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Thursday, April 13, 2006
Three things
Matt Zoller Seitz’s Sopranos blogging is essential reading but his take on Lost based on last week’s show really impressed me (I’m always a week behind on the show, so this post might read funny if you’ve already scene last night’s installment). He writes:
But the longer I watch this series, the more convinced I am that the action-adventure elements -- the big setpieces, the plot revelations, hell, the whole master narrative -- are its least interesting and maybe least durable aspects. What hooks me is the "Twilight Zone" sci-fi-as-morality-play vibe, the sense that this island is not exactly real and not exactly a fantasy or dream, but is instead a dramatic tabula rasa for the characters, a place where metaphors become tangible, real enough to see and touch and even converse with; basically an immense psychic theater-in-the-round.
Exactly. I was waiting for someone to put into words the appeal of the show for me, especially when I was constantly reading viewers of the show gripe about an “aimless plot” and how weak the ending will surely be. Lost isn’t a novel with a set number of pages or a film with an exact running time. With this new era of television, where dramas like Lost but also The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood prove to be genuinely intelligent and engaging works, we must re-adjust how we evaluate genre entertainment now that some of the best of it is being produced for a less finite medium. Lost may last three seasons or it might last eleven. We can’t have our expectations be based around the build up to a twist ending with all the events leading up to it in a tight structure.
Telling stories in television allow writers and producers to be much freer with the pace of the story and how wide-ranging they choose it to be. We can concentrate on many different characters and plot elements that would make a novel or film seem too top-heavy. That’s why I find it exciting when revelations and character development on Lost open up more questions than they provide answers. Otherwise we would have one interpretation of what the island and all the tests the characters go though to be. I prefer to think of the show as being about a place in-between life and death where characters decide what kind of people they will truly be, either individualists who look out for themselves or collectivist who depend on the cooperation and input of others to build towards a better life for everyone (that’s an oversimplification, for one it is never just one or the other, but for the purposes of this argument I hope it will do). Is that what the island actually is? I don’t know and don’t much care. I’m more interested in getting the characters into situations where their philosophies butt heads with each other, as Locke (brilliant choice for a name!) and Jack do every week, or where their idea of reality is challenged, as was Hurley’s last week. I find that far more satisfying than trying to decode the symbols that appeared after the counter’s countdown or trying to figure out what those infamous series of numbers can mean.
All that being said I do hope that the mysterious “him” that the fake Henry Gale spoke about is to be played by Kyle MacLachlan.
At this point, between the sales of their books and the press coverage they receive, it is fair to say that Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman are as known and as powerful as most of the well known authors writing prose today. There is one name that is absent from that list, a writer whose work I find more satisfying than all three of those men. The name is Grant Morrison. You and I are very familiar with his work. You might even agree with me that his work doesn’t suffer from the cold calculations of Moore’s, the un-ironic worship of the macho ideal in Miller’s or the affectations of Gaiman’s. But do the readers of the New York Times Book Review know? Do the people stocking the shelves of Barnes & Nobles know? I don’t think so.
I believe that the main problem is that Morrison doesn’t have that one book that, presented in a nice hardcover edition and with hosannas galore printed on the back cover, can define his whole career. Morrison chooses to write long series like The Invisibles or Doom Patrol (only know getting a proper trade paperback program!) to showcase all his talents (his reasons probably have to do with some of the ideas in the above item). Moore’s Swamp Thing work is collected across six trades but for the casual fan who just wants to read a few graphic novels a year they can go into a bookstore and come out with Watchmen or V for Vendetta and see what all the fuss is about. The closest Morrison seems to have to one special book is Arkham Asylum with Dave McKean, recently given a special 15th anniversary re-release, but that is hardly his best work and certainly not very representative of why Morrison is so good.
I hoped the trades of WE3, Seaguy and Vimanarama would change the situation but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Here were wholly original stories with consistent, not to mention wonderful, art teams that provided all the optimism, intelligence and skill the best of Morrison’s work has to offer. Unfortunately the sales of the book in single issues weren’t spectacular and Vertigo/DC didn’t give the trades any special attention. All this while Gaiman and Andy Kubert’s 1602, good but not as good as WE3, got plenty of attention in the press and at literary events.
Perhaps we’ll see an Absolute Edition for Animal Man or the Seven Soldiers series? Will All-Star Superman in its collected form do the trick? We’ll see. I just want the world to know of one of the greatest minds to have written comics.
Who is the next Stan Lee? I say Dan DiDio, Graeme says Larry Young and then Chris Arrant says Warren Ellis is the new Man. I’m coming around to Chris’s point to be honest. As far as being creators I think Lee and Ellis both define a certain era of comic book writing. DiDio is an editor and while Larry is a good writer he isn’t an innovator like Ellis is. I also like the idea of the new Stan Lee as not promoting a company but promoting a lone creator, himself, and with many different apparitions on the internet. Information was more centralized in Lee’s heyday and Ellis’s presence(s) reflects the fractured and anarchistic way people learn and interact about everything, including comics and their creators.
It’s kind of a weird debate though, to compare people to Stan Lee. It’s a bit ghastly as well, considering The Man is still alive. But I wrote about it anyway and you read it. Here is your reward for doing so:
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