Carnival of souls

* I recommend Joe “Jog” McCulloch’s MoCCA report.

* I do not recommend reading Platinum Dunes producer Brad Fuller’s rationale for remaking Rosemary’s Baby:

“I want to address that,” Fuller said. “Because if we don’t do Rosemary’s Baby, somebody else [will]. They’re not going to pass on it. And, like I said, being horror fans like we are, we would want to take the opportunity and take a shot at it, rather than read about someone else doing it. So all the s–t we get for doing these things–it really just comes out of being huge fans and wanting to take a shot, you know?”

Fuller added that they have not come up with a story for the reboot of Rosemary.

This line of reasoning in almost beautiful in its utter lack of cluefulness on every level. But don’t worry, everyone, “it really just comes out of being huge fans.” See, he’s one of us, my fellow idiots horror buffs! (Via the equally appalled Jason Adams.)

* Here’s a very, very, very long examination of the final scene in The Sopranos that makes a fairly convincing case for interpreting it in one particular direction rather than another. It goes in for close-reading that borders on clue-spotting, but that is by no means the sole source of its argument–the most convincing aspects are the ones drawn from a series of increasingly less cryptic statements I’d never heard before from creator David Chase. (Via Keith Uhlich.)

* This interview with Grant Morrison about Final Crisis #1 is, as they say, FULL OF WIN. In large part the questioner, Newsarama’s Matt Brady, focuses on continuity discrepancies between FC #1 and various miniseries from the past year or so, particularly the widely rejected weekly “spine of the DC Universe” series Countdown. Morrison’s answers, which explain that most of the events we’ve seen so far that contradict what happened in his comic were written after his was completed, are beyond delightful:

Obviously, I would have preferred it if the New Gods hadn’’t been spotlighted at all, let alone quite so intensively before I got a chance to bring them back but I don’t run DC and don’t make the decisions as to how and where the characters are deployed.

[snip]

…bear in mind that Countdown only finished last month so Final Crisis was already well underway long before Countdown and although I’ve tried to avoid contradicting much of the twists and turns of that book as I can with the current Final Crisis scripts, the truth is, we were too far down the road of our own book to reflect everything that went on in Countdown, hence the disconnects that online commentators, sadly, seem to find more fascinating than the stories themselves.

[snip]

The way I see it readers can choose to spend the rest of the year fixating on the plot quirks of a series which has ended, or they can breathe a sight of relief, settle back and enjoy the shiny new DC universe status quo we’re setting up in the pages of Final Crisis and its satellite books. I’m sure both of these paths to enlightenment will find adherents of different temperaments.

I don’t know why this particular interview is reducing me to Internerd speak, but that’s just pwnage all over the place. It also scratches a real itch for me because I’ve spent most of the time since the issue came out debating with some friends of mine whether or not Grant “should” have tweaked a line or two to “fix” the “problems” of his comic not lining up with Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray’s or whoever it was that did the New Gods stuff in Countdown. Even aside from the temporal/logistical issues Morrison himself points out, the answer is “of course not.” He’s a writer, not a janitor, and his obligation is to tell a good story, not to provide a seamless experience for devotees of a shared fictional universe cobbled together from the work of thousands of disparate creators by corporate diktat.

Anyway, the interview also explains how the issue connects with similar elements in Seven Soldiers, sticks the book into Identity Crisis a bit, and confirms my theory as to why the book took an offhand approach to Martian Manhunter’s death:

we wanted to open with a nasty, execution-style death of a superhero as a way of demonstrating how far behind us the Silver Age is. We’re conditioned to expect the hero to fall after a noble struggle or to give his life saving the universe but this had to be different. The scene was very much about calling time on expectations and letting our readers know up front that the rules have changed. Evil is getting away with it. Things are going to get nastier and grubbier and scarier before it’s over, just like in the real world.

I look forward to subsequent issues.

17 Responses to Carnival of souls

  1. Ken Lowery says:

    They’re not going to pass on it. And, like I said, being horror fans like we are

    I couldn’t read any further, because klaxons and red lights just started flashing like crazy up in here.

  2. Ben Morse says:

    This post is FULL OF LOSE :-p

    Without us “devotees,” baldy can’t afford those mind-altering goodies that let him write crappy Joker stories.

    Yes, I will haunt you everywhere you make this argument. 😉

  3. Bah! Silence Ben Morse!

    That was indeed a most triumphant interview with Morrison, Parallel Sean.

    With Grant’s blessing, I shall now begin the mental processes that will erase Countdown and Death of the New Gods from my mind.

    “They never happened…They never happened…”

  4. Ben Morse says:

    Wha–calling in multiversal doppelgangers?! Dirty pool, Collins!

  5. Jim Treacher says:

    If “the story itself” is steeped in DC continuity, if in fact it could not exist without it, then why are the nerds out of line for pointing out when it breaks that continuity?

