"Simon Pegg is right, geeky genre fiction usually IS childish, even when it’s also something more"

This is on www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

 

Aug. 12 "Simon Pegg is right, geeky genre fiction usually IS childish, even when it’s also something more": I cut out this article by Dan Kaszor in the Edmonton Journal on May 30, 2015.  I cut it out because it analyzes superhero movies and stories in general.

It talks about comic stories and how there are lots of grey issues, but simplified.  Here's the whole article:  

“I’m very much a self-confessed fan of science-fiction and genre cinema. But part of me looks at society as it is now and thinks we’ve been infantilized by our own taste.” — Simon Pegg

That quote, given in an interview last week to the Radio Times, set the geek world on fire. How could Simon Pegg, the king of the nerds, say such a thing? Ignoring the fact that the vast majority of Pegg’s output has matched the themes he espouses in that quote (Spaced, in particular, is less a show about being geeky as it is about characters in a state of arrested development), some of the most lauded works of genre fiction in the past 30 or 40 years have taken on the “infantilized” nature of genre fiction head on.

It’s important to recognize what it is that actually draws us to certain genres and styles of storytelling. At their basic level, most genre fictions are power fantasies. The main characters are given strength beyond that of the natural world (and the reader) and the agency to reshape the fictional universe to their own liking. It’s an escape from the real world where you don’t have that same power or agency.

It isn’t to say that these stories can’t be more and say more. They often do. Science fiction in particular is an apt way of making you think about complex problems in a way outside of your basic context. But, for the most part, the reason they star people dressed up in tights or wearing a rocket pack is the childish hook to draw you in (and let’s face it: you aren’t cosplaying as Bernard Marx*). It’s usually unrelated to whatever the “more” is and that “more” sometimes (heck, usually) never comes.

This comes across most clearly in the superhero genre, where characters are very explicitly given almost god-like powers. It’s a very simple fantasy to want to just be able to punch the world better. It’s a simplistic, childish base language — the equivalent of eating a chocolate bar.

In 1985, one of the most famous works of super-hero fiction aimed at answering the question of “what if superheroes were real”: Watchmen. While many people laud the verisimilitude of the work, much less is made of the (arguably more important) genre deconstruction it does. The thesis of Watchmen is that the superhero, taken to its logical conclusion into the adult world, is an inherently terrifying being, something that is not fun nor escapist, but horrifying and/or pathetic. The book has an analogue for Superman who is so powerful and alien as to essentially be god. It has three analogs for Batman: one who is literally impotent unless he’s punching someone, one who is a psychopathic street murderer and one who sees killing a city of people as acceptable collateral damage.

Watchmen is often lauded as the pinnacle of superhero fiction, and in many ways it is. But it’s also the end of superhero fiction. There isn’t really any space to build beyond what we see in Watchmen. If you concede that the superhero philosophy is inherently “fascist” (a word plucked directly from the Hollis Mason autobiography that lines the back of many issues), Watchmen is saying that the fantasies fuelling superhero fiction only work in the exciting escapist way that we want them to if we embrace a childish naiveté about the consequences behind them.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to a genre. The Western, which dominated the popular culture of the first half of the 20th century, was a similar morality play of white hats using violence to strike down black hats. However, as the genre matured, that simple morality became problematic to many creators.

1956’s The Searchers introduced a classic Western hero whose traditionally “heroic” traits left him a bitter, destructive, murdering racist. In the 1960s, Western heroes became more and more indistinguishable from the villains, culminating in 1969’s The Wild Bunch, where the only real differentiation between heroes and villains was a slight difference in the amount of malice shown during violence.

After the ’60s, the Western was pretty much dead as a populist genre. Clint Eastwood attempted to reconstruct it in the 1970s with The Outlaw Josey Wales, and his brilliant Unforgiven is a seeming admission that the Western hero must always now be a nigh-hellish figure. What remains of the Western genre is almost entirely adult fare — which is, of course, fine; great, even — but you will basically never see another Western taking summer cinemas by storm, and the child-like base template of the genre hasn’t been successfully attempted in years.

