On Mary Sues and spoony bards

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized make-out session.)

The concept of the Mary Sue used to be so simple.

Way back in the days of yore known as “the 1980s”, when the Web was but a gleam in the eye of a few idealists and, as far as those few people who had even heard of the Internet were concerned, it was Usenet and nothing else, the term “Mary Sue” arose in those fledgling fanfic communities that were springing up even then to describe a certain type of character endemic to such stories, one instantly recognizable the instant you saw it, so long as you weren’t the one who wrote it. She was the flawless, brilliantly unique, perfect character who hijacked the story, turned all the other characters into drooling fanboys, and generally acted out the author’s every fantasy.

Then someone decided to start looking for Mary Sues in actual fiction, not based on any other franchise. After all, why shouldn’t the same idea apply to any kind of fiction? It’s not like being in a fanfic is a requirement of being a Mary Sue, is it?

Wellllll, it didn’t work out that way. For one thing, it turns out that a good part of what makes a Mary Sue a Mary Sue is related to being in a fanfic. It’s in how the character completely takes over the story, which implies that there is a story to take over, and it’s in how the character hijacks the other characters into fawning admiration for her. If the situation is that way from the start, is there really any “hijacking” going on?

Take that out of the equation, and you really do rob the Mary Sue of a lot of its identity, and you need to create surrogate criteria for characters that have a similar effect. You also run into another problem: until the advent of webcomics, most original fiction had to go through some sort of barrier to entry, meaning that most writers of such tend to be better than writers of fanfic. In fact, the mere fact that they do create a universe of original characters rather than take a set of characters that’s given to them almost automatically puts them a step ahead of most fanfic writers. I’d argue that there are really only two excuses for writing a fanfic: if you’re saying something about the characters and setting themselves, or, much less defensibly, if creating original characters would only lead to a charge of being a rip-off. Even if such writers do create what might be called Mary Sues, they tend to be a bit better at hiding them.

And then you have characters like Ethan of Ctrl+Alt+Del, so commonly accused of Sue-dom, but why? It seems to be mostly because Lucas and Lilah stick with him through thick and thin, which seems to me a pretty weak justification for a charge as serious as Mary Sue-dom. I could see it if Ethan were presented as consistently in the right, or if his “flaws” were, to use TV Tropes’ phrasing, presented as “endearing”, but pre-miscarriage Ethan’s antics seem to be to often be presented as being in the wrong, and that Ethan isn’t always supposed to be presented as the sympathetic character (and those times when he is implausibly successful often aren’t intended to be taken as seriously as the haters do). That Lucas and Lilah continue to stick with him may say more about them than about Ethan. But, of course, what does it say about them, and about how the whole strip is written?

Suddenly you start having a lot of arguments over what does and doesn’t count as a Mary Sue. Does it just have to be a representative of the author, or does it even need to be that?  How much of it needs to be in the flawlessness, or would a flawless character who has a lot of bad s**t happen to him regardless count? How much of it needs to be in being uber-powerful, or would the planet-juggling Silver Age Superman count? How much of it needs to be in how much goes implausibly right for them, or would MacGyver count – or for that matter, a suite of characters who routinely beat the odds but not any one character? How much of it needs to be in hogging the spotlight, or would Harry Potter count?

Or perhaps the definition is just in being a model of perfection? But that opens a whole ‘nother can of worms, because there are a gazillion models of perfection, and in some instances you’re not going to be able to incorporate all of them into a single character, and besides that clearly isn’t why Ethan elicits the accusation. There seems to be a sense that all of the above play some part in defining what a Mary Sue is, but how much and in what proportion is seemingly impossible to pin down.

And then there’s the question of gender, whether to use terms like “Marty Stu” to describe male Mary Sues, or if the term “Mary Sue” really does imply a gender bias that one is unlikely to admit to. Four years ago Robert A. “Tangents” Howard charged the accusation of Mary Sue-dom of sexism, that many accused characters wouldn’t have been called Sues if they were male (to the extent that he felt “Mary Sue” really meant “halfway competent female protagonist”). I intended to write a response, but no sooner did I start my webcomic reviews than Tangents started the long, slow transition to its current state, and by the time it had reached the point that I would have had anything to link to, I was already transitioning away from webcomics posts.

I get the sense that what Howard had hit on was the fact that we hold men and women to different standards of perfection, and specifically, often seem to hold women as inherently more perfect than men. The image of perfection for women is sweet, all-caring, beautiful, all ponies and sparkles – a lot like the fanfic characters that gave rise to the term. A female character who lives up to those ideals is unrealistically perfect; a male one, too girly (and thus inherently flawed, ergo, not a Mary Sue). On the other hand, the image of male perfection is of a badass who mows down anyone who gets in his way. We don’t call characters who live up to those ideals Mary Sues, we make lists of Chuck Norris Facts about them (and even if they started as parody, I sometimes wonder how serious they’ve become).

It does seem like there is a standard by which a male might be called a Mary Sue (or Marty Stu, or Gary Stu) that might not necessarily apply to a woman, just as the reverse might be true. Besides Ethan (whose unsympathetic portrayals might be better noticed on a woman), the example I would cite would be Rayne Summers of Least I Could Do. Perhaps Rayne’s most defining characteristic is his status as an utter Casanova who sleeps with women like they’re going out of style. If we were to reverse this situation, with a woman sleeping with men left and right, we wouldn’t call her a Mary Sue, we’d call her a slut, maybe even a whore. Which brings me to Elan of Order of the Stick.

Well, actually, I need to talk briefly about the main OOTS cast’s other nominee for Mary Sue-dom, Belkar, he who, before O-Chul’s display of badassery, was OOTS‘ resident Chuck Norris. Despite being an utter sociopath, Belkar doesn’t show much of any other shortcomings in battle (no pun intended), and besides being a complete badass when not Mark of Justice’d, tends to get all the best lines and one-liners, to the extent of being much of the fandom’s favorite character despite his ostensible role in the comic. He might be the model I would point to for what a truly Sue-ish Ethan would be like. Still, it’s quite clear no one is willing to put up with him except insofar as he can be controlled, and his uneasy truce with the rest of the OOTS seems to form a key plot thread and source of development for the comic. Elan, on the other hand…

Look, I’ve run into at least two people who are utterly sick of Elan’s stupid antics and think they monopolize the strip’s humor quotient and take away from the plot. I’m not talking about that, though it is relevant. I wouldn’t say those antics are the funniest things I’ve ever read, but I wasn’t driven into a rage begging Rich to stop with the stupid-Elan jokes either; I even get a kick out of Elan being even more genre-savvy than the rest of the group. In fact, if Elan had more of those antics I might be more forgiving of him as a character.

