10 Things That Dollhouse’s Finale Taught Me
#10: No-one will visibly age in the next ten years, except for the possibility of some grey appearing in women’s hair. This is, obviously, good news amongst a sea of bad.
#9: Having characters tell other characters how cool your central character is, instead of actually showing said character actually doing anything cool, is not only not convincing, but kind of horrifically awkward and embarrassing. Especially when the character literally tells the audience “She’s so cool.”
(Note: Echo was not cool. Ever.)
#8: While I’m considering writing tips I learned from the episode: Logic is less important than fan service and shock value. But then, I should’ve expected that considering the Buffy comic “Twilight” reveal, as well as the Boyd thing earlier in Dollhouse. Still, “I’m a former psychopath” struck me as particularly convenient/lazy, especially considering Alpha served no purpose in the episode than another character couldn’t have.
#7: By 2019, Mad Max chic will have made a comeback, meaning that the only designers to have survived the brainpocalypse were Project Runway contestants.
#6: In 2019, all fights will apparently happen in a series of fast-cut, close-up scenes that nonetheless fail to disguise the fact that angry mobs apparently consist of maybe six people at most.
#5: Apparently it doesn’t hurt that much to be repeatedly shot in the legs. Equally apparently, shooting people in 2019 means that they don’t bleed.
#4: Using hair metal music for a fight scene in a television episode that is already piling on the 1980s cliches as if it has bought them wholesale may make viewers wonder whether they are, in fact, watching scenes from a never-before-screened pilot for a Glen A. Larson-produced Terminator television show.
#3: The future will be oversaturated and yellow until someone has invented – but not activated – a device that will save humanity, at which point it’ll be blue skies for everyone. Therefore, optimism affects the color of the sky.
#2: Future geniuses can invent devices that will somehow bounce signals off of clouds in the sky so that they can be transmit all around the world from an office building in the middle of LA, but cannot figure out how to add a remote control to said device, meaning that Grant Imahara from Mythbusters may be the pinnacle of human intelligence and ingenuity and it’s all downhill from here on.
#1: The moral of Dollhouse ends up “Technology is really bad in the wrong hands, but give us a decade and everything will be just fine.” Which may, in fact, be a step up from “Objectifying women is a bad thing, and to prove it, here is Eliza Dushku in skintight leather as a programmable sexbot.” So: Win?
Reason To Like Where I Live #23
One of my favorite discoveries since moving to Portland has been the concept of work dates. It’s not just the “getting out the house while still getting work done” aspect of it that I adore so much – although, don’t get me wrong, I love that part of it – and neither is it the company, as good as it is to see the glamorous Laura Hudson of Comics Alliance on a fairly regular basis. No, it’s the people watching that makes me completely swoon over the whole thing. Right now, I’m sitting in a coffee shop, sipping my San Pellegrino and stuck between a woman who reminds me of a blonde Colleen Coover knitting her heart out while she tries to ignore the older gentleman blasting Peter Gabriel out of his headphones on her other side, and two filmmakers discussing work, the usefulness of editing software and, at one point, something about mobsters and protection programs that I was struggling to evesdrop on without seeming too obvious.
Elsewhere in the cafe, there are people studying, people planning house buying adventures (A realtor seems to have set up shop here, she’s cycled through various dining partners on the same cup of coffee, assuring them all that now is the best time to buy; I get the feeling that now is always the best time to buy, for her), and lots and lots of people on laptops. The lure of people watching and free Wifi, it seems, is strong for people like me. All human life is here, as the saying goes, as long as all human life is made up predominantly of SE Portland media types.
The Future, Now!
[It's another weekend of working insanely hard, so here's the essay from last month's Comix Experience newsletter so that we don't fall into another long run of radio silence here.]
It feels like it’s been awhile since we last talked – Wasn’t it a year ago? – and as always happens during the holiday season, all manner of news was announced by comic publishers. As is only fitting, then, everyone here at The International Kingdom of FBR thought we should “mix things up,” as the kids say, and (with the use of our patented Pietroand Crystal Ball technology) reveal some of the hottest comic headlines of 2010 – before they happen!
Yes, that’s right; I said “hottest comic headlines.” I’m not quite sure what came over me. Can we move on already?
FUTURENEWSSTORY! DC’s plans for the Superman titles have already been partially-announced; this month’s solicitations reveal the Last Stand of New Krypton crossover, which in turn will lead into this summer’s War of The Supermen crossover. But few are prepared for what will come after that, as DC prepare for what may be their most controversial Superman project yet, Holidays With The Supermen.