  6. Well, I don’t know how ‘steeped in DC continuity’ it really is. My wife, who’s only exposure to DC is a few Batman comics and the Justice league cartoon, followed it just fine. I think the problem is that long-time readers make these assumptions that simply having a character in FC that’s appeared in prior stories demands some fore-knowledge of the character’s entire history up to that point. If you read Final Crisis from fresh eyes, you get all you need to know in the text itself – it’s very easy to follow – it just leaves questions unanswered for later in the story. I mean, yes, Grant could have rewritten Superman’s dialog to fit in with the Death of the new Gods and Countdown, but why should he? I think this is a case of people blaming a story for not adhering to their personal priorities – for a lot of people, continuity is more important than the story itself.

  7. Bruce Baugh says:

    I was geeking about related stuff with friends last night – and yeah, I do think that we were notionally biting the heads off blog posts and swallowing them live – and I realized an interesting bit of usage.

    I read DC Universe #0, and liked a lot of it. I had no idea what was up with the Lanterns segment because I’ve only been hearing about it, not reading the book. I saw it described in several reviews as “incomprehensible”, and at first I fell into that. Then I realized that I could also simply view it as “mysterious” and wait for more scenes later that fill in the gaps. Both responses convey the info “I lack the clues necessary to know who these people are or what exactly is going on”, but the first carries much more of a judgment about it. And just as I lack the background to pick up on the implicit meaning of the scene, ditto (but more so) with the background to firmly judge whether I ever will (if I read the series) get the clues.

  8. And I think that’s the key, really. You just have to roll with something like FC and assume, like a novel, that you may not have everything thrown at you in the beginning. If the story unfolds and you’re still scratching your head at the end, then that’s just poor storytelling and has nothing to do with continuity gaffs. I get that the characters and concepts of FC are steeped in DC mythology, but I’m electing to take a long view and see the characters in a pure/Justice league Unlimited view and not let myself get bogged down in the whole “But how can he be taking a crap in the Crystal Lavatory when last month the Joker put a cherry bomb in the toilet and blew the thing up?!?” type of thinking. I seem to recall that a lot of classic myths (and Morrison seems to view these DC characters/stories as modern myths) rely on the audience’s familiarity with the idea of the character and what he represents far more than they do continuity of plot between tales (Hey, I thought Loki got turned into a dog? How can he be hangin’ with Balder now?)

  9. Jim Treacher says:

    I just think it’s silly of him to say “the stories themselves,” as if they’re somehow separate from the borrowed toys he’s moving around in DC’s sandbox to create them.

  10. I see your point, Jim. But the way I see it, continuity is value-neutral. The ideas embedded in continuity can be good, bad, or indifferent. Ditto the stories whose telling they enable or prevent. Success in using continuity is wholly dependent on the skill of the creator in question. I have no problem with someone cherrypicking the elements they use to tell the story they want, provided that the story ends up being good. Hell, DC as a company has done just that several times–Crisis on Infinite Earths, Zero Hour, and Infinite Crisis did on a line-wide scale what Morrison’s doing with the last year’s treatment of the New Gods. It really does come down to, yes, “the stories themselves” and whether or not they’re any good.

  11. I think every writer in the Big Two does that, to an extent – focuses on the crap they like, the stuff that they can use, and forgets the rest. I mean, I see where Jim is coming from – this story really is dependent on the toys Morrison is using: the line up of the JLA, the existence of the Monitors, Libra, etc. and without them, well, could FC exist? I mean, one could use the Watchmen example of how Moore turned his pitch from established Charlton characters into an independent new universe, but FC really is built on the back of DC’s stable of heroes. Yet, like Sean said, everyone pretty much cherry picks the stuff that helps them tell their story. The only difference here is that FC comes at the tail end of so damn many BIG EVENTS, each meant to tie into the other. It doesn’t help that DC has sold FC as the end of a massive sequence of such events, making it nearly impossible for Joe Fan to just turn off his brain and enjoy FC as a stand-alone story, as Morrison seems to want to some extent. I agree Morrison comes across a little flip about the matter, but in spirit I think he’s taken the best approach on this.

  12. Jim Treacher says:

    I agree with Morrison that the nerds should pipe down. (Bob Haney wrote a lot of really fun stories that completely ignored DC continuity.) But he wants it both ways and he should really get over himself.

  13. Failure to be sufficiently over oneself is truly the one unforgivable sin on Earth-Treacher. See also Norton, Edward.

  14. Sean says:

    You said it brother. I’m so over me.

  15. Jim Treacher says:

    I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.

  16. I’m just a jealous guy.

  17. Carnival of souls

    * Here at ADDTF I enjoy taking credit for being right, since it happens so infrequently. Regular readers may note that I’ve been defending The Incredible Hulk against sight-unseen unfavorable comparisons to Iron Man and kvetching about the supposedly p…

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