Superheroes have obviously not been shuffled out of the limelight after Watchmen in the same way Westerns crumbled after The Searchers. Part of this is that the more modern fans of genre fiction want to read these “realistic” heroes through a childish mindset (see Zack Snyder’s very literalist interpretation of Watchmen and his “Do you bleed?” take on Batman).

And that’s part of what Simon Pegg was griping about — even when presented in an adult manner, genre has a way of being pre-chewed and regurgitated back in such a way that renders much of the nuance moot — signifiers such as brutal violence and grey morals reinterpreted as being cool instead of troubling — making the end product even more childish than the sanitized basic version.

But of course, that isn’t all of it. Much of modern genre fiction layers in complex adult ideas into the childishness. You can see this in some of Marvel’s movie output — most specifically Captain America: The Winter Solider, where the question of “who watches the watchmen” is brought up without shaking the moral fundamentals of the genre.

Perhaps the best example of taking simplistic genre stories and then layering them with interesting, complex adult ideas is Star Trek, where swashbuckling superhero cowboy Captain Kirk swings from planet to planet getting into exciting adventures — but those adventures often play out as interesting, complex and layered examinations of the very adult human condition. (Which, apropos of nothing, is why I’m happy Pegg is writing the next Star Trek movie, since the first two certainly didn’t get this.)

The show uses a taste of candied confections to get you to eat your vegetables. And to be clear, there isn’t anything wrong with candy. Candy tastes good! It’s just that adults should probably know better than to just eat candy all day long.

All Simon Pegg was saying was that it’s strange that grown adults seem to be constructing their entire identifies around eating candy and then angrily claiming they are eating vegetables. At the very least, you should admit you are eating candy.

http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/movies/simon-pegg-is-right-geeky-genre-fiction-usually-is-childish-even-when-its-also-something-more

"In the footsteps of Superman"/ "An education that sparkles"

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

 

 

May 28  "In the footsteps of Superman": I cut out this article by Marlene Habib in the Globe and Mail on Nov. 10, 2014.  It was under a special section called "Report on Colleges."  It's about studying to be a comic book artist.  Here's the article:

The world is rich with comic book fare, driven by U.S. publishers such as Marvel Comics (Iron Man and the X-Men) and DC Comics (Batman and Superman), and the influential and rapidly growing Japanese manga market.

But comic book “visual storyteller” Ken Steacy aims to put more Canadian artists, writers and cartoonists on the comic book industry map – whether they follow in the footsteps of industry legends such as Toronto-born Joe Shuster, co-creator of Superman, or take a more entrepreneurial route.

Mr. Steacy and his wife, graphic novelist Joan Steacy, developed and founded the Comics and Graphic Novels certificate program at Camosun College, an 18,500-student community college in Victoria.

Camosun bills the Steacys’ eight-month program, which is in its third school year, as “the only one of its kind in the Canadian public postsecondary school system.” Each student pays $10,500 for tuition, fees and supplies, with a focus on drawing, creative writing and publishing for visual storytelling.

Students learn about the history of comics in the United States, Canada, Britain and Japan, but also create their own “cmics magic,” says Mr. Steacy, 59, who has been inducted into the Canadian Comic Book Hall of Fame, which recognizes lifetime achievement in the industry.

“We teach visual storytelling as language composed of words and pictures. Camosun is the ideal home for our program, with their tradition of career-focused skills-based training,” he says. “And we encourage students to tell the story that only you can tell – communicating things in your heart.”

With 17 students enrolled for 2014-15, there have been 31 graduates ranging in age from 19 to late 50s, including Karen Gillmore, an inaugural-year alumnus.

An artist and musician, Ms. Gillmore, who turned 60 this summer, spent a year looking for the right course before enrolling in the Steacys’ program, justifying the cost by saying it would help improve her illustration work.

“I started out not knowing a lot about Canadian comics culture because it’s different than American or Japanese; it’s more creator-oriented,” she says from her Victoria home.

“As the course went on, I said, ‘I’m going to be a comic book artist – I always wanted to tell my own stories as opposed to other people’s stories,’” she adds.

Ms. Gillmore, who moved to Canada from the United States about 20 years ago to be with her husband, just released her first graphic novel. A frequent comic book convention-goer, Ms. Gillmore has also published two comic books of her own.

