April 13th, 2009 by Neal

Continuing my tradition of random non-sequitor looks into my new novel (5,000 more words now, do you kennit, as a man once said):

The title of chapter eight is OMEGA COCK!

And the great thing? Makes total sense in context.

This is Omega Supreme, a Transformer from several years ago. I imagine he is in possession of an Omega Cock. Sadly, the toy was lacking in this respect. Something about a toy for children.

I was reading a little bit this morning, Simple Art of Murder again, and a little bit of a look into “Murder/Kill Your Darlings.” The idea being, if something stands out to you as good writing, or a piece of good writing, you should kill it, beacuse it’s probably pretentious shit.

Sometimes, this is very true. But sometimes, it’s remarkably naive. Because I love this entire fucking book so far, more than anything I’ve ever created. Seriously. And there’s no high-minded thought to it, though there is a moral lesson. It’s just a fucking GREAT STORY. Something in my blood’s been crying out for it.

And yet, if I removed my precious darling Omega Cock, I know the work would suffer for it. How’s that for a Freudian insight into the writing process? BWA HA HA HA! TAKE THAT, AUTOBOTS!

March 25th, 2009 by Neal

Valerie D’Orazio has been an important influence to me in the last few years. I bring this up because today, she’s indicated in her blog that she’s going to step away from Occasional Superheroine after a fashion, and channel the energy elsewhere. There are a few quotes that particularly moved me, given that I’m going through a similar crisis of conscience:

Quote one:

…she said what I had already figured out myself. That the blog was so tied into this strong, adversarial, tumultuous energy that even if I wrote about harmless topics, it would still attract some people who wanted more anger, more tumult. So I could write about daisies and there would be some brilliant individual who would react angrily with: “Daisies?! What do you have against petunias?!” And so on and so on. Because they’re addicted to the drama. I get it.

I get told every once in a while by well-meaning people that this sort of tumult and schadenfreude is just the warp and weft of the Internet community, and not a big deal at all. Within that point of view, I often feel as if I’m the one singled out as doing the worst behavior of all — being real and saying how I actually feel at any one given time. I’m told not to act like a martyr, and then instead to just sit and not say anything. Which is sort of like…being a martyr. I guess it’s better to be a quiet pious-eyed martyr, of the old Christian variety, than an annoying loud-mouthed spouter of opinions. That’s what I got from those conversations.

Quote 2:

I do think there will be an end-point to this blog very soon, and I will carry the conversation onto another blog under my name. I will certainly talk about comics, pop-culture, my life, etc, but it will be done from a new forum. A lot of the passion I put in my posts…maybe it’s time to put them in my comic book writing. I need to do this. I’m not the same person I was when I started this blog. I’m not better or worse, I’m just different. My goals are different. My perception is different.

I sympathize with Val, because her audience is much larger than mine (I presume, or at very least, as I’ve witnessed, more vocally rude) and her site deals with a more controversial source material.

I also am going through some of the same things, albeit in diminished fashion, she is. On a smaller scale, I mean. And it’s hard for me. For eight years, I’ve written for the Superman Homepage and had my every word analyzed and spit back at me, most of the time by good people, but some of the time by the mealy fools that teem and fester like a bloated carcass across the internet (including, sadly, a few creators). People will log on anonymously and send me awful, unjustified streams of hate mail. Threaten my family. Threaten me. Some people will write with good intentions and engage me in a dialogue, and that dialogue will take a turn for the worse. Some people get angry when I can’t respond to them immediately. Others become the best friends I’ve ever had that I’ve ever met. It’s a complex bag.

I used to give creators crap for not wanting to dive in and interact. My logic was that the idiots can be ignored. My ignorance was that sometimes you can’t tell the ignorance from the kindness, and the trolls know that, and will capitalize on that just as much as they’ll take advantage of a sensitive, kind person.

I’ve not always agreed with Val on everything. But see, I’m one of those individuals that, when I disagree or agree, can say, “Well, that’s her opinion.” Below that class in my regard is the person that will then debate that person if their opinion is different politely, and below that is the person who insists you change to their viewpoint and threatens you if you do not change it. I would say 99 percent of the people are the people who are like, “Well, that’s her opinion.” or who close the browser if they’re mad. Unfortunately, they (the kind) are also dead silent on the constant for that very reason. They keep their shit to themselves. Which is, as I age, what I become more inclined to do (He wrote on the internet, chortling).

I wrote Val, however, so I’m a hypocrite, but it was to encourage her to ignore the bastards, and as a point of sympathy for what she’s going through. I see a lot of people hesitate to write courageous things for fear of the response. I don’t want to be a part of that. I want to be courageous. Like I would have, she responded to me in kind, taking time out of her day, being courteous. Those interactions (when I’m the one responding) are ones I value and want to encourage. But they’re vastly outnumbered by the shitstorm of assholes with personal agendas or failings. For every one kind letter (which I hope I could have been for Val at a hard time), there’s people who will not let it go and have your email and hate you.

