The Horror Of Holiday Journalism
(For the first – and probably last – time ever, I’m running an Ono essay while it’s still available in Comix Experience’s newsletter at the store in San Francisco. Normally, I wait until the new one is out, but this ceases to be topical… well, a few days ago really, but definitely today, so I figured what the hell. Happy Holidays, people.)
It’s the Holiday Season already, which means many things to many people: Children complaining that you won’t tell them Santa’s phone number so that they can text him their wish list for the year, stores filled with decorations that seem to have nothing to do with even the most commercial understandings of any known religious holiday on the planet, the same seven songs on every radio station you listen to, people on random street corners selling fir trees that are quite clearly merely seconds away from dropping their needles all over the ground trying to convince you that this is the tree that will make your family happy for the next three weeks at least… It’s a winter wonderland and no mistake. But just as you find yourself settling down in front of a Yule Log video and mug of steaming eggnog, kindly spare a thought for those less fortunate during this time of year. The ones who won’t get to celebrate with their loved ones. The ones for whom the end of the year doesn’t mean laughter, joy or even the innocent happiness of a peck on the cheek under the mistletoe.
I’m referring, of course, to journalists.
For journalists, the Holiday Season is the second worst time of the year (Closely following the summer, when it quickly becomes clear that the rest of the country is going on vacation and enjoying the good weather while it lasts, while they are stuck inside trying to come up with yet another angle on the already-tired story that’s dominating the headlines due to the fact that nothing of any interest happens in the summer and so everything will be written about, reported on and analyzed until it crumbles to pieces in front of your very eyes. What, you thought there was actually anything important about summer movies? Not at all! It’s just that, without Megan Fox’s piercing stare and limitless acting abilities, you would’ve read more stories about President Obama’s dog or something. It’s all a terrible sham). It’s the time of the year when editors turn to them and, without fail, ask for one of two things: A “Best Of The Year” list – which, this year, may also be a “Best Of The Decade” list, terrifyingly enough* – or a Gift Guide for concerned shoppers who care enough about the people they’re giving the gifts to that they want to them to be successful and liked, but not enough to actually know what they should be getting for said people without the help of a stranger who has been forced to write a guide that is generic enough to appeal to many different types of people who have almost nothing in common.
Neither of these things are fun to write. For one thing, both require varying amounts of research, whether it’s reading lots of back copies of their publication to find out just what came out that year anyway (And, inevitably, discovering that not only did that book that you were convinced was this year actually from three years ago, leading you to become concerned about your age if time is appearing to squash down like that and it wasn’t like that when you were younger and measuring your life in terms of school semesters and oh God those were the days what did I do with my life) or spending hours trawling through Amazon.com to try and find out what is actually selling these days and therefore might be worth recommending to people. Research, as anyone who’s read any DC or Marvel comic that has ever featured a scene involving a medical professional in any kind of medical setting can attest to, is both so hard and so boring that it’s not something that any writer wants to do at all; that’s how we end up with such scientifically unfeasible concepts as the psychic nosebleed or female hemophiliacs. Therefore, anything that requires any amount of research heavier than just going to Wikipedia a couple of times** is generally frowned upon, and last time I checked, Holiday Gift Guides aren’t on Wikipedia just yet, and user-generated Best Ofs won’t appear in time. That’s why no-one wants to write one of those stories.
And yet, they appear every single year without fail, just like Bing Crosby’s disembodied head following you around while you’re in Macy’s singing “White Christmas” and telling you how much weight you’ve put on since the last time he saw you, before adding a bombombombombom for effect. It’s what editors in The Biz call “supply and demand”: They pretend there’s a demand of it, so it’s the journalists’ job to supply it or else they’ll be demanding a new journalist who can write a simple story when it’s asked for, on deadline, no questions asked. Again, anyone who’s read any X-Men comic that wasn’t written by Grant Morrison or Joss Whedon in the last two decades*** is probably intimately familiar with the concept****.