What’s gotten to me about Elan is that, in the past, he’s gotten not one, not two, but three women swooning over him, despite (ostensibly) having the IQ of a brick. Now obviously, the stick-figure format doesn’t get across features that might change my opinion, and I’m obviously not the best judge anyway, but taking away the goatee from Nale’s “realistic” police sketch doesn’t leave me with an image I’d call “ruggedly handsome”. But near as I can tell, that’s not really his appeal to the ladies (well, aside from Therkla) anyway, judging by how Haley defends him to her father: “Elan is the best man I’ve ever met. Sure, he’s a little dumb sometimes…But he’s… I don’t know. Pure. Honest. Better than I am, that’s for sure. He makes me a better person just by being around, and I like feeling that way.”

As sickening as it might be to hear Elan described like he’s Tim friggin’ Tebow, Haley isn’t alone; the general consensus among forumites is that Elan is the one genuinely good character in the OOTS, if not the whole cast. Think about that for a minute. Like many writers, Rich Burlew tends towards flawed, morally ambiguous characters; rather than simply go for simplistic fantasy archetypes, Rich tends to give his characters complex, contradictory personalities that make them more interesting as characters. But Elan seems to have avoided this stick (no pun intended), instead becoming a paragon for everything good and sweet (though not being above “seduc[ing] female bad guys“). Is this starting to sound a lot like the fanfic characters that gave rise to the term Mary Sue? What if I told you that, aside from his romantic liasons, while Elan gets on Roy’s nerves, literally every other member of the OOTS leapt to his defense when he was kidnapped?

Elan’s saving graces, the traits that save him from being an overly perfect figure, are supposedly his utter uselessness in combat and the aforementioned stupid antics – at least one of which falls under the “endearing” exception. But the former hasn’t been all that relevant since Elan picked up his level in Dashing Swordsman. As for the latter, they’ve become decidedly inconsistent, ever since Rich saw fit to give Elan more “character development” in the fourth book that amounted to removing one of the last things that kept him flawed. Elan spent the fourth book thrust into the position of leading half the team, with V going crazy and Durkon more prone to defer, and went through his own plot arc with his involvement with Therkla that may have put him through the wringer in the short term, but led him to “mature” coming out of it, giving him some experience of the “real” world that dragged him a little ways out of stupidity, only that was one of the few things keeping him interesting. (While I’m on the subject, one of my issues with the fourth book is the way, with the main plot stalled, Elan so stole the spotlight of his half of the OOTS with a plot that ultimately went nowhere that he completely overshadowed the real plot development of that half, V’s descent into madness.) Elan has returned to acting the goof in this book, sometimes, but I wonder if that’s Rich realizing his mistake on some level and trying too hard to overcompensate, to the extent that it now seems out of his present character.

But with all that, what really drove me to write this post is the present update (and my thankfulness that Rich’s recent slow update schedule allows me to write this post on it). I’ll admit, this is one of the more entertaining strips of the book and certainly one of the most entertaining strips of the Linear Guild confrontation thus far, but damn if it doesn’t also underscore how Elan’s being written these days. Because this strip hints that Elan may have just seduced Sabine. Let me repeat that. Elan just seduced a friggin’ succubus. One whose present love interest is his own evil twin who’s out to kill him. I mean, I’m running out of things to say about all of this. What’s next, is Elan going to wrap up the entire plot of the strip all by himself?

I will say that this sort of mapping of traits from an archetype to a particular character is certainly an inexact science – as I indicated above, the whole point is how uncertain the concept of a Mary Sue has gotten – and none of the above has taken away too much from my enjoyment of the strip, or even, at times, Elan’s antics. But it has definitely gotten on my nerves and stuck in my craw for some time. This marks three straight books with a subplot centered on Elan (and the second book is the only one that really lacks it), and this one is going on for nearly a hundred strips and over a year real-time, despite apparently being of tangential relevance to the hunt for the Gates and despite numerous other plot hooks that I would ordinarily think would be resolved in this book. Elan hasn’t gotten to the point of overshadowing Roy as the main character of the OOTS… but this book is making me wonder.

Let the sports television wars begin!

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Over the last few months, the first shots have been fired in a multi-million-dollar war for control over the sports television landscape.

For the past decade, if not the past two decades, ESPN has controlled this ground, at least on the cable side, leveraging its strong portfolio of rights across multiple sports to build the biggest brand in cable television. Sports is one of the few pieces of programming that attracts the most valuable viewers, and ESPN has used it to become the most profitable division of the Walt Disney Company and one of the most popular, well-known, and notorious brands in America, while extending its reach around the world. And ESPN’s dominance has meant that most sports need to play by ESPN’s rules or risk irrelevance.

Now others are eyeing ESPN’s turf. In fact, four of the other five major media companies have at least partially positioned themselves for their own piece of ESPN’s riches. All had some stake in the game before, but all have also attempted to set themselves up to become much more serious at the sports rights game, and ESPN only raised the stakes when it broached a whole new world in what’s possible on cable when it snagged the rights to the BCS. Comcast fired the first salvo by acquiring NBC Universal, expressing its intent to turn NBC Sports into an entity on par with ESPN. Others have made their own moves to keep up, with Fox expressing its intent to bring more sports back to FX and CBS rebranding the CBS College Sports Network to drop the “College”. Billions of dollars are at stake, and the major media companies want a piece of the action.