Brian K. Vaughan left the internets, semi-famously. That’s probably a wise decision. I’m not that brave. I know that I have my corner on the Superman Homepage, and that I love this site, and that there are a few places that really enhance my life and never bring me grief. But I tire of message boards. I tire of vitriol. It’s not that most of the time it’s not something I can do, it’s that in the long run, folks wait until your grandmother dies, and then they pounce. They fucking do. And it ruins your shit for a week. What could have been an important, good week.

It’s time, as a damned good friend related to me, that I could be spending doing any number of awesome things. It’s time, as Val points out in her article, that I could be spending working on my comics. Or banging my gal. Or eating a hoagie. Or reading a book. Or running. Or anything, anything, anything in the known universe and including Hugh Jackman OTHER than justifying myself to people who I have already justified myself to with my goddamned work. Or not. But explaining the work has never changed anything in that regard to anyone.

To that end, and as a gesture of solidarity for the trouble Val has gone through, and others I know have gone through on a regular basis, I’m gonna stop hitting message and comment boards at the Superman Homepage, where I was formerly a rather large mod presence. Over the last year I’ve gone to the steps of deleting any letters that come my way that are cruel or rude. Now I’m going further, and will not respond to every letter I get that’s kind, only the ones that truly intrigue me, because I too often fall into the trap of, “Oh! He’s asking questions, he must be curious and have good intentions, so I must respond to them.” And then it’s not.

Too often, it’s, “Cool reviews! I was wondering what you think about Watchmen!” (or insert X topic of the day here)  And, to be cordial, I reply, “It is a movie on film.” (IE, the most banal, noncommital thing ever) To which they reply, “I disagree with you there, I think, I think, I think.” And I’m thinking, “I don’t even know this guy, and he’s debating me.” It seems like a kind letter or gesture, but it’s actually sucking away time I could be working. This is probably fifty percent of my correspondence on boards. The other forty is people who debate why I write what I write, and the other ten are the constant stream of good damned people who just want to say thanks. And I love them. But they’re fighting to get the loaf of bread with midgets that have long fucking knives. And anyway, they can still email.

And it pervades your consciousness and fucks up things. You second guess yourself. I was with FRIENDS today, honest-to-god friends, not internet people, and I was afraid to say to them, “Yeah, I liked the new Indiana Jones” because whenever I say that online, I get the shit ripped out of me. So I downed it a little, then brought up the thing I liked about it or wanted to talk about, and it made me look and feel like an ass. Turns out, I was among friends, I didn’t have to be ashamed to be myself, but the internet and my interactions with it over the years pushed me to second-guess myself (and overanalyze, like I am here), which I find it doing more and more often lately. When I say, “I really dig Stephen King.” I feel I have to caveat it instead of it just being a fact of opinion for me, because when I mention it in articles I get nasty letters. Or when I say, “I really fucking hated George Bush.” I am presumed to have to explain why to other people, despite the fact that I know why I have come to these things in my own mind, and feel justified in doing so.

So I’m gonna lay off that bullshit.

What irks me is that the intellectual in me says, “Yeah, but that’s what the fucks in the political spectrum do. They square themselves off against any alternative thought and don’t respond to critics, and they thereby suck.” And that’s generally true. It’s generally true about comic book writers, too, in my experience, who think that their shit doesn’t stink. They don’t listen to valid criticisms, don’t vette their own work with themselves or others they are creating with, and resultantly, you get shit like Final Crisis, which blew ass because it was the Grant show with no thought to telling a story people would dig. IN MY FUCKING OPINION, he felt he had to caveat like an ass.

But that (intellectual walling off) doesn’t happen because they don’t listen to the media or the internet or naysayers. That happens because they don’t put proper effort or time or thought into the craft of a thing. I can anticipate, being a wise man, any criticism of my beliefs and works, and thereby decide to include or not include elements based on that. I can be my own fucking critic, and accept where I fail, without the help of a fat man in a Star Sapphire shirt. Failures in work occur from this lack of consideration of the work on the part of the artist, as I know from viewing the people I see as role models who put in the fucking work. They care for their craft. They work into it. The failures just coast and whip shit out. I’ve known them and seen that as well.

George Bush was a smart enough man to know, had he actually looked at all sides of things before acting, that the Iraq War would fail. I know this because I knew this as a lay asshole with no military experience. I didn’t need to write him a letter to convey that to him, and my letter wouldn’t have changed anything. He consciously ignored common sense to justify the actions he wanted to take, and thereby failed. There were a million things he could have done better, but as I realize (and the reason I quit CTF is), a thousand internet trolls debating over the angels on the head of a pin never solved a goddamned thing, and as much as I could intellectually debate our former president, if he stepped down from his ivory tower and went toe to toe with me and I empirically whipped his ass where he’d done wrong, he’s still be the same person he ever was, and it would not profit him intellectually to listen to me, because he’s a fucking moron. People who are not fucking morons can self-regulate, and so I must.

It seems simple, and self-evident, but I need to cram that into my fucking cranium by taking a step back and using the internet as a consumer instead of a provider, and leave my providing for the texts I craft, generally, or in fashions that I can control and do not bring me stress. Not the letters or the response.

