We [Fraction and his wife, Kelly Sue DeConnick] were pregnant at the time, and while I was out there I started to realize that if I had a daughter, there would come a day when I would have to apologize to her for my profession. I would have to apologize for the way it treats and speaks to women readers, and the way it treats its female characters.

I knew that if we had a daughter, because I know my wife and I know the kind of girl she wants to raise and I know the kind of girl I want to raise, she was going to look at what I did for a living and want to know how the fuck I could stomach it. How could I sell her out like that?” Fraction continued. “That conversation is still coming, and I’m bracing for it in the way that some dads brace for their daughter’s first date or boyfriend. I became acutely aware that I had sort of done that thing that lots of privileged hetero cisgendered white dudes do. ‘I’m cool with women, and that’s enough.’ It’s not enough. It’s embarrassing to say, because we somehow have attached shame to learning and evolving our opinions, culturally, but I became aware that there was a deficiency of and to women in my work, and all I could do at that moment was take care of my side of the street.

— Writer Matt Fraction on his role on expanding the profile of female characters in the Marvel Universe. (via goodmanw)

(Source: comicbookresources.com)

Took off my Crazypants

joehillsthrills:

sleepyhollowjacks asks: I was reading your chain of tweets about Paxil and had a question. One of the conditions that medicine is reported to treat is OCD (I have that). But isn’t OCD a productive tool for the highly creative types? Weren’t you afraid it might hinder your writing process?

I struggled with mild OCD and not-so mild paranoid ideation for decades; it was especially bad in the year or two around the publication of HORNS, a paranoid book written by a paranoid and unhappy man.

For a long time I was determined not to get help, because I was very afraid that if I took a pill, or saw a therapist, it would destroy me creatively. Then one day I realized I didn’t give a shit about whether or not I could go on as a writer… it was far more important to find a way to go on as a person, so I could be the best possible father to my kids, and not a miserable man who couldn’t make his appointments because he had to keep driving home to see if the oven was on. A person who looked behind pictures in hotel rooms to see if there was a fiber optic video camera hidden back there. And so on.

It turned out that my paranoid idea that treatment would destroy my creativity was like all my other paranoid ideas: bullshit. My compulsions and shrill fantasies weren’t empowering me creatively; they were fucking me over. If I wrote five pages and hit save and Microsoft Word told me I had ended on an odd-number of characters, instead of an even-number of characters, I assumed the day was a failure. This is not a joke. Logic didn’t enter into it.

After Heart-Shaped Box, I wrote parts of three different novels that didn’t work, because I was scared to write anything - scared of being hated, being sued by phantom persecutors, being criticized, letting people down, looking like a fool, and on, and on. Completing HORNS, and getting it right, was the hardest thing I’ve ever done as a creative person, because I did it with an interior voice constantly screaming in my ear that it was all wrong, that publication of the book would destroy all the good will I had created with Heart-Shaped Box. I got the novel written - and it came out good, Goddamn it - even though I usually began my day by searching my office for listening devices.

Can a little bit of OCD be adaptive for a creative person? Maybe, to a degree, when it leads to rigorous habits and good discipline (I remain a very habit-driven person, a guy who works through a series of checklists each day). But it’s very hard to be successful as an artist when you’re flinching from imaginary terrors and on the run from imaginary enemies. It’s also difficult to get anything written if you wind up in an institution; try and type when you’re in a straight-jacket, it isn’t easy.

As an afterword to all this, I’d note I wrote most of NOS4A2 after getting on Paxil and getting into therapy and dealing with my problems. It was hard-going at first, but in the end I wrote the novel with joy and excitement. I owed it to my kids to get my shit together. If getting right emotionally has helped me to do some of my best work, that’s just a fringe benefit.

I think mainstream American Superhero comics lag a little behind other expressions of teenage life in culture, and if you do that, you’re risking writing comics that appeal to the parents of teenagers rather than the teenagers themselves.

