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Disheartening.Disappointing.Sad. Every writer on this project should be ashamed of themselves. Especially those who don't need the money. I love most of them, JMS in particular, but this is a misstep.  Every once in a while you get an "I am Spartacus"   moment and, if you choose not to stand up, well, that's on you. This is one of those moments.  All these amazing talents, at least one of whom said, multiple times that this was a crap idea and he wouldn't participate (Darwyn Cooke), should have simply told DC, "Nope. Not me. Not this one." That would have been showing true respect for who is, hands down, the most influential single writer in comics alive today. (And I'm not even that big a fan of the original work. I like it a lot. Very, very much, actually, but I prefer Gaiman and Morrison as their works are hopeful and Moore's is mostly fairly bleak.  However, that changes nothing.) This project bears zero resemblance to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and only the use of Wendy Darling in  Lost Girls is potentially on point vis a vis Moore's "hypocrisy." Watchmen is not about the Charlton characters "thinly disguised." It began as an idea for the Charlton stable but was, by no means, where it ended up.  Watchmen is not, in point of fact, a basis for anything.  It's is not only a self-contained work, needing no further "enhancement;" it is a self-contained work about a very specific time in Western politics. And it is, in its way, a pastiche of what comics had been up until that moment as well as being a criticism of the dead-end moralistic viewpoint that was largely expressed in American comics. Part of the reason Moore, Morrison and Ennis took US comics  by storm, aside from their fantastic skills as writers, is that they brought the basic dystopian cynicism to their work that was the rule in Britain under  Thatcher but which Americans under Reagan (at least the majority of Americans) didn't do. It raised the bar and created a massive emotional response in its readers that, really, hasn't been matched since except by, ironically, the hopeful Brit, Neil Gaiman and the angry-hopeful Brit, Warren Ellis. Part of the reason the movie didn't work for a wide audience is that it asked too much be accepted and one of the things that was too much was that we were looking not into an alternate future but into an alternate past. That works for comics, sort of, but it doesn'treally work. Also, and this is primarily why the [redacted] at DC couldn't possibly understand this, the central them of the series (one of) is that NOSTALGIA KILLS. In every case, the character's attempt to hold onto their pasts got them either killed or so fundamentally altered that they were effectively killed. The only forward-looking characters are Jon and Adrian and they both "win." Everybody else dies either physically or figuratively. As DC is a nostalgia machine, there's no way they could possibly understand this aspect of the work and, not understanding that, are incapable of creating authentic spinoffs of that work.  It was never designed to be a serial. it was never designed to have sequels. It was designed, much like a clockwork (another central theme) to work in twelve components and to take advantage of Time both in the real world and in the fictional world it presents. Even the PAGE LAYOUTS are about time. It was designed to be precisely what it is: a stand-alone novel set in and about a particular time and place in history. Adding prequels might be a sound business decision (we'll find out) but it will diminish the importance of that earlier work and undercut its intent and meaning to the point where it will become "just another comic book." yes. It will. Why? Because, once these books are out they will be someone's FIRST sight of the Watchmen story. Meaning the original will be compared to them or thought of as simply the end of the story. That, alone, should have prevented this. Sometimes commercial art is actually Art.  When it reaches that level it's to be protected, marveled at, learned from, enjoyed, all that, but never gilded like the proverbial flower. Unless you don't get it. No one has done a sequel to the Mona Lisa. There are no Further Adventures of Holden Caulfield. No one has added lines to he Road Not Taken. There's a reason and it's not copyright. Well, maybe it is copyright, now that I think of it. At least in Caulfield's case. And, btw, Moore already told us hat happened BEFORE THE WATCHMEN. About  half of the series was about just that. So, again, no need to do this. Except if you're out of ideas, fear risk and think your audience is a bunch of suckers. Oh. Wait. We're talking about DC.

Well. Here we are again. We made it.


This year, for me, was less of a struggle in some ways than most of what came before. In other ways it was crazy.


Most the good stuff came in the professional realm. Lots of things that I'd worked hard to see happen did. A few fell apart. The BIG CARTOON NETWORK PROJECT got sent down which was a blow. You guys would have LOVED this thing.  Ah, well.




