Kill All Monsters(?)
News
Some quick hits this week.
The prose stories by Magnus Asplii that featured in Metropo, a cyberpunk ‘slice of life’ anthology I edited, is now available in a separate eBook volume over at Amazon.
There are plans afoot to do something similar with the equally awesome comic shorts contained in the volume too, so watch this space!
Brief Thoughts on ‘Swamp Thing Winter Special’: Panel configuration, monsters and the zeitgeist.
As alluded to last time around I thought I’d share my thoughts on ‘The Talk of the Saints’ by Tom King (script) and Jason Fabok (art) which featured in Swamp Thing Winter Special and was recently nominated for an Eisner Award for ‘Best Short Story’.
Spoilers abound.
Cleverer people than I have always talked about how the opening gambit forms a contract between reader and creator(s). They often serve to give the reader an idea of genre, tone and the stakes of the story.
This technique runs through King’s work for Marvel/DC, specifically in relation to structure and how it impacts tone and pacing. If you look at Mister Miracle, Omega Men, or The Vision we see the opening pages as variations on the same configuration - a nine panel grid.
These works are often focused on character work, dialogue, and subtle nuance and pacing. More panels, after all, means more time the reader will spend lingering on the page. With the opening pages of this Swamp Thing tale, King and Fabok point towards a more mythic type of storytelling with characters becoming lost in the beautiful (and dangerous) vistas of the landscape.
This is done with four, page-wide, panels stacked atop each other. The emphasis, initially, is on the lush vibrancy of ‘the green’ slowly draining out of the page to be consumed by the white, negative space of the coming storm. From this, our protagonist and antagonist emerge, already locked in the struggle that will define the story.
King and Fabok use this opening sequence at the end of the story too, tipping their hat to the cyclical progression of nature, disaster and even good and evil itself. Everything is a return to what came before in some shape or another. It’s notable this is the second short story nominated for an Eisner this year that seems to focus on facing up to the omniscient destruction of the planet and all that entails.
This is nothing new to comics (Brian Wood’s The Massive springs to mind), but as the crisis becomes even more pressing with each passing day, it’s something I imagine we’ll see more of. Prose has SolarPunk after all.
There’s also the reveal the boy Swamp Thing has been protecting for the entirety of the narrative is the real villain or monster of the piece. There’s the obvious allusion there to humanity being the villains in relation to climate change, no matter how many times certain people cry out our collective innocence/denial.
But, more importantly here, is the very idea of what a ‘monster’ is in terms of its role in pop culture and wider society. King and Fabok lean hard into this too and perhaps there lies the real thrust and meaning behind the story.
The word monster derived initially from Monere (Proto-Indian-European, so waaaaay back), before morphing into the more familiar, Monstrum. The definition of this latter variation is ‘a divine portent or sign’, an omen of things to come.
Even the initial origin, Monere, is made up of the word ‘men’ which initially meant ‘to think’ or ‘to remain’, perhaps pointing to the heightened opinion we’ve always had of both ourselves and our durability in the face of mother nature.
King, Fabok, and many others before them have utilised the ‘monster’ archetype in Swamp Thing in various forms through the years. Swamp Thing then adheres to the role of monster too, albeit in a far more traditional manner.
Monsters are there to reflect the darker aspects of our zeitgeist back at us, to show us our worst natures and how they are affecting the world around us. They are our weaknesses and darkest impulses made mythic and palatable. They show us all we have to lose if we continue on our current path.
Links
1) Alex Dalbey raises some really pertinent points about the ‘failure of caricature’ in Wolfenstein 2 over at Bullet Points Monthly.
“There is a clear divide between Blazkowicz and Sister Grace’s visions of America. Sister Grace watched the Nazi takeover of the United States in real time, and saw what Blazkowicz didn’t—just how much of America, the white America that Blazkowicz grew up in, is happy and comfortable under Nazi leadership. More importantly, she knows from her lived experience that this oppression was already a part of the fabric of America. Even though Blazkowicz grew up with an abusive, racist father, he is stubbornly ignorant of that hate being widespread and systemic. No matter what evidence Sister Grace offers up, Blazkowicz insists that America only needs to be freed from the Nazis.”
2) I really enjoyed Rich Larson’s Painless from Tor, so much so I brought it for Kindle and sought out some of his earlier work. I’m looking forward to digging in to his recent short story collection, Tomorrow Factory real soon.
3) This recent essay from Aeon asks you to consider that aspects we only attribute to each other may also occur in animals:
“The inner lives of farmed animals cannot be characterised entirely on a species level. Instead, they are unique individuals with personality to spare. Those personalities map familiarly onto the same characteristics that comprise human personalities.”
4) I really like the concept of this post by Jesse Kriss on the idea of ‘minmal computing’, using the barest bones of tools to get the job done.
5) Writers, please do not do this.
6) Joyce Carol Oates runs her eye over Ted Chiang’s new collection for The New Yorker:
“Indeed, irony is sparse in Ted Chiang’s cosmology. It is both a surprise and a relief to encounter fiction that explores counterfactual worlds like these with something of the ardor and earnestness of much young-adult fiction, asking anew philosophical questions that have been posed repeatedly through millennia to no avail. Chiang’s materialist universe is a secular place, in which God, if there is one, belongs to the phenomenal realm of scientific investigation and usually has no particular interest in humankind. But it is also a place in which the natural inquisitiveness of our species leads us to ever more astonishing truths, and an alliance with technological advances is likely to enhance us, not diminish us. Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress.”
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I’m off to feed hay to the endless, bottomless maw of my two guinea pigs.
See you in two!