Biology 101

I finally got The Millenials in the mail! The disc sat around for a bit and I kept forgetting to take it out with me. I guess I was a little afraid of the commitment and kept thinking I was going to go back in and edit things some more. Then I remember the Magus Council motto. "Finish it!" So it's off. Hopefully I'll have copies in hand by Dragon*Con.
Now, a little story about the origins of the The Millenials.
It's the 80's, my sophomore year of high school, which makes if 1984, since school has just started. I'm sitting in Biology 101, which is dreadful boring and made even more so by the dried up little man teaching the class, when my best friend in the world Travis O'Neill turns to me and asks "If you can have any superpower you want, what would it be?"
As many of you know, this is a standard question among geeks. It doesn't sound profound or out of the ordinary, though I think that's a deception. It is a very profound and revealing question. I'm sure Travis and I had this discussion before, we had been friends since seventh grade, but I don't recall the question begin asked so specifically. It caused me to stop and think carefully about my answer. I let my mind conjure up an image I found desirous, appealing, enchanting. Some channel of communication was open that day between my self and unconscious, my body and my mind. I saw images of young, lithe athletes contorting with improbable agility. Body's that moved with grace and ease, folding and extending in gravity's embrace. I saw scenes from my favorite martial arts films, the flips and flying feet, my favorite wrestlers, the high fliers and risk takers, and even some flashes of Lion-O in his feline grace. All this raw date translated quite elegantly into a character with animalistic characteristic, something ferral and powerful, lethal and predatorial. Strength, speed, agility, senses, all heightened like a jungle cat. And of course, augmented healing. This was very important and prove to be even more telling and crucial than my original visions of balletic superhuman agility.
A name followed soon after. I always hesitate to say where I got the unusual moniker of Tiger Nightfight. Perhaps I'll give a prize if anyone can guess correctly.
And all this occurred rather quickly.
Travis answered the question for himself and created an alter ego for himself, somewhat in contrast in several ways to Tiger Nightfight. The two formed the nucleus of a super team based largely on people we know and ideas that we had been entertaining for some time. Since we identified so strongly with these characters, in fact, they were us, with our own lives as the background and foundation, we nutured them and invested time and energy into them. This was the first idea we seriously considered turning into a comic book. This was our flag ship, our X-Men, our Justice League. A world grew around them, slowly but surely.
Time passed and Travis and changed. We grew older and our lives became more sophisticated. I moved away and we grew apart. Our correspondence diminished and then came to a halt. I went to college and exploded into a millions pieces, all fighting for escape and peace. But these characters never left me. I continued to nuture and develop them. They proved resilient to change, and became greater and stronger in my mind. I never let go of the dream they represented, of the first comic book I was going to write. Of course, the only character that's left from the original idea is Tiger Nightfight. It's just as well, the others weren't really mine to use anyway. Oh, the group is very similar to the one we invented in biology those many life times ago. Stands to reason those themes and dynamics are going to show up over and over again in my work. It's it's own animal, though. I completely reinvented the idea after reading the Watchmen in 1990. I'll admit, not shame in that. I'm not trying to write the Watchmen. I know better, but I'd be a poor scholar and a bloody fool if I didn't readdress the way I related to tea genre after reading Moore's book. I reinvented them again in 1999 after a particularly revelatory night watching WWF's Raw is War.
And that's a not too brief story of the origin of the Millenials.
I hope you were paying attention. There will be a quiz.

Wow!

I just finished making the corrections my editor found! That means I've just got to wrap up the cover and do the paste ups! I'm going to make it to press by Friday!!
And they induce labor tomorrow morning! James and Dawna are having their baby!
What a week!

Clarmontinization

As I said, I write stories that contain elements of the Fantastic. That is my genre. Any form of writing is a genre, but generally the word is marginalized to mean poor writing, generally writing that serves the form rather than the story. In this case, the story is about the Fantastic rather than about character or tone or structure. The characters are defined by what makes them fantastic rather than what makes them interesting. It becomes more important that a character is an alien or a paranormal or the product of some inexplicable anomaly than who they are, what they do, how they relate to people. When one is writing a story about the fantastic, it then becomes important to introduce and define the character by these fantastic elements. This leads to some awkward exposition composed of the bullet points of the characters history and relevant dramatic points. No one does this better than Chris Claremont, long time writer of the X-Men.
As I write stories about the Fantastic, I cam in constant fear of Clarmontinizing my characters. There's always that moment when a character comes on to the page and my first instinct is to have them do a force trip, fall on a 5 foot steel spike, and then launch into a soliloquy where they explain that because they can turn their body into pudding, they could fall on that spike without being hurt, and then lament the angst of being Pudding Boy and how everyone who meets him thinks that his chat room handle and won't go out with him.
If the situation calls for it, of course I'll deal with it. Yet I find the situations don't often occur naturally. One of the reasons I'm so stoked about the layouts and script for Xrox #2 is because I give information that defines the characters by skill and role (what we used to call "character class" back in the day) without making it obvious or heavy handed. In fact, people will probably read it and not get it. And that's okay. It's more important that we get to know who the characters are.
I find this is true to my real experience. It is no longer important for me to define myself by my sexual orientation so I don't make the point of bringing it up when I meet people. It does come up, it's there the whole time, I don't know if people pick up on it or not, but it's there. Sometimes I think I'm Claremontinizing myself, like sometimes I fear I'm Clarmontinizing my stories. Sometimes I do make a declaration that is dangerously Clarmontesque. Old habits and all that.
Identity is make up of all these parts, sort of like Ken Wilbur's holon theory, a whole/part. (at least it was Wilbur who first introduced me to the term) All of my characters have a "character class" that I define them, or I define them by their fantastic quality, so it's there all the time, I just like to think I get past all of that and think of them as people and not as tokens.
So, let's all just chill out people, and stop Clarmontinizing each other. I ask you, can't we all just get along?

Gibbering Mouther

Rob "The Luddite" Crabtree, fellow Magus Council member, pointed out that in my inebriated state Wednesday it wasn't entirely clear that The Millenials wasn't going to press today. I will, however, easily make a July 8th deadline, which is still "The first of July" so that I'll be within the boundaries I set for myself.
Which means I should spend some time today polishing up the few rough bits...but I don't wanna!! I spent all day sucking down cathode (or whatever comes off of a computer) rays yesterday. Today I had planned to decent into my underground lair and putter about in my studio. The mojo is just right, still not totally together, but the vibes are kickin'!
I am going to work on layouts for Xrox #2. I'm ahead of schedule but I'm digging the way my ability to visually tell a story is growing. My powers seem to be increasing at an exponential rate. (and maybe they are, how does one measure such things?)
So, hopefully everyone is clear about the situation. Enjoy yourselves. Go look at Matt Dembicki's page. He's a great guy and a great artist and deserves our love and devotion. So does Rafer Roberts. Plastic Farm is really good and quite ambitious. I wouldn't lie to you.
Well, not about that...