Two big things were negative.


A friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer and is, currently, kicking back at that monster with everything she's got.


Another friend of mine, Dwayne McDuffie, left us. It was awful and sudden and I've said a bit about it elsewhere so there's no need to say much more.




Dwayne was one of the best people I ever met. Gifted. Gracious. Funny. Everything a mentor should be except not old enough to actually be mine. 


I feel cheated that I wasted so much time being polite, not pushing the friendship for fear of making him think I was one more Hollywood social climber. I envy those who were his friends for longer. NOTE TO SELF: Do Not Waste Time.




I will miss him and, whether you know it or not, so will you.


I wrote a LOT last year, much of it won't even be seen until later THIS year. Short stories, the blog, comics, a novel, the TV show, the OTHER TV show, even some poetry (thanks to my wife insisting I flex those old muscles again).


Oh. We got a couch.


Normally I use this opportunity to remind people who are struggling that things can work out. It's easy, when things start turning your way, to forget the bleak times when you're sitting alone at three a.m. wondering where the hell your life is going or where you're getting that last 60 bucks to cover your rent.


Readers of this blog will know that, despite my economic circumstances, I've always been a big believer in the turning wheel. No matter what's going on in life, good or bad, the wheel will turn. When things are crappy it's the knowledge of the wheel that you use to get you through. 


When they're good that same knowledge is good reminder not to get a swelled head or stop working hard.


People in my business forget that. They forget it a lot which is why you see so much bad behavior coming from the backstage of this industry.


But I won't. My life has been Interesting in the proverbial Chinese way for a long time now but it hasn't always been fun. Fun, it seems, is not the point.


Living is.


2011 was awesome. I very much hope 2012 will at least be the same. I'm going to work hard to make it better. This time next year, I hope to have a lot more to say. That's the plan anyway. We'll see what the wheel says.

DWAYNE MCDUFFIE

Some years ago, a great many now, I walked into a comic book shop (something I was extremely likely to do in those days) and began browsing.

I picked up my normal stack of stuff, the Xs, the Legions, the Avengers and the Knights in the Dark. 

This was in the time when new companies were popping up all the time and, though smaller than the so-called Big Two, were offering some pretty competitive work. Elementals. Grendel. Mage. Elfquest. Hellboy A Distant Soil. Nexus. 

Too many to mention, really, to anyone who doesn't already know.


The world of comics was undergoing a sea change at that time, decentralizing, giving more and more power to the creators rather than to their editors (a dubious blessing in some cases) and, in some few instances, actually challenging long held notions of what might make a go in the marketplace.


So my stack included a good many of these because, though I was much younger than I am, I was already old then in the multiverse of comic books and reaching that edge where they just would no longer easily satisfy. Some people might call that edge the end of adolescence but I call it pattern recognition.


For many years by then I'd become increasingly dissatisfied with the way people who look like me- brown skin, predominantly African descent- were treated in the medium I loved. As a child I had loved the damned things without regard to their social meaning and influence. I followed the Bat and the S, the 4 and most of those who came after, never realizing that, despite the wide variety of color and experience in the real world, a world in which I lived, the world of comic books was a Klansman's wet dream– Four colors of white.


It was the work of industry Great Will Eisner, his Spirit in particular, that pulled me up short and hard.


This was a character I loved created by an artist I loved, to whom I was exposed via a large-sized, hardcover book called THE GREAT COMIC BOOK HEROES. 

I loved the characters in that book so so much I wanted to find all their adventures wherever I could. This was during a time when comics weren't valued so much so, early on, it was relatively easy to put hands on certain ancient comics if one was ready to dig a bit.


So I dug. So I found and so I read. So I met Ebony.




I won't bore you with how he was depicted, how he spoke, what an hideous portrayal of people like me he was, though not as bad as his replacement, a lovely yellow fellow called Blubber. 

Ebony was the first but by no means the last of this sort of version of black people which was only slightly worse than the general absence of decent black people in comics. Or really, non-whites of any sort.


