What Writers Can Learn From Joss Whedon’s The Avengers

What Writers Can Learn From Joss Whedon’s The Avengers

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avengers-movie-poster-1Disclaimer: This article will reference some scenes from The Avengers film. While I’ve tried to avoid specific spoilers about major twists, there are some things that give away plot elements and twists from the other Marvel Comics movies, such as Thor.

If you are a writer, be sure that you get a receipt when you go to The Avengers, because you should be claiming it as a work-related research expense on your taxes this year. (This should not be considered tax advice. Please consult with your tax preparer before making financial decisions.)

There has been no shortage of digital ink spilled gushing over how great the movie is. I’ll provide a link to some of the highlights below if you want to delve into the film itself. However, I wanted to go beyond discussing The Avengers as purely a viewing experience, but to focus on a couple of elements that writers can best take away from it.

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Lost Classics of Pulp: Judex

Lost Classics of Pulp: Judex

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judex_65_2judex01Pioneering silent film director, Louis Feuillade rose to prominence with his stylish 1913 serial, Fantomas which faithfully adapted five of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain’s bestselling pulp thrillers. Feuillade next succeeded in fashioning an enthralling original story based around the Apache street gang which figured prominently in the Fantomas series. Les Vampires are led by the vampish Irma Vep, played by the exotic Musidora (France’s answer to Theda Bara). The 1915 serial was hugely successful and was a highly influential work in its day. Feuillade was tasked with the challenge of trying to follow up these two successes with a third commercial property.

Responding to the criticism that his films glorified crime and violence, Feuillade turned to author and playwright Arthur Bernede for help. Together they crafted a pulp vigilante dressed in a dark cloak with his face partially obscured by a slouch hat. Judex, Latin for “judge,” fought crime with his loyal brother, Roger and a menagerie of amazing beasts and an assortment of colorful companions by his side. These and Judex’s gadget-filled secret lair and private plane had a tremendous influence on the burgeoning pulp fiction market in England and America.

 

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Goth Chick News: An Internet Head-Trip Brought to You by Shaun of the Dead Creator Edgar Wright

Goth Chick News: An Internet Head-Trip Brought to You by Shaun of the Dead Creator Edgar Wright

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image002Two versions of Snow White, TV sitcoms remade for the big screen and (stop me before I hurt myself) the re-release of Titanic…

Think there’s no originality left in Hollywood?

Microsoft apparently agrees with us but is thankfully smart enough not to try and fix it themselves.

Instead they enlisted the talents of Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright and Marvel and Lucasfilm illustrator Tommy Lee Edwards (famous for his work on the Batman and Hellboy comics) to create a very cool entertainment concept in the form of an interactive animated story called The Random Adventures of Brandon Generator, launched April 12th.

Think of it as a Choose Your Own Adventure story for the multi-media generation.

Visitors to the site will get a seven-minute video that explains the story of our hero Brandon Generator, who is having severe writer’s block.  One dark night after too much coffee, Brandon wakes from his caffeine-induced blackout to discover prose, sketches and ideas on his Dictaphone that he did not remember leaving.

And you get to provide one or all of those elements.

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Alana Joli Abbott Reviews Grave Dance

Alana Joli Abbott Reviews Grave Dance

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gravedanceGrave Dance
Kalayna Price
Roc (pages 372, $7.99, mass market first edition July 2011)
Reviewed by Alana Joli Abbott

It is infrequent that I find myself reading a second novel in a series that utterly outstrips the first, especially when the first volume is highly enjoyable in its own right. So it was with delight that I flew through the pages of Grave Dance, Kalayna Price’s second Alex Craft adventure. Set a month after the conclusion of Grave Witch, this mystery-come-urban fantasy starts in the middle of the action, with Alex, a magic-wielding private eye, investigating the mysterious appearance of a pile of dismembered left feet. Although a foot is not enough to allow her to raise the shades – the memories stored in dead bodies – that usually make her valuable as a consultant, she soon finds herself embroiled in a case being fought over by her city’s mostly-human police force and the Fae Investigation Bureau.

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Snarky Female Protagonists and Why I Read Them

Snarky Female Protagonists and Why I Read Them

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junoDear Black Gate readers,

I don’t even remember what my last post was. Mea culpa, mea culpa; I was moving across the country, I was getting a job with some Beluga whales, I was joining a writing group,  I was traveling to places I’d never been before, I was reading other people’s fledgling novels and trying to come up with some kind — any kind! — of useful crit for them, I was writing up a storm.

(Several storms. Big magical brouhahas*, with silver clouds and dark lightning and dead swans and such.)

Woe is me, these things are hard, man! But enough of this moaning and groaning. I’m back now, see?  And I’ve been reading.