Playing this game comes at a price, and increased competition will mean increased rights fees, which is very bad news for sports on broadcast television – cable networks collect money from subscriber fees in addition to advertising, which broadcast hasn’t really branched into, “retransmission consent” fees collected by individual stations notwithstanding – and very good news for sports leagues and conferences. Yet it’s very possible they’ll play a significant portion of the game with none of the suitors, instead choosing to play it with themselves. Over the last decade, the league-owned network has become all the rage. All four traditional major professional leagues have their own networks, as well as two college conferences (with a third soon to join them), and while it’s common for such networks to be run or launched by the media companies (NBA TV is run by Turner, for example, and the Big Ten Network is run by Fox), it’s probably more the norm for leagues to keep their networks to themselves, as with the NFL Network.

There are five contenders to the sports programming prizes, each seeking to obtain as many of them as they can, with the ever-present specter that the leagues granting the prizes may choose none of them and keep them to themselves.

As the incumbent ruler of the roost, ESPN remains the best positioned of the bunch, but time will tell if it can keep its advantage. ESPN has just about everything the other contenders could ask for. “The ESPN family of networks” has no equal among the other contenders, and the jokes about “The Ocho” become less funny every day. ESPN boasts not one but two full-time sports networks seen by the vast majority of the country (the only ones of their kind), including what is for most the sports highlight show, plus a broadcast outlet (available in a pinch even if they sometimes seem to want to kill sports there), a college sports network (with rights most competitors would die for), a sports news network (also the only one of its kind), a Spanish-language network, a 3D network (also the only one of its kind, although other networks have produced 3D broadcasts), and just for good measure, a classic-sports network. Throw in a video-streaming service (further advanced than any other), a radio network, a network for mobile devices, heavy investment in international rights, and a virtual monopoly on college-sports syndication, and ESPN is basically a one-stop shop for anything a league could need.

But now Comcast’s merger with NBC Universal has sent the message that they intend to challenge ESPN for the throne. Certainly they seem to be the next-best positioned, being the only other contender with anything resembling the all-sports network ESPN represents, bringing two with the soon-to-be-rebranded Versus and Universal Sports, not to mention the sport-specific Golf Channel (whose brand is already appearing on golf broadcasts on NBC). The merger coupled all of this with a broadcast presence on NBC, and while they don’t have a Spanish-language sport-specific network, they do have a Spanish-language outlet with Telemundo and mun2. Comcast also has something ESPN doesn’t: a collection of regional sports networks, which builds a strong brand for them in local markets. They also benefit from synergy with their cable operations, something no other contender can boast.

But Versus still has a long way to go before they have the quality of sports contracts ESPN has, NBCSports.com is well behind the other contenders online, NBC itself continues to struggle as a broadcast network, the closest thing they have to a college-sports network is the mtn., and the recent departure of Dick Ebersol cripples Comcast’s ability to pick up strong sports rights without one of the most respected names in sports broadcasting.

Potentially the wild card in this battle is Fox, the only other contender with a strong presence on both broadcast and cable. Fox is also the only other contender with its own collection of regional sports networks, which remains a bigger brand than Comcast’s, as well as FX, Speed, Fox Soccer Channel, the Big Ten Network, and Fox College Sports, all of which Fox has taken steps to unify under the Fox Sports brand as of late. Fox doesn’t have a sport-specific network other than their past efforts to make one out of FSN, but they do match ESPN note-for-note in various areas that other competitors don’t: a sports-specific Spanish-language network, a nightly highlights show on FSN, a radio network (which, unlike ESPN Radio, lacks any rights and might not be pursuing any), and being ESPN’s main competitor for international rights. All this makes Fox almost as well-positioned to challenge ESPN as Comcast is.

Turner is the next-best positioned; in fact, with NASCAR, MLB, NCAA Tournament, and the crown jewel, NBA rights, Turner has the best existing presence on cable of any contender except ESPN, and that has led to the development of some of the better sports streaming capabilities. Already stocked with sports on TBS and TNT, Turner’s taking of a share of the NCAA Tournament led to an expansion of sports onto truTV, and that appears to have gotten the idea into their minds of adding more sports onto that network; they were reportedly considering putting the NHL on that network. But Turner’s big Achilles heel is its lack of any sort of broadcast presence; I doubt the CW, which parent company Time-Warner is a partner in, will ever find sports to be in line with its target audience. (Which is too bad, because sports would be the best way for the CW to truly become a fifth major broadcast network.)

The remaining broadcast network is CBS, but CBS doesn’t have much other than its own broadcast network. They may be looking to change that: CBS took what was once ESPNU’s truest competitor, the CBS College Sports network, and dropped the “College” from its name, making it simply CBS Sports Network. But CBS Sports still has nowhere near the distribution of even Versus or ESPNU, and it’s doubtful that CBS would be able to snare any truly valuable rights for the network. CBS also doesn’t have much of anything else either; they don’t even hold a stake in the Westwood One radio network anymore.

But while CBS brings a strong broadcast presence (at this point, maybe the strongest broadcast brand) but has no presence on cable, Turner has one of the strongest presences on cable, but nothing on broadcast. It’s no surprise that the two companies, already partners on the CW, make natural partners for sports as well, each complementing the other with their strengths, as was demonstrated most readily when they joined forces to cover the NCAA Tournament. For big events that require both a broadcast and a cable presence, the combined forces of CBS and Turner can present a formidable force where neither would even be a contender individually.

These contenders have already started facing off over some significant sports rights, and the battles have already taken on some interesting dimensions, with ESPN picking up surprisingly few wins. Fox fired the first salvo when it picked up cable rights to the Big 12, putting games on FSN and FX for the next 13 years. Things got interesting when ESPN and Fox tag-teamed on rights to the Pac-12, apparently in part to keep Comcast from establishing a foothold in the market. This belatedly gives Fox the beachhead they were seeking in college sports during their time controlling the BCS contract. Comcast then took control by renewing NBC’s and Versus’ existing NHL rights.

However, the big prize was the much-delayed race between Fox, ESPN and Comcast for the rights to the Olympic games, America’s second-most important property. Despite conventional wisdom holding that the loss of Ebersol would hurt Comcast most in Olympic negotiations, on Tuesday NBC kept control over the Olympics through 2020 by paying nearly twice as much as the competitors. The outcome was a bit of a surprise, both that ESPN didn’t pay more after blowing a lot of smoke about making a play for the Games, and that NBC didn’t pay less, especially after losing substantial sums on the most recent contract, speculated to be among the reasons for Ebersol’s departure (in the end, this round wound up being a replay of the last, Ebersol-led bid), and blowing a lot of smoke about fiscal responsibility.

But Comcast apparently decided that a four-Games bid would ultimately cost less for them, and hopes to make more money in part by spreading the wealth to its cable networks, including Versus. However, unlike a lot of “professional” analysts I’ve read, I’m not convinced a two-week event every two years is going to give Versus the push to achieve ESPN-like legitimacy or carriage fees. NBC did indicate a commitment to showing more events live, including all of them by Rio 2016, but it’s possible many of them will only be available online. The biggest downside? ESPN continues to be shut out of the two events that would most take advantage of their family of networks, the NCAA Tournament and the Olympics. The former in particular would have been a great fit given ESPN’s existing commitment to college basketball.

Where will the next battles be? There will certainly be some interest in the Big East, but the next truly big showdown will be over Major League Baseball, whose current contract ends in 2013. That should be as entertaining and gripping as the battles we’ve already seen – they all should. And I’ll be getting the popcorn ready to keep an eye on all of them.

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The most pivotal week in the history of webcomics

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I’m slowly working my way back to doing regular webcomic reviews – look for some down the pike, starting with a review of Comixtalk, once I finish my studies for the quarter – and not a moment too soon. We’re in a heady period for webcomics, a turning point in their development. This has been an eventful week.

First was “Dating-Guy-gate”, when Least I Could Do‘s Ryan Sohmer accused Canadian network Teletoon of ripping off his concept for another series. The facts of the matter are very complicated and the whole thing has a good chance of going to court, but the upshot of the whole affair was a Kickstarter effort to film a LICD pilot (I’m incredulous that Randy Milholland had to set it up for him because Kickstarter is limited to Americans for some reason), which proved wildly successful. This could be a momentous moment for webcomics, and Sohmer is in a uniquely qualified position to lead the charge. While I have a feeling that, once I finally get around to reviewing it, I will absolutely loathe LICD for its alleged sexism and allegedly Mary-Sue-ish main character, there are few webcomics I can think of that are better suited for translation to television, or any other medium.

Most other gag-a-day webcomics are either too decentralized to support even the sort of plot for a 30-minute show (Penny Arcade, xkcd), or would have trouble appealing to even a broad enough audience for a fairly focused cable network, especially a problem with video game comics (as with previous efforts of Sohmer’s Blind Ferret Entertainment, PVP and Ctrl+Alt+Del). Least I Could Do is one of the few popular gag-a-day webcomics with broad enough subject matter to actually attract the interest of TV networks. In fact, I don’t know how much Sohmer would be considering American outfits, but I could easily see LICD fitting right in alongside the animated comedies on Fox’s Sunday night lineup – on an American broadcast network, alongside such titans as The Simpsons and Family Guy. If LICD could pull that off, it would become, by far, the most famous webcomic in the world overnight.

(Translating a story webcomic to the big screen poses similar challenges. Most story webcomics, especially former gag comics that underwent Cerebus syndrome, have an odd mix of humor and seriousness that would be difficult to market or portray on the big screen. Even a comic as story-focused as Order of the Stick would be difficult to translate, but even Girl Genius has an odd enough balance to give Hollywood execs pause. The equivalent to LICD in the story webcomic community, from the perspective of how easy it would be to translate, would probably be Gunnerkrigg Court – a story that has drawn more than a few comparisons to Harry Potter. But as we’ll see, there is another way to turn a webcomic into a movie…)

Next came DC’s announcement of digital day-and-date distribution for its revamped universe, which has led more than a few retailers to cry doom. As well they should; DC makes up about a third of the comic book market and is probably responsible for much more than that coming through their doors. That many are calling this move inevitable does not make it any less of a stake in the heart of the direct market, or any less one of the bigger ones. We’re likely to see many more would-be comic book creators make the move to graphic novels and webcomics.

Finally came what could be the biggest news of all: One of Penny Arcade‘s old spinoff concepts has been optioned by Paramount to be made into a feature film. Forget a show that could have languished in obscurity on a Canadian cable channel: this could see millions of Americans flock to movie theatres and make Gabe and Tycho millions of dollars, not to mention (as with the LICD animated series) pave the path for more webcomics to see the silver screen.

And that’s before we get to the detente between print cartoonists and webcartoonists at this year’s National Cartoonist Society Reuben awards.

These are baby steps: even if LICD gets made into a series it could be on some obscure or Canadian-only channel, this isn’t Penny Arcade itself but an idea they threw out there once, and both are far, far away from actually being made. But I get the sense that this is a turning point, a milestone week, in the history of webcomics. If even one of these projects get made it gives webcomics by far their broadest exposure they have ever had, and between that and DC’s colonization of the digital market could lead to a huge influx of new people into webcomics. We may look back on this past week as the one that webcomics started to bloom, started to move out of their extended adolescence and into the full-blown adulthood (or, if you’re more like Bengo, out of childhood and into adolescence) that would confer upon it the respect and corpus of literature due any other medium.

What DC Comics’ revamp really means

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This may be a two-part post, though the second part probably won’t be under the “webcomics” heading. If you’re not familiar with comics history, get a crash course before continuing with Part II of “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis”.

This September, DC will effectively reboot its entire universe (well, not really – more on that in a bit), launching 52 issues to, presumably, replace their existing line of titles with a more “modern” DC Universe. DC previously rebooted its continuity in 1985-6’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, and performed “soft reboots” (performing various retcons without wholesale junking what came before) on roughly 10-year intervals thereafter, in 1994’s Zero Hour and 2005-6’s Infinite Crisis. (The in-story justification for this reboot appears to be the ongoing Flashpoint event.) Perhaps more importantly for the general comics industry, they will also release their comics through digital platforms on the same day they come out in comic book stores.

Back in 2009 in my “Webcomics’ Identity Crisis” series, I predicted that eventually, the old monthly comic format would fade away, as webcomics and graphic novels replaced newspaper comic strips and monthly comic books. Noting that Diamond had recently induced a contraction of the market and that further contraction to exclude almost all companies other than Marvel and DC was looking very possible, I proclaimed that the direct market existed solely for the purposes of DC and Marvel, and suggested that most of the smaller comic creators would abandon the direct market in favor of graphic novels in bookstores and webcomics. That DC itself is reinventing the company and embracing the web as a parallel revenue stream is a sign even they may be bailing, or preparing to bail, on the direct market. Presumably, they figure that even more than themselves, the direct market really exists primarily to serve Marvel and Marvel alone, who has had a substantial lead over DC for virtually the entire time since the 1960s.

Or at least, it would… if they weren’t keeping the existing monthly comic paradigm.

The monthly 22-page comic is a relic of the days when comics were published on newsstands, when they were magazines that happened to have comics in them. As the idealists of the time who started futzing around with the concept of the “graphic novel” keenly realized, it became obsolete with the rise of the direct market in the 1970s; Marvel and DC continued publishing them mostly out of inertia, while smaller publishers that took advantage of the direct market published monthly comics because Marvel and DC did (and because they were cheaper and, for a time, less exotic than graphic novels). The only reason the comic book industry accepts that comics should be published in 22-page chunks every month is that that’s the way it’s always been done. If the direct market perishes, it won’t continue to be the way it’s done – even when bookstores stock monthly comics, it’s always segregated from their other magazines on spinner racks, reducing the point of pretending to be magazines.

By keeping one foot in the direct market, DC is shutting themselves out of the creative benefits of a move to digital distribution, at an opportune time to do so, coinciding with the reinvention of their universe. By committing to the monthly 22-page comic format, DC has shut themselves out of using the infinite canvas, or even adopting the webcomic model. Perhaps DC is understandably wary of their ability to make money out of the web alone, or whether their existing audience would follow them. But what’s even more baffling than that DC would go the digital route but not take advantage of its possibilities, is that they aren’t taking advantage of this reinvention to move towards the other comic distribution mechanism of the future, the graphic novel model.

Comic books have come a long way from the Silver Age when an entire story could be told in one issue, often leaving room for one or two more stories besides; “decompression” has become the norm, with most stories taking 4-8 issues to complete, and with the greater depth that most comics creators have started looking for, 22 pages has started looking increasingly cramped for an entire story with beginning, middle, and end. This has only furthered the obsolescence of the 22-page monthly comic, so DC could go far by removing the 22-page constraint from their writers and allow them to go as hog-wild as they wish on self-contained stories released less frequently (perhaps two or three times a year) in graphic novel form. (Xaviar Xerexes wonders at the end of this post whether DC is missing an opportunity by not making these comics for kids again, which at least would justify the length as well as the inherent silliness of the whole concept of superheroes. DC’s more “fantastic” heroes haven’t meshed well with the serious stories told with them.)

That DC isn’t doing any of this makes me wonder what the point of this revamp is – it’s worth noting that in 2009, DC Comics was restructured into DC Entertainment to strengthen the connection between comics and other media, making me wonder if the ultimate impetus for this move is to create new properties for media exploitation and reinvent existing properties to be more exploitable. It’s even more baffling that they would keep a foot in the direct market when no one is going to walk into a comic book store unless they’re already a fan of superhero comic books, and even distributing over digital channels isn’t going to be anywhere near as effective at drawing in new “readers” as said exploitation in other media, as Marvel is doing with its line of movies, which are slowly building towards an eventual Avengers movie. Yet by completely relaunching its existing universe, DC risks alienating their existing direct market audience and throwing out one of their biggest assets – as exemplified in the likely end of four or five titles that can claim their legacy and numbering back to the Golden Age.

While continuity can be a barrier to entry to a story, it can also be a tremendous asset, and DC has leveraged its continuity like no other, creating a sense of legacy around their characters. Several characters that were teenagers in the Silver Age have grown into their own identities as adult heroes, with Wally West, the former Kid Flash, even taking his mentor’s mantle as the Flash when his mentor died during Crisis on Infinite Earths. The most famous of these might be Dick Grayson, the former Robin, taking the identity of Nightwing (immortalized on screen during the later run of the 90s Batman animated series) and, since his own mentor’s death a couple years ago, himself taking the mantle of Batman.

However, DC’s approach to continuity and the passage of time has been rather half-assed (how long has present Robin Tim Drake been in high school again? With all these former teenage sidekicks taking adult identities as early as the 80s, shouldn’t the “original generation” of heroes be in their 40s by now?) – they have an interest in keeping the “iconic” versions of their characters, and although the monthly pace of comic books allows much less time to take place than the actual time between issues, the passage of time can’t be held off indefinitely, and for various reasons DC has frittered away a lot of that time.

The reasons for such conservativism are arguably outweighed by the story possibilities it holds back – of the only three characters for whom it really matters all that much (of their next three iconic franchises, two have had at least three different people hold each of their mantles), two, Superman and Wonder Woman, have been portrayed as effectively immortal (although admittedly Lois Lane is another matter), and Batman has, as mentioned, already been killed off and replaced (a move, note, that has been largely critically acclaimed by superhero comic fans, many of them clamoring for Bruce to never come back, despite the seeming inevitability of returns from the dead in comics). But if DC is understandably committed to the iconic versions of their characters, it seems a reasonable compromise is to start a brand-new universe aimed at new readers alongside the existing DC universe, which is then allowed to grow and change dynamically.

Marvel went in this direction with the 2000 launch of the so-called “Ultimate” universe – while wildly successful, there’s evidence a lot of its fans came from existing comics fandom, and the Ultimate universe quickly became as continuity-choked as the mainstream Marvel universe. Still, what’s to stop DC from launching their own “Digital” universe? In fact, DC’s four Golden Age-dated titles are split two apiece between Superman and Batman, and since the end of multiple stories in a single issue DC has tried valiantly to justify the existence of two separate titles. What’s to stop them from putting the “new” Superman in Superman and the existing Superman in Action Comics, or the “new” Batman in Detective Comics and the existing Batman in Batman, and splitting the rest of their line between their universes?

DC has attempted to clarify that this is “not a reboot“, implying that this new status quo will be overlaid on top of the existing DC universe, but they’ve also released material suggesting even the most iconic characters will be revised, made younger, and given new costumes, leading me to ask: why half-ass it? If you’re going to go this far to sweep aside the shackles of continuity, why not cut them off entirely? I personally will watch at least the start of this new initiative with interest, to see what new twists DC puts on their old characters as well as to watch this revolution unfold, and I intend to devote a future post to my own ideas for reinventing DC’s stable, but the way DC is going about all of this, I can’t help but think it’ll bite them in the ass.

