CULLEN BUNN: Sometimes, while Brian and I are brainstorming the stories, we’ll just hit on an idea that’s too good to pass up. Often, Brian’s sketching as we’re talking. He’s just drawing random images, but I keep an eye on his sketchbook because there are some great images springing out of his subconscious and onto the page. When we started talking about the car chase, he sketched a truck careening down the street. And so this scene was born!

I typically write out the action panel by panel, at least to give Brian a solid idea of how I see the scene playing out. That said, I'll often leave it open to some interpretation. I don't map out where every individual is standing unless it is essential to the scene. After it's scripted, Brian goes into thumbnails, and he'll sometimes bump panels around or split one panel into two if he feels it will convey the action a little better.

BH: Like Cullen said, he’s already blocked the action out fairly well for me in the script. He’s got a good sense of pacing and visual storytelling so his action scenes are generally work out really well when it comes to translating it to the page. There isn’t a lot in this sequence we’re looking at that I tweaked. I added panel 2 to page 16 just to pull away from the action a bit and give a sense o the surroundings. I also added the second to last panel on page 13 of the knife flying through the air because I was a little afraid in the thumbnail stage that the flying knife in the previous panel would be lost in the chaos. It also played well into the pacing—the page builds up the action! There’s a flying knife! And THUNK! Cut scene…

RB: Brian, is it difficult making the rhythm and speed of an "action-movie" scene work in a comic or is it something that comes naturally for you? What kind of things do you need to think about, plan out, or watch out for when trying to keep the rhythm of this scene moving?

BH: I wouldn’t say difficult, I’d say challenging. I love doing this sort of stuff. If time and page count weren’t an issue we could’ve made this chase scene twice as long and twice as big. I’m not saying that would have served the story but it would’ve been fun to draw.

As I’ve said before, Cullen has a knack for the pacing so that makes my job a lot easier. I still have to do what I can to make the individual panels work—to keep them dynamic. I have to create movement in the panel, make sure that the action flows, that it’s clear and that I don’t lose track of all the characters in the space and their relation to one another. I call that kind of work “storytelling math”. When I’m laying out action scenes with multiple characters I end up assigning each character a number and my thumbnails end up looking like an NFL playbook.

My only hope is that the reader, in the end, feels the adrenaline and the energy of the scene. I can’t control how a reader views the page, how long they linger on a panel, but I can try to keep the eye moving and the action going.

RB: The Damned is set during the Prohibition and draws on many cinematic influences to capture the feel of that era. The first series contained allusions to early gangster films as well as more contemporary gangster pieces like Miller's Crossing. This issue seems to contain a very fun homage to the period-appropriate Raiders of the Lost Ark. Do you guys talk movies a lot when creating this book? How did the decision to pull elements from Indiana Jones come about here?

CB: Brian and I have talk a lot about movies whether we're working on a project together or not. What's interesting is that while we share many favorites, we also have some vast differences of opinion in what makes a good flick. The good news is, we manage to discuss these differences without killing each other. However, we didn’t really plan on this as a tribute to a specific film. We just wanted to write a rollicking action yarn. Still, the mood of this issue really owes a lot to the Raiders of the Lost Ark … or, more specifically, to the soundtrack. While I was scripting this issue, the score for the movie was playing in my head. In particular, the music from the basket chase scene was a big inspiration for the balance of action and humor I was trying to get across.

BH: I don’t believe that it was ever discussed that we would do this scene as an homage to Raiders. That said, though, it is a two-fisted action scene that takes place on a moving truck. It’s hard to avoid the comparison. The goal for this series was to continue with the same world and characters that we established in Vol. 1 but instead of doing a crime noir type detective story we wanted to go with a more pulp action, Saturday matinee vibe. It’s only fitting that we would, consciously or subconsciously, draw on Raiders or to draw on the same types of serials that Raiders was drawing on.

RB: Brian, since you also letter the book you have the advantage of being in total control of sound effects and designing them right into the page. Is this an element of the process that you enjoy because you seem to have a lot of fun with it in this scene?

BH: On the previous DAMNED series I was doing all the sound effects after the art was complete. I would do them on a separated sheet, scan them, and then composite them with the art in Photoshop. But, partway through issue one of this series I started to draw the SFX onto the page. I would incorporate them into the art as I drew it. I can’t describe the shift that happened in my mind when I started doing that. Something about drawing in the SFX has invigorated the art around it and made it much more fun and exciting to do these sort of bombastic pages.

I’ve had a lot of my friends and peers look at my recent work and tell me that they can see the difference in my work. They say it looks like I’m having a lot of fun. And they’re right! I love to hear that because that means that something is coming through in the drawings that I want to come through in them.

RB: On this page we get a dramatic double page splash that quickly cuts into the action to show Eddie's "spirit" wandering this otherworldly "Purgatory" with The Harvester. This quick cut transition is something you use to great effect throughout the series. There is an element of surprise to each scene change. Why do you decide to cut the action at this particular point and in this way?

CB: I wanted to make sure both Eddie and Morgan's stories were progressing at the same time, and I believe breaking the action from time to time gives the reader a chance to catch his or her breath before jumping back to the action. However, if I'm being completely honest, the pacing of this scene ... the cut away to Purgatory ... was all done in order to pull off the joke on the first panel of page 16. Eddie's exploring the underworld, and he's commenting on how he can take comfort in the fact that his earthly remains are safe and sound ... but little does he know his body looks like it was folded, spindled, and mutilated.

I love the way Brian drew the meat cleaver sticking in Eddie’s skull, by the way.

RB: How specific do you get when world building in this setting? Do you map out Eddie and Harve's journey through this place or is the nature of the setting loose enough that you can just let your imagination go wild?