You know that thing that happens when suddenly you realize how busy you’ve been because you haven’t picked up a book for the sheer pleasure of reading in a while? There are many joys in reading other people’s early drafts of things that are going to turn into magnificently faboosh final drafts, but one of the downers is that when I’m doing that, I feel guilty reading anything for fun. And I’m a fast reader; I’m just a slow dang beta-reader.

However! Last week, I found myself at the Westerly Public Library, a place of golden beauty and polished staircases, browsing. Browsing, I tell you! Do you know how that felt?

Novel.

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Pavis – Gateway to Adventure: The Classic RPG City is Back! (Part Two)

Pavis – Gateway to Adventure: The Classic RPG City is Back! (Part Two)

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pavis_coverLast week I began my review of Pavis – Gateway to Adventure, the new RPG supplement from Moon Design Publications for its HeroQuest roleplaying game in the fantasy world of Glorantha, with a bit of history of this greatest of RPG cities, and an overview of what this massive new book contains. This week, I’d like to look at the book’s content in far more detail, with a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of just what you get in its 416 pages.

Chapter by Chapter

To begin with, the book’s cover is a nice full colour painting depicting a priest of the cult of Pavis, the city god, atop the ziggurat-like temple of Pavis in the new city, facing east over assembled city-folk and worshippers as the sun rises. In contrast to the green and earth tones of the previous two Sartar books, the cover is predominantly pinks, purples, and greys, emphasizing the hazy, desert-like environment of the city. It gives a feel for the predominance of religion – and religious intrigue – in the city.

After credits, contents, and introduction sections, the book launches straight into “Making Your Character”. If you have Sartar: Kingdom of Heroes, you’ll know what to expect here; except that in addition to the Sartarite settlers of Pavis County, there are also HeroQuest keywords and character creation guidelines for Old Pavisites, Sun Domers, Zola Fel Riverfolk, and even Lunar Settlers.

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Art of the Genre: The Top 10 Literary Sci-Fi/Fantasy Covers of the 1980s

Art of the Genre: The Top 10 Literary Sci-Fi/Fantasy Covers of the 1980s

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Can either Keith Parkinson or any artist from a gaming novel crack this list?
Can either Keith Parkinson or any artist from a gaming novel crack this list?

There is a line from the band ELO‘s song Ticket to the Moon, on their concept album Time, that says,

Remember the good old 1980s, when things were so uncomplicated, I wish I could go back there again, and everything could be the same…

I can’t listen to that album [and yes, I listen to ELO often, sue me] without having those words haunt me. You see, the 1980s were ‘my’ time. We all have this period, the decade from childhood to young adult that is seemingly perfect. I went from 9 to 19 in that decade, and it was pure unadulterated magic.

In that time I seemed to be playing GI Joes in my sandbox, blinked, and was attending my senior prom. I can’t tell you where the time went, just that it still resonates in my memory with a warm fuzzy feeling because it was all about me. I mean, isn’t that what your teens should be, a time all about you? There are no mortgages, monthly bills, children to ferry about, wives or husbands to cater to. Sure, there’s school, gas money, some relationship hassle, and a summer job, but realistically that’s window dressing to a period in which you can explore nearly anything you wish and are encouraged to do so.

So, that being established, it isn’t hard to imagine that I see everything that happened in the 1980s with rose-colored glasses. This can certainly be said about the literature of the era. Now given, I’ve gone back and reread a few books from my youth, and each time the shine isn’t what it was on first reading, but nonetheless, the art on those book covers still retains the luster of a bygone age.

It was in the 1980s that I first fell in love with fantasy art, and to a certain degree science fiction art, although I think that particular genre was waning as fantasy came into full bloom with the advent of Dungeons & Dragons. To me, there is nothing better than what I found on the shelves in those years, each title laying the foundation for my life in a profound and lasting way.

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When The Hero Comes Home: A Review

When The Hero Comes Home: A Review

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When the Hero Comes HomeWhen the Hero Comes Home is an anthology from Dragon Moon Press co-edited by Garbielle Harbowy and Ed Greenwood. It’s a surprisingly thin book, given that it holds nineten stories by twenty writers (including two Black Gate contributors, Peadar Ó Guilín and Jay Lake, in collaboration with Shannon Page). Its theme is exactly what it says: the homecoming. The point where the story usually ends. I have some reservations about how the book turned out, but the idea’s intriguing: what do you find when you make it back to where you began? Has the place changed, or have you?

One thinks of Odysseus’ return to Ithaca, or of Frodo’s discovery of what’s happened to the Shire. The conclusion of the story that sums up the themes of all that’s gone before. The last unexpected twist, the discovery that heightens emotion and gives the protagonist one final conflict. Arthur Miller said that every great play has to do with the question “how may a man make of the outside world a home?” But what, ultimately, is home? How do we recognise it?