The Day of Reckoning Revisited

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Due to space constraints, I barely scratched the surface of how far into the gutters the political discourse remains in my first Understanding the News post last week. Here are the titles of a few recent sample threads on the Democratic Underground site: “Teabaggers: Tools of Bin Laden?” “FUCK YOU CONDI RICE.” “An Open Letter to Delusional Rightwing Folks.” Not to be outdone, here are a few excerpts from posters on the right-wing forum Free Republic: “These presstitutes make me sick!” “‘I had no hesitation about taking a human life’… Neither did Stalin. You can’t have a moral dilemma when you have no sense of morality.” “We all know his pappy is a commie, his momnie [sic] is a comie [sic] and that he aint a po azz black boy down fo de struggle. He was raised a privileged white communist punk by his rich ass grandparents.”

I edited these out of my original post fairly early on (and in fact I’m missing even more such comments as a result of my quick hatcheting) because anyone like me can cherrypick the worst comments from public forums where anyone can post like DU and Free Republic, but as I hinted at in my original post when I talked about how partisan views can be self-reinforcing, extreme viewpoints have a tendency to go unchallenged, and hence increasingly legitimized, on partisan forums. For one thing, extreme viewpoints tend to be more vocal about it. This isn’t just a tendency inherent in the positions themselves (the status quo is more of an outrage the further your own position is from it). Consider a hypothetical Democratic message board, with posts from various parts of the spectrum represented. Some posts may be very moderate, others may be all-out Marxist, but they all share one thing in common: assuming there are no trolls, they are probably all in disagreement with the Republicans. Indeed, to feel strongly enough to sign up for an explicitly Democratic message board, one is probably not terribly moderate.

That means there are certain micro-level issues that all of the board’s members are in agreement on. Whenever there is a thread on one of these micro-level issues, the extreme Marxists and the relative moderates will have scarcely any difference between them, in theory. But on issues that might produce more controversy, the moderates are less likely to speak up, because they might be construed as agreeing with the enemy. (In my experience, individual posters tend to have less individual identity on the most popular political message boards.) On the other hand, those that hold relatively extreme positions just on the fringes of what is considered acceptable are allowed to speak freely. Their positions are legitimized, allowing new frontiers to be opened and eventually closing off more moderate positions as the social controls against dissent take effect.

Despite the seeming demise of any principles with which to define and control society – from the naked greed of large corporations to the demands for rights coming from any corner large and loud enough to be heard – the tendency to make such rules, and form societal associations organized around these rules, is endemic. We find it anywhere you look in society, wherever cliques or subcultures are found, and one ignores or underestimates this basic tendency of human nature at their peril. Right now such tendencies have put us on the brink of the abyss, and while I’m still not certain what needs to happen, something definitely needs to happen. Congress will only find the middle ground when America as a whole will, so let’s put together each side’s solutions and the problems with each, and find a way to solve those problems, reason out why one solution is ultimately better than the other, find a solution that incorporates the best of both sides, or at least come to an understanding of each position.

In addition to everything I suggested in my original post, this will require a voice for moderate voices that can recognize the merits of each side and point out their flaws, and hopefully suggest synthesized solutions. The aim is not so much to convince either side so much as to provide a voice for the silent majority in the middle. But for the same reasons mentioned before, moderates tend not to care as much about politics, at least if they’re prone to seek compromise, because they tend not to have very solid views (given their propensity to waver between them) and tend to be okay with whatever comes out, if they even pay attention to politics given how little they care about them. And once again, they’re not likely to escape charges of bias, and may even show some real bias if they become increasingly convinced one side is superior to the other. The entrenchment of our political positions works to keep them from leaving the trenches, and I don’t know how to break the cycle.

I will say that our present system of electing our government on a geographical basis, though it appears reasonable at first glance, does not encourage healing the divide or giving a voice to moderates. Political positions have always been partly geographically determined, whether it was the north being against slavery and the south being for it before the Civil War, or urban areas being more Democratic and rural areas more Republican now. The result is that, even without much gerrymandering, districts have a tendency to become “safe” for one party or the other, which does not encourage and, with our increasing partisan divide, may even discourage the election of moderates. This makes it easier for Congress to reflect the partisan divide in the rest of the country; moderates do get elected, but they do not tend to have much of a voice, especially since their districts may be more vulnerable, and they risk being demonized on the national level among their nominal peers, as Joe Lieberman and Arlen Specter know well; better to give the leadership positions to those more likely to stay in Congress longer. (I don’t believe changing this necessarily requires amending the Constitution, which to my knowledge only governs the division of representation among the states, not that those representatives need to be elected by geographic sub-divisions.)

The geographical system of electing our Congressmen is not the only aspect of our electoral system that furthers the divide. Our “first-past-the-post” plurality system of voting discourages the formation of more than two parties, as should be obvious to anyone who sat through the effect of Ralph Nader on the 2000 presidential election; any viable third party needs to be able to attract exactly as many people from each side. With only two parties, polarization is all too easy; with at least three, one party can synthesize the best ideas of the other two and come up with some ideas of their own that might be better than that suggested by either side. There are ways to address both problems, but I’ll save them for future posts because they’ll take quite a bit of explaining.

Understanding the News: Ignoring the Day of Reckoning

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Note: As this was heavily edited down from a post three times the size, I’ll issue another post greatly expanding on this one.

On January 8, 2011, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner shot US Representative Gabrielle Giffords in the head during a meeting she was holding with constituents near Tucson, Arizona. Although Loughner was a mentally disturbed man who held extreme views on all sides of the political spectrum and paid more attention to conspiracy theories than anything that could be called “news”, the shooting came as a shock to a country deeply divided between left and right. Attention turned to a map made by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin in the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections showing candidates in vulnerable districts targeted by crosshairs.