Post-War, DC’s Earth will have collectively come to its senses and realized that, come on, it’s Superman and everything is going to be okay, leading to three months of special issues where Superman and his new Kryptonian family experience the various holiday traditions of the planet in a series of special one-shots that will temporarily replace the regular Superman books until the beginning of 2011. Explaining the idea, Dan Didio talked about reaffirming the importance of Superman to the DC Universe in general:
“What I thought people had lost sight of is that Superman is, he’s really an icon. Like Christmas, or New Year. But he’s an icon all year round, so we’re trying to remind people of that with books like Superman: Christmas Eve where James Robinson and Bernard Chang show the man behind the shield being iconic and wondering what to get Lois for Christmas while Hal Jordan talks about his threesome with Batgirl and Batwoman before getting his arm ripped off. But we’re not just focusing on Christmas, Superman and DC Comics are for everyone, so we’re also doing books like Steel: Kwanza Or Whatever It’s Called and Yeah, Superboy’s Jewish Now: Hannukah. It’s a very exciting time here at DC, we’re all very excited about these projects.”
Following these special issues, DC plans to launch Superman into his next greatest adventure, January Is The Longest Month Oh God Why Can’t The Holidays Go On Forever.
FUTURENEWSSTORY! As a response to potential fan backlash to Iron Man 2 when it hits theaters in May, Marvel announce that all future projects, whether they be movie or comic, will only be released if fandom asks very politely and then thanks them properly afterwards. In order to get everyone past initial problems with this way of thinking, the leading publisher has already made the decision to not release any information beyond title for all solicitations from June of this year onwards. In the words of Marvel President Dan Buckley, “These decisions are, of course, made on a purely business level and not just because we think it’s funny and because we can at all. And if you don’t believe us, we could always add ‘(Not Final Title)’ to the end of each solicitation, just to really mess you up. Just think about it, okay? Just think about it.”
FUTURENEWSSTORY! Following the success of Blackest Night, DC will turn the comic industry upside down by applying for, and – to the shock of every single living being on the planet, and yes that includes all animals and even plant life – actually being awarded, the copyright of all the colors of the visible spectrum. Talking in the heart of a literal media whirlwind that follows, Blackest Night and Green Lantern writer Geoff Johns told reporters that he knew very early on that it was the very basic concept of color that drove fans to the comic book stores in such numbers for the event, leading Executive Editor Dan Didio to successfully lobby parent company Warner Bros. into assisting them to stunning legal victory.
As a result, no other comic publisher is allowed to use any color in the title of any of their books – a legal decision that leads to a publicity black eye when Marvel Comics rename Black Panther as Negro Panther – and every single DC series gains a color somewhere in their title, leading to unprecedented sales figures for the publisher. By the end of 2010, in fact, Taupe Batman, Wisteria Wonder Woman and Justice League of Amaranth Magenta have taken the top spots of the sales chart for five months running.
The success of the decision allows DC to launch an entirely new line of “futuristic versions” of familiar characters using the HTML coding for colors to denote their science fictional origins. Despite initial retailer discomfort, Superman #FFCC33 and #0000FF Beetle quickly gain strong followings within the Mac user community, particularly among skinny men with beards and glasses who talk about Leet Speak a lot and find design website Clients From Hell particularly hilarious.
FUTURENEWSSTORY! In a stunning move, indie creator Bryan Lee O’Malley announced that he has scrapped all of his original work for the sixth and final Scott Pilgrim book and handed over creative reins of the series to popular Scottish creator Mark Millar.
Citing Millar’s ability to work within the Hollywood system as evidenced with his success on Wanted and Kick Ass, O’Malley said that he felt that, with the Pilgrim movie coming out this summer, he owed it to his fans to step aside and let someone more in tune with a mainstream audience take the next step forward. Fans of the earlier books in the series decried Millar’s decision to retroactively make Pilgrim a comic-reading virgin who finds a form of personal release through acting out fanboy fantasies in an increasingly unrealistic and ridiculous series of set pieces that betray a lack of experience in almost every social situation imaginable, but mainstream media critics hail the move as “groundbreaking,” “a stunning social satire unlike everything we’ve ever seen before” and “clearly the work of the man who should take the crown from Alan Moore’s head even before he is ready to give it up.”
By year’s end, O’Malley was unavailable for comment, having purchased his own private island with his profits from the new Pilgrim book and cut himself off from all contact with the outside world.