Therefore: The Best Of The Year List and Gift List. We here at Fanboy Rampage Towers are no stranger to the zeitgeist when it comes to publishing fads – Who could forget our 3D issue, just a couple of years ago, or the month in the mid-1990s when every word came on its own individual Pog? The most successful gimmick we were tried, of course, was the issue of Comix Experience Onomatopoeia that came with five different variant covers, meaning that there were more covers than there were pages in the actual newsletter… But each one had its own headlines in the speech balloons down the right hand side that, when read in the correct order, revealed the end of the then-ongoing Infinity War mini-series from Marvel – and we also know what side our metaphorical bread is metaphorically buttered (Metaphorical butter, of course, because we choose to use a low-fat spread for health reasons) on. Oh, we’re not going to sell out completely, don’t worry; you won’t get a Best Of The Year list from us, because we just don’t dig an agenda that puts a value on art, man. No piece of work created by human hands is better than any other piece of work created by human hands, unless we’re talking about Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Boxes, which was pretty lackluster to say the best, come on. But that aside – and, sure, if you really push us and put a metaphorical gun to our completely-non-metaphorical heads, we’ll admit that we really thought that Richard Stark’s Parker: The Hunter by Darwyn Cooke was kind of the bar for awesome over the last twelve months, so sure, you can imagine your own list that has that at the top, then everything else that was published in 2009 in the middle, and Astonishing X-Men: Ghost Boxes at the bottom if you really wanted, but are you really going to be that guy? Honestly? – we don’t do Best Of lists.
Gift guides, however… Well. That’s another story.
There’s an art to doing a truly great Gift Guide. Anyone approaching one has to come at it with a fresh mind and a clear head… A new pair of eyes and your ears to the ground… Your nose to the grindstone, and I think you know where I’m going with this. But you have to say goodbye to the old cliches and instead look at Society anew: What kind of people are there in the world? And what do they want? I’d be tempted to call it a meticulous science, but that would suggest that it’s only a science, and really, it’s so much more. It’s more like alchemy, but even alchemy is a bit too sciencey, so let’s just call it magic and accept that, like Doctor Strange and Doctor Voodoo have demonstrated, it’s not for the weak-hearted or for those with sensible hair. There are entire organizations dedicated to this kind of endeavor. Maybe you’ve heard them described as “Cool Hunters,” “Intellectual Pop Culture Strategists” or even “People Taking A Survey For No Immediately Apparent Reason.” They’ll ask you about your tastes, your likes and dislikes, and even what you had for breakfast this morning, and then frown when you say that you were in a rush and so skipped breakfast so that you could make it to work on time. These are the people who knew about Facebook, Twitter and even the entire internet before you did, because that’s what they get paid to do: Know things first, and then make sure that you know about them and want them too.
You don’t mess with the Cool Hunters.
For months already, these people have been at work, looking at what you’re reading and listening to and wearing, shaking their heads in silent despair the entire time, writing things down and planning out what to sell you for Christmas or the Religious Holiday of your choice. They map things out, create PowerPoint presentations and flow charts to explain why you should buy Product X for your girlfriend but Product Y for your Aunt Flo, and they put all of this information into giant supercomputers that even Jack Kirby would’ve been impressed by, ready to spit out suggestions for whoever can afford to ask.
The gift you should get anyone for the Holidays is one of those supercomputers. And, when they ask why, you should tell them that I told you that Knowledge Is The Greatest Gift Of All.
You’re welcome.
* – Seriously, am I the only person who is stunned that it’s been ten years since we were all concerned about the Millennium Bug and the Y2K virus? I mean, I know it wasn’t yesterday, but still, this seems ridiculous. I feel like there are entire years I must’ve missed in there. It’s like I was starring in a particularly unambitious version of Futurama or something.
** – For those who feel the need to just mess with journalists, editing a Wikipedia entry of someone particularly newsworthy to include a lie that is obvious enough for readers to catch it when reading it in, say, the San Francisco Examiner one day but subtle enough so that it’ll remain invisible to the reporter who decided to cut and paste instead of actually doing their own research is a way to do so that is fun, easy and surprisingly satisfying in an admittedly shameful manner. I highly recommend it.
*** – Chris Claremont left the X-Men books in 1991. Which is now almost 19 years ago. Again: See “Old, getting” and “Old age and senility, I think I’m closer to it than I actually knew.”
*** – Potentially available to the exception list is Chris Claremont, who not only invented the formula that X-Editors have tried desperately to stick to on his original run throughout the 1980s but has also shown a weird ability to nonetheless write whatever the hell he wants no matter what editorial prodding he is getting, presumably by saying “When you invent a multi-million dollar franchise that almost singlehandedly kept the publisher’s reputation for innovative storytelling alive when your editor in chief is pushing a retro agenda that will see books like X-Factor and Thunderstrike be published, then you can give me advice on whether or not to kill Wolverine and make Kitty Pryde into a miniature Wolverine even though it makes no sense whatsoever” whenever challenged. See: “X-Men Forever” and “No, Really, She Phased Through His Arm And Kept A Claw And Just Didn’t Notice? That’s Ridiculous.”
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