110: obsession and math
Hullo.
How come I didn’t know about Crocodile’s mash-up cover of Groove is in the Heart and California girls until now. You’re a fool, Kieron.
Contents!
Odded
Bigger! Bangier!
Little Birds
For Creators
Byyyyeeee!!!
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Issue 18 of Cinema Purgatorio, which is the final one, and rounds off all the stories, including Modded. I have no idea when Avatar will be collecting Modded, but I think it’ll make a cute trade. It’s certainly not like anything else I’ve ever done. At least in a 1:1 way.
I suspect if there’s anyone who does a read of my career, they’ll look at Modded as a warm up run for DIE. Modded is me playing with videogame history in a light mode. I originally thought Modded would be a little more serious, but it almost instantly resisted my desires. The material I was mining was far more playful, but the experience made me realise what superstructure DIE would require to support the gothic melodrama. In the end, Modded basically was me doing Rock Paper Shotgun fanfic, and having far too much fun. I really can’t believe the amount of injokes I got away with. Or (if not got away with) at amount the level of injokes I wrote.
Thanks to Nahuel for the art on this. He’s been amazing to work with. He was great on Mercury Heat, but every issue he’s found ways to be weirder and more playful in this. I just imagine his face when he reads the script turning into a bemused frown. He wants me to draw… what? What?
Been fun.
Also, Star Wars 66 is out, which is the penultimate issue. Luke versus the Partisans. Leia versus Trios. Tunga’s versus his previous personal best of fabulousness.
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I mentioned this last time, but now it’s got a flyer so it’s a little prettier and more attention grabbing. Chrissy and I at Big Bang on June 8th for a DIE launch event. Adventure!
I spent the last three days off twitter to avoid having Game of Thrones spoiled before I could watch it. The only thing I let spoil Game of Thrones is Game of Thrones’ creative choices.
In other words, the last few days have been an interesting time. It’s only a micro internet detox, but an internet detox nevertheless. The funniest moment was on Monday night, when we were settling up the bill for the Korean barbecue and the table over the wall started talking about it extremely loudly. Cue heckling over the wall and me running roadrunner style from the restaurant with my fingers in the ears.
I’m not going to talk about the show in detail, at least yet. That line I opened this section with is me being a smart arse – my general position of the latest episode is less a problem with content than execution. Away from spoilers, I do want to write something about how battle scenes operate, and the bits of Game of Thrones (and other shows) that do fascinate me, in terms of how to visualise combat, and what they choose to do. But I’m jetlagged, so it’ll have to wait. It’ll also inevitably segue into episode 5 of Barrie, because That Was Some Television.
I’ve followed the discourse over spoilers though, which has reached the eating its own tail stage of the discourse. It’s really a conflict between two sets of twitter use – or rather, one of twitter’s uses (live discussion of current event) being entirely against the desires of current another set of users (being able to use something which is likely an important tool in their social life, support network or actual job without having their pleasure reduced by someone’s yappy mouth).
Me? I’m not an anti-spoiler purist, but I think takes which dismiss it entirely are way off. To quote something I wrote in a piece about twists…
In passing, as it’s vaguely on topic - you may remember the research from a few years ago saying people who know a twist enjoy the story more than people who don’t know a twist. Even this is true - and a single study should always get an eye-brow raise - but it strikes me as a confusion over what “enjoy” means. All pleasure isn’t equivalent, and you can only have surprise on your first time through a work of art. That’s novelty. You can have that and then gain the “Not surprise” experience second time through. If you spoil a work, it means the “novelty” experience is something you will never have. You may enjoy something more if you know the twist but you can always rewatch it to get that pleasure. If you’re spoiled, the individual specific pleasure of that first watch has been stolen.
If it’s something you’ve been following for nearly a decade (for TV watchers) or nearly twenty-five years (for the book folks) I think being a little precious over that first watch is entirely understandable.
I did spend the week thinking that the social media that’s really needed is a simplified twitter where folks can go to live tweet their thoughts about TV shows. Hell, it could work with twitter functionality. Rather than a hashtag being used for you to search, you tagging a hashtag means only people who are explicitly following the hashtag see it.
This probably exists, but I’m not googling to find out in case it spoils the end of WicDiv or something.
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The winner of the Creator for Creators grant was announced at TCAF. As David Brothers said on the panel, this was an incredibly tight year, but Shobo and Shofela Coker’s Outcasts of Jupiter managed to pull ahead.. It looks like this…
Go and have a nose on the site for an interview and a bunch of pages. Excited to see the full thing.
The week has been in Toronto at TCAF. Perhaps unsurprisingly, little work has been done. I’ve been doing the con, and carrying around my moleskine and writing ideas and fragments as they came to me. There’s been a lot of it. It’s the first time I’ve actually tried to use a moleskine to keep my early project doodlings. New page for new thing, scribbling. Several new pages as I play with a few new projects and parts of old ones.
That’s a tell that it was a good con. If it’s a good con, I walk away fizzing with energy. You meet people. You hang with peers. You decompress. You get perspective. You walk away wanting to do more stuff. TCAF was a good con for that. I’ve actually been fired up enough about something to just mail a publisher to suggest doing something completely different with something I’m doing. A truly ludicrous choice if we go that way, but that’s the way I like it.
TCAF was also unusual in that it was an excellent con that was exactly like I thought it’d be. It’s a con I knew by reputation, and its reputation was 1:1 what I thought it’d be. The only surprise was that the Library venue. I’d had it resplendent in my head, but was expecting something a little more prosaic in the flesh. In fact, it was significantly more resplendent than my imaginings, this vertiginous space. I also liked that people queuing for our signings were down a row of books, which means that folks could read while they wait. That’s the civilized way to do it.
Panels were excellent – Stephanie and Jamie double-teaming me in a DIE/WicDiv panel was gleeful, the Creators for Creators announcement was a hell of a thing to be part of and the music panel? This was Kid Koala, JonJon and us two, and basically was a freewheeling cross-discipline discussion. Scratch, animation, comics, and finding weird links between them. Obsession and math, and I can’t wait to give Floor Kids a try. In fact, I’ll get it now.
We also DJed, which was fun, as always. Technical problems on our own equipment caused more issues than usual, which lead to a lot more escapes. So we left a little dissatisfied with ourselves, but folks seemed to enjoy themselves, which is all that really matters. Next DJing is… oh, I just don’t know. Perhaps the WicDiv Wake.
I’m going to wrap this off before the Jetlag consumes me. Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
London
15.5.2019