It was pretty ugly and it hit me in the face like a freight train. My heroes were part of the same ugliness that was, at the time increasingly becoming part of my real life. 

The older I got, the more real that ugliness became, more pervasive and more subtle. This created in me (and thousands of others) a sort of cognitive dissonance as I (and they) attempted to resolve the vicious contradiction of love for the various heroes and rage and hatred for their chroniclers who seemed intent on spitting on me who had only ever wanted to bask in the glow of their adventures.


Love won out but it was not without a cost. There was always this simmering undercurrent, a sort of gnawing expectation that oscillated between hope and dread as I waited for the next depiction, knowing it would likely be ugly but never knowing the degree.


Once in a great long while a reasonably decent character might appear (mostly in Marvel comics, nearly never in DC) they were nearly always in the background of the Important Whites, weaker, not as smart, never the point of the story and nearly never the hero.


But love won, as I said, and I sucked up this constant insult, pretending mostly not to notice unless the offense was so pointed it could not be ignored.


"That's what comics are," I told myself. "But, as long as they don't actually mention non-whites, they're not truly being offensive."


I made myself content with invisibility as the better of two evils. I was a child and didn't know that one was the same as the other. But I was content enough.


Until I met ICON.
When I picked up that random book on my weekly excursion to the comics shop, I met Icon and, through him, STATIC, The Blood Syndicate and all the others created by Milestone Comics (now Media).


"Finally," I thought as I poured over the pages. "Finally someone got it right."


I don't need to describe the actual books to you. They're out there and I recommend finding them. The point is every story was written and drawn by people who either were relatively well-known at the time or weren't but went on to greatness after the company let them show their stuff.


It was also the first comic book I ever felt compelled to write a so-called fan letter.


It was then that I met Dwayne McDuffie for the first time.


As I said, comics were (and largely remain) a wasteland when it comes to non-whites and here was an entire line of comics for the rest of us and for whites as well. It was, as Dwayne himself proved to be, an entirely benign response to a fairly ugly situation- building something new instead of railing against the injustice of the existing paradigm.


Sadly, this was met with hostility by the so-called "industry media" of the day, painting the books as diatribes against the wrongly characterized "mainstream" industry (they were not) created by poor artists and writers (again, not so).


McDuffie, one of the two or three black writers that had ever managed to score work at either of the Big Two, persevered, telling the truth of his work to anyone who would listen and moving forward as if simply telling the truth and showing the work would be enough to win. He was, like me, naive about the public he hoped to serve, gifting them with a cleanliness of spirit they did not and perhaps do not possess. 

The fledgling stories were, ultimately, rejected by the larger audience and the industry at large, left to fade back into what they could only have thought was rightful obscurity.


I envision a lot of smiles from some men who should consider themselves lucky we will never meet. I get angry, you see. I have an extremely low tolerance for cowards and an even lower for racists. These men were both. And likely still are, those that are still alive, as there has been nothing to change their minds. Indeed, DC comics has gone into clear retrograde over the last couple years, literally killing off the few minority characters that had managed to squeak through.


I would have been incensed by these men, mostly lesser talents, having this sort of control over an industry and using that control to squash something benign and beautiful.


Dwayne was not that way. He was better than that. He simply moved forward, thinking so far outside the box that the thing itself could scarcely be defined as such. He moved on without rancor, without too much anger (though I'm betting there was some. None of us are immune.). Began the climb in another, more broad arena, that of animation. To say he excelled there, where money rather than feelings is the bottom line, is to understate things in the extreme.


He wrote for many series, created others winning award after award until he had carved out a bright career for himself as well as a legion of friends and followers both backstage and in his now more massive audience. I don't know that I could have done this. Maybe I could. But not without some shouting and fist swinging. I'm not made for the path he took however much i see it and recognize it as the better one.


My correspondence with Dwayne grew over the years from that initial few lines, to the sort of web-based friendship that most now take for granted but which, at the time, was rather rare, until finally we met face-to-face and became actual friends, rather than virtual. 

And, more than that, Dwayne was a great teacher, never shy to share anything he knew about writing or any of the other endeavors in which we were both immersed. It's not an exaggeration to say, without his input, I would not have garnered the successes I've had. He's one a very select few in that regard but at the top of that list without doubt.