People on both sides called for bipartisanship, civility, and toning down the political discourse, and later that month at the State of the Union Address, congressmen of both houses sat in the chamber regardless of political affiliation, breaking with tradition. Even Keith Olbermann, who arguably was one of the standardbearers of the division of the political discourse on the left, apologized for anything he may have ever said that might have been construed as supporting violence. Later that month, Olbermann’s MSNBC show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, was abruptly cancelled.

Did anything result from all the calls for bipartisanship? Not really. Other than Olbermann, the same figures are the most public representatives of left and right, and I see no evidence any of them have changed their MO. Radio host Laura Ingraham recently expressly rejected another call for unity from President Obama, and another radio host, Mike Malloy, suggested that the Navy SEAL team that took out Osama bin Laden should have taken out George W. Bush instead. And I found these incidents from, respectively, Media Matters for America, which had a column calling Obama’s haters “deranged“, and Newsbusters, which called one recent claim of radio host Randi Rhodes “lunacy“. Even Keith Olbermann will restart Countdown on Current TV next month – and it’s worth noting that the breakup with MSNBC may have been in the works ever since Olbermann was suspended the previous November for donating to Democratic congressional candidates.

In my view, the left seemed more self-aware about their sins than the right. While Olbermann fell on his sword, no comparable conservative figure shared the same fate that I know of (with Glenn Beck’s Fox News program only being cancelled in April). While Olbermann apologized for any perceived sins, Palin – from whom one could have drawn a more direct line to the shootings in Tucson – refused to take any responsibility and instead attacked the media for allegedly jumping to blame the right for the attacks. In the end, the left’s reluctance to play the same game as the right only came out as a win for the right – one side pulls the conversation as far right as they want, but the other side is too reluctant to do likewise. I’d like to think it wouldn’t take a conservative figure being shot to shock the right out of their complacency, but I’m not sure if even that would work. But if an assassination attempt can’t bring “red America” and “blue America” together, what can?

Tribalism is a natural result of the human experience. We like to think that we’ve risen above tribalism, but we merely live in bigger tribes today, and smaller sub-tribes among them. One of the most important aspects of any group of people are the moral precepts and core beliefs holding the tribe together. These core principles are at the heart of the tribe’s identity; they allow its members to identify other members of the tribe, beyond those they personally know, and they serve a more practical purpose in keeping the tribe together by creating social controls against those who undermine the rest of the tribe. These controls, and the principles themselves, can have nasty consequences. Anyone who disagrees with a group’s core principles will not remain a member of that group for long.

So it is that our two great political persuasions have purged themselves of heretics and seek complete purity. The other side is pure evil; it is the enemy; to even consider it for a moment is to introduce an impurity. When these core beliefs are held in unanimity, they can be self-reinforcing, and as such they are often deeply held, thought to be self-evident, so now the enemy becomes stupid too, if not outright liars; after all, aren’t our positions so obviously right? At this point, they have become fundamentally religious beliefs, so deeply held that those who hold them cannot make any decisions, cannot even function, if they find themselves forced to throw them out.

In the case of our two great political persuasions, it is thought that the course of action most in accordance with these core beliefs is always in the best interests of America, in every situation and on every issue, regardless of whether or not it contradicts other beliefs they claim to be just as core; to claim otherwise is an absurdity, a heresy. Regardless of what they may claim their principles to be, both parties will sacrifice their principles to support their true clientele. Republicans will always seek the best result for corporations, while I suspect there is some truth to the Republican cariacture of Democrats as not-so-closet socialists.

To make matters worse, the media – Fox News, MSNBC, and major radio companies such as Clear Channel, but all the media to some extent – have gleefully exploited and furthered the political divide. By providing mass outlets for those who would drive each party further into the fringes, they further legitimize such extreme positions and in fact make the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann instantly mainstream. That it is eminently understandable (outrageous positions attract attention and ratings) does not make it any less shameful.

The media are responsible for the divide, and they have a responsibility to put that divide back together. In previous posts I’ve mentioned my frustration with CNN for trying to stand in the middle rather than on both edges, and specifically that letting Jon Stewart shame them into cancelling Crossfire was a mistake. But while that’s still important, I now suspect it’s doomed to failure without more sweeping changes, because the divide is now being driven by forces outside the media, and there’s probably no convincing Fox News to stop furthering the divide.

I don’t know anymore how to really begin healing the divide, or even stopping its growth. It will take a humanization of the enemy – a realization that there are real people who are persuaded by the other side, and they aren’t all misled or delusional – a recognition that we are all Americans who have to live with the people and ideas of the other side; a recognition that politics is not some sort of zero-sum game where the only goal is to “win” but something with real consequences; a sober assessment of our values, what they mean, why they’re desirable, and when they can be too much of a good thing; and above all, it will require a recognition that the partisan gridlock now afflicting Congress – a natural reflection, and microcosm, of the division of the country – is preventing us from moving forward.

I’m not sure if either side really wants to do any of this, and I’m not sure how to get them to – our political persuasions are so entrenched it seems impossible to pull them out of the trenches. But something needs to be done… or else I fear the shots that were fired near Tucson will prove to be the first shots of a new civil war.

Understanding the News: Introduction

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I have long considered myself a bit of a philosopher; in fact, for most if not all of Da Blog’s existence, philosophy was my main plan for my future, despite misgivings, hopes for Da Blog itself, and dabbling in other areas. However, I am not a philosophy major in college, because I find what is currently called “philosophy” to be too esoteric and ivory-tower, and overly focused on irrelevant and purely hypothetical questions.

Philosophy is not merely concerned with such esoteric speculations. I consider philosophy to be of the greatest importance for unpacking the critical questions of human nature. Philosophy has long been concerned with building a framework with which to understand human behavior. The conclusions reached have not always been entirely accurate – in particular often denigrating or denying the social aspect of human life – but it has been a common and constant theme in philosophy since at least the days of Plato’s Republic.

That philosophy has largely abandoned this ground, and made itself irrelevant and laughable to the extent that it has stayed, is quite unfortunate, because in my view, there is no question more important. For all that has been said about the wonder of the universe, the promise of technology, the hunt for the Higgs boson, and all the other myriad triumphs of the physical sciences, it is the simple question of human nature that has had and will have the biggest impact on the course of history, because it is, ultimately, humanity that sets that course.

