This is not a drill
Updates
Curriculum (this is not a drill!)
You may (or may not) have seen this recently:
https://twitter.com/ryanklindsay/status/1026424055048466432
For early subscribers to this newsletter you’ll have heard me talk about Curriculum before. It’s been many years in the making and it (finally) launches as a web comic in September.
“Curriculum exists in a pulp-sci setting, sitting at a point in the universe where Godland, Runaways, and E.C.’s Weird Science collide as we follow a teacher and a group of his students who are transported across the galaxy during a field trip. Each issue focuses on a member of the cast as they struggle to find their way home. On the way, they’ll find dead civilisations, psychic horrors, cults, vengeful gods, and good old fashioned monsters. It’s here, at the fringes of the galaxy, that they’ll begin to unravel their own personal mysteries, coming of age in a universe that seems to want them dead.”
This project has lived, died and been resurrected multiple times over in our collective minds. It was the kind of project one conceives of without realising the sheer breadth of the task you’re taking on. 12 issues, rotating writers and a wholly new art team with each issue?
Madness.
But, the first half of the season is entirely done and it will be here for your reading pleasure in September.
For more info, and to read the comic itself when it launches, go here.
Times New Human
Ganzeer has published another prose short that I edited, Cyborg Ella, over at the Times New Human website. I really like the juxtaposition of the rural and future tech in this one.
Disconnect (also not a drill)
Disconnect art is like…98% done. Letters to come and then this is a lock. There may be some news about where this one is going to be published in the very near future. Just sayin’.
In a somewhat related note this year’s Reith Lectures are by historian Margaret MacMillan and they explore the “tangled history of war and society”, covering the concept of the warrior, civilians in war, war in art and societies justifications for conflict. There’s some good questions about gender and war at the end of the warriors episode that are particularly pertinent to Disconnect.
The lectures can be found here or in your podcast app of choice.
Weekly Notes
This week, between editing jobs and the stressful pre-prep of moving house, I’ve been building and breaking the plot of a (prose) short story.
At the same time I’ve been making my way through Beating the Story by Robin D. Laws which came recommended via Kieron Gillen’s newsletter.
The book is a super-detailed look at the various narrative elements that go into storytelling at a modular level. It’s catnip for those of us who enjoy reading about this kind of thing.
Naturally, the old adage of “take what you need and leave the rest” from this kind of book applies. Interestingly, there is also an outlining/structural tool that you can use that puts into practice many of the concepts mentioned in the book.
I’ve found the book most useful in terms of a scene’s function, its relation to the character arc, and other important elements. This kind of clarity is often helpful in determining whether a scene is truly needed or you’re just spinning wheels (the beginning of Lost Season 3, I’m looking at you).
I’m finding the detailing of the type of beats each scene is (Reveal, gratification, question, etc.) a bit too granular for my liking, but YMMV.
I’ve been using a combo of a pocket notebook and Workflowy to sketch this all out and move the various pieces of the story around. It’s not quite there yet, but steady progress has been made.
Other than that I’ve been working on generating concepts for a group of thematically linked comic shorts. This has mostly taken the form of taking a few existing ideas (everyone has a Spark File, right?), smashing them together and seeing what comes out the other end.
Links
1) Noam Chomsky on the current media obsession with Russia.
2) The Bullshit Web - a post about how much cruft and crap clutters up the modern website, not just design wise, but in the code too.
3) The Ringer produced a list of the 100 Best TV Episodes of the Century. I’m pretty happy with the top choice (which may spoil it for those who know me). The downside? No The Shield? Come on.
NOTE: The link is best viewed in a full web browser.
4) Hallucinations may reveal the underlying circuitry of the brain. Mathematics is the best.
5) Bear
“As the Second World War fades further into the past, the passage of time can make firsthand accounts told by its survivors and participants feel less like their own lived experience and more like distant fables or pages from history books. The German filmmaker and animator Pascal Floerks grew up hearing such stories from his grandfather, once a Nazi paratrooper who killed, and saw friends killed, in battle. In Bär, Floerks examines his relationship with his grandfather, not only as a Nazi veteran, but as a gardener, car collector, painter and dear family member. Twisting a convention of the personal documentary genre, Floerks uses archival photography to tell his grandfather’s story, but replaces his likeness with that of a bear, invoking the duality of the man’s warmth and his potential for violence. The result is jarring and haunting – a deeply personal account of a grandson-grandfather relationship and the universal drift between generations that cannot be detached from a terrible history.”
Video link here (English subtitles available if you click on the CC button). Via Aeon.