In terms of blocks, I suspect a good chunk of it comes out of comics being a visual medium. Text is a great obfuscator of content. You can read a book, and your parents will never know that it contains matter they’d have trouble with, because they’re never actually going to read it. But comics, being visual, are transparent. At a glance, they can judge it — and so often judge it at a glance, without actually reading it.

So you walk a line. I started “Young Avengers” with the scene for a number of reasons, but one of them was certainly seeing if Marvel would let me do it. If I weren’t able to write that, I’d have had to bow out of the gig, because there would be no way of doing anything I thought worth doing.

Marvel didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

I think the biggest blockade to the creation of the content is creators not choosing to create the content.

— From my new interview about Young Avengers over at CBR, which finds me in a pugnacious somewhat wanky mode. (via kierongillen)

on script formatting:

mattfractionblog:

i tweeted earlier about a scene in SATELLITE SAM where a torch singer is singing a torch song; of these things, beyond their existence, I know nothing. So I trust Howard, or our editor Tommy The K, to suggest good ones. For the purposes of layout, though, i put in dummy text from a 2 Live Crew song, because the idea of Howard Chaykin reading 2 Live Crew lyrics delights me to no end.

Here’s what a panel of my script looks like:

A few things to keep in mind: it’s the second time we’ve seen the location, so there’s some economy going on; also I’ve been writing for Howard for years now and we’ve got a degree of simpatico happening. By and large, though, what I think every format needs, regardless of what it looks like, is clarity, simplicity, and speed. Is there ANY WAY your artist can get confused about what page they’re on, what panel they’re on? Is it completely fucking obvious what the dramatic beat is, who speaks, what they say, and the order in which they say it? Are you spending more time formatting than you are actually writing (I was guilty of this for a long time)?  HOWEVER you get it down, do it with precision, clarity, and swiftness. A script should be about the page, the panel, the story — not a design element unto itself. I used to spend as much time designing the document as i did writing it. Silly.

Now, to get self-critical for a second… that second shot, which could work in film, will be a pig to make happen in comics. it is in fact BAD COMICS WRITING — that kind of deep-focus stuff isn’t the best tool sometimes. So why’d I write it? Well…  Howard can do it, one; Were I to guess? Howard will take the angle from the door and GENE will enter from panel left and in the background we’ll see EVE — so I could’ve written it smarter, leading off with GENE instead. But sometimes when I write I just let the camera float and trust my collaborator will make me look like i know what i’m doing. 

Two, sometimes I think there’s value in preparing a kind of menu and letting your collaborator carve away what they don’t want. Here are ALL THE THINGS happening in the frame around the dramatic beat that demands the image be shown. The beat is: Gene arrives late. The rest is Howard’s to find. The club, the singer, the crowd, the ambiance… he’ll find it.

And three, sometimes it’s just bad writing and you know in your heart of hearts your collaborator will in fact bitch about you but fix it, so fucking deal with it, let them solve the problem and make you not look like a hack, and get on to the next thing. then maybe think twice before posting it on your blog but at this poing you’ve already typed all this bullshit out so blahhhrrg

Superman, then, is the agent of modern fable — the most compelling
fable the 20th Century gave us….

At the heart of that myth and legend is Romance.
That is not the same as the weak, whiny demands of soapopera that begin with “characterisation” and crap on with demands for
ever more levels of “conflict”, “jeopardy”, “ensemble writing”, “tight
continuity” and all the rest of that bollocks. These things are unimportant.
Many of them just completely get in the way of the job at hand.
SUPERMAN requires only the sweep and invention and vision that
myth demands, and the artistry and directness and clean hands that
Romance requires.

SUPERMAN is about someone trying their best to save the world, one
day at a time; and it’s about that person’s love for that one whose intellect
and emotion and sheer bloody humanity completes him. It’s about
Superman, and it’s about Lois and Clark. And that’s all there is. That’s
the spine. That must be protected to the death, not lost in a cannonade
succession of continuing stories.