No more letter columns for the Smallville review. No more responding to petulant requests and demands. No more comment boards unless the purpose and intent is plain.

A good example of how it fucks up your life is the way I’m considering ending this piece. My mind is saying, “God damn, man. They’ll come at you from the angle, “Oh, you wrote a shitload of reviews, and now you’re saying you can’t take criticism.”

But I’ve written a hundred times about how there’s a difference between someone putting a work into the public and asking it to be reviewed after you pay for it, and me giving an article up freely to people who don’t pay for it as a piece of analysis and having people attack the analysis simply because they disagree with matters of opinion. The person who can’t see or comprehend that shade? There’s no helping them. There’s no reward in making that assertion for them. And the person who CAN see it doesn’t need my words to tell them that, so there’s no profit in it. None. None. None.

I don’t need it, I don’t want it, and I’m done with it.

Thereby you will see “Caveat Emptor” on the top of this page in the title bar, forever more. And if you cannot comprehend it, then go fuck the fuck off. I will, in turn, give you what you pay for. A good piece of writing, and little more. That’s my duty as an artist.

And Val… don’t let the bastards get you down. I hope she’s off working on Cloak and Dagger, and they’re still masturbating to furry porn wondering why she didn’t reply to their complaints.

March 14th, 2009 by Neal

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! CHRISTIANS OF ALL STRIPES! FINE CAPITALISTS!

The time has come, where we, the intelligent, shall no longer deign to support the rabble! For WE are the intellectual elite! WE are the stuff that dreams are made of!

Following this post, I, along with my fellow intellectuals, will be leaving this country for a secret base in the mid-west, where we will develop PROJECT-X!

All hail the almighty dollar! We are GOING GALT! For TOO LONG we have put our support into that mongrel dog, the artist, the mother, the out-of-work person with a chemical addiction! They are scum, and do not warrant our attention or treasure!

We are AMERICANS, by god, and as uniquely American as we can be, because we are supporting capitalism by moving somewhere to start a commune! We are uniquely American, because we can run a factory that needs workers WITHOUT THE WORKERS! We are totally American, because the figurehead of our movement, that of good Christian men everywhere (and I do mean men, ladies, though we will deign to rape you if your name is Dagny, because that name is fucking HAWT!), is so Christian that she in fact DOES NOT NEED GOD! She is the most Republican atheist on the face of this planet! Her god is the dollar, and PRAISE BE!

Some might say this is contradictory! Ignore them! They are part of the rabble, and obviously not sophisticated enough to keep up with the likes of I or Glenn Beck!

Instead TAKE UP YOUR FURS! LIFT UP YOUR HEDGE FUND! BURN THE YOKE OF YOUR MARGINAL TAX RATE THAT DOES NOT IMPACT YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING!

Are you with me?

I SAID ARE YOU WITH ME?

February 26th, 2009 by Neal

TIMBER! Get it? No? You will by the end of the post, I hope.

A point of my book about ninjas is that existentialism is stupid. The idea that we can reduce arguments to the point of absurdity by questioning the constinuent elements of the question bother me. Yes, when I ask the question “What is god?” we must first define or have understood the words “what” and “Is” and “God” but too often, I find the existentialists I encounter use it as a way to avoid the question, “What is god?” by ignoring the question and muddying the waters.

To that end, I am pissed, because I cannot draw a metaphor. There is a man, alone, in a room full of people he calls his associates, and I want to make the “If A Tree Falls in the Forrest” gag. The idea being, the intention of the question is to ask what a thing means when humans aren’t there to experience it, but I want to poke at, “Does a thing mean something if many people experience it, but there’s no point to it?”

But I know it would fall by the wayside, because people are so damned religious, and the subject/object paradigm is so enmeshed in our damned society that even without knowing why, if I were to do that, they would think something wrong.

We are convinced we are special as entities, and thereby religion is a fine thing for us. We want to feel better than what we are, so we say, “Yes, we will live forever!” even though our existence is finite. To that end, I’ve “lost” the tree in the forrest argument many times to someone who will not acknowledge that if a tree falls in the forrest, and no human is around to perceive it, YES, it still makes a fucking sound. We just weren’t there to hear it. The idea that without US, or without the implied ME, things do not happen, it just baffles me, even though I’m the most arrogant son of a bitch in the world because everybody loves me. He chortled.

At any rate, I see it as the center of the universe argument, its kin.

For all we fucking know, there are people in the future looking back on that forrest. For all we know, there are alien telescopes in space watching that tree’s every fucking move, and that tree is their version of Jesus or Buddha. For all we know, there’s an old hermit no one ever loved or listened to in that forrest who saw that tree fall, and when he dies having told no one of that tree falling, it’s only not heard because we were too dumb to listen.

To pragmatically accept the idea that NO ONE heard it, and no one possibly could, begs the question of how we were even aware of it to ask the question in the first place, and contradicts itself.

In other words, fuck existentialists. Give me a devil’s advocate first any day.

But beyond that, I have completed all but the clerical work on the novel. I will read it one more time tomorrow, and probably find one or two errors, but otherwise… my tree is downed. Do you care to hear it?