Not all of the stories in When the Hero Comes Home have these kinds of questions on their minds. Overall, though, the tales do tend to examine the idea of ‘home,’ rather more than they do the idea of ‘hero.’ Then again, the existence of a hero, however defined, is inherent in the theme; it’s the nature of the home that implicitly has to be established. So: these are stories about fairly unambiguous heroes, finding that things at home are more complicated, and often more disappointing, than they’d thought.

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Quoth The Raven: “Nevermind”

Quoth The Raven: “Nevermind”

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the_raven_posterThe Raven (2012)
Directed by James McTeigue. Starring John Cusack, Alice Eve, Oliver Jackson-Cohen, Luke Evans, Brendan Gleeson, Kevin McNally.

This is more of a funeral oration than a review: The Raven flew right into a car windshield this weekend and failed to crack either the windshield or the top five at the U.S. box office, instead pulling in a sad $7.2 million to flop down at seventh place. This coming weekend, Earth’s Mightiest Heroes will tread it into dust, from where its spirit will be lifted “nevermore.”

And that’s fine, because The Raven is a sad sack of a film. It’s bad, but instead of feeling resentful of the filmmakers, you feel bummed that their good intentions and concepts never gelled — and they were apparently quite aware of it. The Raven knows it isn’t good, and that’s the saddest part.

For a great U.S. author inexpensively reachable in the public domain, Edgar Allan Poe has always posed a puzzle for feature-length filmmakers. Poe predominantly wrote short stories and poetry (producing only one novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which I always thought sounded like the start of a dirty limerick), and his tight construction and “unity of effect” philosophy of writing makes his work difficult to translate into a length of ninety minutes or more. Short stories often make superb material for feature films – the form is closer to narrative movies than the novel is – but Poe helped define the form with an economy of story, time, and place beyond the call of duty. When this combines with the intricacy and detail of Poe’s language, it puts any screen adaptors in a tough position. Most films with Edgar Allan Poe’s name in the credits are more homages to his work than straight adaptations.

The Raven, the third major film to carry the title of Poe’s most famous poem, takes the “loose inspiration” tactic, mixing the concept of previous fictionalized biopics like Kafka (1991) and Hammett (1982), where the author plays the part of the hero within a story similar to those he writes. However, I doubt either Steven Sorderberg or Wim Wenders were on the producers’ minds. They were probably thinking of the success of the recent Sherlock Holmes films and all the serial killer movies to come in the wake of The Silence of the Lambs and Se7en.

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On Sale Today: Gods of Opar by Philip José Farmer and Christopher Paul Carey

On Sale Today: Gods of Opar by Philip José Farmer and Christopher Paul Carey

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gods-of-oparI love these Philip José Farmer collections from Subterranean Press. They’re gorgeous, for one thing, with wonderful Bob Eggleton covers and the top-notch design typical of Subterranean. They look great lined up on my bookshelf.

But they’re also a terrific and economical way to obtain some of Farmer’s best work, whether you’re interested in his short fiction — collected in Up the Bright River, Venus on the Half-Shell and Others, Pearls from Peoria, and the massive The Best of Philip Jose Farmer — or his linked novel series, such as The Other in the Mirror.

The latest offering from Subterranean Press is no exception, collecting two long out-of-print novels and the conclusion to the trilogy, co-written with Christopher Paul Carey, which appears here for the first time:

Gods of Opar: Tales of Lost Khokarsa collects for the first time anywhere Philip José Farmer’s epic Khokarsa cycle, including the never-before-published conclusion to the trilogy, The Song of Kwasin.

In Hadon of Ancient Opar, the young hero Hadon journeys from his outpost city to the heart of the ancient African empire of Khokarsa, battling in the Great Games for the chance to win the king’s crown. But just as Hadon stands upon the precipice of victory, the tyrannical King Minruth usurps the throne and overturns the beneficent, centuries-old rule of the priestesses of Kho. Now Hadon must set out upon a hero’s journey unlike any other—to hunt down a living god and return with his bounty. The saga continues in Flight to Opar, as a decree by the oracle hurtles Hadon upon a perilous quest that will determine the fate of the next twelve millennia. In The Song of Kwasin, Hadon’s herculean cousin returns to Khokarsa after long years of exile in the Wild Lands. But soon Kwasin finds that in order to clear his name he will have to take up the cause against King Minruth himself and stop him before he fulfills his mad quest for immortality high atop the sun god’s bloody ziggurat.

Gods of Opar is 576 pages in hardcover. The trade edition is $45; there’s also a $65 Limited Edition with loads of additional content, including The Song of Kwasin Outline, a Khokarsan Glossary and Calendar, and more. You can find complete details at the Subterranean Press website.