Why are politicians so corrupt? Why are corporations so ruthlessly greedy? How come we can’t feed everyone? How come we aren’t doing anything about global warming? Why do wars happen? Where does religion come from? Where does evil come from? And most importantly, how can we fix all of the above?* The answers to these questions, and many more besides, are rooted in an understanding of how humans actually work and behave, and why. They are the most important questions for our modern world, not questions of the physical sciences or metaphysics.

(*Obviously, this question assumes that religion is something to be fixed, which you may disagree with.)

I’m currently taking a sociology class that has an assignment to write blog posts connecting current events to the numerous social theories developed over the years about the modern world. It’s a project that quite frankly, I should have started early last month, but I haven’t yet shaken my procrastination issues; I’ll be releasing two posts a week to compensate. (After my numerous attempts to compensate for the lack of an Internet connection at home were a minor theme of Da Blog for the first four years of its existence, someone from Comcast convinced my mom to finally get an Internet connection at the worst possible time, when my inability to complete even my modest class schedule is putting a severe damper on my finances.) However, I may not stop when I’ve completed the obligations of the assignment; I may continue the project indefinitely into the future, as a regular feature on Da Blog. In fact, this project may well be the start of something that becomes the most important part of MorganWick.com in the future.

As a storage place for the new project as well as a way to organize all the posts related to it in one place, I’ll be introducing a new category to Da Blog, “Understanding the News”. The category will start out a subcategory to “My Comments on the News”, but I may move it to the “Philosophy” category if I feel the need to (the fact that this very post isn’t a good fit to “My Comments on the News” may be a sign I may need to move it). It’s not the best of names, but I hope it gets across the notion that this project is about finding a better understanding of why the world is the way it is, and the forces behind everything that happens in the world that might not be obvious.

AND WHY IS HIS MOUTH MOVING NOW???

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(From The Order Of The Stick. Click for full-sized protected speech.)

OOTS fans are known (at least among their own kind) for how speculation-happy they are, so it’s a rare treat when Rich manages to pull a twist that catches everyone off-guard.

Simply put, no one expected Zz’dtri to come back after Vaarsuvius called him out for being a Drizzt clone. It wasn’t exactly death, but considering how easy that is to fix in this world, getting taken away by copyright lawyers may well have been a bigger guarantee he’d never come back.

This, of course, raises a horde of questions, not least of them concerning Zz’dtri’s chronology during the intervening time, how recently he’s shacked back up with Nale, and other such questions. One rather intriguing avenue it opens up was pointed out by a forum member who matched the aura on the mysterious scrying eye with Zz’dtri’s.

It also shows just how much Rich’s art has changed over the years. Compare the detailing on Zz’dtri’s robe and cape in this strip with that in his last appearance. Although there have been a few times when art changes have been sizable enough to be pointed out, they haven’t been anywhere near as jarring as we see with a character that hasn’t been seen in over 700 strips.

(Although that doesn’t quite apply to the new hairstyle, which I’m not sure if I’ll ever get used to…)

Rich Burlew will NOT be upstaged by some random Australian guy!

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(From The Order of the Stick. Click for full-sized champion.)

Dammit, Rich, stop confirming wild forum theories, you just encourage more and wilder theories.

As with “the white-haired guy in prison is really Ian“, I’d dismissed the theories proposing that the “champion” Roy had to face in the arena was actually Thog – half the time I had thought they were actually joking. But actually going this route raises some interesting questions.

Don’t get me wrong, I had every expectation the Linear Guild would show up in this arc at some point – I just wasn’t sure how. The only way I could think of seemed too contrived, as though they’d arrive like a deus ex machina out of nowhere at a random point. Now, however, they’re present in the minds of the OOTS before they’re present physically. Simply put, this was not supposed to happen.

Although the Guild escaped in the middle of the Battle of Azure City, no one except themselves (and their secret allies) knew of it. Elan even told the Empress of Blood’s court that Nale was dead. Now, if Thog is not only alive, but just a few feet in front of them, it stands to reason that Nale and Sabine survived the destruction of Azure City’s castle as well, and that should get the minds of the Order members spinning.

One of the first things they’ll do is ask a lot of questions of Tarquin. Thog was already part of the Guild when Nale fought his father, and if any OOTS member got a good enough look at the Wanted poster that got them in this mess, they’d know that. That means Tarquin has had a known associate of Nale’s in his possession for, by the forumites’ calculations, 9 months. How aware was he of that? Is there a particular reason Tarquin has kept him alive so long? Does he know whether Nale or Sabine are around as well? Did Elan convince him that Nale wasn’t with Thog anymore, or did his claim that Nale was dead only make Tarquin more suspicious?

In any event, once it turns out that Nale is, in fact, alive, something tells me the OOTS will have some hell to pay…

One problem with the multi-comic setup: The only major development since my last post has been Fireballs explaining the situation with Me, who then got recruited by the Halley-Newton group. Oh, and Shakespeare got involved.

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(From Irregular Webcomic! Click for full-sized potato salad.)

Few webcomics have the balls to spring a twist so huge on their audience it forces them to reassess everything they’ve been through before.

So give some credit to Irregular Webcomic! and its Cliffhangers theme, which used the occasion of its 3000th comic to drop an absolute bombshell on its audience: Erwin, the bumbling Nazi straight man to Haken’s Col. Klink-esque military commander, has been working for the other side the whole time.

I’ll admit, the reveal didn’t have the impact for me it probably should have at first, because the source was Ginny (also now revealed to be his wife), who hasn’t exactly come across as trustworthy in the past. But this comic, which features a past Erwin springing from jail and explaining his backstory to the 80s Mythbusters, suggests that at the very least it should be taken seriously at the moment (you never can tell with Nazis), which works out to be a surprisingly interesting, if relatively obvious, twist on the old trope of the bumbling recurring villains. I imagine either comic probably caused a good chunk of IWC readers to look back at all of Erwin’s previous appearances looking for clues and contradictions – and it’s worth noting that his blurb on the cast page says that he “restricts his individual thoughts to making scathing social commentaries on Nazi policies”. And that Morgan-Mar has teased an Erwin/Ginny relationship before.

Well played, Mr. Morgan-Mar (even if he won’t see this until next month). Well played.