Besides Camosun’s program, some comic book training is offered at dozens of other postsecondary schools in North America, but they’re usually courses – not programs – that are content driven, Mr. Steacy says.

(Many of the schools are also privately run or don’t just focus on comic books. For instance, Max the Mutt College of Animation, Art and Design in Toronto has a four-year diploma program that covers cartooning and other areas such as animating in 3-D for video games, with tuition running a total of about $45,000.)

Interest in breaking into the comic book and graphic novel industry is partly driven by the massive potential financial rewards.

The North American market for comic books and graphic novels in 2013 was valued at $870-million (U.S.) – $780-million print and $90-million digital. That’s up from $681-million – $680-million print and $1-million digital – in 2009, according to a paper titled The New Comics Customer presented by Milton Griepp, chief executive officer of the Wisconsin-based publishing and consulting company ICv2.

Those figures don’t include the big box office takes from comic-book inspired movies or related sales of memorabilia.

Comic book creators, publishers and fans – who dress up as superheroes, villains and other characters – gather in droves at hundreds of Comic Con conventions around the world annually, including Comic Con expos in New York, Toronto and Medellin, Colombia, CUT and the Victoria Comic Book Expo in B.C., to name just a few.

Since his breakthrough 1974-published Super Student two-page comic strip that he wrote, pencilled, inked and lettered, Mr. Steacy has written and illustrated the adventures of characters including Astro Boy (Osamu Tezuka’s 1950s-originated science fiction series), Harry Potter, Iron Man and those in Star Wars, and has produced his own major print works, including Tempus Fugitive, The Sacred and the Profane, co-authored by Dean Motter, and Night and the Enemy with acclaimed science-fiction author Harlan Ellison, due to be re-released next year.

Among his wife’s works, her autobiographic graphic novel series, Aurora Borealice, deals with her struggles with literacy and how meeting media theorist Marshall McLuhan in art college changed her life.

The couple’s idea for the Camosun program stems from Mr. Steacy’s experience during years teaching workshops and evening courses, and while signing copies of his works at comic conventions. He was commonly asked where one could go to learn the craft – only to have no ready answer because he learned it by practical application, built on a foundation of film and illustration studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design, which is now OCAD University.

Finally, about four years ago, Mr. Steacy was teaching in part of the Change Everything program at Camosun’s continuing education department, when he and his wife pitched the idea of a full comic book program – getting it under way in the 2012-13 school year.

In conjunction with creative writing instructors in the English department, the Steacys work to help students to develop skills in fiction and non-fiction writing, script writing, comic and graphic novel drawings, storytelling layout and character design. Students also gain publishing knowledge to manage their own careers – as their main project, they must each create and publish a 24-page colour comic book, which can be used in a portfolio to show publishers, and potential employers and clients.

Comics are not just as pop culture staples, Mr. Steacy says, but also can be “edutainment” in the form of entertaining and educational resources and manuals. He says that since the 1950s the U.S. Army has been using a comic-book format to train soldiers on the use of equipment. Camosun also helped the B.C. government revamp a food-safety training guide for the service industry by replacing words with cartoon images.

“Of all our students, we’ve had very few who wanted to do mainstream comics,” Mr. Steacy says. “All the rest wanted to do Web comics, graphic novels. … They’re much more interested in the kind of stories they tell and they understand the future – their intellectual property is the currency of the future, and they get that.”

Superheroes, super sales

Comic books are said to have their origins in Japan in the 1700s, but they didn’t gain popularity until the 1930s in the United States with the release of Famous Funnies, a 68-page periodical that sold for 10 cents and became inexpensive entertainment during the Great Depression.

Today, boosted by the widespread popularity of superhero movies and television shows, as well as conventions where fans dress up as their favourite characters and comic-book creators attend signings, the comic book industry is thriving.