CB: Purgatory is definitely a shifting setting, and we've mapped it out only in broad strokes. In the beginning, it was just a place of mist and spindly trees, which is strange and creepy, but can get a little dull after a while. We'd already revealed that the demons used this realm as a hiding place before they crawled into deeper realms. It just seemed natural that a city existed here at some point. In addition, the exploration of the realm in this series really helps to set up what Brian and I have planned for the overarching storyline.

BH: I’d been waiting to draw this spread since the end of Vol. 1. Cullen and I knew we were coming back and we knew that we needed to make this world more real for both Eddie and the reader. This image is pretty in line with the image that popped into my head when we first discussed the idea of the ancient city. Our “Purgatory” is a place that is bigger and more important than it at first appeared and that’s everything this two-page spread is telling you. This scene also reinforces the fact that this place has a history, as briefly touched upon in Vol. 1.

RB: Brian, how did you decide on the fuzzy panel borders that you use whenever we are in this setting?

BH: When we first introduced this place we wanted to get across that this place exists outside Eddie’s normal experience. It’s not a dream, but it’s not the real world either. I’ve always thought of this place as a ghost world. Leafless trees, ruins, fog. Populated by cloaked ghost like figures (not pictured here) so it was only a natural extension of the world and Eddie’s relationship with it that established the ghost like borders. It sometimes appears as if these images themselves are coming to us through the fog.

RB: Back to the action, we come to possibly my favorite scene in the entire series so far - Morgan smashing his brother's head through the windshield. This issue is really our introduction to Morgan. How have you used this scene to show us what Morgan's character is all about?

CB: The key here is that Eddie has been a real schmuck to Morgan for many years. The brothers have a lot of bad blood between them, but it's familial blood. Eddie's not a nice guy, and he's used his brother's dedication to family to his advantage again and again. There's pretty much nothing Morgan wouldn't do to protect his family. But just because he'll do anything to save his brother, that doesn't mean Morgan likes it. Luckily for him, he has a perfect way of venting his frustration. Eddie's dead, and nothing that happens to his body really matters. Morgan knows his brother will come back to life at some point, so bashing him up a little in the name of a rescue doesn't matter too much. Consider the beatings Eddie's corpse takes to be therapeutic for Morgan.

BH: This panel was a blast to draw—all that glass and sound effects flying around the cabin! I was looking forward to drawing this page quite a bit—I thought it was fantastic in the script. That’s one of the things I love about working with Cullen. We talk through what the broad strokes of each series and issue will be but he still writes scripts that are entertaining, exciting and surprising for me to read.

RB: Cullen, the theme of Prodigal Sons is definitely family focused. Can you talk about how you've even infused that theme into this action scene?

CB: The idea of family drives everything in the scene. Morgan's really throwing himself into the frying pan, and he's taking one hell of a beating. That's not something he would do for just anyone. But for family, he'll take great risk. What's more, he knows that Eddie killed himself and put himself in harm's way in order to rescue their mother. Morgan doesn't necessarily believe his brother can succeed, but he's willing to risk pretty much anything for even the slightest chance that Eddie might be right. The brothers have some deep, unresolved issues with their mother (just what those issues might be, we haven't revealed completely) and they'll both go to extremes for closure. Eddie kills himself. Morgan leaps onto the back of a speeding truck filled with demons.

************************************************************************************************

I want to thank Cullen and Brian for taking the time to do this interview and to Oni Press for making it possible.

The second issue of The Damned: Prodigal Sons comes out this week. The original series is also available as a trade paperback in most comic book stores. Find out more about this series at www.thedamnedcomic.com

01:04 AM | Comments (0)

May 21, 2008

Weekly Picks

Another week, another batch of solid recommendations from the RBN staff.

Mike's Picks of the Week:

Dean Koontz's Odd Hours - Koontz continues his series featuring the charming Odd Thomas who can see the dead and sometimes is called upon to help them find their way home. The Odd Thomas books have gotten better as they go along so it's no reach to assume this one will be worth the price of admission.

Larry's Pick of the Week:

Cargo Pants - OK, it may seem like an arch or ironic fashion choice if you live in an urban environment, never more than three blocks away from the life-saving supply depot that is your average Starbuck's, but take it from a new dad: venturing out into the world with an eleven-month old is a logistical undertaking on the level of a well-planned military strike. Gone are the days of just hopping in the car and going down to the local bodega to grab some Vitamin water for a stroll down to the zoo; nope, now you need a change-of-diaper kit with moist towelettes, a fresh set of clothes, various unguents and creams, food and water and formula and toys; maybe a new shirt for Daddy, too, if you're going to be out long. Add in sunglasses and baseball caps and contact lens solution and kleenex and band-aids and wallet and car keys and cell phone and unless you want to be one of those guys carrying a purse, it's time to spring for a coupla pair of pants with nine pockets instead of four.

Ash's Picks of the Week:

Comic Relief - I haven't been to Comic Relief in a couple of years, as I never get across the Bay to Berkeley anymore, but I was shocked to hear of of Rory Root's passing Monday. There are plenty of people who have more to say on the subject - personally, I feel like I need to head over to BART sometime this weekend and shell out a buck or two in honor of one of comics' strongest advocates.

Erin's Pick of the Week:

Giant Bicycles, Suede w model So all of my friends are tired of hearing about this but, honestly, I'm just going to have to keep talking for just a smiiiiiiidge longer - I have a new bike. There comes a point in every sweet suburban lady's life when she has to own a Real Bike. My cousin defines this as a bike purchased at an official bike shop that costs over four hundred dollars. I used to scoff at this, wondering why anyone in their right mind would spend that kind of cheese on a bike when your local big box store has some sweet rides for under a hundred bucks. If you were looking to splurge, there's some for $150. Well, I strolled into my local bike store to look at someone's left-behind mountain bike and came out a believer. This bike is amazing. It's a sky blue cruiser-style with flat pedals and has big ol' gel seat for my big ol' butt and a super-light frame. This bike looks and feels like the one you had when you were eight, kind of like a seven-speed leg-powered chopper and is an easy, upright ride for those of us who are not digging the near-horizontal feel of most of today's modern bicycles.