That’s what, in the continuing rush to top the last plotline, I see getting lost.

— Warren Ellis, WHY THEY’LL NEVER LET ME WRITE SUPERMAN
Brief, Disconnected Notes On An American Mythology (via ragnell)

(Source: therearecertainshadesoflimelight)

drawing-bored:

browsethestacks:

Pat Lupoff And Dick Lupoff As Captain And Mary Marvel At WorldCon In Pittsburgh (1960)

your meemaw and peepaw were cosplayers!

ubu507:

AGHAST!

Junot Diaz on Men Who Write About Women

The Atlantic: It sounds like you're saying that literary "talent" doesn't inoculate a writer—especially a male writer—from making gross, false misjudgments about gender. You'd think being a great writer would give you empathy and the ability to understand people who are unlike you—whether we're talking about gender or another category. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
Junot Diaz: I think that unless you are actively, consciously working against the gravitational pull of the culture, you will predictably, thematically, create these sort of fucked-up representations. Without fail. The only way not to do them is to admit to yourself [that] you're fucked up, admit to yourself that you're not good at this shit, and to be conscious in the way that you create these characters. It's so funny what people call inspiration. I have so many young writers who're like, "Well I was inspired. This was my story." And I'm like, "OK. Sir, your inspiration for your stories is like every other male's inspiration for their stories: that the female is only in there to provide sexual service." There comes a time when this mythical inspiration is exposed for doing exactly what it's truthfully doing: to underscore and reinforce cultural structures, or I'd say, cultural asymmetry.

ifreakinlovebooks:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

mckelvie:

polyjuiced:

Kieron Gillen talks about Young Avengers at C2E2 - [x]

Don’t worry, polyjuiced, you get used to the speed of the talking.

Junot Diaz on Men Who Write About Women

The Atlantic: It sounds like you're saying that literary "talent" doesn't inoculate a writer—especially a male writer—from making gross, false misjudgments about gender. You'd think being a great writer would give you empathy and the ability to understand people who are unlike you—whether we're talking about gender or another category. But that doesn't seem to be the case.
Junot Diaz: I think that unless you are actively, consciously working against the gravitational pull of the culture, you will predictably, thematically, create these sort of fucked-up representations. Without fail. The only way not to do them is to admit to yourself [that] you're fucked up, admit to yourself that you're not good at this shit, and to be conscious in the way that you create these characters. It's so funny what people call inspiration. I have so many young writers who're like, "Well I was inspired. This was my story." And I'm like, "OK. Sir, your inspiration for your stories is like every other male's inspiration for their stories: that the female is only in there to provide sexual service." There comes a time when this mythical inspiration is exposed for doing exactly what it's truthfully doing: to underscore and reinforce cultural structures, or I'd say, cultural asymmetry.

neil-gaiman:

kellysue:

patloika:

I couldn’t make it out to their signing, but that didn’t stop me from getting stuff signed! :)

Thanks, Matt and Kelly Sue!

Loikamania!

I’ve known Kelly Sue since, er, 1997. Maybe earlier.  That was 16 years ago.

She has not perceptibly aged in that time, despite having had two children and becoming a comic book writing goddess in the meantime.

Am I the only one who thinks that this whole not-aging thing is sort of sinister?

terriwindling:

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”

 ― Ursula K. Le Guin

The art above is by the UK book & paper artist Emma Taylor.

seanhowe:

Robert Morales, 1978.

Writer Robert Morales, who collaborated with Kyler Baker on the 2003 Marvel miniseries Truth: Red, White & Black, passed away this morning in his Brooklyn home. He was 54.

“We spoke on the phone for many years, at least once a week and often more. I am shattered,” author Samuel Delany wrote in a Facebook post announcing Morales’ death. “His many friends will miss him deeply. He had agreed to be my literary executor, and the idea that he would pre-descease me never entered my head. For me and many others he was an indispensable friend. To say he will be deeply missed is an incredible understatement.”