FUTURENEWSSTORY! Final proof, if anyone needed it, that comics have officially become a writers’ medium in the last decade has finally arrived in the shape of Marvel Comics’ 10 Years of Brian Michael Bendis At Marvel trade paperback, celebrating a decade of the bald writer’s (dark) reign at the publisher (Let me break away from the Crystal Balling for a moment to say that, while I was initially upset at the announcement of this book – Marvel having turned down my repeated, and increasingly insistent, demands for a similar 3 Years of Van Lente And Counting collection, not to mention the multiple volume What, It’s Got To Be Something Like Thirty At Least, Right? Let’s Say Thirty-Five, That Sounds About Right, Okay, Thirty-Five Years of Chris Claremont At Marvel COME ON YOU GUYS HE INVENTED THE X-MEN IN ALL THE WAYS THAT COUNT APART FROM ACTUALLY COMING UP WITH THE CHARACTERS OR THE CONCEPTS Jeez – I’ve since come to realize that it’s actually an important milestone for the House of Ideas. Sure, they’ve done creator-specific collections before, with their Marvel Visionaries line, but those have always been held back for people who were either dead or just dead-to-Marvel, with the exception of Chris Claremont, but let’s face it; X-Men Forever is like the comic book version of pity sex where Marvel is concerned. There’s probably some weird blackmail material involved in the fact that Claremont still has a job there). The Bendis book demonstrates Marvel’s realization of the value of their present creators… Or, more appropriately, the value of exploiting the brand name awareness of their present creators. The next step? Well, it’s not anything you’ve been expecting.
Due to be announced next week for an April 2010 launch is The Brian Michael Bendis Collector, a monthly magazine from the House of Ideas devoted entirely to Brian Michael Bendis. Based, in part, on TwoMorrows Publishing’s fine, entirely-anal-but-that’s-more-than-alright-with-me The Jack Kirby Collector, the magazine will feature excepts from Bendis scripts, previously-unseen interviews with Bendis, revealing email exchanges about Luke Cage between Bendis and editor Tom Brevoort, and interviews with those whose lives have been touched by Bendis, like Matt Fraction, Ed Brubaker and Tom Brevoort.
According to editor Tom Brevoort, the magazine was created because Marvel recognized the value that Bendis brought to the publisher:
“Everyone here at Marvel feels that Brian’s name alone can bring new readers to a title. Look at the success of things like New Avengers, Mighty Avengers, Dark Avengers, Avengers/X-Men: House of M and Ultimate Spider-Man Avengers. So we figured, what if his name was actually in the title? Originally, the plan was to have Brian write a new autobiographical comic every month in which he’d tell wacky and uplifting stories about his personal life and career in the comics industry, but then we remembered that Fortune And Glory really wasn’t as good as everyone said it was, so Joe and I put our heads together and decided that a magazine celebrating his immeasurable influence on the comic industry was the next best thing.”
Like its inspiration, The Brian Michael Bendis Collector will mix articles by professional writers and academics with pieces written by fans, with the first issue containing such essays as “Why Bendis F’in Rules” and “Janet Van Dyne Deserved To Die: Secret Invasion‘s True Worth Unveiled.” Similarly, the magazine will also have theme issues devoted to the many different facets of his career, including his early independent work, his run on Ultimate Spider-Man and how many times he can write about the Scarlet Witch being crazy without actually ever doing something with that idea. But perhaps the most exciting part of each issue will be the monthly column by comics historian Mark Evanier, wherein he will explain what it was like being an intern to Bendis during his early days in the industry.
In one final move to create similarity between The Jack Kirby Collector and The Brian Michael Bendis Collector, Marvel announced yesterday that it was canceling Bendis at the end of this month, and that his death would not only ensure that the Bendis Collector would be a fitting memorial to his work, but also launch a new temporary branding for the publisher’s main line. Look for more details of Fallen Writer: The Death Of Brian Bendis to be released at the end of this month.
Almost Like Family, Only Slightly More Dysfunctional
My old place of work had a particular culture that couldn’t really, in all honesty, be described as “corporate” – Something that, genuinely, was a plus for the place as much as that sounds like a diss – but at the same time, wasn’t anything like the real world either (Something ably demonstrated by the fact that one of our most prominent employees was occasionally better known as Pretty Tony, despite his name actually being Mike. Don’t ask). It was Business By The Seat Of Its Pants more often than not, as we continually investigated all the exciting new ways in which Murphy’s Law could come on any given day, but there were also times when the Best Laid Plans also came together and still left everyone feeling somewhat confused about what the hell had just happened.
A couple of years after I’d joined the company, for example, we had a companywide meeting. We were a pretty small company, maybe 100 people or so, so that wasn’t the massive undertaking that it sounded like; we’d all push and shove ourselves into the big conference room and hang around uncomfortably while listening to whatever we were all gathered for. Generally, companywide meetings fell into two categories – Bad News, or Someone’s Birthday (We celebrated people’s birthdays on a monthly basis, for the most part, although people who’d been there forever and/or were the heart of the company got their own celebrations. We were kind of awesome, in that way) – and we knew that this wasn’t a birthday, so as we went in, everyone was gossiping about what was about to happen. We all thought we’d pretty much figured it out; things had been slow, and we were expecting to be told that things would be rocky and maybe there’d be layoffs or cutbacks or something similar. As we milled in the room, expecting the worst, we were slowly joined by the people in charge of the company: The managers, the VP of Customer Service, the head of sales, the person in charge of accounting. But the meeting didn’t start. We all stood there, confused, making jokes and small talk, and wondering what was up, and someone said that we were waiting for the last Big Cheeses: The owner, the HR person and the director of operations. So, we waited. And we waited.