September orders of comics and graphic novels by shops in North America were valued at more than $50 million for the second time in three months, according to figures by Diamond Comic Distributors, a Maryland-based distributor of English-language comic books, graphic novels and pop culture-related products.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/a-program-that-lets-students-follow-in-the-footsteps-of-superman/article21509988/

"An education that sparkles": This is written by Deirdre Kelly also for the Report on Colleges.  It's about jewelry making and I'm interested in it.  Doe anyone remember this Dec. 2012 blog post "jewelry business/ HIT & master list/ credit card sales"?:  

 http://badcb.blogspot.ca/2012/12/jewelry-business-hit-master-list-credit.html

Here's the whole article:

Craft Ontario’s inaugural retail show in Toronto during the Thanksgiving weekend showcased the designs of 15 young jewellers, many of them with their own indie lines of handcrafted pieces made of precious metals.

Many of the participants in Emerging Makers were trained through the community college system, which recently has expanded its offering of jewellery programs to reflect the popularity of the craft.

Among them was Alex Kinsley, a 24-year-old recent graduate of George Brown College’s three-year jewellery design program.

Originally from Hamilton, Mr. Kinsley moved to Toronto in the summer of 2010 to participate in the program. Founded in 1967, it is the longest running and most established program of its kind in Canada, according to the college.

“I choose the community college because it had a really good program for what I wanted, was affordable, and was located in a desirable city,” Mr. Kinsley says.

But it was what he could do in the final year of the program that really sold him: “The ability to design and create something unique fascinated me,” says Mr. Kinsley who now runs his own jewellery company, Kinsley Vey Designs.

Community colleges offering jewellery programs across the country provide training formerly covered by the manufacturing sector through apprenticeships.

When manufacturing in Canada began to decline 15 years ago, the schools enhanced their course offerings, adding design and emphasizing jewellery as not just a profession but as an art, a form of self-expression, according to George Brown.

It’s a sea-change that has increased enrolment in community college jewellery programs across the board, says Paul McClure, a practising goldsmith who is a professor of jewellery studies within George Brown’s Centre for Arts & Design.

“We’ve actually doubled our capacity over the past eight to 10 years in terms of enrolment,” Mr. McClure says.

Mr. McClure says jewellery design is increasingly popular among students who aim to eventually establish their own independent jewellery lines once their training is finished.

Forty per cent of graduates, he adds, will go in this direction. The others will seek employment in the industry, finding work as bench jewellers, gemologists or in customer service.

It’s a valuable education, says Erin Tracy, who 10 years ago launched her own business, Erin Tracy Bridal and Fine Jewellery, in Toronto after studying at the Ontario College of Art and Design (it had become a university by the time she graduated).

“Attending college to learn my trade was beneficial in giving me a realistic view of the working life of a jewellery designer,” Ms. Tracy says.

“I spent our time in class using my hands and exploring the very same materials I use today in my work. I also have maintained relationships with many of the same suppliers I was introduced to during my time in college. Running my business has really been an extension of my time and work during my college years.”

Other schools offering metalsmithing programs and attracting record numbers of students are Vancouver Community College, LaSalle College in Vancouver, Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, and Georgian College in Barrie, Ont.

Saskatchewan jeweller Jeanie Andronyk, a graduate of the Vancouver Metal Art School, believes jewellery design programs are gaining in popularity as more opportunities for graduates to sell their wares open up across Canada.

“The maker/entrepreneur movement has been building for years with the rise of [the e-commerce site] Etsy, along with craft and trade shows that exhibit handmade products, and a general appreciation for DIY culture,” says Ms. Andronyk, whose Andronyk Jewelry brand is based in Shaunavon, Sask.

George Brown has 170 students enrolled full-time in its jewellery division. That number is growing.

“We are seeing our international student population rising,” Mr. McClure says.

“We now have a 25-per-cent international student body, with students coming as far away as Britain, China, India and other points across east Asia.”

Participants have a choice between a one-year certificate program, a two-year diploma or a three-year advanced degree. The latter involves hands-on experience with established professionals, such as the Toronto luxury jeweller Myles Mindham.

Mindham Fine Jewellery Inc. has mentored six George Brown students since it started working with the college three years ago.

The mentorship program invites third-year students to visit the company’s production shop to review their final projects with regard to the practicality and feasibility of what they have designed. Some go on to be full-time employees, among them Gillian Lee and Vanessa Wray.

The aim, says Mr. Mindham, is to give students “a professional outside opinion of the direction they are taking.”