Go on, it's summer, find your helmet. Do some lazy figure-8s through the neighborhood, watching the sun dappling across freshly mown lawns and waving to your neighbors. You'll find it's an afternoon well-spent.

Rich's Picks of the Week:

The Damned: Prodigal Sons #2 - I was able to read a preview of this issue and wow is it fun. Whereas, the original series went for an old James Cagney gangster flick vibe this new series seems to be going for 1930s pulp adventure.

Hulk Visionaries: John Byrne TP Vol. 01- I loved John Byrne's run on The Hulk when I was a kid. It was pretty short compared to his more lengthy and more famous runs on The Fantastic Four and Superman but it was just as character redefining and fun to look at. It's got everything you want in a Hulk comic - Doc Samson, the Hulkbusters, Betty Ross, the Avengers, New Mexico deserts, lots of debris.

One thing it has that you don't want though is the Hulk wearing tight purple briefs.

Julian's Pick of the Week:

Toronto Hispano American Film Festival - One of the other film festivals in Toronto. With the big, flashy, star-studded Toronto International Film Festival being the one everyone's heard about at one point or another, the smaller film events tend to get lost in the shuffle. This is just one of many excellent, alternative and inexpensive film events in the city throughout the year. With films from countries like Mexico, Cuba, Peru, Argentina and Spain, among others, for the affordable price of $10-12 and at Toronto's Bloor Cinema (one of the few remaining theatres that has a personality of its own) this is an excellent option to see movies with a soul instead of special effects.

04:05 PM | Comments (0)

May 20, 2008

Steven Hall Interview

Raw Shark Texts author Steven Hall drops by RBN to talk about his stellar debut novel, the writing process and what comes next.

MC:Your first novel "The Raw Shark Texts" have been widely acclaimed. As a first time writer what has this ride been like for you?

SH:It’s been so far beyond anything I hoped for or expected. The response has been phenomenal, it really has. A year after UK and US publication I’m in quite a strange place, I’m still thinking ‘did this really happen?’

MC:What kind of work had you done before dedicating yourself to getting a book out there?

SH:The book took about five years to write, more like six if you add the editing process into that. Before The Raw Shark texts I was trying to write a different book, so for ten or eleven years I’ve been trying to become a published author and everything else has really been secondary to that. I worked as a photographer’s assistant, data entry clerk and even a private detective (briefly!) to fund the writing

MC:The Raw Shark Texts is kind of difficult to describe in bullet points. I've seen it compared to films like The Matrix and the writings of Murakami and Neil Gaiman. For people not familiar with the book how would you describe it?

SH:You’re right, it’s very hard to describe. The idea was that the book would seem to evolve itself to reflect each reader’s interests and expectations (hence the ink blot word play of the title). I’ve joked that The Raw Shark Texts as a postmodern slipstream romantic psychological sci-fi metaphysical action puzzle thriller horror mash-up before now, maybe that’s as close as I can get!

MC:For me the book is a wild mix of a heartbreaking romance, a metaphysical adventure and flat out horror. Were you worried about trying to fit so many different genres into your first novel?

SH:No, not worried really, the challenge was a big part of what drove me on with the book. How many things can the same book be without collapsing in on itself? Was it possible to write a single book that a horror fan would see as horror, a romance fan see as romance, a puzzle fan see as something to be solved? Was it possible to also look at what a book is and what the jobs or the reader and writer are and how can they be stretched and challenged? You’re right, looking back I should have been terrified, but I was mainly excited to be treading what I thought was such interesting ground, I think.

MC:The story's hero is Eric Sanderson, a young man with no memory of who he is. Eric begins receiving notes and packages from himself that get progressively odder until they start to prove to be invaluable. Why did you decide to make the second Eric Sanderson a blank slate?

SH:I’ve been asked so many times – ‘why on earth start with a guy who doesn’t know who he is? Hasn’t amnesia been done to death?’ And I’d generally reply with something wonderfully articulate like ‘Oh. Has it?’ because it genuinely didn’t occur to me!

I wanted to put the reader in Eric’s shoes from the very first line and it seemed like an interesting way to do it. When we pick up a book and start reading we have no idea who the characters are, who we can trust and who we can’t, it seemed interesting to put the narrator himself in the same position.

MC:Talk a bit if you can about the conceptual world that Eric Sanderson can tap into...

SH:I’d like to quote you a little bit instead, if I can. This is a document written by the First Eric Sanderson, it’s the first time the Second Eric (our narrator) comes into contact with the idea of the conceptual world:

Imagine you’re in a rowing boat on a lake.
It’s summer, early morning. That time when the sun hasn’t quite broken free of the landscape and long, projected shadows tiger-stripe the light. The raystripes are warm on your skin as you drift through them, but in the shadowstripes the air is still cold, greyness holding onto undersides and edges wherever it can.
A low clinging breeze comes and goes, raising ripple patches across the water and gently rocking you and your boat as you float in yin-yang slices of morning. Birds are singing. It’s a sharp, clear sound, clean without the humming backing track of a day well underway. There’s the occasional sound of wind in leaves and the occasional slap-splash of a larger wavelet breaking on the side of your boat, but nothing else.
You reach over the side and feel the shock of the water, the steady bob of the lake’s movement playing up and down your knuckles in a rhythm of cold. You pull your arm back; you enjoy the after-ache in your fingers. Holding out your hand, you close your eyes and feel the tiny mathematics of gravity and resistance as the liquid finds routes across your skin, builds itself into droplets of the required weight, then falls, each drop ending with an audible tap.
Now, right on that tap - stop. Stop imagining. Here’s the real game. Here’s what’s obvious and wonderful and terrible all at the same time: the lake in my head, the lake I was imagining, has just become the lake in your head. It doesn’t matter if you never know me, or never know anything about me. I could be dead, I could have been dead a hundred years before you were even born and still - think about this carefully, think past the obvious sense of it to the huge and amazing miracle hiding inside – the lake in my head has become the lake in your head.
Behind or inside or through the two hundred and twenty-one words that made up my description, behind or inside or through those one thousand and twelve letters, there is some kind of flow. A purely conceptual stream with no mass or weight or matter and no ties to gravity or time, a stream that can only be seen if you choose to look at it from the precise angle we are looking from now, but there nevertheless, a stream flowing directly from my imaginary lake into yours.
Next, try to visualize all the streams of human interaction, of communication. All those linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries, streams through shared memories, casual relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures, cause and effect. Try to see this immense latticework of lakes and flowing streams, see the size and awesome complexity of it. This huge rich environment. This waterway paradise of all information and identities and societies and selves.
Now, go back to your lake, back to your gently bobbing boat. But this time, know the lake; know the place for what it is and when you’re ready, take a look over the boat’s side. The water is clear and deep. Broken sunlight cuts blue wedges down, down into the clean cold depths. Sit quietly, wait and watch. Don’t move. Be very, very still. They say life is tenacious. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places. Life will always find a way, they say. Be very quiet. Keep looking into the water. Keep looking and keep watching.

MC:You've created one of the more memorable menaces in recent memory in the Ludovician, a conceptual shark. How did you come up with the Ludovician and the other conceptual fish?

SH:I got interested in the way we seem to incorporate water terminology when we talk about language, thought and the mind – stream of consciousness, flow of conversation, the depths of the unconscious. When a person is making some concept more complex than it needs to be we can say they’re muddying the issue, or muddying the water. The water references are always there. I started to wonder – what kind of animals would live in these non-physical streams and flows? What would they be like, how would they interact with each other and with us? The Ludovician shark evolved from there.

MC:Once Eric first encounters the conceptual shark he begins a quest for answers. Along the way he meets Scout who may or may not be someone else. Can you talk a bit about her character?

SH:Scout seems to mirror Clio (Eric’s girlfriend, who apparently died some five years earlier) in ways that the Second Eric mirrors the first. In fact, and I hope I’m not giving too much away here, you’ll find a lot of mirroring in the novel - everything from the blindingly obvious to the very obscure. One reader has written a wonderful essay about the nature of the mirroring in The Raw Shark Texts over on the book’s forums (www.rawsharktexts.com/unspace) although lots of spoilers are lurking on those pages too, so do be careful if you’re not a spoiler fan.

There’s not too much else I can say about Scout without unbalancing the book and taking some of the control I hoped to give to readers away again. In an nutshell she’s a pale, pretty smart-ass who spends most of her time underneath buildings.

MC:As is having your hero being chased by a conceptual shark intent on devouring him isn't enough the plot continues to evolve to include other inventive concepts like Unspace and Mycroft Ward. Can you talk a bit more about them?

SH:More mirroring! Mycroft Ward was a Victorian gentleman who perfected a way of replicating his personality in others, but something went very wrong and his personally corrupted with each transfer and now he’s a sort of living identity virus. He never appears personally in the story, Eric never meets him. A couple of reviews thought it was on oversight, that I’d forgotten to include him (!) but it was always very important that we didn’t ever see him personally, some enemies are like that after all.

Unspace is all the nameless places, those areas that are never really used or seen and somehow are not quite one thing or another – the service corridors in shopping complexes or the basements of abandoned factories, for example. You could look at unspace as the unconscious too if you choose too, if you approach it from that direction then there are a few Easter Eggs waiting for you in the story…

MC:Despite all of the wild conceptual ideas in the book I found it to be a powerful love story. How important was it to you to make Eric's love for Clio the central part of the story?

SH:Eric's love for Clio and the loss he feels and suffers when she’s gone is the very heart of the story. We talked above about all the different genres the book shifts in and out of, but at the core The Raw Shark Texts is about love and loss. It’s about a boy who loses a girl and (depending on how you choose to read) never recovers from that or shifts Heaven, Earth and the nature of reality to get her back. Or maybe both.

MC:From the beginning the story unfolds in such a way that I think you could argue that it may only be happening in Eric's mind or that it might actually be real. As the author do you want people to come in on one side or the other?

SH:I want the reader to make those decisions. I tried to set up Raw Shark is such a way as to give the reader as much power and control as possible. I wrote the book with three different readings in mind, all of which function well within the story. The idea was that each reader would find themselves reflected in the story they found themselves reading. Whether you see the ending as happy or sad, for example, hopefully says as much about you as a reader as it does about me as the writer.

The most exiting thing is that it didn’t stop there. In the last year I’ve heard maybe another ten wonderful new readings of the story which have come from readers, some of them amazingly inventive and they all stand up to scrutiny. I’m very happy for each reader to read the book in their own way.

MC:You use text in inventive ways in The Raw Shark Texts. How did you decide what you wanted to try? And how hard of a process was it to figure out what might work in that kind of format?

SH:Something that the book plays with on several levels is the difference between imagining and seeing and I always wanted the Ludovician to be something of a hybrid between the two. Getting the images right was tricky, or rather getting the tone of the images right was. The early sharks I created looked far too graphic-y, too much like illustrations. I wanted the arranged text pictures to feel more closely related to the standard text, almost as if the format were morphing to let the shark though. After some experimentation, I decided that all the images should be made in Word rather than with a drawing or graphics package. I’m happy with the results but the whole thing took a long time, especially the flip-book!

MC:There has been some fairly inventive marketing for the book, from things like your myspace page to the clips found on Youtube featuring Tilda Swinton reading a passage from the book to handycam footage of the Orpheus. How did that come about?

SH:Well, my MySpace page is just my MySpace page! People keep calling it innovative marketing and I think my publishers may have even won a marketing award for it (!) but it’s just my own MySpace page where people can find info on the book, my work and my thoughts. I’m certainly not the first writer to have one! I felt it might be interesting and useful for other upcoming writers to see the process of a book coming through to publication, me dealing with reviews of various kinds and all the other madness that happened, so I blogged about all that stuff. Hopefully it has been useful or interesting to someone!

I wrote a proposal to my publishers suggesting an alternate reality game to promote the book because I thought it was different and interesting and it also kinda suited the nature of the novel. I was surprised and delighted when my publishers went for the idea. We had a few meetings with a very cool ad company who built the game itself (it starts at www.lostenvelope.com). Then my publishers won a marketing award for it (!!). Heh, I don’t mind really, the most important thing was that it created a sort of snowball effect with other international publishers putting up their own ARGs and other interesting Raw Shark content (including the Orpheus myself and the good folks at HarperCollins Canada built for the Canadian launch). I love all that stuff, the incompleteness, the digging, the active readership – it’s all a big part of what Raw Shark is meant to be. I’ve even put sections of the novel online which don’t appear in the printed book and different international editions have different content (the narrator of my next book even cameos in the Greek translation of Raw Shark). It’s a conceptual rabbit hole!

MC:You have also continued telling the story through hiding various missing letters from the first Eric Sanderson and expanding upon fragments, particularly The Aquarium Fragment, across different editions of the book. What's the response been to this? And how much more is still out there for people to find?

SH:The additional fragments are still in production, the idea was for them to keep appearing over time, maybe even over the next ten years or so. Of course, Raw Shark may be very obscure by then but there’s something interesting and exciting (and something very Raw Shark!) about writing additional content for an obscure book! Hopefully though, the fragments will help keep the book fresh and stop even the most serious diggers from ever hitting the bottom. There’s a lot still for people to find, and there’s more to come.

MC:The Raw Shark Texts is currently in preproduction to become a movie. What if anything can you say about that?

SH:Not too much at the moment, I’m afraid. I’m hoping to see the script very soon and I’m very pleased it’s in the hands of FilmFour and Blueprint, but other than that I’ll have to go for the mysterious/slightly annoying ‘no comment’. Sorry!

MC:Rumor has it that you are currently hard at work on your second novel. What can you say about that? When can fans expect to see your next work?

SH:The next novel is due to land in 2010, although there might be something else before that if I can get it up to speed in time. From the beginning I’ve had the idea of an over-arching five book project of which Raw Shark Texts is book one. That’s not to say they’re a series or anything, there isn’t going to be a Raw Shark II or Raw Shark The Revenge but there’s a theme of sorts. It’s pretty exciting to be moving forward with the Bigger Picture…

09:21 PM | Comments (0)

May 15, 2008

I Gots Me Some Enthusiasm

Larry Young, the Chief Visionary, Creative Engine, and Marketing Guru for AiT/Planet Lar has got himself some enthusiasm, and isn't exactly shy about sharing it.

So, I gots me some enthusiasm.

In this case, it's probably bordering more on "an obsession" or "a fetish," though, at this point. See, I love helmets. Football helmets, motorcycle helmets, SWAT gear helmets. Chinese jet fighter helmets, French firefighter helmets, spacesuit helmets. Not to mention all the comic book-inspired helmets I love for their cool design, like Doctor Fate's lid, or The Rocketeer's Art Deco crash bucket.

But after a while, you get the enthusiasm to make up one of your own, and that's what my pal John Hays does:

http://aeprops.com/alteregos/Gallery.html

A wizard with the clay sculpt, and an artist pulling soft plastic around a vacuform machine, John sure can create an excellent prop or piece of costuming. I scored one of his Golden Age Flash helmets, and with a trim of the plastic and a few coats of paint straight from the rattle-can, I had another museum piece for my helmet collection:

Straight out of the box.

A little trimming of the extra bits, and some light filing and sanding.

A quick coat of white primer on everything.

Gold for the wings...

...and silver for the lid...

...and it's ready to display...

...until it's time for a little crime-fighting.

10:07 PM | Comments (3)

May 14, 2008

Weekly Picks

Here's what to look for this week. Recommended by the RBN staff.

Mike's Picks of the Week:

David Gunn's Death's Head series - Book one came out last year while the sequel hits stands two weeks ago. Take a part cyborg, seven foot tall post human soldier with a wisecracking sidekick that happens to be his gun and a knife that he stores inside himself and you've got the makings of a fun character. Add in hard military sci fi set in a distant future where Earth is only a legend and massive powers are waging devastating wars across the galaxies and you've got a really interesting series.

David Gunn is another UK sci fi import who has a distinctive voice and style well worth reading for anyone who likes authors like Neal Asher or Richard Morgan.

Larry's Pick of the Week:

Clamato I have always loved the Clamato juice. Maybe it's growing up in New England, where tomatoes and clams coexist peacefully on the summer picnic table, making me nostaglic for the taste-combo; maybe it's the high sodium content, or the generous helping of MSG. Maybe it's the magical healing properties of the stuff... so much so that they put the recipe for the world's best hangover cure right on the label to save you the trouble. I mean, seriously; next time you're in the grocery store, go look at the back of the label: "Rim your favorite glass with salt. Then over ice, combine the juice of one lemon, a dash of hot sauce, worcestershire and 8 oz. of Clamato. Add a stick of celery for garnish. For an extra twist, add a shot of vodka." I mean really. When was the last time you saw a Coke label? It doesn't say "Take an old Prego jar, fill with ice. Add twelve ounces of Jack Daniels and top off with Coca-Cola" I can tell you.

That drink recipe on the label is a generic version of the Bloody Caesar, which is the national drink of Canada. Although Clamato has just 6 percent of the "red juice" category, it has a 27 percent share among Hispanic consumers in the U.S., and that's grown nearly 20 percent in the last four years. The website is in Spanish. It doesn't even have an English version. And yet, it's in nearly every single big-brand grocery store in America. Clamato is an undiscovered gem, and possibly beverage's best-kept secret. In America.

Ash's Picks of the Week:

House of Coffee I'm sick. Been feverish and flu-like since Friday, and have been largely miserable from it. If Erin wasn't busy mainlining the stuff, she'd realize that something like "Nyquil" or "Theraflu" is too easy of a joke to make for a sick blogger. Instead, this week's pick of the week is the silver lining to any of my stay-at-home clouds, San Francisco's House of Coffee. One quick stroll from the apartment and my morning gets to start with fresh-roasted coffee, a breakfast sandwich, and service with a smile for $5. Henry Kalebjian is a Master Roaster, and getting to watch beans being hand-roasted RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU is a coffee aficionado's dream. Sure, I'd rather not be coughing up a storm, and it'd be nice to feel like a normal human again, but it's nice to know that there is an upside to being stuck around the apartment!

Erin's Pick of the Week:

Nyquil Oh, magical green juice, you've been drugging my illnesses into submission for so many years now. Asthma attacks, the common cold, that nasty incident with the flu...we've seen it all and survived. Your green nastiness is a sign of possible hallucinations and sleep to come. Long live NyQuil!

P.S. And don't worry, baby, I think the red stuff is for sissies. You and me all the way, green death flavored NyQuil!

Rich's Picks of the Week:

Batman #676 - Grant Morrison begins the "Batman R.I.P." storyline that was teased in DC Universe #0. From what I hear, the Batman character is going to get killed off and DC will cease publishing both of the long-running comics Batman and Detective Comics.*

*I may have received bad information on this one but we'll just have to see how it plays out.

Transhuman #2- The second issue of Jonathan Hickman's "mock-umentary" about genetic engineering is noteworthy because my friend Eraklis Petmezas provides the backup story, "Mr. Lune".

Julian's Pick of the Week:

Charlie the Unicorn (and its sequel) - Internet videos and animations come and go, but once in a while one that stands out above the rest comes along and Charlie is that video for me. Go to youtube and search for it if you haven't seen it yet. It's a mixture of bizarre and absurdity that made me laugh much more than anything else in a long time. Also, I have officially declared it The Best Video on the Internet. So, there.

12:55 PM | Comments (0)

An Actual Girl, or I Hate Capes

Erin Jameson debuts her new column on girls and comics culture.

Hi. I'm Erin-with-an-e and I'm here to talk to you about what it's like walking into your friendly local comic book store in a skirt. Not that, you know, I shop every month in a skirt. Sometimes I slink in camouflaged, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and looking at my shoes. Either way, you know when you're trying to look at the new issues and there's a girl with a handful of singles looking at a thick manga with a starry-eyed girl on the cover and tapping her lip thoughtfully and you keep bumping into her and she doesn't make eye contact during the apologies? Well, that's me.

Don't take the lack of eye contact personally. I'd love to talk, it's just that there are more important things to think about. Like if I should commit to the newest Tokyo Pop book and wondering which seven books Warren Ellis has out this month.

And therein lies the contradiction in being a comics girl. What kind are you? Are you the kind that does cosplay and reads everything that Tokyo Beat and CMX puts out? Are you the kind that reads capes exclusively? Do you read sensitive indie comics-as-lit and handmade mini-books? Did you decide, drawing that line in the sand that says you specialize?

I totally used to buy into this grand myth that I couldn't buy certain things because they were "girlie" and I wanted to hang with the boys. Oddly enough, this was perpetuated by one of the assistant managers at my local store for years before I caught on. This was the same man who piled my stack high with Liberty Meadows and Transmetropolitan and robot manga, which he definitely qualified as "not usually [his] thing" while sliding it into my pull box. I often wondered how much money they could've been making had I just had the guts to boldly flip through those tempting ice cream colored paperbacks back then.

At the time, though, I smirked at Liberty Meadows' sheer gall and flipped through the robot manga, bored, bored, bored. I have to confess, if I'm bored, I usually have someone else to blame as I don't typically pick out my own comics. Sure, I'll skim the racks but I depend mostly on recommendations. But, I digress. During this round, I found Transmet fascinating, all filth and politics and even the vaguest hint of the strangest love story ever so he continued to be a major factor in what I was reading for years and still is, to this day, having led me through the racks to Mr. Ellis' door.

Then several things happened - I moved, the store moved and, somehow, this staff member and I parted ways. And I slowly, slowly started exploring my options. There was so much I hadn't read just because it didn't seem cool. I started skimming the manga racks at my store and even had the courage to drag along a team of fellow message board denizens through the racks in Chicago to help me spot any stray booths. I discovered that, even though I took some flak the one time I ran into my former friend, it was totally okay to add both Doktor Sleepless and Faker and High School Debut in the same month without worrying about being labeled a big ol' girl.

Mostly because, umm, I am a girl. In fact, I'm going to go so far as to say that it's even okay for big tough X-Men fans to read those pastel slices of escapism, too. Seriously. Sometimes they feature boys who play sports, if you need a cover story for the first few books. And if anyone gives you any static about it, smile sweetly and wonder if it's tough being that cool.

11:25 AM | Comments (0)

May 13, 2008

Jeff Somers Interview

Jeff Somers,author of The Electric Church and The Digital Plague, stops by RBN to talk about writing
his first sequel.

Mike Collins:The Digital Plague picks up several years after the conclusion of The Electric Church. What's happened to Avery Cates in that six or seven years?

Jeff Somers: Oh, the usual: Drinking tea, writing haikus about flowers, and asasinating police—the sort of thing every desperate career criminal does after receiving nearly unlimited wealth and a cleared police file for services rendered. That and creating a first-rate criminal organization in Manhattan, thus making himself a minor criminal deity, and as a side project (with his colleague Wa Belling) assassinating as many corrupt System Police as possible.
Avery is a pretty bitter guy by the end of the first book, and he's trying to take revenge against The System as a whole and the System Security Force in particular.I imagine that by the beginning of The Digital Plague Avery is just starting to realize that even with the immense wealth and power he's achieved, he's still just a speck in The System and all his efforts are just annoyances to someone like Richard Marin.

Mike Collins: This is your first sequel right? How was that experience different from writing The Electric Church?

Jeff Somers: First sequel, yes. On the one hand, there was a lot more freedom. I'd spent a lot of time on TEC, revising the same story over and over again. A sequel gave me the opportunity to take the universe and characters I loved and do anything I wanted with them. On the other hand, the publisher really wanted this book and pressured me subtly to deliver it,things like kidnapping my pets, sending men to break my legs, and, once,burning down my house. My Corporate Masters are terrifying folks,really.

On the other, otherhand, a sequel is an opportunity to let the universe you've created evolve. I don't like it when books in a series exist in a static world where all the basics stay the same. The real world doesn't stay static. So the sequel was a great, exciting opportunity to start tearing things down a little, remaking the universe I'd created.

Mike Collins: Avery, as usual, starts out in trouble. For a character you claim to love you sure beat the hell out of him...

Jeff Somers: Hey, he's in a hard line of work. I became a writer mainly to avoid beatings and nano plagues and guns pushed into my ears, you know? Also because I can do my work sitting in a comfortable chair with a nice drink in hand, instead of running through sewers. Plus, it's fun to run your characters through the mill. Misery is interesting.

Part of this may also be my moral compass I've created a character who kills people, who physically assaults people when annoyed, who has stepped over the bodies of friends in order to save himself — albeit, perhaps, regretfully. Then I went ahead and made him kind of fun and charming.It feels good on some primitive level to then smack Avery in the head with a lead pipe. It feels like the Literary Lead Pipe of Justice.

Mike Collins: Infecting your hero with a nanotech virus designed to murder the world is an interesting plot device. How did you come up with the basic plot?

Jeff Somers: This is an idea I've had for a while, a technology designed to mimic a natural vector. I was playing with the ideas of macro versus micro threats to survival: Societies have pretty good reactions to macro threats, like invading armies or terrorists or a nut with a gun on a clock tower (not always effective reactions, but organized reactions, you know?). But when the threat is individual, it can fly under society's radar for a while. You see someone getting sick and while you might have empathy for them or try to help them, it also seems very much their problem. By the time it's apparent that the threat is widespread or even global, it can be too late.

Thinking on that, I wondered,if I were a futuristic technological genius trying to destroy the world and remake it in my own horrible image, flying under the radar for a while would be a very good idea.

Mike Collins: Outside of New York, we also get to travel to Newark and Paris. Neither are exactly tourist destinations. Most of the settings in Avery's stories are pretty bleak. Are there parts of his world that aren't quite so dark?

Jeff Somers: Of course. You do see some glimpses of that world in The Digital Plague, I think. But Avery doesn't travel to those parts much, despite his wealth. He's limited by his worldview; the man gets itchy whenever he thinks he's out of his element. Also, the story, by design, moves pretty fast so there wasn't room to explore further.

There are areas of The System where people are fairly well off and fairly happy—because they are completely assimilated into the world, cogs in the machine. They serve The System and are rewarded for it, and most of them would be unaware of how miserable the vast proportion of the population is. They would think of themselves as normal, law-abiding citizens, and their spheres would be pretty happy ones. At least until the plague came to town, or people like Avery.

Mike Collins: Switching things up, this book features Avery thrown in with a group of SSF Stormers. Was it fun making him a fish out of water?

Jeff Somers: You bet. Here's a man who's not just a criminal—and a fairly famous one but a criminal who's well-known as a cop-killer, being carried around like luggage by the police. I think the sequences with Cates and the cops also demonstrates how similar they really are, in many ways, which was really fun for me to work with.

Mike Collins: Aside from several returning characters from The Electric Church, we get a whole new cast in the sequel. Can you talk a little bit about the two major new characters, Happling and Colonel Hense?

Jeff Somers: I love these two, to be honest. I really enjoyed having some System Police along for the whole ride to get into their heads a little, and I love the contrast between Happling, who's a gorilla of a man with a temper so volatile you wonder that he doesn't have six or seven strokes a day, and Hense, who looks like she'd be small and weak, and yet is pretty firmly the one in charge. I liked the implication that in the System Security Force, the chain of command really means something.

I have to admit, having Happling be at near-stroke levels of rage for most of the book was also a lot of fun.

Mike Collins: Something that gets mentioned a few times throughout the book and especially plays a part at the end is Chengara. What exactly is that?

Jeff Somers: Chengara is a System Penitentiary. We're going to spend a bit of time there in the next book, and that's all I can say right now.

Mike Collins: One of the things I really enjoyed with both of the Avery Cates books is how you name each chapter with a phrase that appears in it. Why did you decide to go that route?

Jeff Somers: Frankly, it's fun. I like the foreshadowing, especially when I manage to pick a phrase that ends up meaning something different from what your first expectation might be.

Mike Collins: The Digital Plague has a wide open ending. Can we expect to see more of Avery Cates in the future?

Jeff Somers: Well, I've got the third book almost ready right now. Beyond that, it's hard to say at the moment—I think poor Avery's got a lot more stories in him, but there's a lot of daylight between that and actual books, you know? Beyond the third one—The Eternal Prison—nothing is certain, though I'd love to find the time to write more about this world.

Mike Collins: Do you envision staying with sci fi or do you want to give other genres a shot?

Jeff Somers: I work in a variety of genres. My short fiction has been all over the place (you can see http://www.innerswine.com/oldfic.html for an overview of my published stories) and my first novel, Lifers, was more or less mainstream. I'm planning to work in all sorts of forms and categories, if anyone is, you know, willing to pay me to publish them.

Mike Collins: Writing isn't a full time occupation for you. What kind of work do you do as a day job, and how if any does that impact on your writing career?

Jeff Somers: I'm an editor. I work on unexciting technical and academic books. When I started in this career approximately seventy years ago, my boss told me "No one chooses to work in technical publishing. We all just fall into it." What happened, of course, was that after five wonderful years
lazing around college as an English Major, the idea of actually working for a living horrified me, so I took the lowest-paying job that utilized and required only my word skills, which meant I could do the job half asleep.

Mike Collins: Is it hard to balance out both careers?

Jeff Somers: Only occasionally. For many years, of course, I had very few paying gigs and all my writing was at my own pace and mainly for my own eyes, so if I had a long day at work that precluded writing or a few weeks of being extraordinarily busy, it was no big deal. Now that I have actual deadlines and contractual obligations, sometimes it gets a little hairy.

Mike Collins: Do you ever envision a time when you would be able to just write full time? Is that something you even want to do, or do you prefer being able to write what and how you want?

Jeff Somers: Do I envision it? I envision it constantly. In my vision I am wearing a purple robe made of something very soft and comfortable and carrying a scepter of some sort. When I wave the scepter, beer appears on the table before me. In the afternoons I lounge on a hammock in the back and dictate some brilliancies to my unpaid secretary, who volunteers to work for me because of my recognized genius.

Wait, I blacked out for a moment...

I wouldn't want to write for a living in the sense of being paid to
write specific things, except in very limited circumstances. For
example, I write a regular column for Brutarian Magazine for American cash money, but the subject of the column is all up to me, so I can just do what I like. If I could get paid for doing stuff like that, and for writing books and stories as I feel like it, then, huzzah, let's do it. But I wouldn't want to write what others tell me to. I'd prefer to work the day job, to be honest.

Now, ask me if I want some Hollywood fool to pay me for film rights to "The Electric Church" so I can fill my bathtub with hundred dollar bills and lay around until the pressure sores become intolerable, and I'd say, sure, why not.

Mike Collins: What else do you have coming up Jeff?

Jeff Somers: Aside from working on the third Avery Cates novel, I'll be appearing on
the Joey Reynolds radio show (710 AM, WOR; at 1AM on May 12th (technically
the morning of May 13th) and I'll be reading at the KGB Bar in Manhattan on August 20th as part of the Fantastic Fiction Series run by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel. If you're in the area, come on by and accost me. I enjoy it.

11:16 AM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2008

I Gots Me Some Enthusiasm

Larry Young, the Chief Visionary, Creative Engine, and Marketing Guru for AiT/Planet Lar has got himself some enthusiasm, and isn't exactly shy about sharing it.

So, I gots me some enthusiasm.

Now that I have a kid, I spend a lot more time in the car, driving around on four wheels, than I did before. Apparently, it's not advisable to just bungee-cord a nine-month old into the milk crate bolted to the back of your 2004 Derbi Boulevard 125 and scoot around, even if he does kind of like the wind in his hair. So since I'm following all the proper rules of the road and there's no need to call child-endangerment because I was just kidding around, there, about the scooter, and he's got the approved car seat and all, I have time to listen to a few CDs when I'm driving the kid from here to there.

I like to burn my own mixes because I'm not that big a fan of the radio. Honestly, I'm one of those old crusts who thinks there hasn't been much good pop music done since Stevie Winwood left Traffic, so there's not a lot for me to listen to.

Anyway, one of the mixes I made to entertain myself as I drove Daddy's Taxi to and fro is called "Speak English, Mick!" after that line of Whoopi Goldberg's in JUMPIN' JACK FLASH where she's trying to figure out the lyrics to the song by playing it over and over. Man, talk about a little too much 1986, huh? Literally two seconds on google with "jumpin jack flash" + "lyrics" would give Whoopi the words and help her figure out the coded message to save Jonathan Pryce and it's a ten minute movie and done.

Basically, it's a long mix of songs I like precisely because the lyrics don't make any sense. I had the bad luck to end up an English major as an undergrad, concentrating in the American Literary Renaissance. Hawthorne, Melville, those guys? Lots of allegory, symbols, metaphor. I loved it, don't get me wrong, but it makes me the sort of reader who loves dense storytelling and the sort of writer who makes things a little complicated just to show off, you know? So when I'm going to Babies R Us to get larger-sized, orthodontally-correct pacifiers, I like to listen to weird pop stuff that doesn't make any sense just to occupy the three-pound nerve bundle that is my grey matter while I drive.

The first song on the mix is Stevie Nicks' "Edge of Seventeen" from her solo album Belladonna. You put in "edge of seventeen" + "lyrics" into the ol' Google, and you get 46,000 hits, so I'm pretty sure we're not violating anybody's anything here, but just in case: All song lyrics are property and copyright their respective owners. All lyrics provided for educational and language learning purposes only.