Eventually, the VP of Customer Service made some kind of, Well let’s just go ahead and start anyway announcement, and launched into this amazing, unexpected, quasi-inspirational speech about, yes, times are hard and belts have to be tightened, but we shouldn’t take it to heart because we were all incredible and doing our best, so let’s all work together for a better future! Truly, if you’d heard it, you would’ve thought that we were all soldiers about to head into the easiest battle in the world or something; it was over the top and completely unearned, but it worked nonetheless: We all got fired up by the idea of a company that we believed in – even though, if you’d asked us, we weren’t sure that we did – and that treated everyone as family. Let’s all do this thing! we were thinking as one, when the VP dropped in as an afterthought, oh, and there may be some organizational changes, but you’ll find out about those in time. Now let’s get back to work! Go team!
And, as we left the room, we noticed that the director of operations wasn’t in her office, where she’d been when we went in. This didn’t seem like a big deal; we all assumed that she’d gone for an early lunch or something. True, when she didn’t come back that afternoon, it seemed slightly odd, but maybe something had come up. That would’ve explained why she didn’t come in the next day, or the day after that, after all.
We never really knew for sure that she’d been let go until she came to get her stuff (Or did someone come for her? I can’t remember), and then it dawned on us: That whole meeting was to distract us while she was getting fired. While we were being given an announcement about how the people were the company, she was being told that, actually it was the other people who were the company and would she mind terribly if she left without making a scene? There’s something funny and sad about the two things happening at the same time, but if I’m honest, the mix of both of those things – The genuine feeling that the company was more of a family than just a business, and the fact that we were seemingly told that specifically to distract us from knowing that someone was being fired – feels like it somehow sums up my affection and confusion about those days, and for the company in general. I miss a lot of the people I worked with, there, but I’m also left with the feeling that I was never quite sure what I was doing there in the first place.
It’s Me Again, Yes How Did You Guess
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? The reason for that is, I went on vacation. And, as I’ve discovered since moving to America, vacation doesn’t actually mean “time off” as much as it means “time pushed to either side.” Maybe it’s just me, but everytime I get near vacation that doesn’t involve my work actually stopping with me, I end up doing more work beforehand, and then managing to make everything afterwards seem much harder than it actually probably is. It’s like my brain decides to prepare for a worst that probably wouldn’t even be as hard as I imagine, and then, upon returning, finds itself stuck in the realization that things have happened while I was away.
The answer to this, of course, may be to never go on vacation again. But I’m sure that that would have the desired effect. Anyway: Finally back. Should we get 2010 started properly now?
(And yes, Betty Boo was awesome.)
One Decade Earlier
Never let it be said that I ignore Twitter’s trending topics, even if some of them take more than 140 characters to fully explain. But #10yearsago (as the kids say), I was waking up in Old London Town with my best friends, having made sure that the world didn’t end when the calendar clicked from 1999 to 2000 – Not that I really thought it would, but really, who could tell? – and more than a little freaked out by something I’d seen the night before.
For about a year before this, you see, I’d been having a bad break-up with an ex-girlfriend. The actual break-up had gone reasonably well, as these things go (Although there was one embarrassing moment of me running through the streets to her, at one point, for one last kiss. It was like something out of a very bad movie, but that was before I really knew about selfconsciousness like I do now), but what neither of us could’ve predicted were the following months of fallout that saw us repeatingly hook up in secret, despite the appearance of other potential partners and loves in our life. Somehow, we’d always fall into bed together, until the affection we had for each other was almost entirely used up, and then, past that point, we’d still end up together. I can’t even say “things got bad,” because they already were bad, but they definitely got worse, and by the time 2000 rolled around, this woman had become someone I was actively avoiding and kind of scared of, just because of what would happen if we’d met.
So there I was, with friends preparing to see the start of the year 2000, watching New Year celebrations from around the world on TV, and suddenly the announcer mentioned the name of my ex-girlfriend’s hometown and there she was on the television. It seemed like something out of a horror movie, a “You’ll never escape me, ever” threat without words. Some kind of sign that nothing was going to change. My friends quickly changed the subject and the channel, but it stayed with me for the rest of the night, and when I woke up the next morning, stayed with me even then, too.
Luckily, it wasn’t true. Things changed, and we saw each other again only a handful of times, none of them involving one or both of us naked. The last time, in fact, I was with a group of friends that included another ex – one whom I’d fallen out with and then come to realize that she was a best friend I didn’t know I’d had – and, as she saw the ex I was addicted to come into view, this other ex turned to me and, giving me a look that read If you ever sleep with her again, I will cut important body parts off, said “If you want me to beat her up, I will. I’ve wanted to since she broke your heart the first time.”