The mentorship program has been so successful that George Brown is now in the process of developing an internship program that would continue to involve Mr. Mindham.

“It’s no secret that the North American mass production jewellery industry is in contraction, with local manufacturing companies closing over the last decade due to offshore manufacturing’s competitive edge,” Mr. Mindham says.

“But the good news is that the higher-end, more skillfully crafted local goods market is still on the rise. As we have expanded, the need for well trained and skilled people has grown.”

This is good news for Mr. Kinsley, who plans to build on what he learned in college to build his jewellery brand.

“My current status is as a jewellery artist/designer, which is exactly what I was hoping to get out of the program,” he says.

“Going forward, I aim to attend more craft shows and begin a circuit I can do yearly and find more places to take my work, either on consignment or wholesale. I also want to apply to international contemporary craft galleries with my larger, one-of-a-kind pieces.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/jewellery-programs-offer-an-education-that-sparkles/article21514102/

One Life to Live/ "His mission: cultivating a Youtube for readers" (Wattpad)

This is on my www.badcb.blogspot.ca:

May 15: Here are a few things I have written down on a piece of paper and that I was supposed to write about.  It's kind of random.  I kept it relevant with writing like TV shows and words I learned.

One Life to Live: I never watched this soap opera, but if you read how it got cancelled, then got on the web series, and then cancelled again.  Read this from Wikipedia:

One Life to Live (often abbreviated as OLTL) is an American soap opera broadcast on the ABC television network for more than 43 years, from July 15, 1968, to January 13, 2012, and then on the internet as a web series on Hulu and iTunes via The Online Network from April 29, 2013 to August 19, 2013.^[2][3][4] Created by Agnes Nixon, the series was the first daytime drama to primarily feature ethnically and socioeconomically diverse characters and consistently emphasize social issues.^[2] One Life to Live was expanded from 30 minutes to 45 minutes on July 26, 1976, and then to an hour on January 16, 1978.

After nearly 43 years on the air, ABC canceled One Life to Live on April 11, 2011.^[7][8] On July 7, 2011, production company Prospect Park announced that it would continue the show as a web series after its run on ABC,^[9] but later suspended the project.^[10] The show taped its final scenes for ABC on November 18, 2011, and its final episode on the network aired on January 13, 2012 with a cliffhanger.

On January 7, 2013, Prospect Park resumed its plan to continue One Life to Live as a daily 30-minute web series on Hulu and iTunes via The Online Network.^[11][12] The relaunched series premiered on April 29, 2013.^[13] The new series was plagued with several behind-the-scene problems, most notably a litigation between Prospect Park and ABC regarding the misuse of One Life to Live characters on General Hospital.^[14] On September 3, 2013, Prospect

Park suspended production of the series until the lawsuit with ABC was resolved.^[14]

^{My opinion: It's like this show is on and off, and on and off.  I know Veronica Mars got cancelled, and years later it became a movie.  It's like Arrested Development got cancelled, and years later it goes on Netflix with new episodes.}

I learned some words while reading: Do you know any of these words?

Apocryphal-of doubtful authorship or authenticity.

Détente-a relaxing of tension, especially between nations, as by negotiations or agreements.

Halitosis-a condition of having offensive-smelling breath; bad breath.

May 23:

Joycean- of, relating to, or characteristic of James Joyce or his work.

May 28 "His mission: cultivating a youtube for readers": I cut out this article by Shelley White in the Globe and Mail on Oct. 24, 2013.  It was in the business section of the newspaper, but it's about reading and writing too.  It mentions about how fan fiction is really big on the site.  Well you can go on the internet and type in fan fiction of whatever TV show and movie you like and read it from there.  Here's the article:

When it comes to the future of Wattpad, his innovative story-sharing site, Allen Lau isn’t thinking small. In fact, he wants Wattpad to be the next YouTube.

“When someone is looking to discover new reading content, I want them to think of Wattpad as the No. 1 destination,” says Mr. Lau, 45, of his Toronto-based website.

As it turns out, Mr. Lau is well on his way to reaching his goal. He has 19 million users in 200 countries. They spend 4.5 billion minutes a month on Wattpad, and the numbers continue to grow. The millions of stories on offer run the gamut from fan fiction and sci-fi to romance and poetry, with some of the most popular authors drawing more than 1 million views.

But Mr. Lau and his partner Ivan Yuen haven’t just created a vibrant online community, the median age of which is 18. Wattpad is disrupting the traditional publishing model and changing the way the world reads.

“People don’t just want to pick up a book and read,” Mr. Lau says. “They want to comment on the work, interact with their favourite authors, share it with others and post their own stories. Instead of a few gatekeepers choosing to accept or reject manuscripts, the public is deciding what they want to read.”

Mr. Lau’s keen insight into the future of reading originated a decade ago – before the iPhone, before Kindle – as he sought to solve a problem he faced personally.

“I’m a huge reader, and I wanted to be able to read stories on my mobile phone – a Nokia that displayed five lines of text at a time,” Mr. Lau says. “There wasn’t an easy way to do this, so I set out to build a solution myself.”

It wasn’t until several years later, in 2006, that Mr. Lau found what he was looking for. He received a message from Mr. Yuen, a former workmate living in Vancouver, who wanted feedback on a mobile reading app he was building.

Mr. Yuen had also created a website that allowed users to share and upload stories to their mobile phones easily. Mr. Lau immediately caught a plane to Vancouver to begin planning what would become Wattpad.

“Being the geek that I am, I figured if there was no solution to a problem that I faced, there must be a market opportunity,” Mr. Lau says.

YouTube had just been sold to Google for $1.65-billion, and Mr. Lau envisioned how the concept of mobile, social, user-generated content could be applied to publishing. With Wattpad, people could follow their favourite writers, share with friends and be notified every time a new chapter was added to the story they were reading.

Perhaps the most forward-thinking idea Mr. Lau had was to tailor Wattpad to mobile devices, allowing users to read and write stories whenever and wherever they like.

“People don’t really read on their PC, they read on the go and they read when they want to escape into another world and be entertained,” Mr. Lau says. “Today over 85 per cent of time spent on Wattpad is coming from phones and tablets.”

Mr. Lau also bucked the notion that in this era of texting, Twitter and videogames, teens don’t read. A key part of Mr. Lau’s success was to combine reading with two things young people love: mobile phones and social media.

“We’re seeing tons of teens reading and engaging on Wattpad,” he says.

Mr. Lau says another important element of his success has been to let the site grow organically, rather than try to sell users on what’s “hot” or on-trend. “Wattpad is where trends emerge, it’s not a platform that dictates what the trends are,” he says.

As an example, the site’s fastest growing story category is fan fiction. There are 4.7 million such tales on Wattpad, based on characters from TV shows and movies such as The Vampire Diaries and The Hunger Games.

But how does the site make money? As Wattpad’s numbers continue to grow, there has been pressure to monetize.

Mr. Lau says they are experimenting with a “fan funding” program, similar to Kickstarter or Indiegogo, where readers can contribute to their favourite artist’s new work in exchange for rewards such as having a character named after them. The site also recently partnered with the publishing company Sourcebooks, which will be releasing the works of select Wattpad authors in either print or e-book format.

But Mr. Lau says he’s in no rush to attempt full-scale monetization before he feels the community is ready.

“We’ll be trying many different things before deciding on our approach,” Mr. Lau says. “But our No. 1 priority right now is continuing to grow the Wattpad community.”

“I always say that when we have a community of a billion users, there will be a million ways to make money.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/starting-out/his-mission-cultivate-a-youtube-for-readers/article15020377/

Jun. 18:

Prorogation- to discontinue a session of (the British Parliament or a similar body). 

 

Jul. 13 Antediluvian-

1. of or belonging to the period before the Flood. Gen. 7, 8.

2. very old, old-fashioned, or out of date; antiquated; primitive:

Aug. 12:

Riesling-1. Horticulture.

1. a variety of grape.
2. the vine bearing this grape, grown in Europe and California.

Synecdoche:

1. a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special, as in ten sail for ten ships or a Croesus for a rich man.

Acerbic-sour or astringent in taste:

 

Circumscribed-1. to draw a line around; encircle:

to circumscribe a city on a map.