I wish I could have learned the trick that allowed him to take the slings and bullets of his "peers" with such grace, but, as I said, I lack that gene. I hold grudges. I get angry.


Even though he was repeatedly treated poorly by the industry he so loved, he never ceased to believe that simply making something beautiful was the best way to clear out something ugly.


And he was, as always, right.


That first note led to a friendship that started small and grew into something I loved and which continues to this moment despite his current silence and great distance. He's dead now. Taken in a useless random way just as he was reaching the apex of his powers as a writer. We will never never see what amazing things he was to create. 

I know for sure he had plans to amaze and was lucky enough to be asked to participate in them but, like the rest of you, I will never know what those things were. he is gone now. For good.


Over the next few weeks people will lionize him and rightly so, but much of that praise will be from the very people who did their best to thwart him when he simply tried to say, with everything he produced, that we are ALL valuable, we are ALL here and we are ALL in this together.




It was true then. It's true now. It always will be true.


Good-Night, Maestro. You will be missed.


copyright © 2011 geoffrey thorne, all rights reserved

So it's the second day of the reshuffled deck and I need to do this or I won't get to it.  The last eighteen months have been crazy. Awesome but crazy.


Much of my conversation here has been about the roller coaster and what it takes to survive it. I came up with equations, some zippy one-liners and some, I hope, fun anecdotes about all that, all in aid of saying, "This is doable. It's wicked hard work but it's doable."


That paparazzi-chasing gadabout Marcus Aurelius popped this one off a little while back and I took it to heart. "Because a thing seems difficult for you, do not think it impossible for anyone to accomplish."


He's a quippy little bugger, old Marcus is, but that one is true.


So. The last eighteen months.


To compress a really long story into something bite-sized, I made it a policy over the last few years to say, "yes" to any paying gig that involved me writing, polishing or consulting on the writing of fiction of any sort. I met, worked with and for a lot of people in that time and wrote a stack of stuff I'd never have written otherwise.


So one of those former employers came to me with a proposal - "Co-write something with me and I guarantee the right people will see it." So I did. So she did and we ended up staff writers on this:






It was an interesting experience in the Proverbial Chinese way. I wrote a lot. I learned a lot. I met some great people.  My partner (yes, we were partners for the duration) and I were not asked to return.  They say this means nothing in the big scheme of professional TV writing but to me it felt like being fired (because that's what it was) and it was the first time in over 20 years of professional employment that I'd been fired.


Well. Wait. No. Right out of college I worked in a sort of cold-calling sweatshop managed by a former classmate who fired me for being ten minutes late. Once. He was a prick but ten minutes is ten minutes, I guess. Live and learn.


Anyway. I was rescued from professional oblivion (the sort of oblivion that exists only after you've been fired from something you've worked years to attain. can you say "bleak?") by the good folks at this place:






I loved this show and had tried for two seasons to get a seat at that table. They always liked me, they said, but the money was never there. This year, in the proverbial nick of time, not only was the money there but there was an empty chair.


I packed up my kit at Law and Order on a Friday. That Monday I was at Leverage.


The next twenty weeks were, by far, the most fun and the most rewarding of my professional life due ENTIRELY to the awesome crew of people I was lucky enough to work with there. They bust their asses to make that show and they manage to do it with a smile (usually) and without becoming [expletive-deleted]'s. To say I loved this time is to understate the feeling by parsecs.


I helped with all the episodes (everyone does; that's how it works) and I got to write this:

Fun, baby. I mean If-You-Seek-ing FUN.


And scary. Flying solo is always scary, no matter how many times you do it.


I have to stress, too, that this was, none of it, due to lottery wins or luck. I don't believe in luck. I don't believe in thanking the spirit world or providence or any of that for the wins I get in life or blaming my many losses on the bad will of evil ghosts. 


I believe in hard work. I believe in taking the punch and getting off the mat as fast as you can. This blog has, when it has talked about anything serious, stressed that one view over and over.


Another thing that happened this year– and, by "happened," I mean "something else I worked hard to make real."– was this: